For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at least, the past two decades have witnessed seismic transformations in bibliographical infrastructure. Catalogues, painstakingly compiled, have been appearing and evolving—organized, for the most part, by geographical region. These catalogues themselves have also now been brought together and augmented by the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project based at the University of St Andrews, enabling powerful opportunities for comparative and transnational study. Our capacity as scholars of preindustrial Europe to explore the geography, character, and evolution of printing is greater today than at any point in the past. With some ease, we can now see what was printed, where, and when, and we can more easily locate copies of items in libraries worldwide as well as access digital surrogates.

As this remarkable infrastructure becomes ever more complete and reliable, it is important that scholars confront rather than ignore one of the most inconvenient truths of book history—survival. For the greater part, short-title catalogues have been compiled using books which exist in libraries today and can be verified through physical inspection. But to what extent does this surviving record distort our sense of what was once published? Can we measure rates of survival and loss? How far will we ever be able to reconstruct the legion of the lost? This is the subject of Lost Books: Reconstructing the Print Word of Pre-Industrial Europe, a truly breathtaking collection of essays edited beautifully by Flavia Bruni and Andrew Pettegree. Twenty-four contributions by leading scholars cover a very wide range of subjects, across a broad geographical and chronological span. Amongst many other subjects, we learn about lost books of polyphony in Renaissance Spain, how newspaper advertisements in the Dutch Republic can be used to identify lost works, how the Stationers’ Company Register can be used to reconstruct lost English print, lost broadsheet ordinances in sixteenth-century Cologne, and a consideration of the impact of looting and Nazi book burning on Polish-Lithuanian collections.

One of the most vibrant if provocative pieces is offered by Falk Eisermann, head of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke at the Berlin State Library. It is a brilliant survey of some of the issues involved in reconstructing lost incunabula—or, as he terms it, the “Gutenberg Galaxy’s Dark Matter.” It draws attention to the inherent dangers, as well as rewards, in exploring this area—tackling issues such as: bibliographical ghosts, fragments of works which may or may not indicate books now lost, and how manuscript copies of printed books or paratexts might point to now-lost works. Bibliographical dark matter, as with its cosmological equivalent, can only be studied by observing the behavior of visible objects surrounding it. Eisermann concludes by emphasizing the value of the search but dismisses the wisdom of any attempt to employ statistical modeling techniques to estimate numbers. In contrast, the merit of such attempts is in fact demonstrated elsewhere in the volume; such analyses are handled well—and usefully—by other contributors, not least Jonathan Green and Frank McIntyre. Statistical work need not necessarily offer bald estimates of everything which has been lost but may draw attention to different patterns of survival for different types of work.

Whether or not we are cynical of statistical modeling, or however frustrated we might become at not being able to develop a clearer impression of bibliographical dark matter, one thing is certain. Talking about these issues—confronting the legion of the lost—is better than ignoring it. This volume demonstrates a panoply of techniques and approaches to do just that. Together, the contributions demonstrate that lost books—albeit properly flagged—should be included rather than omitted from bibliographical catalogues (something which does not routinely happen at present). As Pettegree observes in the introductory essay, the gain in recovering these works far outweighs the inherent dangers in including them (25). However, beyond reconstructing individual titles, having some appreciation of the broader context of loss should be an important consideration for all scholars of Renaissance Europe.

This is a rich, intellectually sparkling, and genuinely important collection of essays; it will—or certainly should—inform debate on this issue for many years to come.