College and Research Libraries Recent Publications BOOK REVIEWS McArthur, Tom. Worlds of Reference: Lexi- cography, Learning and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Computer. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1986. 230p. $24.95 (ISBN 0-521-30637- X). LC 85-7860. At first, Tom McArthur's Worlds of Refer- ence looks like just another history of books and printing. It is distinguished, if at all, by a philo-technological conclusion, ' a somewhat unexpected concentration on reference books, and an overall emphasis on the impact of books generally and printing specifically that is deeply in- debted to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's Print- ing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979). In 230 copiously illustrated pages, it moves swiftly and glibly from Cro- Magnon cave paintings at Lascaux and Al- tamira across 30,000 years of human his- tory. McArthur stops at Sumer and Egypt to admire the invention of writing on clay and papyrus, meanders through the co- dex on parchment of late antiquity and Christian Europe, notes Chinese develop- ments in papermaking and printing, and f1 spends a bit more time on the implications of printing from movable type in the post- Gutenberg era. He eventually lands atop the computer revolution scarcely out of breath, indeed, with energy enough for a little bit of crystal-ball gazing into the shape of things to come. Within this broad context, the Glaswe- gian linguist and lexicographer looks most specifically at the history of the study of language and at what he regards as there- lated creation of reference books, mainly lexicographic but also encyclopedic. (This is a distinction McArthur himself wants to blur; see, e.g., chapter 13, especially p .109.) It seems unfortunate that this fo- cus should be burdened by his charmingly confessed ignorance of firsthand scholar- ship in many of the topics on which he speaks; a bibliography that is a pastiche of scholarly, semischolarly, and popular sec- ondary sources; and a text filled with sweeping generalizations on a variety of subjects, not all of them equally agreeable, others merely obvious. (These flaws may also reflect his debts to Eisenstein, whose book also exhibits them.) It is, for in- stance, hard to imagine the librarian who will be either astonished by or in disagree- ment with McArthur's remar~s that ''the essence of information handling is that by imposing shape it banishes randomness'' and that "the greater the certainty of find- . ing what you want when you want it, the better the system" (p.11). Like Eisenstein, McArthur has pro- duced a book that is awfully easy to dis- trust. It resembles nothing so much as Al Capp's Shmoo. It waddles over to are- viewer and urges him to dine out on it. I want to resist this temptation. Flaws and all, McArthur's is an oddly important book that will repay the time a reader spends with it. Though its dust wrapper tells us that Worlds of Reference is intended for ''lexicographers, historians, educators and information scientists as well as the general reader," librarians ("information scientists"?) and library educators will want to pay attention to it. McArthur is not int-erested in the history of books and pril'1:tin~ per se. H he were, then his book wotald be almost entirely without merit. His tlopic is rather human- kind's efforts to bring the universe of in- formation und-er cOII\mand. In this his- 177 178 College & Research Libraries tory, the development of writing systems, and then of printing, plays a crucial role; efforts to control information not only an- tedate writing but also will postdate print- ing, as McArthur understands. His book is, in fact, a prolonged "meditation" on reference, by which I think he means- Frederick C. Crews' joke in The Pooh Per- plex about Murphy A. Sweat's "large freshman anthology, All Previous Thought" (p.64) notwithstanding-quite literally "all previous thought" and the . ways in which it is stored, accessed, and classified. Significant to his argument, and a point that he rightly stresses, is the close rela- tionship between classification and stratifi- cation: "we don't just classify, we strat- ify," he remarks (p.176}, and discussion of ''canon-formation'' as part of the taxo- nomic process is a recurrent theme in his book (e.g., p.35ff.). The impact of stratifi- cation on the shape of reference tools, as their compilers have recognized and ac- cepted various hierarchies, failed to think about them at all, or sought to neutralize March 1987 them through adoption of, for instance, alphabetical organizing principles (A is not superior to L; it simply precedes it in an in- variant series) is something that we don't often think about. Yet it affects the ways in which information and decisions about what constitutes information reach us. The tension between topical and alphabet- ical organizing systems is an issue that, in libraries, is familiar to catalogers. I am by no means certain how many reference li- brarians also consider it with respect to their own tools. That a concealed thematic organizing principle may underlie even an ABC approach to an encyclopedia (p.157) is worth pondering. Nor am I certain how frequently the au- thority (as opposed to the authoritative- ness or accuracy) of reference tools is con- sidered within the field. This too, however, is a topic that McArthur usefully considers. His discussion of the contro- versy surrounding the publication of Web- ster's Third New International Dictionary in the 1960s is illuminating in this regard (chapter 16). Whether or not its compilers , he International Bibliography of Acid Rain the newest research tool covering acid rain, snow, fog and sulfur dioxide pollutants ... ' ' .. ·..- :·' "'; .. , . . -., ' . . ~~ . , _- The latest bibliography from BIOSIS®; this one-~olume publication is comprised of over 3,900 bibliographic records, covering the period 1977 through 1986. The price? Only $45.00. Order your copy today! __ Enclosed is payment of $45.00 for the International Bibliography ol Acid Rain. __ Please send me a pro forma invoice. 