College and Research Libraries


186 College & Research Libraries 

Dominique Jamet and Helene Ways-
bord provide a short piece-one as-
sumes, the "official" statement--on the 
background and aspirations of the Bibli-
otheque de France. This is followed by a 
much more detailed essay by Gerald 
Grunberg, the head librarian of the Bib-
liotheque de France, and Alain Gifford, 
the head of information services, on the 
projected service and collection policies 
of the new library. In a short piece en-
titled "My Everydays," Emmanuel Le 
Roy Ladurie, the chief administrator of 
the Bibliotheque Nationale talks about 
how he spends his time. The scene shifts 
from France to Eastern Europe in the 
next essay, in which Prosser Gifford of the 
Library of Congress describes the efforts 
and plans to assist Eastern European 
countries in developing parliamentary 
libraries. Networking among Eastern 
European libraries, and between those 
libraries and the libraries in Western 
countries, is seen, of course, as a primary 
means of establishing open and effective 
information services. 

The final two articles are on library 
architecture. The first is a straightfor.:.. 
ward description by architect Cathy 
Simon of the design of the San Francisco 
Public Library, and the final article is a 
highly energetic discussion by Anthony 
Vidler, a professor of architecture at 
Princeton, of the controversies sur-
rounding the selection of Dominique 
Perrault's design for the Bibliotheque de 
France. Vidler concludes that "rarely has 
architecture been so fundamentally re-
duced to the status of an ideological 
sign." Anyone at all interested in library 
architecture will find Vidler's essay well 
worth perusing. 

Few librarians will want to read 
through this collection from beginning 
to end, but most will find one or two of 
the essays relevant and refreshing. These 
are voices we seldom hear: European 
librarians as well as American scholars 
who have taken the trouble to famili-
arize themselves with some key library 
issues. The stated purpose of the collec-
tion is to place the debate over the future 
of scholarly communication and librar-
ies "within some significant historical 

March 1994 

and social perspective, to burrow beneath 
its terms in order to identify and to contex-
tualize its stakes and motivations" -and 
it is in a way the very disjointedness of 
these essays, the range of knowledge 
and authority they exhibit, that con-
tribute most to the fulfillment of that pur-
pose. Many vocal stakeholders and many 
conflicting motivations will influence and 
drive the transformation of the research 
library, and those of us responsible for 
managing that transition do well to heed as 
many opinions, theories, and gripes about 
the future evolution of the library as we 
can find-especially those emanating 
from the professional users of our services. 
This special issue of Representations pro-
vides an appropriately diverse sample of 
such visions and values.-Ross Atkinson, 
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. 

Carlson, David R. English Humanist 
Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript 
and Print,1475-1525. Toronto: Univ. of 
Toronto Pr., 1993. 275p. $50 (ISBN 0-
9020-2911-6). 
''This is a book about books: why they 

were made the way they were and how 
they were used, in England, during an 
important period in their history," 
begins David Carlson, a member of the 
Department of English at the University 
of Ottawa. 

The developing professionalization of 
humanistic scholarship during the reign 
of Henry VII and the early years of 
Henry VIII emerges clearly from Carl-
son's seven case studies of the private, 
semiprivate, and public appearances of 
particular works. He analyzes lavish 
presentation manuscripts that either 
succeeded or failed to elicit patronage; 
deliberate fashioning of the authorial 
image through choice of material; reuse 
of the same material in different formats 
and for differing audiences; the issue of 
both impressing and benefiting from 
one's peers; the role of the printer in 
·establishing reputations and in reach-
ing markets; the uses and impact of 
single and multiple copies, manuscript 
and print distribution; and the mean-
ings of manuscripts' nonverbal elements 
and their graphic presentations. 



During this period in Britain it became 
possible for the first time for scholars to 
earn a living by writing, and, concomi-
tantly, English printers recognized the 
existence of a humanist market. Four of 
the authors discussed are foreign-born, 
including Erasmus; the other three are 
native Englishmen, including Sir Thomas 
More. Carlson presents their works from 
the broad and fresh economic and cultural 
perspectives offered by the history of the 
book as a discipline. Book historians will 
find his chapter on printers' economic 
needs and marketing strategies of partic-
ular interest. 

In the past few years Carlson has writ-
ten a dozen articles on similar or related 
topics. His seventeen-page bibliography 
here offers a useful compilation for any-
one researching the book's composition, 
production, and reception in early Tudor 
England. Thirty-two full-page illustra-
tions, drawn from the manuscripts and 
books discussed, help bring the publica-
tions to life. 

For academic librarians the interest of 
Carlson's careful research into motives 
and meanings lies in his explorations of 
the complex relationships among scholars, 
patrons, publishers, reputations, and 
markets that remain with us today. The 
possible nuances of publication-which in 
early sixteenth-century England still was 
not synonymous with print-are seen 
once more as twentieth-century scholars' 
distribution patterns shift into an elec-
tronic mode.-Elizabeth Swaim, Wesleyan 
University, Middletown, Connecticut. 

Daedalus. Journal of the American 
Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vol. 
122, no. 4 (Fall 1993). Issue Title: ''The 
American Research University." $7.95. 
This issue of Daedalus assembles a dis-

tinguished company of academics to de-
fine the historic moment that American 
research universities now face and to 
consider the future. The essayists are 
four senior faculty, three university 
presidents (one of them emeritus), a pro-
vost, and two foundation and learned 
society officers. The essays are uni-
formly thoughtful and, with few excep-
tions, deeply engage the reader. One of 

Book Reviews 187 

them, by statistician Stephen M. Stigler, 
conveys serious purpose with some wit. 
His tone is the more welcome because 
the condition of research universities is 
fundamentally so troubling and the 
grounds for optimism so uncertain. 

Libraries are mentioned in passing 
perhaps ten times in this volume, so 
librarians will have little direct reason 
for reading it. Librarians at research uni-
versities who wish to understand their 
own institutions are, however, well ad-
vised to read these essays. The same ad-
vice applies to any academic librarian 
who is sensitive to the issues of diversity, 
the epistemological crisis in higher edu-
cation, the ability of academe to make 
hard choices, the international dimen-
sions of education, and the future of aca-
demic health centers. 

Most of the issues under discussion 
have a long history in higher education, 
but they come together in the 1990s in 
particularly troubling ways. But per-
haps the most troubling of these issues 
may actually be unprecedented: there-
focusing and retrenchment of federal 
support for scientific, medical, and en-
gineering research (treated most fully in 
the essays by Jonathan R. Cole, Rodney 
W. Nichols, and William C. Richardson). 
This shift is unprecedented only because 
the federal commitment to such research 
has itself been so much a product of a 
particular (and one can hope unique) 
definition of national security set in 
place by World War II and dominating 
national policy until quite recently. 

As if fundamental shifts in the finan-
cial base of research universities were 
not enough, higher education is also 
beset with an epistemological crisis and 
with deeply conflicting promptings on 
diversity. Cole and John R. Searle both 
address the crisis in knowing. Searle's 
essay is at once both philosophical and 
political. He describes the ways in which 
the Western rationalistic tradition has 
shaped knowing at the university and 
the ways in which some contemporary 
linguistic and philosophical currents in 
thought challenge this tradition, leaving 
us- possibly!-with nothing but oppos-
ing political powers to guide academic