College and Research Libraries 358 College & Research Libraries book's authors are highly sensitive to the use of the word information throughout the text. Not surprisingly, the foundation has praise and great expectations for the value of the RLG Conspectus for the sharing of resources nationally; the foundation also considers the recent ef- forts of the Colorado Alliance of Re- search Libraries as a useful prototype for cooperation. So, what, in the final analysis, will be the model for scholarly communication in the future? The authors word the an- swer to this question with such great care that it is worth citing verbatim: "It is extremely unlikely-we would say al- most inconceivable-that any alterna- tive model will completely supplant the existing one at any point in the foresee- able future. Rather, we envision a situa- tion where incremental modifications to the current model will be made. We would also argue, however, that it ·is equally inconceivable that there will not eventually be a more-or-less complete transformation of scholarly communica- tion." We were right all along. This excellent study is accompanied by more than the usual scholarly apparatus, with foreword, introduction, bibliogra- phy, three appendixes, a glossary, and even a fifteen-page synopsis, con- tributed by Ann Okerson, director of the ARL Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing. Unfortunately, it has no index. It is quite evident that the Mellon Foundation has a genuine desire to help the scholarly communication system grow stronger, healthier, more effective. It has distributed many copies of its study to university presidents, academic vice presidents, and library directors free of charge and is making other copies available for wide distribution at nomi- nal cost. The foundation sees that the future of scholarly communication is not a library issue, but an institutional issue; that it is not just an institutional issue, but a national issue. The Mellon Founda- tion has done much to advance scholarly communication and the cause of aca- demic libraries by producing and dis- seminating this study.-Charles B. Osburn, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. July1993 Glazier, Loss Pequeno. Small Press: An Annotated Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. 123p. $49.95 (ISBN 0-313-28310-9). LC 92-15482. Bibliographies are not usually recom- mended as entertainment. But then can there be any more charming annotator than Loss Glazier? As incisive and infor- mative as one might wish, he never re- sists an opportunity to gloss, adding a bit of background or a reference, a passing opinion or an illuminating quote. The result is that this shortish list (174 items) may well be the elegy of the Mimeo Rev- olution, that Indian summer of literary Modernism. Glazier likes his subject too well ever to be dry, and has shown clev- erness at a postmodern way of writing history. Self-confident, limited, not total- izing, not transcendental, thoroughly entertaining. This is not a comprehensive book. It is restricted to the period since 1960, and to American materials only. It concerns it- self not with single authors or presses, nor regional publishing, nor reviews, how-to-books, vanity or subsidy publish- ing, or fine presses. It is strictly literary-a significant limitation-and includes cur- rent information, coresources, and sup- plementary materials (catalogs, lists, bibliographies). The standard histories and other sources covering the period up to 1960 are concisely dealt with in the preface. While I can't think of anything missing, Glazier's purpose is not to be the last word, and he has not dug out obscure material (except for one master's thesis, and some letters to editors). Though not exhaustive, this is a well-done list. Its glory is all in the annotations. Glazier begins with an introduction mostly devoted to characterizing the small press, where we learn that the "mimeo revolution" was actually made more on offset presses. I suspect Glazier would like to believe that the "spirit of mimeography, that of the small pub- lisher, has produced an important leg- acy; it enters the nineties not only with a proven record of the production of liter- ary texts but with an increasingly visible presence in the publishing industry." Yet, as with the term hacker, there has been an important shift in thirty years that begins to come out as Glazier tries to return the term small press to its origi- nal meaning. Little magazines (increas- ingly a misnomer) have received most of the attention while the volume of pub- lishing has shifted largely to books. "Academic quarterly," "alternative" and "underground press," or "independent publisher" are all too astigmatic or wide- angle to serve as descriptive terms, in- cluding as they do, the nonliterary, the too-commercial, and the insufficiently independent. The problem is that there has been a culture shift, and what Glazier chooses finally to call small press, numbering about 700 at the beginning of his period, has been overwhelmed by small, independent publishers of New Age books, cookbooks, and self-help books. While the small press has tripled in size, these other publishers have gone from nothing to some 12,000 in the same period. The noncorporate, locally based, small scale press of limited readership and uncommodified cultural ideals (de- scribed here as the epitome of the spe- cies) has become a minority force even on its home ground. Nowhere is this revealed more clearly than in the sequence of COSMEP catalog listings (items 167-170), from the first (a "who's who" and a "vital record" of the mimeo revolution at a crucial moment) to the last (a "disappointment" and captive of the "commercially expedient"). In be- tween, we have the lavishly designed and illustrated Whole COSMEP Catalog in reverse alphabetic order and the micro- fiche third version, innocent of editing. The fourth is thoroughly professional, typeset, paginated, edited, and vetted- and soulless. Well, this is the history of the boomers themselves, who made this movement and now have come to middle age and power. I hope that Glazier's optimism is justified. One thing is clear: small presses (and litera- ture, and we, too) are not what they were, whatever they are to become. Meanwhile, I've spent hours browsing through the entries, and all that familiar, funny, laughable, confused, wonderful time again. Don't put this book on the Book Reviews 359 reference shelves. Let people check it out and take it home with them. -Charles W. Brownson, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. Euro-Librarianship: Shared Resources, Shared Responsibilities. Ed. by As- sunta Pisani. Binghamton, N.Y.: Ha- worth, 1992. 605p. $49.95 (ISBN 1-56024-266-3). This volume documents the proceed- ings of a conference held in April1988 in . Florence under the auspices of ACRL's Western European Specialists Section (WESS). Weighing in at a hefty 605 pages, it comprises some fifty individual contributions offering in their totality an impressively diverse collection of .topics, approaches, languages, and potential readerships. According to the brief intro- duction by Assunta Pisani, the purpose of the conference (and presumably of the volume) was to foster an exchange of information between Western European specialists in North American libraries and their Old World counterparts, centered on the relatively conventional theme of efforts to "collect, organize, and preserve materials that support re- search" and a potentially more contro- versial "examination of both the needs for research on Western Europe and of the programs underway to support these needs." So far, so good. Few library collection managers with responsibilities that in- clude Western Europe would dispute the need for a cogent and detailed examina- tion of these topics. And yet, many potential readers of this volume will be both attracted by the topics and repelled by their presentation in the uneven, re- dundant, and diffuse format of this lightly edited collection. The compilation's problems are at least threefold. First, the spread and dis- tribution of topics defy clear description. The papers are distributed among fifteen rubrics, but the intended meaning of these rubrics is muddied by their appli- cation. At least one paper, Herbert Lott- man's smooth "A Library User's View," stands outside these categories altogether; another category ("Access: Cooperative