The fifty-eighth volume of Studies continues its tradition of presenting a wide range of articles by international scholars on bibliography, textual criticism, and other aspects of the study of books.

The volume begins with an essay examining an issue fundamental to all scholarly editing, the relationship between thoughts and the tangible records of those thoughts in physical documents. Three articles address the role of intermediaries between writers and readers: the contribution of one of the best-known medieval scribes to the texts he was copying, the use of speech prefixes in the plays of Shakespeare as a guide to the source from which the editions were set in type, and the phenomenon of basing printed editions of early English plays on shorthand transcriptions of actual performances. A related piece identifies directories of American bookstores in order to cast light on the insufficiently known process by which books moved from publishers to readers from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Other articles present a little-known set of regulations governing the conduct of workers in an English printing house around 1700 and trace the nineteenth-century development of a great Dante collection. The volume also includes another magisterial study of early book jackets by G. Thomas Tanselle, this time extending the examination into their florescence in the 1890s.

The articles and their authors are:

"Mind and Textual Matter," Richard Bucci, Mark Twain Project; "Scribal Intentions in Medieval Romance: A Case Study of Robert Thornton," John Ivor Carlson, Yale University; "Compositor B’s Speech-prefixes in the First Folio of Shakespeare and the Question of Copy for 2 Henry IV," S. W. Reid, Kent State University; "Memorial Transmission, Shorthand, and John of Bordeaux," Gerald E. Downs; "The Bagford Chapel Rules: An Unknown Set of English Printing House Regulations from the Late 1600s or Early 1700s," Alan D. Boehm, Middle Tennessee State University; "’The Tragedy of the Book Industry’? Bookstores and Book Distribution in the United States to 1950," Michael Winship, University of Texas; "Collecting Dante from Tuscany: The Formation of the Fiske Dante Collection at Cornell University," Christian Dupont, Independent Scholar; "Book Jackets of the 1890s," G. Thomas Tanselle, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.