My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The 1951 Windsor Lectures in librarianship from the University of Illinois were a fun and quick read. It contained three lectures, of which I most enjoyed Mr. Weber’s topic. In it, he covered the differences between English and American editions of English novels. Sometimes you had typos, sometimes pirated editions, sometimes the pirated editions more correctly reflected the author’s intentions than the official version. Ray and Carter both covered how much things have changed in book publication and collecting. Ray notes the rise and fall of the “triple-deckers” (3-volume sets of novels popular in the early 1800s) and the shift in collector taste from finely-bound volumes to “original boards”. Carter takes on the original boards topic as well, noting how there often wasn’t just one “original board”. Carter also tells us how there was more innovation in publishing in the first 35 years of the 19th century than in the previous 350 years.

If you’re a collector, librarian or bibliomaniac, this is an interesting read and worth the little bit of time it takes to read it.