reviews.indd 458 College & Research Libraries gain access to patron information. Agents often collect information without citing the authority under which they are op- erating, and many of us are intimidated by their authority and arrogance. (This reviewer witnessed that phenomenon from the other side of the badge for four years as a special investigative officer for the USAF.) Vaccinating one’s self by reading Mr. Foerstel’s latest work will go a long way toward helping us remain level-headed when confronted by law enforcement officials. The FBI has a long and well-docu- mented history of doing whatever it deems necessary, whether legal or not, to gain access to information on American citizens. Unfortunately, the book includes only two brief references to Carnivore, the FBI’s twenty-first-century version of wiretapping, which processes many kinds of electronic communications including e-mail. Perhaps, this can be the topic of a future book. Foerstel has given a major portion of his energies over the past two decades to writing about this ongoing struggle. During this time, he has been on the front line to observe and participate in many of these skirmishes. His latest book contin- ues this important work and should be a source of pride for all library workers. Ref- uge of a Scoundrel also should inspire us to continue our vigilance and to increase our efforts to ensure that those who use our li- braries have full access to the information they need to earn a living and lead their lives, particularly to exercise their right to hold their government accountable. It is still far too early to write the defi nitive book on the impact of the Patriot Act on libraries. However, the current work is clearly a solid beginning.—David R. Dowell, Cuesta College. Miskolczy, Ambrus. Hitler’s Library. Trans. Ridey Szilvia and Michael September 2004 Webb. Budapest: Central European Univ. Pr., 2003. 164p. $39.95 (ISBN 9639241598). LC 2003-12659. The “library” in question is housed at the Library of Congress, having been rescued from a salt mine at the end of World War II. This is some part of a library alleged to have been 6000 volumes strong, but, odd- ly, Ambrus Miskloczy never tells readers how many volumes it now comprises. It is commonplace to analyze the influences on historical figures by scrutinizing their reading matter, largely, if necessarily in- directly, by looking at whatever records survive about the holdings in their per- sonal libraries. Sometimes this procedure is used to assess the independent value of historical sources; if X could have known about Y because information on Y was contained in books in X’s library, the prob- ability that X corroborates information on Y is diminished by virtue of the fact that X had access to such information. In this multimedia age, this would be bad method and, even under the best of circumstances, leaves a lot of loose connec- tions. This procedure can never be proba- tive because it is indirect in at least two significant ways: it does not account for all the matt er these figures might have read, and owning a book does not imply reading that book. Although not evaluating Hitler’s writings as historical sources, Miskolczy is not unaware of this and divides his study into chapters that assess the infl uence of Hitler ’s library in diminishing degree. Thus, a chapter deals with works in which Hitler penciled his own notes, which seems a bona fide way to measure intensity of interaction. Following chapters deal with books that Hitler “read into” and books that Hitler “did not read (in depth).” This latter taxonomy is based on the absence of evidence; that is, Hitler left no physical traces behind, leading to the assumption that he spent less time on these books, which might or might not be true. When Miskolczy leaves those works in Hitler’s library that contain Hitler’s notes, he is forced into mounting speculation. Of this there is perhaps too much, frequently punctuated by the usual “must haves” and “could haves.” At times, Miskolczy in- dulges in acts of psychoanalysis not really justified by the evidence. The result is a text that is overwrought and overlong, with its interest declining in direct proportion to the author’s need to rely on his own intu- ition rather than Hitler’s extant notes. The jacket blurb asks rhetorical ques- tions: “How and why did such rabble obtain such immense power? How did the cult of the self and the cult of the individual become indivisibly intertwined with an exalted death cult and the fear of death si- multaneously?” This work does not answer these barely intelligible questions. In his turn, Miskolczy promises “new insights,” but these are largely a matter of added detail because the analysis breaks no new grounds but, rather, tends to confi rm con- ventional wisdom about those fi gures and ideas that influenced Hitler. Thus, eleven pages are devoted to discussing how Hitler saw Richard Wagner as a major intellectual ancestor. Nonetheless, at least in its fi rst half, this is an interesting, occasionally pro- vocative work, not least for the fact that, with all that has been written about Hit- ler, so little use has been made of these Index to advertisers ACRL 453, 462 AIAA 371 Annual Reviews cover 3 Archival Products 438 CHOICE 426 EBSCO cover 2 Greenwood Publishing 367 Haworth Press 368 Optical Society of America 399 Scopus cover 4 TechBooks 383 Book Reviews 459 materials that, whatever their limitations as sources, deserve at least some of the treatment that Miskloczy fi nally accords them here.—David Henige, University of Wisconsin—Madison. James Moran. Wynkyn de Worde, Father of Fleet Street. 3rd. London; New Castle, Del.: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, in association with the Wynkyn de Worde Society, 2003. 70p. $22.95 (ISBN 1584561041). LC 2003-53595. This new edition of Moran’s brief 1960 retrospective of the early printer Wynkyn de Worde includes a bibliography of works on de Worde and comes blessed with an appreciative preface by John Dreyfus. Notwithstanding both, it is hard to fi gure out why yet another edition of this small biography is needed. With its unfortunate title (a teleological double entendre), Moran’s study remains a use- ful and serviceable guide to the life of the ambitious Flemish printer whom Caxton imported to help launch the black arts in England in the later fifteenth century. But I doubt that there is a recall queue for it at your local college library. So why do we need this, its third instantiation? Moran was, among other things, a printing historian of a traditional sort. He was interested in output and paper and fonts, in the nuts and bolts of the business of making books. Typography was his forte, and he contributed a series of valu- able works on the subject in the 1960s and 1970s. But his oeuvre belongs to an earlier moment in the history of the history of the book, a moment when there really was no “history of the book” in the sense in which we have it today. Although, as John Drey- fus points out in his preface, Febvre and Martin’s L’Apparition du livre (A. Michel) came out in 1958, it took a good twenty years for scholars to assimilate its lessons and approaches to the history of the book.