College and Research Libraries


The underlying strength of Dillon's 
analysis is his sophisticated view of the 
complex of activities associated with the 
act of reading. Much of this volume is 
devoted to a discussion of previous re-
search from many fields, such as cogni-
tive science and psychology, on the act of 
reading. It is dear that basic technical 
aspects of reading electronic text, such as 
image quality and organization of on-
screen displays, are as important as print 
fonts and page formatting are to printed 
documents. There are many subtle as-
pects of textuality and reading, such as 
the ability of readers to grasp and retain 
the overall structure of a document and 
an argument, which have been rarely 
discussed in examinations of reading of 
either print or electronic text. In Dillon's 
view, no single discipline, such as cogni-
tive psychology or information retrieval, 
adequately explains the reading process . . 
Thus, his discussion attempts to draw 
points of contact between a number of 
different conceptions of reading or, per-
haps more accurately, information con-
sumption. 

It is to Dillon's great credit that he sees 
broad lines of continuity between print 
and electronic text. The organization of 
print and electronic reference materials, 
such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, 
are rather similar. Dillon suggests that 
proponents of hypermedia have failed 
to grasp the degree to which users of 
print documents rarely read in purely 
sequential fashion. While it may be 
slightly less convenient to jump from 
place to place in a printed document, 
there are many cues to entice the reader 
to break the linear order of the printed 
book, including indexes, tables of con-
tents, foot- and end-notes, not to men-
tion cross-references and other points 
where authors recall or anticipate re-
lated discussions. Finally, Dillon warns 
us in several places, electronic resources 
will not completely supersede print me-
dia at all. It is obvious, he suggests, that 
few people would want to read a lengthy 
text of any kind in its electronic rather 
than print form. Thus, "one should 
avoid seeing electronic text as a competi-
tor to paper in some form of 'either-or' 

Book Reviews 369 

challenge for supremacy." The two 
forms of text will exist as complements 
to each other, distinguished by the tasks 
best performed by each medium: "The 
strengths of the computer will enable 
cheap storage and rapid access while the 
intimacy and familiarity of paper will be 
retained for detailed studying and ex-
amination of material." 

The degree to which electronic text 
becomes an important distributive me-
dia, alongside print, largely depends on 
the degree to which electronic text de-
sign can make information responsive to 
the requirements of readers and the de--
mands of particular kinds of textual in-
formation.-Mark Olsen, University of 
Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 

A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. Ed. 
Nicolas Barker. London: British Li-
brary, 1993. 206p. $40 (ISBN 0-7123-
0287-5). 
The title of this collection is from Mil-

ton: "Books are not absolutely dead 
things but doe contain a potencie of life 
in them to be as active as the soule 
whose progeny they are." This animis-
tic credo nicely epitomizes a volume 
which brings together under the editor-
ship of Nicolas Barker an admirable set 
of articles on the history of the book. 
Based on lectures given at UCLA in 
1986-87, the collection provides a useful 
introduction to the range of topics and 
methodologies that coexist under the ru-
bric of "the history of the book." In fact, 
Barker contends that the history of the 
book is more than a field of study; it is 
a genuine discipline in its own right. 
Thus Barker and his collaborator, Thomas 
Adams, begin the volume with a found-
ing manifesto, a "new model for the 
study of the book," one which seeks to 
provide a more defined and functional 
conception of the new discipline than 
Robert Darnton's earlier "communica-
tions circuit" did: "Our scheme is de-
signed to encompass all the topics 
that would properly be included in 
the history of the book. .. . What we 
offer is a map." Models are, I suppose, 
necessary evils; we chafe at their preten-
sions and confinements but find their 



370 College & Research Libraries 

architectures reassuring. Barker and 
Adams' model is thoughtful and inclu-
sive, and it has a heuristic value that 
should make it valuable to instructors 
and their students. Where Darn ton's 
model stressed individuals and commu-
nication as a process, the Barker-Adams 
version emphasizes functions in the ma-
terial production of "the book." It is, 
they state, about books rather than com-
munications. One can quibble with its 
claims, elements, and patterns-! al-
ways thought that books were about 
communications-but this model, like 
Dam ton's, is useful in bringing focus to 
a still amorphous field of research. 

The pity of it is that the volume took 
so long to appear. Nearly a decade old at 
this point, Barker and Adams' concerns 
are part of an earlier conversation on the 
history of the book, and some of the 
contributions to the volume have ap-
peared elsewhere. Tom Tanselle's es-
caped altogether. Nonetheless, better 
late than never. Crafted by a distin-
guished group of scholars and librarians 
from Britain and America, the contribu-
tions are uniformly solid. They offer 
something to specialists and generalists 
alike, and in brief compass they cover 
the terrain from the Middle Ages 
through the nineteenth century, from the 
written to the printed word, from author 
to bookseller. 

Richard and Mary Rouse document 
the rise of an organized book trade in 
late medieval Paris, then the bibliocenter 
of Europe. Fueled by demand from the 
new University of Paris and from an 
emerging market of lay readers, the 
trade operated acccording to an increas-
ingly specialized division of labor. Lotte 
Hellinga reminds us that as the printed 
word came into its own in the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, the manuscript 
codex did not die or disappear. Rather, it 
was revalued, its roles and functions re-
defined as a transmitter of texts. 

