The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians. by Barry Kernfeld. lanham, md.: Scarecrow Press, 2006. ISbN-13: 0-8108-5727-8; ISbN-10: 978-0-8108-5727-8. 174 pp. $45.00

A new and intriguing branch of scholarship has been grafted into jazz research by the notable scholar Barry Kernfeld, most recognized as the editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, who sets out to document and trace the unexplored history of the fake-book in The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians. As Kernfeld indicates in the introduction to this work, it is surprising that a study such as this has not taken place previously, considering the controversial position and influence that fake-books—which are for many musicians indispensable anthologies of standard repertoire tunes written in lead-sheet notation—occupy in the jazz world, not to mention the relationship they share with the battle over ownership in general. Indeed, to tell the story of the fake-book is in essence to understand its role in the larger context of piracy that to this day infects the music industry. Kernfeld examines numerous music trade publications, exhumes FBI files and court documents, and interviews prominent jazz artists to assemble a compelling narrative of this worthy subject, which has until now been marginalized in scholarly discourse.