College and Research Libraries


ing to raise a family, pay the greengrocer, 
and find some sort of continuing financial 
security. 

The book primarily addresses two aspects 
of the writing profession: the difficulty of its 
achieving identity as a profession and the 
economic consequences of this difficulty. 
Walter Besant, on whose writings 
Bonham-Carter draws heavily, said of early 
efforts at organization by authors: 

They began . . . with an impossible theory: that 
authorship is a profession as distinct as law or 
medicine; and that it is possible to unite its 
members, as those called to the Bar are united, 
into a guild or company governed by its own 
laws. At the most, authorship is a collection of 
professions. . . . There is one thing, and one 
thing only, for which those who write books and 
papers which are sold can possibly unite-viz., 
their material interests. 

Within this economically oriented con-
text, Bonham-Carter chronicles the long, 
frequently aimless, evolution from the pe-
riod when authors, either as depende~ts of 
patrons or as frenzied hacks, producing and 
selling their writings like piecework, were 
virtually without an identity, on to the 
breakthrough of the 1700s when novelists 
like Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett 
found a readership so wide that the pub-
lisher was obliged to recognize at least the 
successful author as an economic coequal, 
ending with what occupies a full half of the 
book, the years between the founding of the 
Society of Authors in 1884 and the passage 
of the Copyright Act of 1911. 

The prodigally documented details of this 
latter half may, as much as anything, make 
the reader wish for a more even treatment 
throughout the book. Up until 1884, 
Bonham-Carter's coverage is, as he prom-
ises, selective-in terms both of authors 
mentioned and of the attention they re-
ceive. While the varying fortunes of his 
writers as they tried to deal with their pub-
lishers are well worth the reading, the effect 
is almost more like a series of annual re-
ports than literary history. This makes the 
book less interesting and broadly useful 
than it might have been. Authors by Profes-
sion still has considerable value, however, 
and should not be ignored by the academic 
librarian.-Charles Helzer, University of 
Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 

Recent Publications I 157 

Bernier, Charles L., and Yerkey, A. Neil. 
Cogent Communication: Overcoming 
Reading Overload. Contributions in Li-
brarianship and Information Science, 
number 26. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood 
Pr., 1979. 280p. $19.95. LC 78-73794. 
ISBN 0-313-20893-X. 
In deciding to write about lack of cogency 

and communication and reading overload, 
the authors have chosen a topic of great 
interest to all of us who struggle to "keep 
up" in the face of mounting piles of unread 
journals and unchecked SDI printouts. The 
authors, and in particular the first author, 
also write from an impressive background in 
the management of library and information 
systems, particularly in the scientific and 
technical areas, and Bernier is writing on a 
topic on which he was expressed himself in 
print a number of times. It is with reluc-
tance, therefore, that the reviewer is forced 
to report that the expectations raised by the 
title, the expertise of the author, and the 
cogent introduction are not fully met. 

The book starts promisingly by convinc-
ingly introducing its premise-that people 
read and view, but do nothing appropriate 
about it, even if it is in their own interest to 
do so. It goes on to state the book's subject 
and purpose in admirably simple terms; that 
it is about reading and then doing some-
thing appropriate about what has been read. 

It is perhaps inevitable that, having raised 
such high expectations in the reader, the 
authors are not really able to solve the prob-
lem they have so well presented. The first 
half of the book is devoted to the explaf\51-
tion and advocacy of terse communication, 
sometimes also expressed as terse organiza-
tion, terse literature, and terse conclusions. 
It is a topic on which Bernier has written 
before, and he states his case with emotion 
and urgency-that communication could be 
made more useful and used if much of the 
excess verbiage were removed. 

The authors are protagonists and not ob-
servers, and they present nothing less. 
From the advocacy of terse communication, 
which is defined as reduction to 1 percent 
of the original, the authors proceed to ul-
traterse, which is even less than 1 percent. 
They argue that present techniques of sur-
rogation, including abstracts, indexes, and 
skipping, have all failed. It is an unavoid-



158 I College & Research Libraries • March 1980 

able observation that the exposition of the 
case for terse communication is itself any-
thing but terse. 

