Script & Print 37:4 (2013) 249–252 © 2013 BSANZ [ISSN 1834-9013] REVIEWS Joseph A. Dane. Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2010. xii, 244 pp. ISBN 978 0 8122 4294 2. US$59.95; £39. Joseph A. Dane, What Is a Book?: The Study of Early Printed Books. University of Notre Dame Press. 2012. xvi, 278 pp. ISBN 978 0 268 02609 7. US$30; £26.50. Reviewed by Shef Rogers These two books build on Joseph Dane’s 2003 The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method (University of Toronto Press), a work that set out to challenge a range of received truths among bibliographers. 1 Out of Sorts focuses loosely on typography while What is a Book is intended as an introduction to bibliography for those who might ind McKerrow, Bowers and Gaskell too dull or daunting. Both books offer insights into bibliographical methods and present Dane as a scholar whose ideas ought to be taken seriously, though fully articulating the signiicance of many of his ideas may fall to others of a more methodical disposition. Out of Sorts is in two parts, broken up by an “Interlude” on George Herbert’s shape poems. The irst three of the four chapters in part one present impressive arguments about how early type may have been cast, how we measure and classify types in incunabula and whether italic type is any more spatially eficient than gothic type. 2 Chapter four shifts from methodological to aesthetic concerns in probing the meaning of the term “gothic” in the decorations and typography of Percy’s Reliques (1765). The second half of the book gathers a more miscellaneous set of concerns under the general rubric of “Images and Texts.” It opens with a distinction between the editorial idea of copy text and the practical evidence of printer’s copy, leading to an analysis of how manuscript marginalia may have found its way into print in sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer. Dane then revisits the problem of the necessity for a base text in digital editions, this time using as his example the Piers Plowman archive. He had previously explored the topic in chapter ive of The Myth of Print Culture in relation to the Cambridge electronic Canterbury Tales, and comes no closer to a resolution this time, concluding that “A database or an edition can only be a means for answering questions its editors foresee” (135). While his claim holds true for many cases (though not all), it overlooks the value of the anticipated questions that such tools have enabled 1 For a very judicious and detailed review of this book, see James McLaverty’s review in The Review of English Studies n. s. 56 (2005): 313–15. 2 While Dane’s own methods for testing the spatial requirements for different faces are not suficiently controlled to be decisive, they do indicate the need for careful evaluation of the question.