A cool book, if you are looking for a non-fiction about the period form 1760 to 1850. But this has NOTHING TO DO with WILLIAM GIBSON the cyperpunk sci-fi author. This is not that author

This is helpful and informative, but is not a scholarly work. there are other more scholarly books available. i recommend this for bible study students, but not for theology students. more indepth books are available.

You need to know that there are NO color pictures in this guide. This book has small b&w photos of what must be nearly all of R.A. Fox's prints with a price guide. It's great to know all the names of the pictures that I have, and the one's that I've seen that I would like to have. However, this book is better for someone with better eyes than I have. For me, the b&w photos are too small to distinguish much of the detail.

Joy Leslie Gibson's handsome book is a strange mixture of useful fact and wishful guess work. Her early chapters are terrific - she summarises in an accesable and interesting way the work of early scholars and extends it by examining the sumptuary laws and dress standards of Elizabethan England.

I feel she is on less steady earth when applying her assertion that the breathing patterns of Shakespeare's major speeches for women were written with boy actors in mind. As a foundation she asks the reader to accept that all punctuation in the plays is unrepresentative of the authors intentions - including the 1623 First Folio (ignoring the fact that the two editors were actors who had worked with the author since 1593!) and then arbitairily replaces it with an assumption that the thought patterns of the speeches can be understood without them and breath points established. Essentially she removes one set of punctuation that does not fit her thesis and replaces it with one that does - of her own making.
She also makes some doubtful assertions about the women's roles always being shorter than their male counterparts, ignoring roles of such depth, range AND length as Juliet and Rosalind.
Some great material let down by some questionable use of information.