Bergel, Giles, and Ian Gadd, eds. Stationers   Register Online. Glasgow: CREATe, University of Glasgow, 2011. Accessed 8 May 2025. stationersregister.online. There are many ways of thinking about books and of writing about books. Here is Barnaby Rich on the topic from 1610:   Books are like cheese, that is never well seasoned to every man  s taste; for one will say it is too salt [sic], another will say it is too fresh, a third will say it is too tart, another thinks it to be too mild; one will have it too hard, another too soft, another too tough, another too brittle, it never pleases every man  s taste; no more do books.  1 The Stationers   Register for the years from the incorporation of the Worshipful Company by Mary and Philip in 1557 up to 1640 certainly contains all kinds of texture, odour, and consistency of printed text. It is, as historians and literature scholars know, the cradle of copyright. It is also the account and regulatory register of the big cheese that was the London book trade. The goal of the online version, as the editors explain in their project history, is to create a searchable database of the copy-entries recorded therein. A search for Barnaby Rich, would-be fromagerie guide, yields ten entries here including this:   Entred for his Copie vnder the handes of Master Feild warden a booke called Faultes, faultes, and nothinge els but faultes by Barnaby Riche   for 25 January 1606. Stationers   Register Online has very few faults. More on those shortly, but they really are very few. Because what has been created here is a precision tool. It does what it says in the title, and it does it well. Those who use Early English Books Online (EEBO) will want to use this, and vice versa. An EEBO search, however, for Rich  s Faultes, faultes, and nothinge els but faultes (1606) will drench you with all sorts of information and connected data. Some of it useful (such as similar titles), and some of it borderline (such as an article or a recent thesis). Connected data is not, of course, bad at all, but Stationers   Register Online preserves the satisfying feel of a dedicated reference work. This invites serendipity and whimsy, the far happier distant cousins of the algorithm. The home page offers both a full text search and the option of advanced search by name, fees (in pence), date range, half decade, original volume, and entry type. Results may be displayed by date or by register page. This allows the 1. Rich, New Description of Ireland, sig. A3v.  Early Modern Digital Review 8.1 (2025) 6  Early Modern Digital Review  7  user to be extremely serious and focused but also idle, frivolous, and curious. Since you can search by Stationers   Register Online (SRO) number, I decided to put in my birth year of 1967, which produced the engagingly titled ballad   Another most excellent and comfortable ballat of the x. servantes to whome the x talentes were delivered,   for which H. Carre registered copy at a fee of 4 pence on 3 September 1580. Was there more than one ballad based on the Parable of the Talents? Well, not in the Stationers   Register at least. Further searches by name reveal H. Carre to be Henry Carre, who in the 1570s and 1580s churned out an edifying and startling mixture of Scripture and plague songs. Carre was not averse to a bit of polemic either:   All shall be well, The pope is now proved vicar of hell   was registered on 20 July 1581. Good search fields, combined with the ability to manipulate and rearrange them, make for excellent online tools. If fun can be had and curiosity slaked with quirky queries, then highly serious searches are both smooth and sensible. The results, which are listed on screen in an order chosen by the user, can then be opened to an entry that gives the SRO number, the name of the publisher, a rough title of the publication (like seeing advance publicity), the author  s name, the original register folio, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century edition references, the status of the entry, the fee paid, and the master and wardens concerned with the entry. Longer entries, such as SRO 9014 from 26 August 1634, include wholesale transfers of copyright and titles, from widows in particular, to other publishers. All of this information is a starting point for further investigation. The beauty of this resource is that, just like the bound volumes, the reader can follow whatever trails they wish or just home in on, for example, the publishing world of the sermons and poems of John Donne. It  s obviously faster than hefting the volumes about, and it  s undeniably more accessible too. It  s also free to access as a public site, which these days is a true good. Yet this is much more than an XML transcript; it is a newly edited reference work derived both from Edward Arber  s 1875  94 edition and from the original archival sources. The editors have, in a very praiseworthy manner, scooped out the fraudulent nineteenth-century additions  which had lingered on in Arber  s edition   supplied cancelled entries, and also given marginalia not supplied in the print editions. The design of the site is both clean and clear. Anyone who has ever used an index or carried out a Google search can move quickly in and about this  8  Early Modern Digital Review  database. The   About   section is especially useful since it delineates the nature of the source and how the project team approached its task. It also provides a useful bibliography for those who want to read into the topic. There  s also a   Browse   button for trawling, allowing the user to look at five year tranches from the Register. It would be nice  both in this feature and in the search results  to have a note of the total number of records found. It is also worth noting that the   Help   button is not currently populated, but, to be honest, the site is so clear that it is hard to see why it would be needed. In one session, the back button on the browser glitched when returning from a single record to the search results, but this occurred only once, so it may have had nothing to do with the site itself. Any person stumbling across this site could, just by typing   Shakespeare   into the search box, find themselves with five entries ranging from 1607 to 1639. They would learn that King Lear was performed in front of James I and his court on 26 December 1606, that the Sonnets were registered in May 1609, that Two Noble Kinsmen was attributed to the joint authorship of John Fletcher and William Shakespeare in April 1634, that a portion of Shakespeare  s works was part of a large transfer of copyright in November 1636, and that in the same month three years later   An Addition of some excellent Poems to Shakespeare  s Poems by other gentleman   was entered for future publication. It is a tribute to this excellent resource that all this information can be gleaned with alacrity and without any fuss by a casual visitor. Stationers   Register Online is an act of public service that will satisfy expert scholars, curious laypeople, and anyone who wishes to sample the many flavours of London publishing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John McCafferty University College Dublin  Work Cited Rich, Barnaby. A New Description of Ireland. London: Thomas Adams, 1610.

## Références

Rich, Barnaby. A New Description of Ireland. London: Thomas Adams, 1610.