College and Research Libraries probably look askance at the suggestion (p. and that in the last paragraph on page 47; the 30) concerning vigorous weeding and discard- data in Table 10, page 74, showing that 16 ing; in connection with the "proposal for a per cent of the personnel in 826 higher edu- carefully developed book collection for the cational libraries have more than one full year use of undergraduates" (p. 33), Harvard's in an accredited library school certainly do plans might well have been cited; there is not support the statement on the following very little evidence to support the categorical page that "16 per cent . . . have had two or statement (p. 37) that librarians "have as more years of instruction." often as not been guilty" of buying extensively The volume is well and clearly written, in some narrow specialty, leaving behind them each chapter is followed by a list of recom- accumulations of books that will be little mendations, which are, however, for the most used by anyone else; some readers might well part not new, and there is a seven-page bibli- wish for a reference to or authority for the ography which should be useful.—J. Periam statement in the first paragraph on page 46 Danton. Reading and Book Buying People and Books: A Study of Reading and Book-Buying Habits. Henry C. Link and Harry Arthur Hopf. Book Industry Com- mittee, Book Manufacturers' Institute, 1946. 167P. In the fall of 1944 it was anybody's guess whether the boom in book buying would con- tinue after the war, decline gradually, or collapse. Faced with shortages of material and personnel and with the prospect of heavily rising costs, the book industry, in order to protect its heavy investment in plants and organization, needed facts about book reading and book buying upon which to base accurate estimates of future market trends. With the cooperation and financial backing of all branches of the book industry, a consumers' survey on a national scale was conducted jointly by two independent research organiza- tions, the Psychological Corporation and the Hopf Institute of Management. People and Books is a report of the findings of this study by the men who served as joint directors. Conventional public opinion polling tech- niques were used in gathering data. These are fully described. A questionnaire contain- ing 63 items (reproduced in the report) that had undergone eight pretests in the field was administered by a total of 235 interviewers to a stratified sample, consisting of 4000 indi- viduals fifteen years of age and older, of the nonfarm, civilian population of the United States. This was supplemented by two short- er questionnaires used in interviewing 225 book dealers and distributors and 100 college and university administrators (the latter to obtain facts relevant to the publishing of textbooks). The main body of the report consists of a series of simple tables and graphs, showing percentages of people in the consumers' group who answered the questions according to each of various alternatives, with accompanying text describing and interpreting these statis- tics. Basic breakdowns are made according to recency of reading, income level, educa- tion, age, sex, and religious background. The questions deal with such matters as frequency of reading, types of books and subjects read and preferred, physical characteristics and price of last book read, where and how books are obtained, book ownership, price prefer- ences, how and why books are selected, time spent in reading as compared with other activi- ties, comparison of recent with estimated future book reading and buying. "Correla- tions" are reported between some of these vari- ables, apparently from inspection of the per- centage data, but no coefficients of correlation are given. The major conclusion is that "everything in our survey points to a long-term gain in the reading, and therefore in the purchasing, of books." The validity of this inference might be questioned. Years of formal educa- tion appear to be more closely related to fre- quency of readership than any other variable, although there is some relation between fre- quency of reading and socio-economic status. The authors predict a pronounced trend to- ward increased reading of nonfiction. They also anticipate the creation of a huge market 370 COLLEGE AND RESEARCLI LIBRARIES for low-priced books, side by side but not in competition with the existing market for high- er-priced books. They conclude that people will buy books that interest them, without too much regard for price (does this account for the $10 price set on their own volume!). The authors recommend that studies of this kind be repeated at intervals of a year or two. Librarians will agree that no one survey in this field can be regarded as defini- tive. Indeed, so fast have world events moved, that the data for this study, collected between May 21 and June 8, 1945, were ob- solete before publication. They were gath- ered in the closing moments of the pre-atomic age, just after V-E Day, but before the bomb fell on Hiroshima. Moreover, they were ob- tained while millions of American men whose reading interests and habits are known to have been materially affected by their military ex- perience were still overseas. Although some adjustment was made in the sampling quotas, no attempt was made to secure data from this large and influential group of readers. Nor is any reference made in the interpretation of the findings to relevant information about American service men gathered by others. Compared with such studies as Wilson's Geography of Reading, W a p l e s ' People and Print, and W a p l e s and T y l e r ' s What People Want to Read About, the present survey can- not but appear superficial, especially with respect to interpretation of findings. The authors seem unaware that other studies of "people and books" have been conducted by highly competent investigators. They make no effort to relate their findings to those ob- tained in other surveys. In fact, they make no reference whatever to any of the literature in this field. The book is attractively printed and bound but contains neither bibliography nor index.—Alice I. Bryan. Little Magazines The Little Magazine: A History and a Bib- liography. By Frederick J . Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1946. ix, 44OP. Presumably, there could be no little maga- zines until first there were big ones. The authors of this book point out that the little magazine movement (if it may be called that) began about 1910. Its beginnings, then, coin- cide with the end of the muckraking era, which, if it did nothing else, established the permanent place in America of the popular, large-circulation magazine; the number of readers of Munsey's, McClure's, Everybody's increased by the hundreds of thousands under the pressure of new journalistic techniques, but when muckraking died the tremendous circulations remained and presently grew even larger. It seems more than a coincidence that in the second decade of the twentieth century the little magazine began to feed on a vigor- ous and sometimes ostentatious opposition to bigness. Of this relationship, Hoffman-Allen-Ulrich make nothing at all. Instead, they point out a very creditable relationship to the later history of publishing; 80 per cent of the au- thors of literary worth in our time, they say, were first published in the little magazines. It is only fair to add, however, that they de- fine "little" as something more than a matter of size. True, the little magazine lived a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence. Often its only subscribers were its contributors (par- ticularly if you include "would-be" contribu- tors). Sometimes it died a thousand deaths before its final collapse. And collapse, of course, it always did in the end, for if it lived on it was no longer to be considered a little magazine. But they make the further distinc- tion that the little magazine published experi- mental writing and went in for the latest literary thing. Like a number of the editors they are writing about, they are inclined to prefer the term "advance guard" to "little." The distinction is useful though it may be argued. In the history which makes up a good half of the volume, little magazines are divided into six classes—poetry, leftist, regional, ex- perimental, critical, and eclectic. Chapters on each type are interspersed with chapters on the historical development of the genre. Some of the magazines to receive extended t r e a t m e n t are The Double Dealer, The Little Review, Poetry, The Seven Arts, Broom. The Partisan Review is presented as a little OCTOBER, 1946 371