reviews


488 College & Research Libraries September 2001 

rent affairs and that were used in Dilevko’s 
unobtrusive tests. Although a number of 
the author’s other suggestions for improv­
ing reference service, such as periodic re­
certification of librarians, are strongly re­
sisted by many, if not most, in the profes­
sion, they are all offered with well-rea­
soned justifications that draw on the writ­
ings of S. R. Ranganathan, Jacques Barzun, 
Jerry Campbell, and many others. It is a 
thought-provoking exegesis. 

The author does an admirable job of 
describing his methodology, and even 
readers who are unfamiliar with strati­
fied random sampling or bell curve dis­
tributions will appreciate how sound and 
thorough the research design is. The over­
all tone of his writing is far less negative 
than one might expect given the nature 
of the research and the results, but 
Dilevko is not seeking to tarnish the 
profession’s reputation. Rather, he wishes 
to point out where we are not living up 
to reasonable expectations. Budget cuts, 
overworked library personnel, and other 
constraints are cited sympathetically, but 
Dilevko is persuasive in his contention 
that none of these factors will be accept­
able to a populace with new information 
service options that hold the promise of 
delivering superior accuracy. 

This book is not pleasant reading for 
anyone who takes pride in the library 
profession’s dedication to service, but if 
we quibble about details and ignore its 
well-documented message, we do so at 
our peril.—W. Bede Mitchell, Georgia South-
ern University. 

Libraries and the Book Trade: The Forma-
tion of Collections from the Sixteenth 
to the Twentieth Century. Eds. Robin 
Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles 
Mandelbrote. New Castle, Del.: Oak 
Knoll Pr. (Publishing Pathways Series), 
2000. 192p. (ISBN 1-58456-034-7). LC 
00-058865. 

This anthology consists of eight papers 
delivered December 4–5, 1999, at the 21st 
Annual Conference on the History of the 
Book Trade, organized by Birkbeck Col­
lege, University of London. The focus of 

the essays is the changing relationship of 
libraries with the book trade from the six­
teenth to the twentieth century. 

Elisabeth S. Leedham-Green, formerly 
deputy keeper of the Cambridge Univer­
sity Archives, in her essay, “Booksellers 
and Libraries in Sixteenth-Century Cam­
bridge,” clearly documents that libraries 
had to rely on gifts and bequests for their 
accessions and that it was not until the 
seventeenth century that most college li­
braries set about selecting books for pur­
chase. She also points out the irony that 
sixteenth-century scholars would more 
likely find the most popular books they 
needed in booksellers’ shops than in the 
University Library. 

R. Julian Roberts, deputy librarian at 
Oxford’s Bodleian Library, in his essay, 
“The Latin Stock (1616-1627) and Its Li­
brary Contacts,” describes how the 
Bodleian during the seventeenth century 
purchased books using printed catalogs of 
the stock available at the Frankfurt book 
fairs and the help of agents in the so-called 
“Latin Trade,” who traveled widely in 
search of Latin titles for libraries. 

Keith A. Manley of the Institute of His­
torical Research, University of London, 
and editor of Library History, in his essay, 
“Booksellers, Peruke-Makers, and 
Rabbit-Merchants: The Growth of Circu­
lating Libraries in the Eighteenth Cen­
tury,” documents how these circulating 
libraries “helped to fill the gap between 
the requirements of the ordinary reader 
and those of the scholarly and professional 
community, by providing the public with 
the reading matter it wanted—usually fic­
tion—or, in some cases, with the books it 
was thought to need, such as sermons and 
works of self-improvement.” 

Simon Eliot’s essay bears the fanciful 
title “‘Mr. Greenhill, you cannot get rid 
of’: Copyright, Legal Deposit and the Sta­
tioners’ Company in the Nineteenth Cen­
tury.” Eliot, professor of publishing and 
printing history at the University of Read­
ing, examines the Stationers’ Company’s 
records kept by the Greenhills, George 
(1767–1850) and later his son Joseph 
(1803–1892), who served as warehouse 



 

 

Book Reviews 489 

keeper and treasurer of the English stock 
for the Stationers’ Company for most of 
the nineteenth century. Eliot argues con­
vincingly that the administrative short­
comings of the registry system led to its 
abolition and the introduction of direct 
deposit by the publishers themselves. 

