BOOK REVIEWS MARGARETTE LINCOLN, (ed) Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution (Thames and Hudson 2016, 287pp) M E J HUGHES, The Pepys Library and the Historic Collections of Magdalene College Cambridge (Scala 2016, 88pp) The handsome catalogue, Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution, edited by Margarette Lincoln, records an exhibition of the same name held at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich between November 2015 and March 2016. This panorama of Restoration England featured 200 paintings and objects from museums, galleries and private collections from Britain and overseas. Pepys witnessed the execution of Charles I in 1649, began his great Diary in the year of the Restoration and closed it nine years later; the exhibition spanned not only these years but also his life through the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to his death in 1703. With lavish and superbly reproduced illustrations, the catalogue offers 15 short essays including one by Jane Hughes together with her coda on the Diary. Many essays offer helpful accounts of the political, religious, urban and naval world of Pepys; many contributions help us reconsider how the material book appeared to Pepys and why he collected in the way that he did. He collected not simply printed books but also manuscripts and objects of historical, aesthetic and scientific interest. Familiarity with the iPad and the Kindle helps us think more imaginatively about the fundamental characteristics and purpose of books. New equivalents help us think about the practice of collecting books and what for some becomes a debt-inducing obsession where the beauty or rarity of the object is valued as much as its intellectual content. In reading a text the eye recognises particular character forms and words and meanings are in different ways absorbed by readers according to skills, experience and circumstance. Cognitive experiences of reading are fundamentally constant and yet reading modes do vary according to whether one leafs through, scrolls down, uses an index or opens a search term. More broadly, ‘reading a book’ encompasses the appreciation of the book itself – and reclaiming how people understood books and collected, used,
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