College and Research Libraries the last twenty-five years several histories have been published which are superior to a book written at the turn of the century on the curious assumption that "the Russian people have had no history yet." Russia from the Varangians to the Bolsheviks· by Beazley, Forbes, and Birkett (Oxford, 1918) is an admirable account of the period indicated in the title, and there are several one-volume works, for instance those of V ernadskii and Pares, which bring the story down to date. As for lexicons, Segal's New Complete Rus- sian-English Dictionary is certainly the largest but it leaves much to be desired, and second place should perhaps be given not to the an- tiquated Alexandrov volume but to the Bo- yanus and Muller dictionary, a third edition of which, "revised and enlarged," was brought out by Dutton early this year. That a "Russian-English Chemical and Technical Dictionary" has been announced for publica- tion by a New York house (John Wiley and Sons) will be welcome news to the growing number of people dealing with scientific Rus- sian. Miss Basset lists four grammars, in- cluding the first edition of Nevill Forbes's Elementary Russian Grammar. She fails, however, to list a second revised edition, using the new spelling, which appeared in 1943. It is also regrettable that she has not taken note of an equally exc.ellent and more detailed presentation of the subject, that is Colloquial Russian by Mark Sieff, published in England in 1943 and brought out here by Dutton this year. The language material offered is irre- proachable or nearly so. The statement on p.5 that "adjective endings ago and yago in the old orthography are ogo in the new" must be a misprint: ogo replaces only ago. And, of course, "the original form" of the name of the great Russian publicist is not Hertzen but He rzen ( p. I o). This reviewer must also take exception to a statement occurring on p.2. It is true that the alphabet, of which the modern Russian letters are a variant, was named for St. Cyril, the apostle to the Slavs. But it is generally held that he did not invent the Cyrillic characters. He probably devised the Glagolitic alphabet. It is not known who invented the Cyrillic letters, and there is a good deal of uncertainty as to when they originated. This ·must have been either shortly before or after goo A .D. (St. Cyril died in 869 A.D.), as a substitute for Glago- litic. St. Cyril, Miss Basset writes, took the letters "from the Greek of that period, re- taining only a few of the ancient Slavonic characters which had been used prior to his time." Many Cyrillic letters are indeed clearly modeled on Greek uncials; of the rest, three, at the most, may have been taken over from the Glagolitic alphabet. The derivation of the others is obscure. The error, being of no practical import, is not serious in a work of this nature, and on the whole the book serves its purpose very well.-Avrahm Y ar- molinsky, New York Public Library. Reference Books of 1941--43 Reference Books of I94I-I943· ... Third in- formal supplement to Guide to Reference Books~ Sixth Edition, by Isadore Gilbert Mudge. Constance M. Winchell. Ameri- can Library Association, 1944. I55P· Miss Hutchins speaks of Mudge's Guide to Reference Books and its supplements as the "solid base of a small pyramid of lists of reference books, diminishing in size and im- portance the further away they get from the base." 1 This base is now enlarged by the third three-year supplement, Reference Books of I94I-I943 by Constance M. Winchell. 1 Hutchins, Margaret. Int roduction to Reference Work. Ch icago, American Library Association, 1944. p, 89. DECEMBER~ 1944 Lists come, are checked, and often forgotten , but the Mudge-Winchell series is consulted over and over; it is used not only as a buying guide but also as a reminder and inspiration when working on reference problems. ,Selection of titles in the basic work was made with the general library in mind, 2 and the same point of view has been maintained. The policy of inclusion as stated in the 1938- 40 supplement is to list new works, new edi- tions of works previously appearing in Mudge, and new parts of reference continuations which were covered in the Guide. New 2 Mudge, Isadore Gilbert. Guide to Reference Books. 6th ed. Chicago, American Library Association, 193 6. p. iii. 95 issues of regularly established annuals have not been listed unless some change in scope or policy seemed to make a new annotation desirable. 3 The reviewer was surprised not to find the 194I edition of The Bookman~s Manual by Graham until she discovered that it is not in the sixth edition of Mudge. Tech- nically, then, the supplement should not in- clude it, though it seems unfortunate for this useful tool not to appear in our basic guide to reference books. "Processed" publications made their appear- ance in the I 938-40 volume and many are included in the third supplement, though no bibliographic note indicates that they are so published. One of the very interesting and useful features of this list is the unexpected number of rather slight, inexpensive works that are included. Many of these pamphlets are bibliographies on rather small subjects that have been prepared by government bu- reaus, universities, or societies and might easily escape the attention of the librarian. Among these publications are also directories, concordances, and dictionaries. They are very helpful to the small libraries always on the lookout for free and inexpensive material, and also to the library specializing in certain sub- jects. One mimeographed publication that was omitted but might well have been included with the technical manuals for libraries is Code for Cataloging Music, prepared by the Music Library Association in 194I and 1942.4 Because of the increased interest in tech- nical subjects a larger number of books in these fields has been listed. The subject of marine engineering, which was not included in the second supplement or in the Guide, is represented by seven titles in the third sup- plement. There are fourteen titles under the heading Military and Naval, ten on aero- nautics, six on · mechanical engineering. In spite of the war there appear eighty-one titles published outside of North and South America, about half of them from England and ten from Germany. While many of these are volumes added to sets that have been in preparation for some time, it is interesting to notice that such a new work as Loewenberg's 3 Winchell, Constance M. Reference Books of I938-I940. Chicago, American Library Association, 1941. p. 3--J. . 4 Music Library Association. Code for Catalogmg Music. The association, C. V. Nimitz, Music Division, Public Library of the District of Columbia, Washing- ton, D.C. Annals of Opera, 1597-1940 was published in England in 1943. Only books that could be examined in New York libraries have been included. Reference Books of 1941-1943 follows the same arrangement as the Guide and earlier supplements. It is printed clearly and has different sized types to indicate subjects and their subdivisions. Running titles at the top of each page give subject content. It includes about 650 items. Entries give author, full title, place, publisher, date, rather complete collation, series, price, Dewey classification number, and usually an annotation. A note states that prices of foreign books have been omitted unless readily available. Apparently that policy has. been followed also with do- mestic publications, for about seventy-five have no price. At least a third of them are government documents, many of which, no doubt, are free; others are issued by societies, universities, or libraries; a few by commercial publishers. _ The annotations are generally explicit, giving the scope and arrangement of the work. Sometimes comparisons with earlier editions are made; for example; the annotation on the fourth edition of Merle Johnson's American First Editions reads, in part, "Omits 23 names included in the I936 edition and adds I I new ones." An excellent note on the Union List of Microfilms by the Philadelphia Bibliographical Center points out its uses in the library. Sometimes, though not in many cases, the annotations are evaluative; this type of note is used for Runes's Dictionary of Philosophy. Comparison of similar works is occasionally made, as for the dictionaries of abbreviations by Partridge arid by Stephen- son. Very complete contents for such works as the American Imprints Inventory by the Historical Records Survey and the Bibli- ographies of the World at War by the Legis..: lative Reference Service of the Library of Congress are quite useful. The reference librarian of a general library in examining this new supplement can exJ press only pleasure in its appearance and satis- faction in the number of useful titles that are being added to the library because she did examine it.-Emily Garnett, reference li- brarian, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Tex. 96 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES