This splendid volume offers expert new insight into the ways of producing, financing, distributing, and reading printed books in early modern Europe and East Asia. This is comparative history at its best, which leaves us with a better understanding of each context and of the challenges common to book cultures across space and time. -- Ann Blair, author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age and professor of history, Harvard University This engrossing account of the history of the book by leading specialists on the European and East Asian publishing worlds takes stock of what we know-and how much we still need to know-about the places that books had in the lives of our early modern forebears. Each chapter is masterful state-of-the-field coverage of its subject, and together they set a new standard for future studies of the book, East and West. -- Timothy Brook, author of The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties