* There is for instance none of the wealth of information McKenzie provides on production, policy, buildings and equipment, and far less on printing costs. We know that the Oxford compositors bargained with authors for each job, but are told little about particular deals struck. Compositors have been moving out of their pristine anonymity in recent bibliographical studies, but here they are returned to the small back room of history.

* Three pedantic quibbles. Perhaps it matters only to a reviewer who happens to have been born in that province that Württemberg should be spelt with two errors; it should matter to everybody that seven learned authors and a learned press can pass the idiotic spelling of Habsburg with a p. H.G.K., where were you? And a learned press which permits its printer, in dividing a word, to split the Greek chi compulsively confirms one's cosmic gloom.