Abstract

Books in Brief

This article presents information on the book "Sixteenth-Century Books: A Bibliography of Literature describing books printed between 1501 and 1601," by James Bennett Childs. The bibliography of sixteenth-century literature has suffered under the spell of that of the fifteenth. The chief interest of the bibliographers of the first half-century after the invention of printing has been typographical. They have produced monographs on the productions of the printing presses of individual towns and on the work of individual printers. There are not a dozen works devoted to the productions of the printing presses of whole nations, though there are comprehensive records of all the known incunabula. The bulk of the material brought together by Childs consists of monographic studies of individual printers and works on the history of printing in cities and provinces.