College and Research Libraries the "Model Statement of Criteria" . would be useful to any library setting up by laws and personnel procedures. All in all, this collection is useful to have at hand and will be referred to again and again.-John V. Crowley, Assistant Direc- tor, Milne Library, State University Col- lege, Oneonta, New Y ark. Anderson, Charles B., ed. Bookselling in America and the World: Some Observa- tions & Recollections in Celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the American Booksellers Association. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1975. 214p. $9.50. (LC 74-24294) (ISBN 0-8129-0539-3) Delavenay, Emile. For Books. (Unesco and its Programme) Paris: Unesco, 1974. 74p. $1.00. (Available from Uni- pub, Inc., P~O. Box 433, New York, NY 10016) (ISBN 92-3-101147-2) The booktrade and book distribution are essential to the intellectual universe of which libraries are also part. Yet, all too many books we see about bookselling focus on a single facet: the lore of the antiquarian book shop and the memoirs of famous rare bookdealers. One, therefore, turns with considerable anticipation to two new vol- umes promising to deal more broadly with this important phase of information ex- change. The collection edited by Ander- son, a well-known bookdealer and former ABA president, is an "olla podrfda" of pre- sumably original essays and selections from previously issued materials. In the former category, John Tebbel and Sigfried Taubert offer short histories of American and world bookselling respectively. These are followed by brief sketches of the association since its founding in 1900 by former Publishers Weekly editor Chandler B. Grannis and a glimpse of best-sellers over the same period by Alice Payne Hackett. The other items are snippets and snappets by such book- dealers and book lovers as Sylvia Beach, H. L. Mencken, and Adolph Kroch. My initial expectations were dampened by the fact that Anderson's book is more a keepsake of an event than a serious work. Although a memorial, it was put on tlle market for a price, and thus we are entitled to rate it for - content and utility. Some- Recent Publications I 177 times, it is difficult to tell what is original and what is not. Large chunks of Tebbel's otherwise rather good piece are quarried- almost word for word-from his monumen- tal History of Book Publishing in the Unit- ed States ( 1972- ) . Taubert draws heavily on his earlier studies for his text and all his illustrations from his fascinating Bibliopola (1966). His essay proper is weakened by its nation-by-nation structure. This frag- mentary approach is of doubtful validity. It leads, for example, to his offering a sec- tion on the Australian/New Zealand trade but none on those of the more important Lowlands, Switzerland, and Italy. Hackett merely updates her earlier chronicles on best-sellers and provides none of the insight or depth afforded by works like those of J. Hart and F. L. Mott on the subject. Somewhat more informative is Grannis on the association and its activities. One would dearly like to know more about the ABA as a trade lobby, how it applies pressures, and to what ends; also, which types of bookdealers wielded organizational strength and how. I was particularly intrigued by the several passing references to the expan- sion of the chain bookstore phenomenon and dearly wanted to know mo're about it. Commemorations of the personal book- store ("gentlest profession," "the happiest fraternity") are a recurring theme in the collection and must be pronounced unob- jectionable in themselves. I for one have al- ways rather enjoyed the treacly, nostalgic evocations of Christopher Morley and com- pany. But, to strike a rural parallel, we ought not allow the persistent and haunting dream of "family farms" to shield us from the reality that the large-scale, corporate agribusiness is fast becoming the character- istic mode in agriculture. So, too, it appears that the number of full, personal bookstores may be declining with the growth of the chains which monotonously stress best- sellers and remainders as well as seH-ser- vice. Is not this concentration-in-distribu- tion, if true, a potentially ominous develop- ment in the free exchange of ideas? Librarians and others must remain vigilant · to changes in this trend. Anderson's collection, then, is less a han- dy compendium of current bookselling than a mish-mash of materials mostly available 178 I College & Research Libraries • March 1976 elsewhere. Its contributors are not well served by it. Readers who may be familiar with an earlier and highly informative ABA publication, also edited by Anderson, A Manual of Bookselling (1969), can only be disappointed with this anthology. Unesco's For Books sets out to show the problem of inequitable book distribu- tion throughout the world and what the United Nations has tried to do about it. Delavenay declares: "As regards access to books, 70 per cent of the inhabitants of the globe are underdeveloped. Some thirty countries, representing 30 per cent of the world population produced 81 per cent of the book titles published in 1967," and that in 1969 "Europe, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. between them produced more than 75 per cent of the books published throughout the world." Even more alarming is the impact of the world population explosion in the 1950s and 1960s which has meant that the number of books per readers in the under- developed countries has actually decreased! For me, Delavenay's phrase ''book hunger" is a new but apt slogan. To meet that need, Unesco staff have engaged in a program for the past three decades to promote the reading habit and to accelerate the free flow of books. I was impressed with Unesco's efforts to liberalize copyright restrictions on certain texts so that they could be more readily translated into the vernaculars of emerging nations. Unesco has proceeded through a series of confer- ences held in Asia, Mrica, and Latin Ameri- ca. Its best-known effort has, of course, been the International Book Year of 1972. Steady readers of Unesco publications will not fail to find in this book that hall- mark of international organization prose: innocuous platitudes set forth in thunderous and ringing phrases. Unesco's work in this area, nevertheless, is indeed important and should be better known. Delavenay's summaries of Unesco's related publica- tion programs are useful. In sum, collection developers can skip the Anderson and ac- quire the Delavenay.-Marc Gittelsohn, Undergraduate Librarian, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla. Auger, Charles P., ed. Use of Reports Lit- erature. (Information Sources for Re- search and Development) Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975. 226p. $12.50. (LC 7 4-28477) (ISBN 0-208- 01506-X) Hope, like providence, must be our guide for the examination of a new work on ac- quiring, handling, and using technical re- ports. Perhaps it is the much improved bib- lf.ographic control over report literature which now permits disappointment when a new survey is itself weak and disorderly. This small but ambitious book lacks real focus. The editor intended it "to act as a guide . . . simply to show the way, and to eschew any thoughts of comprehensiveness or definitiveness." His intention was to ben- efit two groups of readers: the subject specialists who seek to venture beyond the confines of conventional lit- erature sources, and the librarians and documentation specialists who constantly strive to administer and exploit reports 'literature to its fullest advantage. The book reads, however, rather like a primer somewhat casually assembled for li- brary school students. The first of the book's two sections is titled "Common Factors"; its six chapters have all been written by the editor. Al- though wide ranging-theses, translations, and meeting papers (as preprints) are in- cluded-his observations are generally ele- mentary. A chapter on the writing of tech- nical reports is included; the author recom- mends good English literary usage. The second part, "Specific Subject Areas," was written by various specialists. The chapter titles are: "Aerospace"; "Agri- culture and Food"; "Biology and Medicine"; "Business and Economics"; "Technical Re- ports in Education"; "Nuclear Energy"; "Science and Technology Applied i:n Indus- try." This should be the work's most prom- ising section, but turns out to be quite uneven; no editorial consensus seems to have informed the authors about what con- stitutes a technical report i:n terms of the project at hand. The section on agriculture, for example, considers the publications of agricultural experiment stations; the section on applications in industry (written by the editor) identifies "Reports of Investiga- tions" of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. These