College and Research Libraries successive editings of the basic text) in print for many years to come, and second, that the compiler will maintain his interest in the work and make certain that revisions are made to keep pace with changing tech- nology, to incorporate fuller coverage, and to take advantage of further investigations throwing brighter light on past practices and personalities. T h e volume, of course, is not without its share of inadvertencies—no first printing of a work of such colossal scope could hope to be. (What, exactly, is meant by the seem- ingly contradictory phrase "pure weak lin- seed oil" on p. 86?; surely Adam Ramage was not the builder of the first American-made printing press; William Ged's stereotyped edition of Sallust is dated 1739, not 1744; and so on.) T h e criticism that the needs of an American user are not adequately met is obvious ("California case" and " J o b case" would be useful entries, for example). T h e r e is a plethora of nonessential, sometimes down- right useless, definitions which are either self- evident or readily to be found in any reas- onably good dictionary (oblong, biblio- pegy, polished calf). T h e listing of book clubs leaves much to be desired, especially in regard to American ones (only the Grolier Club is mentioned among the half-dozen ex- tremely important American organizations that come easily to mind). But there is nothing in the above that can — o r is intended to—detract from the work in any substantial degree. This is truly an important addition to the literature of books and book-making, furnishing a reference tool that is unique in our language. It can be improved in later editions, but even if this never comes to pass there is no gainsaying the validity and value of Mr. Glaister's contribution.—Roland Baughman, Columbia University Libraries. Reading Tastes Borrowings from the Bristol Library, 1773- 1874; A Unique Record of Reading Vogues. By Paul Kaufman. Charlottesville, Va., Bibliographical Society of the Uni- versity of Virginia, 1960. 138p. $5.00. Scattered here and there throughout the length and breadth of New England, and doubtless elsewhere in the United States, are ledgers in which have been recorded bor- rowings from the libraries to which they once belonged. These ledgers, not a few of which date back to the late eighteenth cen- tury, are arranged in one of two ways: In some, a page was assigned to each title held by the library, and upon it was recorded the name of each borrower and the dates of withdrawal and return; in others, the ar- rangement was by borrower's name with list- ings, as in a bank ledger, of the titles with- drawn. T h e reviewer has long argued that these records might have some limited value as indices of reading taste during the years of their use.1 Limited their value must be, first because in most instances the character of the borrowing public is not revealed, and second, because there is often no way of de- termining the character of the collection from which the loans were made: e.g., books on history may have been most heavily bor- rowed because more books on history were available for loan from the collection. None- theless, if used cautiously and interpreted judiciously, these registers do throw a little light on the reading interests of subscription library patrons during the early years of our country. Mr. Kaufman, of the University of Wash- ington Library, who had previously made a tabulation of the borrowings of Southey and Coleridge from the Bristol Library,2 has now turned his attention to all the borrowings from that institution revealed in the five registers which span the years from August 23, 1773 to November 29, 1784. T h e Bristol Library Society, a voluntary association of the type familiar to students of library history on this side of the Atlantic, was inaugurated in 1773, with a charter membership of 132 citizens who contributed one guinea annually to maintain the organ- ization. Within a year the Society had ac- quired 574 titles—not an inauspicious be- ginning for early libraries of this type. Its subscribers came from the middle and upper- middle classes of Bristol society, thus its use reflects something of the reading tastes of an informed and thoughtful segment of a com- munity with a long cultural tradition. In other words, it would seem to have been 1 See the discussion of this problem in the reviewer's Foundations of the Public Library. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1949, 114-123. z Modern Philology, v. 21 ( 1 9 2 4 ) 317-320. 