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They may thus serve to undermine accepted canons of truth and significance (Di- derot's Encyclopedie is, of course, the locus classicus for such a reference book). McArthur ends with a discussion of the future of reference in a computerized soci- ety. The perennial issues of reference- " how best to scan for, amass, file, re- trieve, define, illustrate, display and distribute lexicographic and encyclopedic information'' (p.l70)-have been compli- cated by additional issues, most of them resulting directly from the introduction of the computer (whose development McAr- thur suggestively parallels to the impulses behind the development of encyclope- dias). A short review cannot indicate the range of this book. I have called it a "medita- tion" above, but it may mean more just to call it an essay in a slightly older sense of the word essay: a preliminary effort to- ward understanding something about the ways in which the human mind works at keeping the knowledge it acquires. ''When I first started . . . this book,'' McArthur writes, "I thought I was en- gaged in outlining the history of lexicogra- phy and its related disciplines. It took some time . . . before I realized that I was in fact toying with a distinct way of look- ing at human history" (p.16). One can carp all day long about the flaws of a 230- page book that "toys" with such a topic. Yet Worlds of Reference, though far from magisterial, offering no answers, and sometimes obvious, is the product of an intelligent author dealing with issues ut- terly fundamental to the business of li- Recent Publications 179 Valuable Reference Guides Index To Canadian Legal Literature Library Edition Canada's foremost law indexing service will make your research into ·secondary legal literature more efficient by putting you in touch with relevant periodical literature, monographs and government documents in minutes. Completely bilingual to pro- vide access to English and French material. 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F-===-===============·•·= Toronto • Calgary • Vancouv..-r • Orta>m CARSWEll Carswell Legal Publications Ordering Address: 2330 Midland Ave~ue, Agincourt, Ontario MIS 1P7 (416) 291-8421 Prices subject to change without notice. 1187 111 Cellese 6: Iesearch Libraries braries. It is always suggestive, always worth thinking about.-Daniel Traister, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Slavens, Thomas P. Theological Libraries at Oxford. New York: K. G. Saur, 1984. 197p. $43.50 (ISBN 3-598-10563-0). ___ . A Great Library through Gifts. New York: K. G. Saur, 1986. 355p. $40 (ISBN 3-598-10621-1). Both Slavens' study of Oxford's theo- logical collections and his lengthier treat- ment of the library at Union Theological Seminary (New York) were undertaken in the belief they might ''provide guidelines for the development of other libraries" (p.v, Theological Libraries; p.ix, Great Li- brary). The work treating Oxford briefly examines the accumulation of theological and church history collections held in the Bodleian, the History and Theology Fac- ulty libraries, and thirty-one other Oxford libraries. The reproduction of the double- spaced typescript is marred by a number of typographical errors, and poor punctu- ation hampers clear reading. Several fac- tual errors also detract. For example, Archbishop Laud was executed in 1645 and could not have donated manuscripts to the Bodleian up until 1650 as suggested (p.51). The marvelous, early seventeenth- century frieze in the upper reading room of the Bodleian is turned into evidence of the first librarian's narrow religion and collecting (p.49). However, the frieze in- cluded not only church fathers and Protes- tant reformers but also featured Wyclif, Hus, Savonarola, and scientists such as Copernicus, Brahe, Mercator, and Orte- lius. More fundamentai faults prevent the work from fulfilling its stated purpose . In the absence of any conclusion, we are left with "two themes" briefly noted in the preface: the importance of starting early- in the case of Oxford, eight centuries ago-and the important development role played by gifts as well as copyright de- posits and endowment funding (p.v). For obvious reasons the first "theme" does not advance academic librarianship. The second "theme" is important and dis- March 1987 tinctly relevant, but its promise is unreal- ized. In recounting the development of the various libraries' theological holdings, Slavens offers a compilation of notable ac- quisitions accumulated over centuries. Many ·are gifts of splendid rarities invalu- able to theological scholarship, but he does not ascribe the origins of all the im- portant holdings. Furthermore, the over- all importance of gifts to the building of Oxford's fine collections is not well dem- onstrated. The single numerical indication of the importance of gifts is for 1978-79. In that year, only 22 percent(£ 520,000) of the Bodleian budget was available for materi- als purchases (p.92). A total of 79,000 books and pamphlets were accessioned, 43,000 of which were obtained through copyright deposit and 25,000 through pur- chase (p.74), leaving 11,000 unaccounted. How many were in theology? Were they gifts? If so, how could that year be consid- ered representative of the relative impor- tance in past centuries of donations and copyright deposits? A serious omission is the failure to ex- plain the motivations and mechanisms of donation. We can readily deduce the moti- , vations of alumni and faculty donors, but . why do apparently unaffiliated donors give? Is there now or has there ever been a plan for systematic development and do- nor cultivation such as a number of lead- ing academic libraries have instituted in recent years? A Friends group is men- tioned only once as playing an unspecified role in an acquisition during the 1940s (p.67). The listing of many collections and sin- gle items of scholarly interest, coupled with the inclusion of the Bodleian's 1980 reading regulations, points to possible use of the work as a very selective guide to theological research at Oxford. However, the lack of indexing and inadequate dis- cussion of present access tools prevent ready use even in this manner. Slavens' effort to describe the impor- tance of gifts to the development of the li- brary at Union Theological Seminary is more successful. Listed again are notable acquisitions, including many significant