Lauren Alex O’Hagan’s fine monograph, based on a doctoral thesis, focuses on the Edwardian period in the UK as a historical sweet spot for book inscriptions. This period was characterized by fully-industrialized book production and mass literacy that resulted from the 1870 Education Act, but not yet affected by the paper supply problems of World War I. O’Hagan argues that a multimodal approach is needed to understand the way meaning was inscribed into books in the early twentieth century. Sellers today sometimes describe inscribed books apologetically: may show previous owner. But for O’Hagan, they are a resource: she assembles a substantial corpus of some 3,000 inscribed volumes trawled from the now defunct major secondhand seller Bookbarn International, an online Oxfam shop based in Bristol, and a small number from the Janet Powney Collection of books with working-class inscriptions held in Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives. 

O’Hagan draws on various ethnohistorical resources, including census data, to unpack the ways in which owners inscribed their books. She examines inscriptions in terms of materiality and how they were made, and how they vary across different social categories including age, gender—and perhaps most excitingly—class. The move to critical bibliography in recent years has probably had the least to say about questions of class for a few reasons: limited library holdings present challenges in establishing a sufficient evidence base and identifying relevant examples requires substantial research. Mass literacy and cheap books, however, meant that people across a significant proportion of the English population owned books. By assembling a large dataset and researching the owners wherever possible, O’Hagan shows how readers from all walks of life and social classes inscribed their books and analyzes the specific semiotics of these inscriptions.

The book is arranged in six chapters. The first looks at different types of inscription as a way to answer the fundamental question: “what was it that compelled some Edwardians to inscribe within its pages while others chose to keep them blank” (p. 23). O’Hagan extends this line of enquiry to include not just owners, but also those who gave books as gifts and prizes. There are many ways that Edwardians came to own books beyond purchase. Prize books, for example, were awarded for competitions and achievements in a range of educational and religious contexts, and their attendant labels and dedications are a highly visible category of book inscription. O’Hagan’s second chapter considers inscription practices in relation to various categories: gender, age, class, and geography, including both location in Great Britain and Ireland and residence in a city, town, or village. Chapter three investigates what kinds of books Edwardians inscribed and how, as well as how genre, format, and mode of acquisition affected inscription practices. Chapter four explores the materiality of these inscriptions and the decisions made in their production, while chapter five shifts focus from ownership to consider “the various communicative functions that Edwardian book inscriptions have beyond their role as declaration of ownership” (p. 217). Chapter six considers how these inscribed books were circulated and recirculated. 

With such a significant dataset, a statistically-led discussion drives the book. To balance this, O’Hagan includes short paragraphs in separate text boxes that for the most part unpack representative or notable examples. These brief portraits do not generally feature images of the inscriptions, and those included are only black-and-white. It is surely incumbent upon publishers to enable authors to illustrate their work in color where it is as important to the discussion as it is here. In this case, color images would have permitted a fuller demonstration of the power of a multimodal approach. This does not undermine O’Hagan’s core analysis, or make the book less useful, but (literally) omits color and interest from the pages. 

O’Hagan generally presents the statistics generated from this study parenthetically, avoiding tables. Many readers will likely welcome this, but more tabulation would have afforded at-a-glance reference use. That the only critiques I have to make are that I would have enjoyed more detail and more data should indicate how excellent this work is. 

The Sociocultural Functions of Edwardian Book Inscriptions will not only be essential for bibliographers handling Edwardian book inscriptions but will also be useful for those working on inscriptions from any period. The various frameworks to interpret the materiality of writing will clearly have broader implications far beyond printed books. By working through the large dataset and using different lenses, such as types of inscription and variation by gender, age, and class, O’Hagan makes an ambitious and complex study highly digestible. Most impressive about this book is that, even though it is deeply bibliographical, O’Hagan gently decenters the historical book by foregrounding the actors involved and their agency. O’Hagan helps us get closer to inscribers and their worlds, their decisions, and their relationships with the materiality of the printed books in their libraries. 

Malcolm Noble, freelance historian and member of Leicester Vaughan College