78 College & Research Libraries January 2010

so many interpretations and judgments 
possible? Is it the fact that OMAM is a 
play in narrative form, consisting almost 
entirely of dialogue? Is it because of the 
range of characters, including the two 
leads but also the ranch owner, his son 
Curley, Curley’s young wife, a black 
hand, an idealized cowboy, and others? 
Certainly the novel allows schoolchildren 
to study the Great Depression and the 
plight of the homeless and dispossessed, 
but there is more to it than that. Of Mice 
and Men has attained something like the 
status of folklore, and the characters live 
outside the text, in the classroom and the 
imagination. 

Despite some confusing layout, and 
proofreading lapses (see p. 7 for missing 
words), the book could be of practical use 
to teachers and students, even though 
abundant material is available through 
open access on the Web. There is some-
thing to be said for the chronological ap-
proach, which provides a history not only 
of Steinbeck criticism, but of American 
culture.—Jean Alexander, Carnegie Mellon 
University.

Jacob Soll. The Information Master: Jean-
Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelli-
gence System. Ann Arbor: University 
of Michigan Press, 2009. 277p. alk. 
paper, $65 (ISBN 9780472116904). LC 
2008-051142.

In recent years, historians of early mod-
ern Europe have increasingly turned to 
the theme of information in society as 
a historiographical framework for their 
research. This “informational turn” has 
begun to yield a number of studies on 
how information institutions (such as li-
braries, archives, museums) and practices 
(including the collection, organization, 
communication, and utilization of infor-
mation) contributed to the social, econom-
ic, political, and cultural processes that 
shaped the contours of life in European 
societies between the Renaissance and 
the Enlightenment. One topic that has 
attracted considerable scholarly attention 
is the administrative and political use of 

information in early modern European 
states. The intersection of information 
practices, governmental administration, 
and political purposes provides the 
thematic backdrop for the book under 
review, in which Jacob Soll, an associate 
professor of history at Rutgers University 
and specialist in the political and cultural 
history of early modern France, presents 
a wide-ranging and richly documented 
study of how one of Louis XIV’s most 
prominent ministers, Jean-Baptiste Col-
bert (1619–1683), harnessed a number 
of information institutions and practices 
into a “state information system” to sup-
port the administrative apparatus and 
absolutist ambitions of the French state 
under the Sun King. 

 Born into a merchant family and 
trained in the mercantile arts, Colbert en-
tered into state administration at an early 
age and rose to prominence in the 1650s as 
financial manager for, and administrative 
factotum to, Cardinal Mazarin, the chief 
minister of France. From 1661 until his 
death in 1683, Colbert was a leading mem-
ber of Louis XIV’s council of state: serving 
as minister of finance, trade, industry, and 
the navy, he came to control virtually all 
aspects of government administration 
apart from military affairs. He proved to 
be an effective minister, putting in place 
policies designed to rationalize state ad-
ministration, strengthen the position of 
the state vis-à-vis local governments and 
religious authorities, develop French do-
mestic industry and commerce, promote 
French mercantile activity abroad, and 
advance the arts and sciences in France. 
Colbert’s effectiveness as an administrator 
was due not only to a remarkable capacity 
for work and considerable skill in the art 
of wielding political power, but also, as 
Soll argues, to his adeptness at obtaining, 
managing, and deploying the informa-
tion he needed to make policy decisions 
and carry out his many-sided political 
program. Indeed, a primary thesis of the 
book is that, by integrating a wide array 
of information sources, institutions, and 
practices into his administrative system, 



Book Reviews 79

Colbert became, in effect, the chief infor-
mation manager for Louis XIV’s régime 
or, in Soll’s felicitous phrase, “the informa-
tion master” of the French state. 

