Most advice on writing a book review is quietly about new books. Tell the reader whether to buy it, compare it with the author’s last one, mention the price. None of that helps with a 1909 vegetarian cookbook or an 1894 temperance manual. Nobody is deciding whether to buy them. The reader of your review wants to know something harder: what was this book for, and what does it tell us now?
Read it twice, in two different years
Read it the first time as its first readers would have. Who bought it? Mrs. Rorer’s Vegetable Cookery and Meat Substitutes was aimed at middle-class housekeepers who read her magazine columns; she says in the preface that she is not trying to convert anyone to vegetarianism. Kathryn Armstrong’s White Ribbon Cook Book was published by a temperance press, and its whole preface is an argument that no recipe needs wine or brandy. Those are claims, and a review can test them against the recipes.
Then read it again as yourself. Note what surprises you, what has aged badly and what still works. Keep the two readings in separate columns of your notes. Mixing them is where most essays about old books go wrong.
Find the edition before you find the argument
Old books came out in several editions, and the differences matter. Dainties on this shelf is the 1912 edition of a book copyrighted in 1904; Practical Cooking and Serving is a 1919 printing of a 1902 book revised in 1912. If you quote a recipe, quote it from a named edition, and say which. The title page and the back of it tell you most of what you need.
Quote like a historian
Quote exactly. Keep the spelling, the hyphens (to-day, cocoanut), the capitals and the punctuation. Do not modernise silently; if you must explain a word, do it in your own sentence after the quotation. A short quotation that shows the author’s voice is worth three paragraphs of summary. “A soup boiled is a soup spoiled,” from a 1908 Raleigh church cookbook, tells your reader more about its kitchen than a list of its chapters.
Use quotation as evidence, not decoration. Each one should be followed by a sentence that says what it shows.
Judge it in order: describe, place, assess
A fair review of an old book does three things, in this order.
Describe what the book sets out to do and how it is built. Rorer’s My Best 250 Recipes is organised in round numbers, “my best twenty soups”, “my best fifteen ices”, which tells you it was sold as a personal selection, not an encyclopedia.
Place it among the books and ideas around it. Kellogg’s Autointoxication (1918) belongs to a whole literature about self-poisoning from the bowel, which medicine later abandoned. You cannot assess it without saying so.
Assess it last: was it good at what it tried to do, and does any of it hold up? This is where your own view belongs, stated plainly. “The soups are excellent and the nutrition chapter is nonsense” is a perfectly respectable conclusion if the first two steps have earned it.
Structure that works for a short review
For a review of 800 to 1,200 words, a reliable shape is: an opening that shows the book in action (a recipe, a sentence, a claim); a paragraph on the author and the edition; two or three paragraphs on what the book does, each built around a quotation; a paragraph that places it in its time; and a closing judgement. A longer essay can add a comparison with a second book. Rorer against Hill, Philadelphia against Boston, is a classic pairing on this shelf.
Citing what you read online
If you read a public-domain book as a scan, cite the book and then the place you read it. In MLA style the original publication details come first, and the website is the “container”:
Rorer, Sarah Tyson. My Best 250 Recipes. Arnold and Company, 1907. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/cu31924001692288.
AllEssay keeps a clear walk-through of how MLA builds a Works Cited entry and its in-text citations, which is worth having open the first time you do this. If your instructor wants Chicago instead, the same details are there; only the order and punctuation change.
Cite the scan or the edition you actually used, not one you found in a catalog. If a passage on this site differs from the printed page, the scan wins; OCR leaves errors, and a reader checking your quotation will check the book.
When the essay is for an application
Some students write about an old book they love for a college application or a scholarship. That is a different genre. The admissions reader cares less about the book than about how you read it, so the description-and-placement work above should shrink to a few sentences, and the essay should be about what the book changed in your thinking. If you are writing in English as a second language, structora has a practical page of college essay tips for non-native English speakers, on articles, directness and false cognates, which covers the mistakes that read as carelessness rather than as accent.
Things to leave out
- Plot-style summary of every chapter. Pick the parts that support your argument.
- Sneering at the author for not knowing what we know now. Point it out once, then move on.
- Claims about the author’s life that you have not checked. A mistaken birth year undermines a whole review.
- Long block quotations from the book. Public domain means you may quote freely; it does not mean your reader wants to read the book again inside your essay.
The last test is simple. Could someone who has never heard of the book tell, from your review, why it was worth printing in the first place? If yes, the review has done its job.
Readers also ask
Should I correct old spelling in quotations?
No. Quote it exactly as printed, including “to-day” or “savoury”. Add [sic] only for a real error that a reader might blame on you, and use it sparingly.
How do I cite a book I read as a scan on the Internet Archive?
In MLA style, give the original book details, then the site as a container and the address: Rorer, Sarah Tyson. My Best 250 Recipes. Arnold and Company, 1907. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/cu31924001692288.
Is it fair to criticise an old book for its views?
Yes, as long as you first show what it argued in its own terms. Describe, then place it in its time, then judge. Skipping the first two steps is what makes a review read as an anachronism.