reviews.indd


Book Reviews 559 

the romantic hero (the professor) as an 
academic entrepreneur. 

This is a big, important book that cov-
ers much ground. For anyone interested 
in the formation of the modern university, 
it will be useful and, perhaps, indispens-
able. It is, however, a frustrating book 
with flashes of deep insight and wit inter-
spersed in a great mass of dense prose and 
torpid exposition. For the reader willing 
to plow through, it will yield riches. For 
those unwilling to make the effort, it will 
prove unreadable. It is a book that calls 
for an editor—both for content and for 
the frequent typos—the kind that will 
not be caught by spell-check. William 
Terry Couch, head of the University of 
Chicago Press in the 1940s, would not 
have let this one go through but would 
have demanded extensive rewriting that 
would have brought it in easily under 300 
pages.—Lee Shiflett, The University of North 
Carolina at Greensboro. 

Wershler-Henry, Darren. The Iron Whim: 
A Fragmented History of Typewriting. 
Ithaca and London: Cornell University 
Press, 2007. First published in Canada 
by McClelland & Stewart, 2005. 331p. 
alk. paper, $29.95 (ISBN 0801445868). 
LC 2007-002217. 

Modern historiography “relegates the 
sensational to the sidelines” (Georges 
Duby) and elevates the commonplace, 
chronicling changes in mentalities by 
documenting the way simple artifacts 

Index to advertisers 
ACRL 502, 516 
Annual Reviews 471 
Archival Products 531 
ARL cover 2, cover 4 
Bowker 566 
CHOICE 553 
EBSCO 468 
IGI Global 467 
Marcive 487 
Perry Dean Architects 552 
Serial Solutions cover 3 

influence behaviors—changes that then 
determine history. In the historiography 
of libraries and knowledge transmission, 
this trend has been reflected in recent 
years by books that look at the material 
culture of our profession, from ancient 
times to the present. Lionel Casson, in 
Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale, 2001), 
tells the story of the codex book, called 
membranae by the ancients, and how it 
displaced papyrus rolls over several 
centuries, beginning around the time of 
Ovid. Chiara Frugoni’s Books, Banks, and 
Buttons—And Other Inventions from the 
Middle Ages (Columbia, 2003; trans. fr. 
the Italian by W. McCuaig) scrutinizes 
the impact of the invention of eyeglasses 
on the technology and importance of 
reading. Henry Petroski, technology his-
torian and professor of civil engineering 
at Duke, has writt en several books with 
a bearing on libraries and the evolution 
of information storage and transmission, 
among them The Pencil: A History of Design 
and Circumstances (Knopf, 1990) and The 
Book on the Bookshelf (Knopf, 1999). Both 
books focus attention on the development 
and social and cultural signifi cance of 
these everyday objects. A final book de-
serving mention in this context—and still 
awaiting English translation—is Markus 
Krajewski’s Zettelwirtschaft: die Geburt der 
Kartei aus dem Geiste der Bibliothek (Engl. 
“Paper Slip Clutter: The Birth of the Card 
File out of the Spirit of the Library,” Kad-
mos [Berlin], 2002), which traces the de-
velopment of organization and retrieval 
technologies from the sixteenth century 
to the very threshold of computerization 
in the early twentieth century. 

Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Iron 
Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting 
is the latest contribution to this ongoing 
excavation of our technological past. 
Like the other books just mentioned, 
it describes the nitty-gritty artifactual 
details of its subject and their develop-
ment. But also like these other works, 
the author of this new book probes the 
cultural and psychological aspects of 
typewriting, which include its attitudinal, 



560 College & Research Libraries 

emotional, literary, forensic, and even 
occult refl exes—the latter especially ap-
propriate for a technology that came of 
age in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, 
when ghosts did roam and voices from 
other worlds were channeled, frequently 
by new technologies. (One surprising 
example among many others we read 
about here: In the final days of his life, 
Henry James channeled Napoleon—us-
ing his typewriter. No wonder Wershler-
Henry refers to typewriting as a “haunted 
technology.”) 

The typewriter has always riveted 
attention as a complex machine with a 
strong visual and auditory presence. To-
day it remains “one of the biggest visual 
clichés of our age,” rivaling the book itself 
as an attractant of powerful romantic and 
nostalgic associations. In a world now 
dominated by noiseless computer key-
boards—or voice-to-text programs and 
iPhones with no keyboards—and by “out-
put” that is created nonlinearly, showing 
no traces of revisions, mistakes, or total 
failures (where today is the Wite-Out? 
where the wastebaskets full of crumpled 
onionskin?), the typewritten text exudes 
authenticity, immediacy, and even human 
warmth. This is especially ironic since 
there was a time in the not-too-distant 
past when typewritten letters seemed 
cold and aloof, a sorry substitute for the 
hand-penned letters that alone seemed to 
speak from the heart. 