As Soll makes clear at the book’s very 
outset, libraries and archives played a 
central rôle in Colbert’s information ré-
gime. The great minister of state took an 
active interest in these information insti-
tutions: indeed, he oversaw the develop-
ment of three major library-cum-archive 
collections over the course of his career. In 
1654, he was responsible for reconstitut-
ing the collections of Cardinal Mazarin’s 
library, which had been dispersed a year 
earlier during civil disturbances associ-
ated with the Fronde—a task that, by all 
accounts, he discharged with ruthless 
efficiency. Two years later, Colbert was 
given administrative control over the 
Royal Library, which he consolidated by 
appointing first his brother and then his 
own personal librarian as keepers of the 
library: on his initiative, its collections 
underwent major expansion and, in 1666, 
were relocated to new quarters situated 
only a block away from Colbert’s house 
in Paris. At the same time, Colbert was 
also amassing his own private library, 
the Colbertine, which was separate from, 
but closely linked to, the Royal Library. 
By the time of his death in 1683, both the 
Royal and the Colbertine libraries had 
reached immense proportions: indeed, 
their collections were among the largest in 
Europe at the time, the former comprising 
about 36,000 printed volumes and 10,500 
manuscripts (a threefold increase from 
its size when he first took control of it), 
the latter containing no less than 23,000 
printed books and 5,600 manuscripts. 
Soll’s description of Colbert’s methods 
of obtaining materials for these libraries 
reveals the great minister of state to have 
been an enterprising, ambitious, canny, 
and sometimes unscrupulous, collection 
developer. 

Colbert’s project of building up the 
Royal Library and the Colbertine was not 
merely an expression of bibliophilia or 
an attempt to enhance his royal master’s, 

and his own, prestige. As Soll convinc-
ingly argues, it also aimed at putting at 
his disposal large, centralized stores of 
documents to serve as an information 
base for the purposes of formulating 
state policy. The libraries under Colbert’s 
control contained not only the humanist, 
religious, naturalist, and scientific books 
or manuscripts typically found in a well-
stocked early modern bibliotheca selecta, 
but also tomes and documents dealing 
with legal, diplomatic, industrial, and 
mercantile subjects. In addition, they 
served as repositories for dossiers of 
administrative documents of all kinds, 
ranging from copies of legal and ecclesi-
astical charters to be used as ammunition 
in crown disputes with local governments 
and the Church, to detailed reports com-
posed by Colbert’s agents on the state 
of industry and commerce in various 
regions of France and books of accounts 
recording the fiscal condition of the state. 
In other words, both the Royal Library 
and the Colbertine functioned both as a 
statesman’s library and as state archives, 
whose collections amounted to what Soll 
terms “an encyclopedia of the state” (p. 2).

 No less important than the task of 
collecting a diverse body of documentary 
materials was that of setting them into 
order: indeed, Soll claims, “keeping a 
well-organized administrative archive 
and library were [sic] the basis of Col-
bert’s managerial method” (p. 93). At the 
Colbertine, the duty of organizing and 
maintaining the collections fell to a schol-
ar-librarian—initially the mathematician 
Pierre de Carcavy (1600–1684) and later 
the legal scholar and historian Étienne 
Baluze (1630–1718)—charged with over-
seeing its day-to-day operations. Taking 
his directives from Colbert himself, the 
librarian oversaw the filing of incoming 
documents and administrative dossiers, 
as well as preparing catalogs and annotat-
ed bibliographies as guides to the library’s 
collections. Furthermore, he was respon-
sible for providing personal reference 
service to the great minister of state—a 
task that included retrieving requested 



80 College & Research Libraries January 2010

documents, preparing summarizations of 
longer documents, compiling data from 
multiple sources and writing up reports 
on them, and translating Latin texts into 
French. In this way, Colbert treated his 
library as an information bureau avant la 
lettre, whose scholarly workers supplied 
him with the sources and information 
that he needed for his day-to-day work: 
examples of his reference requests culled 
from his personal papers by Soll provide 
a vivid indication of just how daunt-
ingly detailed the information he sought 
might be.

 Colbert used the libraries-cum-archives 
under his control not only as sources of 
information for his personal administra-
tive work but also as instruments for 
projecting state interests into the realm 
of cultural politics. One way to do so 
was to open their collections to scholars 
who might serve as researchers for, and 
spokesmen of, the state. As Soll points 
out, the collections of the Royal Library 
and the Colbertine served as a research 
center for a constellation of scholars 
and scientists whom he recruited and to 
whom he accorded state patronage. These 
érudits were expected to produce works 
of scholarship that advanced scientific 
learning or celebrated the government 
policies and political goals of Colbert 
and his royal master: those who did not 
conform their work to the great minister’s 
wishes or whose research touched upon 
taboo subjects had their library privileges 
revoked and their patronage withdrawn. 
Those aspects of research carried out by 
Colbert’s scholars that were intended 
for public consumption were published 
under the aegis of the Royal Press at the 
Louvre, which functioned as an organ for 
the dissemination of state propaganda. 

