Stephen Rawles is a noted authority on emblem books and has contributed to scholarship about Rabelais. But his magnum opus, long stranded in the obscurity of unpublished dissertations, is a comprehensive bibliography of books printed or published by the sixteenth-century Parisian bookman Denis Janot, now at long last available in print format from Brill. The 1976 dissertation ran over 600 pages, and while it has been treasured by specialists able to access it on microfilm, it was cumbersome to use. Enhanced by numerous additions and revisions, it emerges as a hardback volume in the series The Handpress World. Every academic library serving scholars of the history of the book (or scholars of the French literary scene in the mid-sixteenth century) should probably acquire it.
It must be a source of satisfaction to Dr. Rawles that the book is so attractively presented now, with a lavish number of illustrations (though, according to the introduction, fewer than he would like, due to the difficulty of acquiring the rights to reproduce them). Readers owe gratitude to Brill for agreeing to two-color printing for bibliographic entries that transcribe information from title pages that were printed in red and black.
Thoughtful reorganization of the text makes this version of the work more readable than the dissertation without losing a particle of its value as a reference work. Short chapters identify key periods in the chronological development of Janot's career as printer and publisher, and call attention to the network of colleagues and partners with whom he launched projects. Rawles has done foundational work to foster understanding of these partnerships, which are vital to the analysis of the rare books that survive from the era. Sections that follow establish authoritative reference indexes for identifying the printing materials (woodcuts, fonts, initials, and ornaments) that Janot commissioned and used during his career, many of which continued to enhance books published after his death by successors to his printing business. Brill must again be commended for understanding that in providing generous space for illustrations here, they have secured a long shelf life and authoritative value for the book.
Janot published some of the most important books of the era, in handsome editions treasured by collectors then and since. The author's dissertation chapter on the cultural and artistic importance of Herberay's translation of Amadis de Gaule, published by Janot (with other partners) beginning in 1540, has been excised from this book, presumably because his discussion can be recovered from the pages of The Library 6.3 (1981): 91–108, where it continues to anchor scholarship about that important and influential multivolume work.
The core of the book is a meticulous and comprehensive bibliography of all the books printed or published by Denis Janot from 1529 to 1544. Rawles provides 348 authoritative, evidence-based descriptions, drawn from years of travel to the library collections where copies remain, exhaustive note-taking, and consultation with the unpublished notes compiled by Philippe Renouard, now preserved in the manuscripts division of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Cross-referenced to established reference sources, but based on examination of the surviving books, these entries constitute an exemplar to which all similar scholarship should aspire.
Publication of this seminal study by Rawles is well timed. Considerable scholarship is emerging about the French bookmen of the sixteenth century and the context of the French book trade in the era. This volume joins recent bibliographies of the output of printer Charlotte Guillard, by Rémi Jimenes (2017), and of publisher Fédéric Morel II, by Judit Kecskeméti (2014), in addition to Jean Balsamo's book on Italian books published in France (Jean Balsamo, L'amorevolezza verso le cose italiche: Le livre Italien à Paris au XVIe siècle [2015]). Now that Rawles's work is available in a handier, more attractive, and revised edition, it is certain to be more widely cited and to exert still wider influence on similar projects.
The tedious effort required to proofread a text of this kind cannot be understated. Both the author, as he revised, and the copyeditors at Brill can be thanked for thoroughness. Purchasers of the book will want to hand-correct an unfortunate error on page 157, where figure 3.14 mislabels the illustration of Janot's third set of initials as set 4.
