College and Research Libraries and library is sketched rather well. It is in- teresting to pursue the fortuitous dance of atoms that led Clements to Randolph Adams, a noted librarian.-Ted Grieder, Fales Library, Elmer Bobst Library, New York University. Lubans, John, Jr., ed. Educating the Li- brary User. New York: Bowker, 1974. 435p. $14.50. All a reviewer's hoary cliches apply to Lubans' collection of essays-it is uneven, contains too much material, has rather fuzzily defined objectives, and even lacks an index. Nevertheless, Educating the Li- brary User is one of the most useful and at times inspiring state-of-the-art books to come along in quite awhile. Lubans has brought together some forty original essays on every facet of library in- struction, from the elementary school to the technological university and from the li- brary tour to videotape. Essentially de- scriptive, the work pretends to be a bit more; the first two sections, half the book, supposedly present a rationale for instruc- tion and a discussion of faculty involvement in library-use education. In fact, however, the best essays in these sections are straight-forward descriptions of programs at specific schools or educational levels. A mention of rationale or faculty involvement seems incidental to the thrust of the essays. In any case, Farber's essay on library in- struction at Earlham College is brilliant and humbling; equally good are essays on instruction in undergraduate libraries by Passarelli and Abell and in four-year-college libraries by Kirk. The second half of the book describes the implementation and evaluation of library instruction programs. Included are both overviews of particular instructional tech- niques (tours, computer-assisted instruc- tion, etc. ) and descriptions of particular programs. Many of the essays are excellent, espechilly so given the seeming dryness of the subject matter. Lynch .on library tours and McCormick on handbooks should be- come required reading for those wanting to improve their library's approach to such orientation techniques. Rader's "helpful hints" are an accurate summary for those Recent Publications / 233 planning credit courses in bibliography. The most noticeable failures in the book are the essays by teaching faculty, both from library schools and from outside · the field. The essay by Starkey ("Library-Use Instruction: A College Teacher's View- point") unintentionally shows us how far we have to go in faculty relations. The au- thor, a professor of education, mentions the word ''librarian" only once--and in the sen- tence "Have one librarian escort each group of five people on a guided tour of the li- brary." A history professor writes on the in- triguing topic, "The Lecture-Textbook Syn- drome and Library Use," but uses his space to offer a diatribe against "our ludicrous system of mass education," as he puts it. Wondering why Lubans included such ma- terial, one supposes that having cajoled a faculty member into submitting an essay, it would take considerable temerity to leave it out. The two essays from library school deans are not much better. Goggin on library in- struction at universities does only a super- ficial survey. Breivik writes on library in- struction and the library school, a worthy enough topic, but seems to have little con- viction that library instruction has a place in the professional curriculum. She winds up plumping for her school's course on "the non-user in an urban setting" and for changing the name of library instruction to "Individualization of Communication Con- trols" (I) One should not emphasize the book's failings, however, because it contairis so much that is useful. It should become the basic work for beginning research in li- brary instruction; it includes both a biblio- graphic essay and a nine-page selected bib- liography, and most articles contain ex- tensive notes. Every library instruction practitioner will want it nearby for its de- scription of successful programs and lists of dos and don'ts. And it would be eye- opening auxiliary reading for librarianship students taking reference courses. Lest we feel smug about American ac- complishments, Earnshaw's essay on the co- operative production of audiovisual biblio- graphic aids in the United Kingdom shows how much could be done if our national or- ganizations-and the directors of university 234 I College & Research Libraries • May 1975 libraries-took greater interest. There is still far too much needless duplication of library instruction effort in the U.S. How- ever, the recent news that the Council on Library Resources has funded Project LOEX (the Library Orientation/Instruc- tion Exchange at Eastern Michigan U Di- versity) is encouraging. Lubans' book should help create a common information base for library instruction librarians na- tionwide.-Allan ]. Dyson, Head, Moffitt Undergraduate Library, University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley. Jones, John Bush, ed. Readings in Descrip- tive Bibliography. Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Pr., 1974. 208p. $9.00. Liebert Herman W. Bibliography Old & New: (Bibliographical Monograph Se- ries, no.6) Austin: Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas, 1974. 25p. Readings in Descriptive Bibliography will never find a place on "Fritz" Liebert's bookshelves. With the exception of two or three of the essays comprising the Read- ings, all the others are anathema to Lie- bert's way of thinking of bibliography. And the former director of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library does have some definite feelings concerning the "new" bibliography. I choose the word feelings in- tentionally, because it is precisely the ab- sence of this quality in most contemporary bibliographers-such as those collected here-which Liebert laments. "Bibliophily is the parent of bibliogra- phy," Liebert reminds us at the close of his volume comprising the Third Annual Lew David Feldman Lectureship in Bibliogra- phy. As such, "writing about books and discriminating among them came later, and its vitality still depends on love of the book." Careful to place the master-Fred- son Bowers-above reproach, Liebert re- proves those of his disciples whose investi- gations relate solely to the physical aspects of the book without revealing anything sub- stantive about either its contents or the au- thor. "But the book is only a physical con- tainer," he chides, "and the recitation of the facts of its production, when they reveal nothing about its contents, belongs to the history of technology." Technology is quite pronounced in a number of the essays in Jones' anthology. They total fourteen, and all have appeared before. The editor has brought them togeth- er to update and consolidate much of the work done in descriptive bibliography since the publication of Bowers' Principles of Bibliographical Description twenty-five years ago. Jones envisions the readers to consist of practicing bibliographers, grad- uate students in literature (he himself is on the English faculty at the University of Kansas), and a third category consisting of professional librarians, printing historians, collectors, and dealers. The scope is broad, both in terms of con- tent as well as objective. The essays are ar- ranged in two groups-those of a general nature which touch on all periods of bib- liographical study; those with a more spe- cific orientation, ordered chronologically ac- cording to the modes of book production to which they apply. It would serve no practical purpose to describe and analyze (no pun intended) critically the essays themselves. Mter all, half of them first appeared more than ten years ago. And as for Jones' selections- well, one man's meat is another man's poi- son. Surely, even Herman Liebert would find palatable Bowers' familiar arguments in the latter's "Purposes of Descriptive Bib- liography, With Some Remarks on Meth- od," as he would William Todd's piece showing how descriptive techniques, cou- pled with the study of book reviews, can aid in the discovery of hidden editions and impressions of eighteenth-century texts. And certainly one would have to be a clod, pure and simple, to quarrel with Allan Stevenson's brilliant detective story on the dating of books through the study of water- marks and their variant states. Two of G. Thomas Tanselle's entries, however-one, a minutely detailed and highly technical proposal for a methodology for the description of paper, and the other a survey of techniques for recording press figures, including a comprehensive and sys- tematic set of tables-assuredly would be more difficult to stomach. David Faxon's "On Printing 'At One Pull' and Distinguish- ing Impressions by Point Holes," too, would unquestionably cause some dic;tress. Quite