Colbert’s use of the Royal Library and 
the Colbertine as resources for the schol-
arly manufacture of state propaganda 
formed part of a broader project to shape 
the opinions of influential cultural elites 
both in France and throughout Europe 
and, more ambitiously, to “bring the 
world of learning under the control of the 

French state” (p. 100). Soll neatly outlines 
various aspects of this program, which 
included, inter alia, the establishment of 
a number of scholarly societies—some of 
which, such as the Académie des Sciences, 
still count among the most prestigious 
French cultural institutions today—and 
the foundation of the well-known periodi-
cal Journal des Sçavans, which was run by 
some of Colbert’s protégés and sought to 
shape perceptions of “[t]hat which goes 
on in the Republic of Letters” (p. 101).

A darker side of Colbert’s cultural 
program was his attempt to police the Re-
public of Letters within the French realm. 
This entailed heavy state regulation of the 
Parisian book trade, attempts to control 
the importation of foreign books and 
pamphlets, and rigorous censorship of 
books and pamphlets deemed injurious to 
the interests of the state, be it on political, 
philosophical, or religious grounds: ad-
ducing vignettes from the correspondence 
between Colbert and his learned lieuten-
ant general of police, Nicolas de Reynie 
(1625–1699), Soll paints a vivid picture 
of the cultural politics and administra-
tive mechanics involved in suppressing 
sources of information undesirable to the 
state in Sun King’s realm. 

Colbert’s sustained efforts at suppress-
ing purveyors of suspect literature were 
closely related to two other features of his 
informational policy that loom large in 
Soll’s narrative: surveillance and secrecy. 
As a matter of course, Colbert sent out 
administrative agents to the provinces to 
observe local demographic, fiscal, com-
mercial, industrial, ecclesiastical, and ju-
dicial conditions and to communicate this 
information to him in detailed reports: 
as Soll shows, the great minister of state 
took an active interest in instructing his 
charges on what to write about in their 
reports and how to write it and did not 
fail to criticize them if they failed to meet 
his exacting standards. Such systematic 
attempts to gather detailed information 
were used not only for administrative 
purposes but also for political ends: over 
the course of his narrative, Soll presents 



Book Reviews 81

several examples of Colbert’s use of his 
agents to spy upon, or assess the weak-
nesses of, political opponents and rivals. 
Much of the information that Colbert’s 
networks of agents and informants pro-
cured for him was hidden away in the 
archives of his library collections. Indeed, 
Colbert sought to restrict public access to 
any state documents that did not support 
the interests of the régime: for this reason, 
the documentary universe of the Royal 
Library and the Colbertine was a universe 
closed to all save trusted members of 
Colbert’s administration and his coterie 
of state-supported scholars. 

There can be little doubt that, under 
Colbert, Louis XIV’s France was rapidly 
moving in the direction of becoming a 
full-fledged information state, jealously 
keeping its centralized documentary base 
far from the public sphere that it otherwise 
sought to control through propaganda. 
The great minister of state’s death deci-
sively slowed this momentum. During 
Colbert’s tenure in office, the centraliza-
tion of the government’s documentary 
base had been intimately intertwined with 
the concentration of extensive adminis-
trative powers in his hands, and he had 
expected his eldest son, Jean-Baptiste, the 
marquis of Seignelay (1651–1690), to suc-
ceed him in his functions: indeed, as Soll’s 
account reveals, Colbert put Seignelay 
through a strenuous regimen of training 
in the art of managing administrative pa-
perwork to mold him into an information 
master after his own image. After Colbert’s 
death, however, Louis XIV sought to fore-
stall the formation of a ministerial dynasty 
by reducing Seignelay’s administrative 
portfolio to oversight of naval affairs 
alone—a move that entailed transferring 
management of the Royal Library and, 
more significantly, control of the Ministry 
of Finance, to other high-ranking govern-
ment officials. The posthumous dispersal 
of Colbert’s various ministerial functions 
among several different high officials 
brought to an end his vision of a central-
ized state administration overseen by a 
single, powerful official. 

