This ambitious and long-awaited project, recipient of the Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, ought to be an indispensable resource for scholars working on the book in early modern France. Here, Walsby marshals more than twenty years of research to build the most thorough resource on the French provincial book world currently available. The problem he seeks to address is deeply familiar to researchers working on the French book trade outside of Paris and Lyon: a focus on these print centers leads to exclusion of provincial printers and booksellers, outside of scattered sources in municipal archives and articles in small, local journals. Indeed, a similar issue holds for bibliography and book history writ large, where the majority of both reference works and original scholarship focuses on the lower-hanging fruit of printers and booksellers documented on surviving imprints, and work done in print centers. Walsby appropriately places his dictionary within the context of these existing bibliographies, to patch the gaps between Renouard, Baudrier, and more recent bibliographic projects like the BNF database begun by Jean-Dominique Mellot.
The dictionary collects 2,743 documented members of the book trade operating outside of Paris and Lyon, including 109 entries for women, with nearly six hundred additional women noted in the entries for their husbands. These provincial bookmen and women represent the breadth of professions surrounding the print industry in the early modern world, going far beyond the “booksellers and printers” of the book's title. Walsby even goes so far as to note journeymen and apprentices. The survey also includes bookmen who moved from center to periphery or vice versa, like Macé Bonhomme, a printer and later bookseller who was one of the only printers to depart Lyon in the wake of the great strike of 1541.
Walsby's background in digital humanities projects comes through in the structure and organization of his information, which he carefully defines at the beginning of the volume. The entries act as starting points for deeper research, including brief biographical notes, archival and print references, and a series of facets with controlled vocabularies adding, where available, further details like printer's devices. Walsby has clearly thought about the different aspects of his data, and how they might be applied to different research ends. His introduction is a whistle-stop tour of engaging possible applications, from partnerships among peripheral booksellers to the varying ratio of booksellers to residents in different towns.
The attention paid to women in the book trade is particularly notable. Walsby has taken to heart calls from recent scholarship on this topic and adopts the approach in Jessica Farrell-Jobst's forthcoming work excavating similar women active in the book trade in Nuremburg, buried under their husbands’ names in Reske's landmark bibliography (Jessica Farrell-Jobst, Women as Book Producers: The Case of Nuremberg). The introduction includes a thoughtful discussion about recognizing women's labor and follows through in the design of the volume's paratext. Not only are these women noted in standalone entries, but they appear in two separate indexes, one of women who worked independently, and one of women married to bookmen.
That said, the thorough points of entry for research on women belie an unfortunate lack of other paratextual devices. As it currently stands, the volume has three indexes in addition to the two focused on women: an “index of booksellers and printers falsely indicated as being active in provincial France during the sixteenth century,” an “index of family trees,” and an index cognominum, occupying four pages in total. This might be satisfactory for a traditional bibliography, but these are often already focused on particular cities or families. As it currently stands, it is difficult to support the thorough study of provincial centers that Walsby promises without the addition of more indexes, especially one organized by location. There is an apparent presumption that a user will approach the dictionary by looking for a name, perhaps one that came up in the course of archival research. This limits the possible applications of the dictionary, as users cannot readily search the volume with general queries in mind. It is unfortunate that such a rich resource should have limited points of entry, but this should not diminish Walsby's monumental achievement. Rather, it should serve as a caveat to users, and a suggested roadmap to make the resource more accessible.