Two contributions offer case studies in 
the business of the book. John Bidwell's 
excellent piece of research on the for-
tunes of the papermaking business in 
early nineteenth-century America inte-
grates the history of book production 

July 1995 

into the larger economic history of the 
new nation. "Nothing succeeds like suc-
cess," might well have been the tag for 
Thomas Adams' inquiry into the eight-
eenth-century publishing firm of Mount 
and Page. Acquiring a virtual monopoly 
of maritime imprints in Britain for over 
one hundred years, Mount and Page suc-
ceeded not because of their bold en-
trepreneurship but rather because of their 
conservative approach to a utilitarian 
market, their care in adding new titles, 
their acumen in building a stable backlist, 
and their reluctance to diversify. 

Two other contributions are broadly 
suggestive of different routes into the 
history of the book. Mirjam Foot offers 
an enticing menu of approaches to the 
history of bookbinding and its relation-
ship to the history of the book in general. 
If you can't tell a book by its cover, you 
can surely say a lot about it, especially, 
argues Foot, its relationship to an in-
tended market or reader. One of the most 
interesting contributions of the history 
of the book to the study of literature has 
been its dismantling of the notion of the 
solitary, monolithic, proprietarial author. 
W. B. Carnochan notes that before we 
started hearing funeral orations from 
France about the "death of the author," 
scholars working on bibliography and the 
history of the book had charted the effec-
tive" depersonalization" of the notion of 
authority which printing's division of 
labor introduced. While an author may 
write a text, it takes many "authors" to 
produce a book. At the same time, print-
ing helped foster the mythology of the 
proprietarial author, creating markets 
large enough to permit the liberation of 
the author from a patron and making the 
author the owner of his labor. 

If approached as an introduction to 
the study of a field-complete with its 
own paradigm-this volume holds to-
gether reasonably well. The one egre-
gious omission is a historiographical 
overview that would have given· the 
reader a general sense of the evolution of 
the field over time. The fact that so much 
has .happened in the field since 1986 
blunts the urgency that Barker seems to 
want to impart to the volume, but li-



brarians who either teach the history of 
the book or who are called on to do 
occasional presentations to classes on 
book history, have here a useful collec-
tion to consult. Graduate students 
should · find most of its articles sugges-
tive of any number of topics and ap-
proaches to help them sort out methods 
and design their research. More illustra-
tions would have been welcome, and I 

. am sure that many will wonder as to the 
professional identities of the contribu-
tors: they are nowhere identified. None-
theless, like other volumes in this British 
Library series, the present one is well 
worth perusing by anyone interested in 
the history of the book.-Michael T. Ryan, 
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 
Pennsylvania. 

Antiquarian Books: A Companion for 
Booksellers, Librarians, and Collec-
tors. Ed. Philippa Bernard with Leo 
Bernard and Angus O'Neill. Philadel-
phia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1994. 
46lp. $79.95 (ISBN 0-8122-3268-2). 
There are a great many published aids 

for booksellers, book collectors, and li-
brarians, guiding them through the 
maze of buying and selling books, de-
scribing and preserving them, calling at-
tention to their most arcane attributes, 
and otherwise providing aid and corn-
fort to bibliographical tyros as well as to 
those more seasoned in the art of biblio-
phily. Others are more specialized in 
subjects such as bibliography, the use of 
rare book catalogs, the practice and 
management of rare book and special 
collections in libraries, directories of 
booksellers, book collectors and librari-
ans, and so forth, all claiming some ex-
pertise in guiding the knowledgeable 
and the gullible alike. 

The latest contribution to this field is 
Antiquarian Books: A Companion for Book-
sellers, Librarians, and Collectors. This vol-
ume is organized alphabetically with 
comparatively short entries for most 
subjects, but with longer, more discur-
sive contributions by a variety of experts 
for the more important topics, as se-
lected by the editors. For example, there 
are contributions by Mirjarn Foot on fine 

Book Reviews 371 

bookbinding, John Kerr on book auc-
tions, Anthony Rota on bookselling in a 
changing world, and H. R. Woudhuysen 
on bibliography. The coverage is wide-
ranging, but with special focus on en-
tries broadly relating to bookbinding, 
bookplates, and collecting English 
books on any number of topics. 

Several articles are aimed specifically 
at assisting booksellers as business people, 
particularly those on cataloging (with a 
charming section on the "personal touch"), 
and booksellers as publishers. A piece on 
computers for booksellers is unhelpful to 
those hoping to automate their business, 
take advantage of electronic cataloging, 
or in any other way adapt to the rapidly 
changing world of electronic data man-
agement and applications to the anti-
quarian book trade. There is also very 
little on autographs and manuscripts, 
and the entries on the broader topics of 
techniques of book illustration, copy-
right, and incunabula, provide ade-
quate, if not authoritative, coverage that 
a reference guide of this nature might be 
expected to provide. 

The editorial policy concerning selec-
tion of entries for repositories and 
individual collections of rare books 
(especially those in institutions) seems 
inconsistently applied. There is, for ex-
ample, an entry for the Osborne Collec-
tion of children's books at the Toronto 
Public Library, but not for the Opie Col-
lection at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, 
or the Ball Collection at the Pierpont 
Morgan Library; there is an entry for the 
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washing-
ton, but not the Newberry Library in 
Chicago. The presence of bibliographies, 
or the lack of same, at the end of entries 
seems also curiously inconsistent. Read-
ers of the volume will appreciate several 
useful appendixes, including one for 
Latin and other foreign place names, an 
explanation of the system of Roman nu-
merals, a list of the earliest surviving 
imprints by place, and a selected list of 
booktrade directories. The proofreading 
is good, with a minimum number of the 
inevitable errors. 

With the exception of a creditable en-
try for American first editions (especially