The history of printing, books, and libraries, is confined only to a limited extent within the boundaries of individual countries. There are, indeed, few historical developments which have played a more universal role, in reaction against all kinds of particularism, than type design, printing, book production, publishing, illustration, binding, librarianship, journal ism, and related subjects. Their history should be assessed and studied primarily in an international, not in a local, context. The bibliographical resources, however, which the historian of these sub jects has at his disposal correspond hardly at all to the essentially inter national character of the object of his studies. Since the appearance of the retrospective bibliography of BIG MORE and WYMAN, covering the subject comprehensively up to r88o, the only current bibliography has been the lnternationale Bibliographie des Buck-und Bi bliothekswesens. Covering a representative part of newly published liter ature, it appeared from rgz8, but did not survive the Second World War. More recently, several useful, but limited, bibliographies have appeared.

Volume 1 of A History of the Book in America, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, encompasses the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is organized around three major themes: the persisting colonial relationship between European settlements and the Old World; the gradual emergence of a pluralistic book trade that differentiated printers from booksellers; and the transition from a 'culture of the Word', organized around an understanding of print as a vehicle of the sacred, to the culture of republicanism, epitomized by Benjamin Franklin, and culminating in the uses of print during the Revolutionary era. The volume will also describe nascent forms of literary and learned culture (including the circulation of manuscripts), literacy and censorship, orality, and the efforts by Europeans to introduce written literary to Native Americans and African Americans.