Although the actual history of the 
typewriter and its mostly failed precur-
sors is covered in this book, this subject 
is of secondary importance to the au-
thor, who directs readers of that more 
literal bent to Michael H. Adler ’s The 
Writing Machine (Allen & Unwin, 1973) 
and other like works. Wershler-Henry 
instead writes of the typewriter in the 
tradition of—and with exact knowledge 
of—French cultural archaeologists Michel 
Foucault and Jean Baudrillard and Ger-
man media theorist Friedrich A. Kitt ler. 
The actual title of Wershler-Henry’s book, 
The Iron Whim, is based on a clever pun 
borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, who 

November 2007 

in 1964 described the impact of the type-
writer on modern poetry as comparable 
to that of musical notation on the work 
of composers: “. . . for the first time, the 
poet has the stave and the bar that the 
musician has had.” Calling this “the age 
of the iron whim,” McLuhan capitalizes 
on the double meaning of “whim,” which 
can mean “caprice,” as we regularly mean 
by it, but also the name of a vertical, usu-
ally wooden drum or capstan used in 
early industrial processes. The typewriter, 
this figure of speech is meant to express, 
disciplines and rigidifies the writing pro-
cess while at the same time liberating the 
imagination. Much of the book captures 
the discourse of the typewriter at this 
level of sophistication, making it all the 
more remarkable that it is still such an 
enjoyable read. The intellectual history 
of the last 150 years, from Nietzsche and 
Conan Doyle to Douglas Adams, Paul 
Auster, and the Typewritergate incident 
that brought down Dan Rather, is retold 
here in a string of fascinating anecdotes, 
all through the optics of typewriting as 
a cultural phenomenon. And, of course, 
there is also a chapter devoted to “the 
monkeys”—you know, the ones who, 
given enough time, will reproduce the 
entire Encyclopaedia Britannica? Chapter 22 
of this book is surely the most defi nitive 
treatment of the “dactylographic mon-
key” trope in the literature today. 

The end of this book considers wheth-
er the computer has “succeeded” the 
typewriter, in the sense of emerging 
from typewriter technology as the next 
logical evolutionary step. Wershler-
Henry concludes, despite all the “surface 
resemblances between typewriting and 
computing because of the QWERTY 
keyboard,” that these two technolo-
gies are almost entirely discontinuous; 
that typewriting, despite the apparent 
“missing link” of the hybrid electronic 
typewriter/word processor of the 1980s, 
did not “evolve” into the computer; that 
instead the computer, with its entirely 
different origins, has gone back and taken 
over the role of the “profoundly non-



networkable” typewriter, just as it has 
assumed so many other functions of our 
social and individual lives. 

For library and information historians, 
this book provides a meticulous, but for 
that reason no less readable and enter-
taining retrospective on what was once a 
central technology of our field. At a more 
general level, however, The Iron Whim of-
fers a case study of how material culture 
and spiritual culture interpenetrate and 
inform one another, becoming a single 
large symbiotic whole.—Jeff rey Garrett, 
Northwestern University. 

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Knowl-
edge Management. Ed. David J. Pau-
leen, Westport, Conn. and London: 
Libraries Unlimited (Libraries Unlim-
ited Knowledge Management Series), 
2007. 259p. alk. paper, $45 (ISBN 
1591583314). LC 2006-28274. 

Our horizons as librarians have always 
included scholarly communication and 
“information science,” but have neces-
sarily widened as those fields have 
developed to include not only patterns 
and means of communication and dis-
semination of information, but the array 
of factors involved in transforming data 
into “information” and that in turn into 
“knowledge.” A corollary, however, is 
that as fields of inquiry widen, so do the 
common vocabulary and shared literature 
diminish. This book is an example of how 
that can create difficulties. 

The twenty-two contributors to this 
book are mainly faculty or graduate 
students in international management 
schools or programs in several countries: 
New Zealand and the Netherlands lead, 
with five each; others are in the United 
Kingdom, Peru, Austria, Germany, Aus-
tralia, and Taiwan. There are three authors 
with appointments in, or degrees from, 
library or information science schools in 
the United States and Hong Kong. The 
amount of citation of each others’ works 
suggests that the contributors are part of 
an ongoing network of researchers who 
share many techniques and interests. 

Book Reviews 561 

While not surprising, and not necessar-
ily worthy of criticism, the fact that the 
book is an installment in an ongoing dia-
logue among its authors does mean that 
it serves them better than we outsiders. 
That is, one cannot rely on this book to 
learn new techniques or approaches, and 
still less can one be instructed by concrete 
examples of actual problems or solutions. 
The value lies instead, and mainly for the 
authors and their colleagues in their field, 
in fine-tuning concepts they’re already 
persuaded are valuable. 

The book has three sections: conceptual 
approaches to culture and knowledge 
management, effects of culture on key 
aspects of knowledge management, and 
research on, and cases of, culture and 
knowledge management. The underlying 
presumption is that the anthropological 
concept of “culture” is essential for under-
standing organized, and organizational, 
behavior. Such is especially a concern 
when organizations are multinational, 
international, or global, and hence are 
presumed both to operate in places whose 
cultures vary and to have staff from dif-
ferent cultures. How to avoid problems 
stemming from cultural differences and 
to make global communication easier is 
the concern of the authors. 

The concept of culture is att ributed to 
anthropology, with some contributors cit-
ing Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s landmark 
1952 compilation of at least 164 definitions 
of the term. However, more generally, the 
contributors to this book draw their uses 
of the concept not from anthropological 
literature, but instead from management 
or organizational studies that employed 
it. The concept as used here is rather fixed. 
No mention is made of “culture change” or 
the vast literature in anthropology about it, 
which would mean that the authors would 
have to deal with a moving target instead 
of a fixed principle. Related terms like syn-
cretism, acculturation, and enculturation 
aren’t mentioned either. Overall, the book 
is an argument in favor of being aware of 
cultural variation when studying (or ap-
plying) management and its principles.