College and Research Libraries books should endure. It might tax even an electronic computer to calculate how many books will be written and organized for use in the five billion years still before us and the amount of space they will occupy. Ob- viously present methods and philosophies of book production, book storage, book use, will, under the onslaught of numbers just simply have to change, and drastically. Over the eons books by the millions, including quantities of those now here and present, will surely have to be laid to rest. Who can believe that, a billion years from now, grant- ing a stable and continuing civilization, our present few hundred miles of books will all be considered essential? Or a million years from now? Or five hundred thousand years? Or a hundred thousand? Or ten, or five? Or even one thousand? This is a mere fraction of a cosmic second, but long enough, even at present growth rates of a doubling every twenty-two years, as the Council has found, to multiply the rate of book production by fifty. The fantastic long-range prospects of book increase, both quantitative and cultural, bring this reviewer to believe that of all the worthy projects presently sponsored by the Council the one retiring books from the Yale University Library to compact storage is the most important and a harbinger of things to come. The next and eventual step will be to retire books permanently. When and if this is attempted it will be the most difficult and painful task scholars and librarians have ever undertaken, requiring wisdom and judgment not now among us. And financial support too, whether from foundations or elsewhere, at levels not now approached. If such discarding can be agreed on it will remain only to strike off a list of the books nominated and we will ^khave, horrible thought, a Shaw list of books no longer needed in this world. It is quite conceivable that in the world of the far future the book as an individual entity will not retain the prime importance it now has. Knowledge may be organized only by the codification of basic ideas, phil- osophies, and facts without reference to authorship. T h e complex author-alphabetic approach which even the electronic ma- chines have so far not been able to digest could then be eliminated. It is possible that some far-off foundation, or one not so far off, will organize and support a project to produce some kind of a giant total Syntopi- con of the world's history, science, literature, philosophy, religions. Could this, perhaps, be the stone to bring Goliath into a useful submissiveness? None of us now present will know. We do know though that librarians, more than most people, are, in these matters of control and utilization of the world's knowl- edge, at grips with one of the most funda- mental cultural problems of the times. We can be thankful that a great foundation has recognized the import of these things and set able and astute men and women search- ing for solutions.—William H. Carlson, Ore- gon State College Library, Corvallis. Recruiting for Librarianship Librarians Wanted: Careers in Library Serv- ice. By Adrian A. Paradis. New York: David McKay Company, Inc. [cl959]. x, 276p. $3.50. At a time when recruiting is a crucial problem for the library profession, Adrian A. Paradis's publication of Librarians Wanted, the first book on librarianship as a career to be issued in nearly a decade, should sup- posedly be significant and thoroughly wel- come news to all librarians involved, as all should be, in recruiting. During recent years Mr. Paradis has published several well-re- ceived books for teenagers on various careers. Presently the assistant secretary for corporate work for a major airline, he was formerly a professional librarian employed in law and air transportation libraries. Librarians Wanted may indeed be a useful addition, for a year or so, to a high school library's collec- tion on careers. It is cleverly conceived, rea- sonably fast-paced, and, on the whole, inter- esting reading. Yet in several important ways it is sharply disappointing. Mr. Paradis begins his account by describ- ing the various kinds of jobs in libraries. Here he directs almost as much attention to nonprofessional as to professional positions. He then devotes the greater part of the book to a tour of more or less representative li- 326 C O L L E G E A N D R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S braries of virtually all types. These include public libraries (Cleveland; Dallas; Pittsfield, Massachusetts; South Hero, Vermont; and the Grosse Pointe Public Library near De- troit); regional, school, college and univer- sity (Duke, Dartmouth, Howard, Hebrew Union, Fairfield, Air Force Academy, and Stanford); government (Library of Congress, Department of Agriculture, Washington State Library, and the Chicago and Los An- geles Municipal Reference Libraries); and finally some twenty-eight special libraries of all varieties: Mayo Clinic, John Crerar, Gen- eral Motors Public Relations Library (Ford's Engineering Staff Library gets approximately equal space), the AFL-CIO Library, McGraw- Hill, New York's Mercantile Library Associa- tion Library, the Truman Library, and the like. A number of other libraries are men- tioned along the way. At each stop the author usually introduces the head librarian (by name, often with some account of his or her career), and gives a brief account of the library's history. The library's activities and its services to its com- munity, parent institution, or firm are de- scribed. The author may go into detail con- cerning the library's collections, the compo- sition of its staff, typical reference questions asked by its patrons, its equipment ("club- like. . . comfortable couches and deep easy chairs . . . massive fireplaces"), its color scheme, or its problems ("Leaking roofs, lighting failures, plumbing breakdowns, flooded drains, falling ceiling plaster, and broken door hinges were but a few of [the building superintendent's] problems."). The librarians we meet are invariably competent, dedicated, and pleasant. If Mr. Paradis met any librarians who were ineffective or un- happy with their lot he was kind enough to leave them out of his book. T h e final chapters consist of one entitled "Is It for You?" and others containing dis- cussions of training for professional librar- ianship (the complete list of accredited li- brary schools is provided), of the professional library associations, and of publications of in- terest to librarians. It is unfortunate that Librarians Wanted is not as good in execution as in conception. First, is it really impossible to slant a book at teenagers without making it unpalatable to more mature readers? Mr. Paradis lapses all too frequently throughout the volume, and particularly in the early chapters, into an exclamatory, breathless, pseudo-confidential style of writing which is likely to antagonize any