College and Research Libraries


78 I College & Research Libraries • January 1975 

sumably will be trying to use these boring 
recitals as exemplars. Most bright students 
will benefit from ignoring the prescribed 
and stodgy and doing their own thing. The 
perspicacious Anderson questions at the 
end of each case are surely guides enough. 

Perhaps some day a study will be made 
of the academic library's problems with 
censorship and possible violations of intel-
lectual freedom; until then, this volume will 
more than repay the time spent in reading 
it by any professional librarian who works 
in an academic library. As a quotation from 
Thomas Paine which begins the volume 
says, "those who expect to reap the bless-
ings of freedom must undergo like men the 
fatigue of supporting it." Ameni-Eli M. 
Oboler, University Librarian, Idaho State 
University, Pocatello. 

Mumby, Frank Arthur, and Norrie, Ian. 
Publishing and Bookselling. Part One: 
From the Earliest Times to 1870, by 
Frank Arthur Mumby. Part Two: 1870-
1970, by Ian Norrie. 5th ed. London: 
Jonathan Cape, 1974; distributed in the 
U.S. by Bowker, New York. 685p. $33.50. 
The first four editions of this work ap-

peared in the years 193Q-1956. The pres-
ent edition, the fifth, has been revised by 
Mr. Ian Norrie. The first part of the work, 
covering the period from classical times to 
1870, has been revised only slightly. Per-
haps in some future edition Mr. Norrie or 
a later editor will have time to revise this 
portion of Frank Mumby's book extensively, 
for a great deal of research on the history 
of the book has been done in the last three 
decades, the results of which ought to be 
incorporated. The remark is not intended 
as a criticism of Mr. Norrie. He cannot be 
taxed for not doing that which he never in-
tended to do, nor that which he had not 
time to do. 

The second part of the book is devoted 
to the hundred years 1870-1970, and is 
wholly Mr. Norrie's work. Mumby noted 
indirectly in his preface to the first edition 
that a difficulty in writing a history of pub-
lishing is to avoid producing a book which 
is a series of histories of individual publish-
ers. Ian Norrie has overcome that difficulty 
by interspersing his accounts of individual 
companies with a number of chapters head-
ed "Trade Affairs," in which are treated the 

activities and problems of bookselling and 
publishing as a whole. 

There are a few minor blemishes in the 
second half of the work. On the first page 
of that portion the author says that the en-
couragement of "the civilizing force in 
Homo sapiens . . . is the basic business of 
the British and every other book trade." It 
is an imposing statement. In the pages that 
follow it is not always apparent that those 
in the book trade have kept this primary 
objective well in mind. The author also dis-
cusses the proposal by government in 1940 
to impose a sales tax on books, a proposal 
vigorously opposed by the book trade. Of 
those fighting the tax the author says that 
"Europe was disintegrating around them. 
At any moment each and every one of the 
people concerned with the fight against the 
purchase tax might be fleeing for their lives 
from the Gestapo, but they were able to 
concentrate their minds on this important 
issue. And they won." It is worth recalling 
what else was occurring in 1940 aside from 
the epic struggle against the tax on books. 
The German Panzer divisions smashed the 
Allied armies, and France was defeated. 
Three hundred thousand British soldiers 
were gotten off the beaches of Dunkirk by 
the strenuous efforts of the Royal Navy and 
its civilian auxiliaries. The pilots of the 
RAF, those to whom so many owed so 
much, won the Battle of Britain. It is bare-
ly possible that there might be two views 
of a group who in Britain's finest hour con-
centrated their efforts on defeating a pro-
posed tax on a commodity which they were 
marketing. It should be emphasized that 
these criticisms are directed at relatively 
few pages in a book of more than six hun-
dred. 

The bibliography of publishing and 
bookselling by William Peet which was an 
appendix to the first edition also appears 
In this edition, and it has been brought up 
to date by Monica Carolan. There are other 
appendixes: a list of the officers of the Pub-
lishers' Association and of the Booksellers' 
Association from the 1890s to the present 
time; a table giving the number of books 
produced in subject categories for signifi-
cant years; and another table giving the 
total value of book sales in pounds sterling 
for important years. The work will be prob-
ably most valuable as a reference book. 



