Over the last decades, book history has served a broad front of historians. The granular analysis of how print markets disseminated ideas and shaped the discourses of public life has recast discussions on civil society, nation building, Öffentlichkeit, and various strains of identity formation. Historians of Central Europe will therefore welcome Buchwesen in Böhmen 1749–1848, an annotated inventory of approximately 800 firms in the Bohemian region during a watershed century for the publishing industry. Bracketed between Theresian reforms and the Revolutions of 1848, the book trade came of age. Publishers and bookdealers embraced print matter as a saleable commodity, catering to both established and new readerships with an expanded array of print matter. Although “mass print” would wait for a later age, this “century of words” erected the communication networks that shaped the reception of the Enlightenment, the Revolutionary Era, the Restoration's neoabsolutism, and the empire's liberal and nationalist movements. The public sphere's transformation constitutes a critical topic for social and political historians.

Claire Madl, Petr Pisa, and Michael Wögerbauer's work on Bohemia is the second volume of a projected multivolume series on the book trade in the Habsburg Empire (xv–xvi). Because insufficient information has long hampered historians from interpreting the extent and depth of the Habsburg Empire's print culture, this compendium of firms and bookdealers is a hard-won achievement that will become an enduring reference work. More than a compilation of previously published information, the work reflects the herculean efforts of the authors who sifted through state, commercial, and personal papers in archives and libraries. With this new information, scholars are poised to integrate the Bohemian book trade into broader interpretive frameworks.

The inventory is divided into three sections. The first lists the firms in and around Prague that made up the Bohemian book trade. Various forms of commercial enterprises constitute this list: bookshops, publishing bookshops (Verlagsbuchhandlung), printshops, used bookshops, reprint shops, bookbinders, etching-lithography shops, and, not least, shops for sheet music and instruments. Not only does the heterogeneity of vendors animate our imagination of the Habsburg Empire's print ecology; the list also unearths key evidence as to where and how readers obtained print matter. Bookbinders, for example, emerge as important intermediaries. Although routinely overlooked in the literature, binders played an outsized role in serving rural areas (a grossly under-researched subject). Among other wares, the editors tell us, they vended over half of the state's schoolbooks. Despite efforts from bookdealers to exclude such practices, the binders and their guild proved too important to banish (xvii). Although individual entries vary in length and depth, many listings move beyond the basic information of dates and owners (with their aliases) to gloss their publishing lists and, when pertinent, note their affiliates in and outside Bohemia. The descriptions of firms’ principal publications allow readers to gauge the depth and extent of such genres as theology, philosophy, literature, almanacs, calendars, popular science, and the brisk trade in religious and devotional literature. Such lists provide substantive information on the institutions (state bureaucracies, bishoprics, universities, schools) that promoted and determined the expansion of bookshops. One can follow the decline of Latin and the corresponding rise of vernacular languages, not least of which included Czech literature. Although the editors are vague about literacy rates, the success of compulsory schooling affected the market for popular print. By 1847, the German-language calendar from the town of Leitmeritz exceeded a print-run of 100,000.

The two other sections repurpose the information on firms by listing the thousands of actors working in the profession and locating the cities and towns that marketed print (roughly 154 locales). Scholars will use these directories in numerous ways. For instance, historians seeking to follow individual actors across political and cultural landscapes can link economic networks with cultural associations, municipal offices, state bureaucracies, political affiliations, and other sociopolitical movements. The rise of Czech national literature in the critical first decades of the nineteenth century is one obvious theme that falls in this category. Prosopographical analysis is another possible approach. The volume's biographical information sheds light not only on class composition and social mobility but also on broader sociological patterns of bookdealers’ prominence in civil society. Equally important, the book's topographical information sets down concrete data points for mapping the density and reach of the printed word in Bohemia over time and space. Because information is provided about affiliates and economic connections in and outside Bohemia, scholars can track Bohemian print circuits across the empire and Europe. The data confirms the region's links to Leipzig, the German-language book metropole of Central Europe, but the editors note their surprise at the scant connections with Silesian-Moravian print centers well into the mid-nineteenth century (xvi). Although this reference work serves many research agendas, the transfer and circularity of knowledge within the Habsburg lands as well as with print centers abroad remain pressing questions.

For those who read Czech, the authors of this outstanding reference work have written an accompanying monograph that synoptically analyzes various features of the book trade's transformation as well as offering paradigmatic case studies of professionals in the industry (xviii). For those who don't, it is a pity that this German-language reference work didn't include a précis of these findings in the introduction, however abbreviated, to outline the authors’ principal findings. Their themes and analytical categories would have helped readers navigate the vast ocean of information offered. Habsburg scholars would equally want to know how the authors view their assembled information vis-à-vis current discussions on the Habsburg Enlightenment, the impact of censorship on the book trade, and the degree of transfer between northern and southern print markets in Central Europe. This desideratum notwithstanding, we are indebted to the authors for their painstaking achievement, which opens numerous avenues for future research. The eventual completion of the companion volumes on the empire's other regions will significantly clarify the scale and scope of the Habsburg book trade and its relationship to European letters.