Description

The work reprinted here is Maslov’s synthesis of almost a quarter century of work with, and reflection on, Ukrainian book culture of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In less than seventy pages, he gives us an overview of the major printing houses, the art of the book, and the some of the silent characteristics of the typeface and language of the old Ukrainian book, as well as the book trade, libraries and curators. The second work reprinted herein is far less well-known, and may represent the only narrative scholarly work by Varfolomii Ihnatiienko (1892–1943). We know little of Ihnatiienko personally. His only other major contribution aside from articles is a work of enumerative bibliography (Bibliohrafiia ukrains’koi presy 1815–1916 [Kyiv, 1930]) dealing with the history of the periodical press in Ukraine, published (1930) as volume IV in the Trudy of UNIK. His study of periodical press in Ukraine, however, retains its value in our own time, for it deals with a reasonably objective manner with all the journalistic currents in nineteenth-century Ukraine-currents which have been ignored or suppressed in more recent Soviet studies. Taken together, these two works make a contribution to documenting some of the solid achievements of bibliographical and book studies scholarship in Ukraine during the period of its efflorescence.