Those who read it for pleasure may find 
that six hundred pages on book-trade his-
tory is at times grim going.-D. W. Davies, 
Lloyd Corporation Ltd., Claremont, Cali-
fornia. 

Thompson, Donald E. Indiana Authors and 
Their Books, 1917-1966. Crawfords-
ville, Ind.: Wabash College, 1974. 688p. 
In a superficial sense this volume repre-

sents an exercise in vanity. Funded by 
Hoosiers, sponsored by Hoosiers, prepared, 
published, and distributed by Hoosiers, it 
is a biographical directory of Hoosier au-
thors of the half century from 1917 to 
1966. We take care of our own .... 

But the motivation for the present vol-
ume has some nobler aspects as well. In-
diana has produced substantially more and 
better authors than one would normally 
expect. When the ten best-selling American 
novels for each year from 1895 to 1965 are 
assigned points (ten for first place, nine for 
second place, etc.), and their authors' na-
tive states are determined, the total points 
amassed by Indiana authors are second only 
to those of New York State. Indiana is also 
second only to New York State when fiction 
and nonfiction are taken together. Yet the 
population of Indiana has never attained 
one-fifth that of New York State. 

No one knows why authorship has so 
flourished in Indiana, and although the 
present volume does not attempt to ex-
plain it, it does lay out the data necessary 
for future analysis. Here are biographical 
sketches of the 2,751 authors who made it 
happen. Every author included either was 
"born in the state, or [if] born elsewhere, 
chose to spend the majority of his or her 
maturity within Indiana bounds." Authors 
solely of pamphlets, periodical articles, text-
books, genealogies, and similar publications 
are not included. A wide net has still been 
cast, however, and as a result the volume 
contains biographical sketches of authors 
as different as Kenneth Rexroth is from 
Vance Hartke, and as Ernie Pyle is from 
Alfred C. Kinsey. Much of the information 
presented on the lesser figures is virtually 
unobtainable through any other source. 

The present biographical directory is a 
continuation of a similar work compiled by 
R. E. Banta and published in 1949 entitled 
Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-

Recent Publications I 79 . 

1916. The two works together, therefore, 
now provide coverage for Indiana's first 
century-and-a-half of statehood. The new 
work matches the Banta volume both in 
quality of contents and in format and de-
sign. Yet it also suffers the same basic 
weakness. Since the coverage attempted is 
so broad, it is unlikely ever fully to be at-
tained. It is ironic, for example, that this 
reviewer, although gratified to find his own 
name in the new volume, must point out 
that his father, who also meets the criteria 
for inclusion, is unaccountably omitted. 
Other and more important omissions will 
be turning up for years. Such oversights, 
however, do not mean that this book will 
not serve a useful reference function in 
large libraries or in smaller ones with spe-
cial interest either in authorship or in the 
Hoosier state.-David Kaser, Graduate Li-
brary School, Indiana University, Blooming-
ton. 

Palmer, Richard Phillips. Case Studies in 
Library Computer Systems. New York: 
Bowker, 1973. 214p. 
This book consists of twenty case studies 

of computerization of classical library pro-
cedures and comments; there are no cases 
of network computerization. Six cases deal 
with circulation systems, eight with serials 
systems and six with acquisition systems. 
Graduate students in the School of Library 
Science at Simmons College did "much of 
the initial gathering of information." The 
author made additional on-site visits and 
wrote up the cases. He also introduces the 
book and summarizes it. 

The purpose of the book "is to describe 
and document a number of operational li-
brary computer systems, including their 
cost, so that librarians and library school 
students may better determine whether 
computers should be stamped out or wheth-
er they are appropriate for library use." 
(The phrase "stamped out" comes with 
Ellsworth Mason.) The author concludes 
that although there have been failures in 
library computerization, there also have 
been successes, and some of these successes 
are cases that appear in the book. He antic-
ipates that there will be an increasing num-
ber of successful library computer applica-
tions in the decade that lies ahead. 

By and large, the objectives of the cases