College and Research Libraries


of South Asia, University of Minnesota, 
Minneapolis. 

Shores, Louis. Quiet World: A Librarian's 
Crusade for Destiny. The Professional 
Autobiography of Louis Shores. Hamden, 
Conn.~ Linnet Books, 1975. 309p. 
$15.00. (LC 75-2220) ISBN 0-208-
01477-2) 
Louis Shores' professional career has 

spanned more than forty years at mid-cen-
tury. He has, by his own count, been en-
gaged in twenty "crusades" of which li-
brary education has been the overriding 
one, and the others which have most deeply 
engaged him have been for one race, basic 
reference, encyclopedia, library-college, me-
dia unity, and library history. 

The main thrust of his work has been to 
move the library from an ancillary position 
to that as a primary instrument for inde-
pendent learning. He defines the ultimate 
goal of the public library as independent 
study for all; he believes that reference li-
brarians should initiate inquiry rather than 
merely answer the questions put to them; 
he has fathered the library-college which 
seeks to increase effectiveness of student 
learning through use of library-centered in-
dependent study, and he has vigorously 
promoted audiovisual unity with other li-
brary resources as a means to extending in-
dependent learning down into the second-
ary and elementary grades. 

In Shores' account of his early life, the 
roots of his zeal for independent study can 
be readily identified. At the age of four his 
sister took him to the neighborhood branch 
of the Cleveland Public Library where a 
children's librarian brought him fairy stories 
and occasionally read with him. By the time 
he entered first grade he could already 
read, a fact which gave him superiority 
over his classmates. In high school he dis-
covered for himself, as a means of dealing 
with an abstruse textbook on physics, the 
value of comparing authorities. In an eco-
nomics class he made use of an encyclope-
dic overview to impress the pretty young 
teacher. Both these incidents, he says, con-
tributed to the library-college learning 
mode. At the University of Toledo he was 
discontented with the class-centered cur-
riculum. 

Dr. Shores repeatedly says that he dis-

Recent Publications I 517 

likes to "tell it as it is," by which he means 
that he eschews the grotesque in art, the 
sordid in literature, and defeatism in his 
outlook for the human race. If he does not 
actually believe in the perfectability of 
man, he at least believes man can save 
himself by his own intellect given the quiet 
and resources of out libraries. 

A great deal is packed into this book, 
which perhaps accounts for the fact that in 
the first part especially the style of writing 
seems a little spare. However, there are 
some delightful bits such as the nine-year-
old boy Walter-Mittying around his news-
paper route or the Fulbright scholar Shores 
entertaining S. R. Ranganathan and intro-
ducing the subject of occultism rather than 
classification so that Mrs. Shores found the 
two men on the floor in lotus leaf fashion 
when she entered the living room. The 
pages on intellectual freedom are among 
the liveliest in the book. 

Dr. Shores has a mystic feeling about his 
quiet world of the library, a feeling which 
comes whenever he enters the stacks and 
smells the mustiness of old bindingsj that 
he has been there before-long before. Al-
most every adult has experienced this feel-
ing of deja vu and that librarian is a poor 
thing who in a silent stack cannot thrill to 
the sense of the continuity of man's mind 
and spirit. 

This book is a fascinating chapter in the 
history of librarianship.-Helen M. Brown, 
Librarian, Wellesley College, Wellesley, 
Massachusetts. 

Lancaster, F. Wilfrid, ed. Application of 
~ inicomputers to Library and Related 
Problems. Papers presented at the 1974 
Clinic on Library Applications of Data 
Processing, April 28-May 1, 1974. Ur-
bana-Champaign: University of Illinois 
Graduate School of Library Science, 
1974. 195p. $6.00. (Available from Pub. 
Office-249, Armory Building, University 
of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820.) (LC 
65-1841) (ISBN 0-87845-041-6) 
This is not so much a review as a whine; 

my major quarrel with this book is not with 
1ts content, format, intent, or expertise of 
the contributors; it is the fact that by the 
time you read this review, or get around to 
the book itself, the information in it will be 
two years old, and considerably out of date.