The second half of the book deals not 
with overlap but with cogency and examines 
motivations, psychological bases for com-
munication, attitudes, beliefs, and the de-
sire to persuade as the basis for cogency. 
The authors point out, quite correctly, that 
we are persuaded not only by the message 
but also by the source of the message. 

This is in many ways an interesting book, 
but it is frustrating because no clear solution 
plans are proposed. We are left with gen-
eral admonitions such as " the subject of 
message variables is complex, but we be-
lieve a careful study of these factors will pay 
dividends in increased cogency." Perhaps 
the authors point to the source of the 
difficulty in their introduction, by stating 
that the book itself is an example of the cul-
tural lag that they identify as part of the 
difficulty, and that it could have . been writ-
ten thirty-five years ago. This reviewer fears 
that some form of it may be written again 
thirty-five years from now. 

The work contains a useful appendix, ref-
erences, and bibliography and appears com-
petently researched. It is therefore some-
what surprising to find in it a number of un-
supported and unattributed statements , in-
troduced by " somebody has said" and "it 
has been said. " The book, makes interesting 
reading for those of us who worry about the 
problems in information transfer and read-
ing overload, but it offers only general so-
lutions to these pervasive concerns. Its ref-
erence value is therefore limited.-Herbert 
S. White , Indiana University, Bloomington. 

The Osler Library. Montreal: McGill Uni-
versity, 1979. 64p. $10 plus $1 postage 
and handling. ISBN 0-7717-0046-6. (Or-
der from: Osler Library, McGill Univer-
sity, 3655 Drummond St., Montreal, PQ 
H3G 1Y6.) 
On · the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary 

the Osler Library at McGill University has 
published a small but elegantly printed and 
handsomely illustrated book describing the 
library and giving its history. 

Just as the Osler Library itself has been 
an inspiration to many librarians in the 
United States and Canada, so this book will 

be something to study and try to emulate in 
the future. 

Sir William Osler (1848-1919) had been 
connected with a number of medical 
schools, both as student and as teacher. He 
received his medical degree at McGill, 
taught there for some time, moved to the 
University of Pennsylvania, then to the new 
Johns Hopkins Medical School, and finally 
was chosen regius professor of medicine at 
Oxford University. 

Always, however, McGill remained his 
first love, and when he died his wide collec-
tion of rare books in medicine was found to 
be bequeathed to that institution-but with 
the proviso that it ~ should be cataloged be-
fore it was dispatched overseas. His nephew 
William W. Francis, his cousin Archibald 
Malloch, and R. H. Hill (with the shadowy 
figure of Leonard Mackall in the back-
ground) worked for about eight years on the 
Bibliotheca Osleriana, the catalog of almost 
8,000 volumes that were finally in place in 
the new quarters erect~d for them a.t 
McGill in 1928. Together with the collec-
tion and its catalog came Francis as curator 
and honorary librarian, who stayed until his 
death some thirty years later and who in 
turn left his books and his name to a new 
wing of the library. 

The Bibliotheca Osleriana is arranged as 
Osler saw the literature of medicine, in 
eight large groups: prima, secunda, lit-
teraria, historica, biographica, bibliographia, 
incunabula, and manuscripts. Such an 
idiosyncratic classification is characteristic of 
Osler, who was interested in the problems 
of libraries and who had his own ideas about 
how things should be done. In many cases, 
however, the reasons for assigning works in 
one or another category were known only to 
Osier-though sometimes the annotations 
(many of which he wrote himself) explain 
what Osler thought of the work. 

In any case, the original collection is kept 
in the order of the Bibliothec.a in the pres-
ent Osler Library, much as archives are 
kept in the order in which they are received 
in a library even tOday. To browse through 
the pages of the Bibliotheca, however, is to 
view the history of medicine and its cognate 
sciences through the eyes of one who inti-
mately knew the importance and worth of 
each of the iterris and who could bring to