 The end of Colbert’s administrative 
régime also had consequences for the 
centralized state information system 
that he had created. One was a relative 
decentralization of French state archival 
culture, as different ministers built up 
separate archives for their specific min-
istries: the administratively insalubrious 
effects of this fragmentation of France’s 
state archives would continue to be felt 
for the duration of the ancien régime. 
Another was that the Royal Library and 
the Colbertine ceased to serve as central 
nodes in a single, large-scale information 
system: the former fell to the control of 
the secretary of war, who preferred to use 
different institutional mechanisms for his 
information-gathering and -processing 
activities, while the latter continued to 
serve first as a working administrative 
library for Seignelay and, after his death, 
as a private library for the Colbert family 
until 1732, when its collections were sold 
to the French crown. In a turn of historic 
irony, what was once dispersed has, to a 
large degree, been reassembled in modern 
times: today, the remnants of the Royal Li-
brary, the Colbertine, and many—though 
not all—of Colbert’s personal papers form 
part of the collections held by the Biblio-
thèque de France. 

 The foregoing paragraphs provide 
only a partial synopsis of Soll’s richly tex-
tured study and so do not do full justice 
to the wide range of themes and topics 
that he has interwoven into his master-
ful analysis of Colbert qua information 
master. Nevertheless, they should suffice 
to indicate the book’s general relevance 
for readers interested in the history 
of libraries, archives, and information 
practices in general. As a work of history, 
The Information Master has many virtues. 
Throughout the book, Soll strikes an 
exemplary balance between broad histori-
cal synthesis and attention to individual 
historical details. His extensive knowl-
edge of cultural trends in early modern 
Europe allows him to situate Colbert’s 
information system within a broader 
historical context by adducing parallels 



82 College & Research Libraries January 2010

from the information practices of other 
European states: by noting differences as 
well as similarities, he is able to bring out 
the specific features of Colbert’s system. 
He also impressively marshals a wide 
array of primary sources—particularly 
published and unpublished papers from 
Colbert’s archives—to provide specific 
examples of the information practices 
he is analyzing: these examples are, as 
a rule, well chosen and to the point. As 
regards style of exposition, Soll has con-
structed a narrative whose structure is 
generally clear and well articulated—no 
small achievement given the multifaceted 
nature of the subject he is treating: fur-
thermore, he writes with assurance and 
verve, making the book a pleasure to read. 
The book is thoroughly documented—no 
less than 100 of its 277 pages are given 
over to endnotes and bibliography—and 
its judiciously selected illustrations—10 
figures in all—give the reader vivid visual 
representations of Colbert and his world 
of paperwork, while its index is quite 
serviceable, if somewhat uneven in the 
quality of its execution. 

Needless to say, no book is ever a per-
fect production, and attentive readers will 
doubtless discern flaws within the text. 
Soll’s translations of passages from Col-
bert’s papers are not always as precise as 
one might have expected: such linguistic 
lapses tend to be minor and in no case do 
they undermine his interpretation of the 
historical significance of the passages in 
question. One also finds signs of editorial 
laxity sprinkled throughout both the main 
text and endnotes, ranging from misspell-
ings to poorly edited sentences. With rare 
exceptions, such textual errors are likely 

to cause annoyance rather than bewilder-
ment: nevertheless, one would hope that 
the product of a well-regarded university 
press would exhibit greater editorial care 
than is the case here. 

 The picayune errors mentioned above 
should not deflect attention from the 
generally high quality of Soll’s book. The 
Information Master is an excellent book 
on a fascinating subject that is bound to 
attract readers from a range of historical 
and information-related fields: historians 
of early modern Europe will find in it 
an innovative redescription of Colbert’s 
career; those interested in the history of 
libraries and archives will learn much 
about the political and cultural forces that 
shaped these information institutions in 
early modern Europe; and information 
historians will derive profit from Soll’s 
many insights into the workings of Col-
bert’s information-saturated administra-
tive régime. In light of its excellence and 
potential interest for a fairly wide schol-
arly audience, this book richly deserves 
a place on the shelves of all academic 
libraries.—Thomas Dousa, University of 
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

 
Barbara M. Wildemuth. Applications of So-

cial Research Methods to Questions in In-
formation and Library Science. Westport, 
Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2009. 421p. 
alk. paper, $50 (ISBN 9781591585039). 
LC 2008-053745

In this earnest, encyclopedic, energetic 
and easily accessible book, Barbara Wilde-
muth has produced a landmark text that 
will be of great use to information and 
library science (ILS) master and doctoral 
students, as well as to professors and 
professionals in library and allied fields. 
The hefty volume brings together vari-
ous disciplines, incorporates enormous 
scholarship, and encourages research to 
help further the field of information and 
library science. Wildemuth, a professor 
in the School of Information and Library 
Science at the University of North Caro-
lina at Chapel Hill, is either full author or 
coauthor of all chapters in the book; the 

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