Booksellers and Printers in Provincial France 1470–1600. Malcolm Walsby. Library of the Written Word 87; The Handpress World 87. Leiden: Brill, 2020. x + 902 pp. €165

The problem he seeks to address is deeply familiar to researchers working on the French book trade outside of Paris and Lyon: a focus on these print centers leads to exclusion of provincial printers and booksellers, outside of scattered sources in municipal archives and articles in small, local journals. [...]a similar issue holds for bibliography and book history writ large, where the majority of both reference works and original scholarship focuses on the lower-hanging fruit of printers and booksellers documented on surviving imprints, and work done in print centers. Walsby has taken to heart calls from recent scholarship on this topic and adopts the approach in Jessica Farrell-Jobst's forthcoming work excavating similar women active in the book trade in Nuremburg, buried under their husbands’ names in Reske's landmark bibliography (Jessica Farrell-Jobst, Women as Book Producers: The Case of Nuremberg).