reader as sophisticated as a college sopho- more and which will probably repel even a college freshman. So much, regrettably, for its utility in recruiting efforts beyond the high school level. There is no escaping the fact that the book was carelessly written and edited. T o the non-librarian it will not matter that the first person mentioned, in the acknowledgements, is "William S. Burlington of The John Crerar Library"—though it may startle li- brarians who are acquainted with William Budington. Nor does it greatly matter, in terms of the book's goal, that the author has the Board of Education for Librarianship, which was replaced by the ALA Committee on Accreditation in June 1956, still accredit- ing library schools in the spring of 1959. Any candidate for the profession who reads as far as the last page of the text, on the other hand, may well find himself mystified by the sentence that begins, "Inasmuch as half of your working hours will be spent at your job. . . ." Possibly the reader will have been stopped dead in Chapter 2, however, by the utter confusion of the statement, "In East Orange every effort is made to avoid isolat- ing young people from the adult library and discouraging their use of the adult depart- ment for as long as possible." Under the circumstances routine typographical errors and simple blunders in grammar are perhaps no more numerous than might be expected. Mr. Paradis pauses now and then to re- view the advantages and the disadvantages of working in a given type of library. On the whole, librarianship seems to come out rather well, despite an occasional reference to the "overburdened librarian." It is possible, how- ever, that the reader considering librarian- ship as a career (and perhaps a few already pursuing it) may be tempted to chuck the whole affair upon pondering the rather mor- bid implications of the incongruously quoted comments of a corporation librarian: "Work- ing under constant pressure takes a great deal out of the special librarian. I suspect that I would probably live longer if I had remained in some other type of library work but I'm having a lot of fun and I know I shall continue to in whatever time remains." Any young person exploring a given pro- J U L Y 1 9 6 0 327 fession as a possible lifetime career will have a normal curiosity about salaries. It is too bacl that with an October 1959 publication date, the salary data given in Librarians Wanted refer to salaries received by library school graduates of 1957, and even so are stated on the low side. ALA is quoted as saying that 1957 graduates without experience received an average of $3,900 to $4,200 in their first positions, and those having some experience an average salary of $4,500 to $4,800. Donald and Ruth Strout's careful analysis of the 1957 salaries reported by the library schools, which appeared in the June 15, 1958 Library Jour- nal gives an average of about $4,250 for graduates without experience and an aver- age of about $5,000 for those with some ex- perience. It is further regrettable that the publisher's deadline for page proof appar- ently prevented the author from substituting the Strouts' June 15, 1959 figures for 1958: an average of $4,352 without experience, $5,418 on the average for new graduates with experience. At the other end of the scale, Mr. Paradis's statement that "Chief librarians of large libraries receive salaries of $7,000 to $12,000 or more" is oddly restrained, even as of 1957. In 1957, Edward G. Freehafer in Should You Be a Librarian?, his excellent contribution to the New York Life Insurance Company's series of advertisements on ca- reers, referred to a $3,900-$4,200 salary range for new inexperienced graduates of 1956, and mentioned top salaries of $17,000 for chief librarians in major cities, $14,800 for federal governmental positions, and $25,000 for librarians in industry. In this sensitive area of salaries Librarians Wanted was out of date, and surely unnecessarily so, the day it was published. This reduces still further its usefulness as a potential recruiting device, leaving librarians yet without an acceptable book-length account of their profession. Thus in several ways Librarians Wanted is a disappointment despite its praiseworthy motive and its imaginative approach to its subject. With only a little more restraint in style of writing and a little more effort on the author's part it could have been a most wel- come addition to the profession's recruiting literature. As it stands, librarians will wish to use it in their recruiting efforts, or to buy it for their collections, only with considerable caution, and very possibly not at all.—Robert L. Talmadge, University of Kansas Libraries. Successful Exchange A Serviceable Reservoir; Report of a Survey of the United States Book Exchange. By Edwin E. Williams. Washington, D. C.: The United States Book Exchange, Inc., 1959. 81 p. The survey, proposed by the USBE itself and financed by the Council on Library Re- sources, Inc., was eminently worth under- taking. Its success was practically assured by the Council's choice of Edwin E. Williams, assistant librarian, Harvard College Library, as director. Not only did Williams conduct a skillful and comprehensive examination, but (and in survey-making this does not neces- sarily follow) he wrote a report that can be read. His usual clear prose, flavored with wit and never muddied by jargon, leaves the reader with a precise picture. The larger background against which this survey was made is one of declining exchange activities—particularly with regard to do- mestic exchange—in American university li- braries. In some libraries, once-flourishing exchange sections are now one-man shows. There is a suspicion abroad that exchange is more costly than had been realized. Even if a library receives "free" the material it sends out, there is always a bill somewhere which eventually must be justified. The surveyor flashes a bright light on one important aspect of this decline by his formu- lation of Williams' law: "Exchange is stimu- lated when personnel resources are relatively plentiful and acquisition funds are impover- ished. It is inhibited by scarcity of personnel, particularly when relatively generous funds for purchase are available. Exchange is a means of converting manpower into ma- terial." He further enriches our terminology and sharpens our thinking by giving names to what he calls surplusage exchange and publishing exchange. Although the latter is not escaping thoughtful scrutiny, it is of course surplusage exchange that has declined most markedly among university libraries. It is therefore pertinent to ask what the functions of USBE are and how well it is per- forming them. Williams finds that the USBE is well managed, efficiently operated, and is usefully serving both its domestic and foreign 328 C O L L E G E A N D R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S