College and Research Libraries 252 I College & Research Libraries • May, 1965 gles out as clear examples Pliny's .. His to ria Naturalis" and the great Byzantine Souda (or Suidas lexicon) . He adopts the term .. golden chain" to embody the links that have passed on great scholarship and tra- ditions down to the present day, i.e. , ... .. golden chain of written record" (p.26). In his chapter on Hellas he speculates on sev- eral reasons which may account for the no- ticeable lack of information about private libraries in Greece as compared with those of Rome. At the conclusion of his succinct history of Roman public libraries he poses a provocative query: what would have hap- pened had Ovid not been sent into exile by Augustus but made head of the Palatine li- brary instead? Chapter VI, .. Classical Bib- liography," with its handy compendium of informative data on such details as writing implements, papyrus, parchment, and in- dexes, is a good filler-in for the background to the picture Sir Frederick Kenyon has al- ready depicted in his Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome. Other topics in- clude: religious life and learning (a very fertile field-.. the special character of Chris- tianity involved an immediate interest in books, and therefore in libraries," p.21); the Oxford Greyfriars and S. Robert of Lincoln; Richard de Bury and his Philobiblon; parish libraries; and at the end a delightful little chapter on _.The Study and the Sofa"-a capsule word portrait of _.the social and do- mestic circumstances under which reading is done" (p.262). The list of sources is im- pressive; however, I miss a reference to Edward A. Parsons's The Alexandrian Li- brary; and George Haven Putnam's Authors and Their Public in Ancient Times, though a trifle antiquated, is still interesting read- ing. There are misprints in the Greek and accents are occasionally butchered, but, all in all, this is a highly intelligent text with a wealth of information which spills over even into the footnotes. The book certainly points up the need for more research in this lucra- tive field.-Francis D. Lazenby, University of Notre Dame. Guardians of Tradition: American School- books of the Nineteenth Century. By Ruth Miller Elson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. 424p. $7. (64- 17219). To what extent is an individual influenced by his reading? Librarians and educationists have pondered this question variously. In Molders of the Modern Mind, for example, Librarian Robert Downs described 111 books that, in his opinion, had shaped West- ern civilization. The late, deep-thinking edu- cational philosopher, Michael Demiashkev- ich, in his The National Mind, analyzed the cultural influences, including literature, that influenced the English, French, and German mentalities. But the ·present approach is a more basic one-to the ideas held by the or- dinary man, and it is made through an analysis of a thousand or more schoolbooks to which the nineteenth-century American was exposed. Because there was no competition from television, movies, and the countless recre- ations that confront today's children, school- books undoubtedly influenced last century's Americans considerably. Furthermore, since libraries were almost nonexistent in schools there was no possibility of dispersal through reserve reading. Finally, the accent on memorization reinforced by the monitorial system and catechism-type learning guar- anteed schoolbook influence beyond any- thing today, at least for those who attended school at all. From ·their readers, spellers, grammars, arithmetics, and later, geographies and his- tories, our grand- and great-grandparents learned reading, writing and arithmetic, of course. But they gathered other things also, because textbook writers of the nineteenth century .. were much more concerned with the child's moral development than with the development of his mind." Noah Webster prefaced his 1789 textbook with the purpose .. to diffuse the principles of virtue and pa- triotism." From Dr. Elson's absorbing analysis it is apparent that idealism dominated realism in last century's schoolbooks. In the study of nature, God's creation was nobly reconciled with biologists' evolution. Virtue was almost always rewarded and vice punished. Ameri- cans were God's latest .. chosen people." Other nations were something less. The English were good because they were our parents and their literature was the greatest. But the English were monstrous and cruel in the American Revolution. Other nations ranked below, with various characteriza- tions. The Germans, on the whole, received the next most favorable treatment. Except ' \ 1' for LaFayette, the French were unenthusi- astically described. Ita~ans, although artis- tic, were degenerate, and reproached for housing the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. South European peoples were de- scribed as indolent; Asians generally as de- clining; and Chinese as cunning and deceit- ful. There was a smugness toward Latin Americans that complimented them for their good sense in revolting against cruel Spain, but warned them there was no salvation ex- cept under United States leadership. These national misconceptions were only a part of the nineteenth-century schoolbook teachings. The rest included a hero worship register that put Washington at the top, fol- lowed by Franklin, Lincoln, Columbus, and Penn; and for contrast, Benedict Arnold per- sonified villainy. Other instruction in eco- nomics, social, political, reform, and culture concepts appeared equally naive and con- trasted sharply with contemporary sophisti- cated liberalism and realism as communi- cated by today' s mass media. It is a tribute to Dr. Elson's provocative writing that a reader is stimulated to ask: Is our century better because we relish a fare of virtue punished, vice rewarded? Does our passion for realism and pragma- tism make us a greater nation now than when we naively welcomed fantasy, and "they lived happily ever after"? Librarians of school, public, and college libraries have to select this book. For its list of nineteenth-century textbooks alone, it is bibliographically indispensable. For its con- tribution to our number one professional problem of censorship it merits an intellec- tual freedom award. For good writing and stimulating reading Guardians of Tradition deserves inclusion on all kinds of library reading lists.-Louis Shores, Florida State University. Classification and Indexing in the Social Sciences. By D. J. Foskett. Washington, D.C.: Butterworth, Inc., 1963. 190p. $6.95. No one has ever devised a completely satisfactory classification scheme, and it seems unlikely that anyone ever will. This failing has always been apparent, but in recent years it has taken on increasingly ur- gent importance as scholarly literature has grown more complex and information re- Book Reviews I 253 trieval more sophisticated. The library pro- fession has long been aware of the diffi- culties created by the schemes available, but Foskett, librarian at the University of London's Institute of Education, has now examined the matter thoroughly in specific · relation to the social sciences. He has writ- ten an immensely stimulating book, provid- ing a perceptive critique of each of the existing classifications as well as new in- sight into possible solutions to the problems of classifying social science materials. He is very much in the Ranganathan camp and believes that the "facet analysis" which Ranganathan devised can conceiv- ably supply the key to a much improved classification. He is especially taken with the more refined versions of this approach found in the work of the British Classifica- tion Research Group, ,and particularly in the work of Barbara Kyle. A schedule fashioned along these lines, he believes, would reveal subject. subdivisions and the relationships between subjects much more satisfactorily than any schedule used today. He would have a classification of such flexibility that any two concepts in the area of the social sciences could be related and this relation indicated in the notation of the material. To reach this goal, Foskett, like Rangana- than and virtually all the librarians working in new classifications, proposes a change in the concepts by which an item should be classified. Thus, a book would be classified by whether it deals, say, with a personality or an activity and then subclassified by equally untraditional concepts, like Rangan- athan's Matter, Space, Time, and Energy. The final result should present, he believes, a classification network which would show the interrelations of all categories of knowl- edge, general or specific, where they im- pinge on each other. If the reader finds himself quarreling with any of these ideas, it is probably due more to the nature of the enterprise than it is to Foskett's analysis of it. There are, however, several obstacles standing in the author's way, as he readily admits. It seems fairly reasonable to suppose that no classification system is going to provide for precise rela- tion of every concept to every other one. Foskett faces this limitation squarely, de- bating at some length whether "Cell" should be related to "Child," for example, and fi-