Donald Kerr’s essay, “Sir George Grey 
and the English Antiquarian Book 
Trade,” focuses on the book-collecting 
career of Sir George Grey (1812–1898), 
scholar, colonial governor of South Aus­
tralia, New Zealand, and the Cape 
Colony, and premier of New Zealand. 
Kerr, Printed Collections Librarian at 
Auckland (New Zealand) Central Li­
brary, documents how Grey put together 
two impressive collections, despite the 
hazards and frustrations of long-distance 
book buying. Significant parts of his col­
lections formed the foundations of im­
portant rare book collections in Cape 
Town, South Africa (1861) and Auckland, 
New Zealand (1887). 

Leslie A. Morris’s essay, “William 
Augustus White of Brooklyn (1843–1927) 
and the Dispersal of His Elizabethan Li­
brary,” documents the final disposition of 
the large and extremely valuable collec­
tion of a book collector extraordinaire. 
Morris, curator of manuscripts in the 
Houghton Library at Harvard, focuses on 
the transfer of many of White’s books to 
Harvard College Library, in part during 
his lifetime and in bulk after his death. 
Other important American libraries were 
also his beneficiaries, including the 
Folger, Yale University, the Huntington, 
Princeton University, the University of 
Illinois, the University of Chicago, and the 
Brooklyn Public Library. 

Conor Fahy’s essay, “Collecting an 
Aldine: Castiglione’s Libro Del Cortegiano 
(1528) through the Centuries,” shows 
how much can be learned from a detailed 
study of the first edition of Castiglione’s 
Libro Del Cortegiano. Fahy, emeritus pro­
fessor of Italian at Birkbeck College, Uni­
versity of London, describes the aristo­
cratic author’s relationship with Italian 
and French booksellers. 

Esther Potter, an independent scholar 

specializing in the structure and practices 
of the nineteenth-century bookbinding 
trade, in her essay, “Bookbinding for Li­
braries,” documents the role of bookbind­
ers in the supply of ancillary services to 
libraries. She begins with the initial need 
to repair ancient manuscripts in the 
chained libraries of fourteenth-century 
Britain and concludes with the nineteenth 
and twentieth centuries, where the 
growth of municipal public libraries and 
of large-scale commercial lending librar­
ies provided work for library binders on 
an industrial scale. 

As a starting point for research in com­
parative librarianship, this volume excels. 
Although printing in the New World is 
not the study of antiquity that printing 
in Europe represents, there are nonethe­
less interesting parallels and divergences 
that these essays point out. Libraries and 
the Book Trade will be a worthy addition 
to collections serving bibliophiles, book 
collectors, library historians, and literary 
sleuths alike.—Plummer Alston Jones Jr., 
East Carolina University. 

McCook, Kathleen de la Peña. Ethnic Di-
versity in Library and Information Science. 
Champaign: Univ. of Illinois, Graduate 
School of Library and Information Sci­
ence (Library Trends, vol. 49, no. 1), 2000. 
219p. $18.50 (ISSN 0024-2594). 

Issues of diversity have been a topic of 
discourse in many professions, and as the 
new millennium begins, matters of eth­
nic diversity continue to remain at the 
forefront. In reviewing the state of librar­
ies and library services to minority popu­
lations in the United States, both the field 
of library and information science and the 
racial and ethnic demographics that con­
stitute its workforce must be examined. 

Historically, people of color have been 
underrepresented in the field of library 
and information science, and the lack of 
a profession-wide commitment to the re­
cruitment of minorities to the library pro­
fession has been a major obstacle in 
achieving the goal of ethnic diversity. If 
libraries are to be truly representative of 
the populations they serve, it is impera­