Brendan Boyle replies:

Professor Sandler objects to my use of the phrase statim invenire—“to find immediately.” I claimed that it wasn’t until the early modern period that the phrase had any real purchase. Before that time, finding something in a book—never mind immediately—was awfully hard. She finds this claim odd, since a well-known (to medievalists!) article uses this phrase to describe innovations in the twelfth-century book: tables of contents and what have you. This leads Professor Sandler to wonder whether my command of chronology is so poor that I think the early modern period means the “twelfth or thirteenth centuries.” She’ll be happy to know that it isn’t that poor, and that I only meant to suggest—the well-known article notwithstanding—that books are extremely hard to navigate until, yes, the early-modern period, as anyone who has attempted to read one would know. That her own expertise has given her Google-like facility with the late-medieval book does not change that fact.

She also takes issue with my claim that the codex—the forerunner of the modern book—“developed” in the fourth century. She notes, correctly, that the Roman epigrammist Martial mentions works in codex-form. Still, I take some umbrage at her strangely sour final sentence that suggests this fact was unknown to me. It was not. I learned it, I’m happy to say, from the book under review. And Professor Sandler might have noted, in all fairness, that Martial’s most well-known reference to the codex has him telling his readers the