French books in eighteenth-century Ireland

has legal French. Likewise, the non-English languages spoken in the British Isles fall outside the limitations of 'foreign' imposed by the title, and in any event have been well covered elsewhere. Had the period been extended into the first half of the twentieth century then the number of languages requiring consideration would have been greatly enlarged and extended well beyond Europe. Several of the papers provide detailed case studies within their language areas such as Kate Rahman's study of the Free Russian Press between 1853 and 1870, or Morna Daniels account of the false memoirs of Louis XVI's valet. Several others offer small-scale surveys of their respective languages including Italian (two essays by Denis Reidy and Stephen Parkin), French (by David Shaw), Spanish and Portuguese (Barry Taylor) or Polish printing (Janet Zmroczek). Some essays seek to do both such as Anna Simoni's account of Dutch printing and detailed examination of some bilingual English and Dutch pamphlets of 1615, or Chris Michaelides' account of modern Greek printing followed by an account of the nineteenth-century publisher Stephanos Xenos. The essays are all written by acknowledged experts in their respective fields, either current or former members of the staff at the British Library. They are extensively and rigorously annotated, and there is no doubt that the volume presents a useful contribution to scholarship in an underresearched area. The main reservation I have about the collection lies in the use of the description 'systematic', on the dust jacket, which is only partly justified in terms of its coverage. Above all, the collection lacks an 'overview' focusing on the importance of London as the unifying factor among the different contributions, and outlining the scale of foreign-language printing and publishing compared to that in English. This task is performed to a limited degree within Clive Field's two-and-a-half page preface, and a single page statistical survey up to 1800 by David Shaw (which includes Latin, Welsh, Irish, and Gaelic, but inexplicably excludes Ancient and Modern Greek), but would have been done if they had been developed into a full-length chapter. For all its scholarship, the work does not really provide the 'insight into the history and development of London as a centre for the printing of non-English language material', which is also claimed on the wrapper. In other respects the work is nicely produced and appropriately illustrated. I wish, however, that the seven blank pages at the end might have been used to provide a second index of subjects and names other than the members of the book trades.