reviews


 

Book Reviews 199 

solutions, realizing that the evidence is 
not up to that; but she does a fine job of 
bringing most of the issues together into 
a thought-provoking whole. In today’s 
kaleidoscopic world of information tech­
nology, no work can be timeless, but From 
Gutenberg promises to have a more ex­
tended shelf life than most.—David 
Henige, University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

Conaway, James. America’s Library: The 
Story of the Library of Congress, 1800– 
2000. Foreword by James H. Billington; 
Introduction by Edmund Morris. New 
Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Pr., in asso­
ciation with the Library of Congress, 
2000. 226p. $45, alk. paper (ISBN 
0-300-08308-4). LC 99-058751. 

James Conaway’s history of the Library 
of Congress focuses on the thirteen Li­
brarians of Congress who have served 
our national library for the past two hun­
dred years. The accomplishments of each 
are examined in the context of contem­
porary historical events. The first Librar­
ian of Congress, John James Beckley 
(1801–1807), appointed by Thomas 
Jefferson, served concurrently as clerk of 
the House of Representatives. His dual 
career ended with his death on April 8, 
1807, when he was succeeded by Patrick 
Magruder (1807–1815), the second Librar­
ian of Congress, also appointed by 
Jefferson. During the presidency of James 
Madison Magruder continued the dual 
role of clerk and librarian. In the course 
of an attack on Washington by the British 
during the War of 1812, the Library of 
Congress was totally lost to fire. The li­
brary survived due to the purchase of 
Jefferson’s private collection of 6,487 vol­
umes for the price of $23,950 in the win­
ter of 1814. 

Magruder ’s successor, George 
Watterson (1815–1829), appointed third 
Librarian of Congress by President Madi­
son, was the first librarian charged with 
serving in the position without taking on 
the additional duty of House clerk. A po­
litical activist, Watterson matched wits 
with General Andrew Jackson and lost 
when Jackson won the presidency. Presi­

dent Jackson appointed the fourth Librar­
ian of Congress, John Silva Meehan (1829– 
1861), a former publisher with a more 
pleasing personality than his predecessor, 
who served under nine presidents, from 
Jackson to Buchanan. The apex of his ten­
ure was the designation of the Library of 
Congress, along with the Smithsonian 
Institution, as the official depositories for 
copyrighted works in 1846. The nadir 
came five years later, in 1851, when fire 
destroyed 35,000 volumes, including 
two-thirds of the original Jefferson collec­
tion purchased in 1814. 

Appointed the fifth Librarian of Con­
gress by President Abraham Lincoln, John 
G. Stephenson (1861–1864) spent most of 
his tenure as a colonel in the Union army. 
He is remembered best for bringing in as 
his principal assistant, Ainsworth Rand 
Spofford (1864–1897). When Stephenson 
resigned from his position at the end of 
December 1864, Lincoln lost no time in 
appointing Spofford (1864–1897) as the 
sixth Librarian of Congress on New 
Year’s Eve that same year. Serving under 
nine presidencies, from Lincoln through 
the second presidency of Cleveland, 
Spofford saw the Library of Congress 
through its metamorphosis from legisla­
tive resource to national cultural institu­
tion. Under legislation signed by Presi­
dent Ulysses S. Grant in 1870, the Library 
of Congress became the sole depository 
for copyrighted works, a role previously 
shared with the Smithsonian. The mag­
nificent Library of Congress edifice that 
today graces the Washington landscape 
was Spofford’s brainchild. 

President William McKinley appointed 
John Russell Young (1897–1899) the sev­
enth Librarian of Congress. Young is re­
membered for presiding over the open­
ing of the then new Library of Congress 
and for increasing its international hold­
ings. He died in office in January 1899. 
Young’s successor, also appointed by 
McKinley, was Herbert Putnam (1899– 
1939), who served under eight presidents, 
from McKinley to Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt. Putnam’s forty-year tenure 
surpassed that of any other Librarian of 



 

200 College & Research Libraries 

Congress. His administrative acumen 
was put to the supreme test as he cared 
for the library’s treasures during World 
War I. Before and after the war, Putnam 
acquired major collections elevating the 
Library of Congress to one of the world’s 
great libraries. 

Appointed by President Franklin 
Roosevelt, Archibald MacLeish (1939– 
1944) is remembered for his administra­
tive reorganization of the ever-burgeoning 
Library of Congress and for inspiring the 
library staff throughout the trying years 
of World War II. One of MacLeish’s most 
valuable contributors was his appointment 
of Luther H. Evans as head of the Legisla­
tive Reference Service and later chief as­
sistant librarian. In June 1945, about six 
months after MacLeish’s resignation, 
President Harry S. Truman appointed 
Evans (1945–1953) to serve as the tenth 
Librarian of Congress. During Evans’s ten­
ure, the Library of Congress collection 
grew to almost 32 million items, includ­
ing current acquisitions of remarkable 
quality. He resigned in the summer of 1953 
to the newly elected President Dwight D. 
Eisenhower and assumed the position of 
director-general of the United Nations 
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Or­
ganization (UNESCO).

 President Eisenhower appointed L. 
Quincy Mumford (1954–1974) as the elev­
enth Librarian of Congress. Mumford, 
who served under five presidents, from 
Eisenhower to Gerald R. Ford, was the 
first professionally trained librarian to be 
nominated in the 154 years of the library’s 
existence. He saw the library through two 
decades of unprecedented growth in both 
holdings and staff. Moreover, he re­
quested and received an increase in an­
nual expenditures from $9.4 million to 
almost $97 million. The James Madison 
Memorial Building of the Library of Con­
gress, which was not be completed and 
open to the public until 1980, was his 
brainchild. 

