Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 60 (2023) REVIEWS  Alison Hedley, Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885-1918,   Studies in Book and Print Culture   (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), xii, 248 pp., CAD $85.00 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4875-0673-5, CAD $85.00 (EPUB) ISBN 9781-4875-3475-2, CAD $85.00 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4875-3474-5 Review by DAVID BUCHANAN Athabasca University  By applying concepts from media theory and the digital humanities, Making Pictorial Print analyzes four popular late-Victorian magazines   the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Pearson  s Magazine, and the Strand   as well as the scrapbook media crafted from their pages. Used as case studies, Alison Hedley  s analysis of these magazines demonstrates how publishers and advertisers created opportunities for nineteenth-century readers to engage in popular culture, thus also establishing a better understanding of the emergence of an early modern mass culture that informs new media cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book contains thirty-four black-and-white illustrations, an index supplement, an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. Hedley underpins her methodology with two   conceptual tenets   (7). Firstly, print media literacy enables readers to identify and interpret material production and technological conditions. Secondly, a print technological imagination functions individually and collectively to shape the subjective priorities of readers. Producers employed aesthetic strategies to attract and engage readers. Meanwhile, the interpretation of pictorial representations depended on a reader  s awareness of such strategies. Chapter one,   The Illustrated London News, Popular Illustrated Journalism, and the New Media Landscape, 1885-1907,   highlights the aesthetic and material processes  Making Historical Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines - 2 https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v60i1.41295  that enabled the   embrace of modern popular aesthetics   (28) by the ILN. Hedley points to a   shift from verbally oriented to visually oriented, multimodal storytelling   (28) and explains how   print media crosspollinated with new media   (29). The argument is that the aesthetic composition of the ILN developed the reader  s self-awareness of a new means of mediating the news of the modern world. It   engaged readers   technological imagination   and increased   their understanding of the illustrated magazine  s unique techniques of representing popular culture   (62). The use of statistical surveys and Hedley  s close reading persuasively outline the ILN  s defining characteristics. Whereas the first chapter focuses on literary representation as part of an interactive reading process, a balance between formalist analysis and reader reception emerges differently in chapter two.   Imagining Consumer Culture: Reading Advertisements in the Illustrated London News and the Graphic, 1885-1906   concentrates on the role of advertising in   readers   active participation in mass culture   (63). Hedley describes the ILN and the Graphic as able to   facilitate   (63),   encourage   (64), and   influence   (65) interpretation through aesthetic representation as well as the increased media literacy of readers, furthering the argument on increased media awareness from the first chapter. The reader takes on increasing practical importance as chapter two proceeds. For example, Hedley uses Michel de Certeau to theorize everyday reading practices as strategic and situational, stating that   It was ultimately up to readers to make meaning of advertisements   (78). The chapter concludes with the description of an anonymous scrapbook to demonstrate personal uses of the illustrated press. This back-and-forth between theorization and analysis, on the one hand, and reader reception and case study, on the other, continues as each chapter considers a new aspect of pictorial representation. Following a brief introduction to Michel Foucault  s biopolitics, chapter three,   Imagining Subjectivity: Reading Data Visualizations in Pearson  s Magazine, 1896-1902,   considers how visual representations of data   facilitate readers   understanding of population politics   (90). The focus  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 60 (2023)  Making Historical Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines - 3 https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v60i1.41295  on how quantitative information shown as a picture changed reading practices draws attention to an innovative form of representation that is now taken for granted. As Hedley notes, her conclusions are   somewhat speculative   (113), but her descriptions of the emergence of graphical display in the periodical press generate knowledge of an important form of communication. Chapters four and five turn from the close reading of pictorial representation to the use of and contributions to periodicals by readers. In chapter four,   Imagining Print Production: Making Scrapbook Media, c. 1830-1918,   Hedley contends that scrapbooks provide further evidence of new forms of engagement with popular print. Chapter five,   Imagining New Media Platforms: Taking Snapshots for the Strand, 1896-1918,   provides examples of how readers could contribute periodical content, such as by submitting photography. The Strand not only facilitated reader engagement in a general sense but encouraged active participation in the magazine  s production. Hedley broadens the scope of her history in two ways: first, by attending to readerly interventions; and second, the end of chapter five sets up a transition to twentieth and twenty-first-century mass-media engagement in   Conclusion: Victorian Media Literacies and the Genealogy of the Present,   which connects Victorian heritage to the contemporary digital media landscape through an emphasis on Instagram. In Making Pictorial Print, Hedley describes how readers made meaning of periodicals and situates the history of pictorial design in print media as a direct forerunner of new electronic media in the twenty-first century. She provides extensive detail on emerging forms of pictorial representation  for example, the section on data visualizations successfully brings new forms of non-textual representation to life. The reliance on general theories of reading by De Certeau and others is useful. Yet, without direct evidence, it is impossible to say with certainty what the pictorial magazines in question invoked or how they conditioned a reader  s imagination. Hedley  s solution, in part, is a productive turn to readers   scrapbook reinventions and photography submissions. These endeavours cannot wholly determine how people made sense of popular  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 60 (2023)  Making Historical Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines - 4 https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v60i1.41295  Victorian periodicals, whether as individual readers or as a generalized reading population. Nevertheless, Hedley  s case studies effectively counterbalance a common overreliance on the close reading approach and its related assumption that meaning is inherent in the text. Instead, she directs our attention to the fact that meaning depends on use. Overall, Hedley  s book offers a description of pictorial representation, a selective theorization of reading practices, and her rewarding attention to scrapbooks and photography as (in)direct evidence of reader reception. As such, her book is not only a history of pictorial representation in the periodical press of the late-nineteenth century; it is also conceptually selfreflexive, pointing to the difficulty of understanding how readers experienced visual material culture. In these ways, Hedley manages to expand our knowledge of a critical moment in the history of modern communication at a time when the awareness of production and reception practices is as important as ever. Copyright © 2023 David Buchanan. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 60 (2023)