Appointed by President Ford, Daniel 
J. Boorstin (1975–1987), the twelfth Librar­
ian of Congress, was the grandson of 
Russian Jewish immigrants. A distin-

March 2001 

guished writer, lawyer, and historian, 
Boorstin championed the role of the book 
in the diffusion of knowledge and was 
instrumental in President Jimmy Carter’s 
signing of legislation in October 1977 that 
created the Center for the Book at the Li­
brary of Congress. Boorstin officiated at 
the opening of the new Madison Build­
ing in November 1981 during the presi­
dency of Ronald Reagan. 

The thirteenth and current Librarian of 
Congress, James H. Billington (1987 to 
present) was appointed by President 
Reagan, and to date has served under 
three presidents, from Reagan to William 
Jefferson Clinton. An authority on Rus­
sian history, Billington has brought a glo­
bal perspective to the challenges of ad­
ministration of the nation’s great library 
and has worked tirelessly to find new 
ways to widen access to its treasures, in­
cluding the American Memory digitiza­
tion project. 

James Conaway, author of eight books 
and former Washington editor of Harper’s, 
has written an extremely fascinating ac­
count; however, the lack of references 
proves a serious drawback to researchers 
who want access to the source of facts and 
quotations. A bibliography of more than 
one hundred and fifty items and a good 
index serve to soften the blow. Conaway’s 
very readable prose is unfortunately re­
plete with passages illustrating the lamen­
table fact that the previous grammatical 
taboo of split infinitives is now widely 
accepted and practiced. The result of a 
collaborative venture between Yale Uni­
versity Press and the Library of Congress, 
the volume itself is beautifully conceived 
and designed with a pleasing type font, 
plenty of white space, and sharply fo­
cused black-and-white and color illustra­
tions, including photographs, maps, po­
litical cartoons, and reproductions of art­
works. 

Conaway’s two-century history of the 
Library of Congress will be a popular 
addition to other works on the Library of 
Congress’s history, including David C. 
Mearns’s The Story Up to Now: The Library 
of Congress, 1800–1946 (Library of Con­



 
 

 

 

Book Reviews 201 

gress, 1947), and a complement to the ex­
quisite coffee-table book American Trea­
sures of the Library of Congress (Abrams, 
1997).—Plummer Alston Jones Jr., Catawba 
College. 

Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books— 
Or Books without End?: Reading Interac­
tive Narratives. Ann Arbor: Univ. of 
Michigan Pr., 2000. 205p. $34.50, alk. 
paper (ISBN 0-472-11114-0). LC 
99-6689. 

I think it was a combination of the dooms­
day title, the breathless, schoolgirl-
with-a-crush tone in the acknowledg­
ments to this book, and the first of several 
grammatical errors that initially put me 
off J. Yellowlees Douglas’s The End of 
Books. The “Interactive Narrative 
Timeline” prefacing the text challenged me 
in a different way: Did I agree with Dou­
glas that Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 
(1759), Joyce’s Ulysses (1914), and Ford 
Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) were 
interactive narratives in the same family 
as Michael Joyce’s afternoon (1990) and 
Geoff Ryman’s 253 (1996)? If all of these 
were interactive narratives, what kind of 
narratives weren’t “interactive?” Could a 
lyric poem be interactive? What about 
plays published in print, but not acted 
upon the stage? Was Douglas (University 
of Florida) confusing the experimental 
(and author-determined) fictions of Sterne 
with the supposedly reader-driven choices 
offered in hypertext fiction? Douglas’s 

Index to advertisers
 
AIAA 108, 154 
Archival Products 163 
BIOSIS 179 
CHOICE 172, 195 
EBSCO cover 4 
Faxon/RoweCom cover 2 
Gwathmey Siegel & Assocs. 164 
Haworth Press 107 
Library Technologies 146 
netLibrary 114-115 
OCLC 111 
Primary Source Microfilm cover 3 

book is an attempt to answer these sorts 
of questions, to provide a theory of how 
interactive narratives work for both author 
and reader. 

In the introductory chapter, Douglas 
offers a review of the recent publishing 
and critical history of hypertext narra­
tives, citing both the continuities and the 
disjunctions between publishing on the 
Web and publishing in print. Canonical 
works such as Jane Austen’s Emma are 
available “free” online, whereas Joyce’s 
afternoon and Douglas’ s own short 
hypertext fiction “I Have Said Nothing” 
achieve near-canonicity by appearing in 
a Norton anthology, Postmodern American 
Fiction (1997). She defines interactive texts 
as “those that contain episodes in the form 
of chunked text and a range of action ac­
companying a single decision” and 
“joined together by links.” She further 
subdivides interactive narratives into two 
types: hypertext fictions, which are text 
based, and “digital narratives,” which are 
image based. These slippery definitions 
allow for a wide range of authorial prod­
uct, from computer games to novels; the 
terms seem to be used interchangeably 
throughout the book. 

In the remainder of her book, Douglas 
presents her theories on the connections 
between avant-garde fiction (the earliest 
interactive fictions?) and hypertext, on 
how readers piece together discrete pieces 
of text to form stories. She wishes to ex­
plore in particular the “aesthetic, cogni­
tive, and physical aspects of reading … 
when narratives have no singular, physi­
cal ending.” We, like Scheherazade’s lis­
tener, have a desire for the inexhaustible 
story—a desire that interactive stories 
fulfill. But instead of “saying the same 
thing” every time you read it (as Douglas 
claims print forms of narrative do), in­
teractive narratives remove stories from 
the confines of the static, linear, printed 
page. In a reversal of the print revolution 
Elizabeth Eisenstein posited, hypertext 
allows the reader to return to a 
preindustrial fluidity and freedom from 
the austerity of print. Interactive narra­
tives have no definite beginnings and