8 0 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 quite comparable in its patronage to the Redwood Library at Newport, R. I. which had been organized a few decades earlier. It was, then, a library of the gentleman-scholar; the kind of library that reflects perhaps more accurately than any other type the reading tastes of its clientele. Mr. Kaufman's little volume is devoted al- most entirely to a tabular listing of the nine hundred titles held by the library between the years 1773 to 1784 and circulated for a total of 13,497 withdrawals. T h e titles, and the number of borrowings of each as re- corded in the five registers, are classified in broad subject categories, viz: theology, his- tory (including antiquities and geography), philosophy, natural history (including chem- istry), belles lettres, etc. One can properly, we believe, question the wisdom of devot- ing 104 pages of a 138-page book to the publication of a table in which the forest is scarcely discernible for the trees, but Mr. Kaufman's eight pages of analysis are inter- esting and, in a limited way (which he is very careful not to exaggerate) revealing. Of the nine hundred titles loaned more than 13,000 times, sixteen showed more than one hundred borrowings, and 119 titles were withdrawn only once, though this figure means little unless one knows the length of time each title was included in the collec- tion. Obviously, a book that has been in a library for ten years has a much greater "exposure" to use than one that has been in the collection only a few weeks. Because no accession records are available, the ina- bility to correlate circulation with accession points up the greatest fallacy in Mr. Kauf- man's method. Nevertheless, Kaufman's anal- ysis does tend to confirm some of the sub- jective observations made by the reviewer when he was studying the early social li- braries on this side of the Atlantic. History and travel was by far the most popular sub- ject, representing almost half of the total loans, but involving only one-fourth of all the titles, and exactly the same situation maintained in colonial New England despite our easy assumption that the typical Yankee was preoccupied with his spiritual salvation. Hawkesworth's Voyages appears to have been the most widely read volume, having circulated 201 times. It was followed by: (the numbers in parentheses indicate circu- lations) Brydone. Tour through Sicily (192) Chesterfield. Letters to his Son (185) Hume. History of England (180) Goldsmith. History of the Earth (150) Raynal. European Settlements (137) Robertson. Charles V. (131) Sterne. Tristram Shandy (127) Lyttleton. Henry II. (121) Fielding. Works (120) T h e Greek and Latin classics are only modestly represented, and of these, Cicero, represented by four titles, seems to have been the overwhelming favorite (a total of 148 borrowings). Medieval and Renaissance lit- erature was conspicuously neglected. Susan- nah Dobson's Life of Petrarch was rather frequently borrowed (68 times), but Pe- trarch's own works, though they were in the collection, were largely ignored. Hoole's translation of Ariosto shows only 32 borrow- ings; had it been Harington's rendering, the score might have been higher, but then, Rabelais circulated only seven times. Repre- sentation of English literature is surprisingly modest. Sterne, Fielding, and Swift lead the pack, with Shakespeare a rather poor fourth, perhaps because many of these titles were in the private libraries of the members of the So- ciety. Statistics for poetry are so low as to be inconclusive, though such writers as Mrs. Barbauld and Akenside enjoyed more popu- larity than seems justified by their present- day reputations. Again, the low scores of such writers as Pope and Thomson may be ex- plained by their presence in personal li- braries. In any final analysis, perhaps the most striking value of the Kaufman study is its demonstration of the general similarity of reading tastes in the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans were cousins of the British intellectually and culturally as well as genealogically. T h e Bris- tol Library that Kaufman has investigated could well have been in Bristol, Connecticut. In the reviewer's opinion this is the most important conclusion supported by the Kauf- man "findings," and it is unfortunate that he has not mentioned it in the pages of his study. Though quite properly modest about the results of his work, Kaufman emphasizes that it is only a "pilot" investigation; his recom- mendations that the inquiry "should be car- J A N U A R Y 1 9 6 1 81 ried on by all means to" a later date (p. 138) and that "refinement should, however, be considered by future investigators," (p. 127) seem questionable. T h e basic data is so im- perfect and so statistically unreliable that any attempt to use them as more than in- dicators of the most general hypotheses would be misdirected "scholarship." Never- theless, Borrowings from the Bristol Library has a modest utility and there must have been good fun in its making.—Jesse H. Shera, School of Library Science, Western Reserve University. T H E G R A D U A T E S H O O L of Library Science of the University of Texas has announced the availability of four scholarships, one for one thousand and three for five hundred dol- lars, to be awarded for the academic year, 1961-62. Application forms may be ob- tained from the director's office and the dead- line for applications is March 15, 1961. This NEW GLOBE should be in YOUR LIBRARY • • • 2 4 " in diameter Physical-Political 4,700 place names 333 miles to inch 7 5 " circumference 1959 boundaries Ocean currents Sea depths Trust territories In Navigator stand (illustrated) over-all height is 47". Distance and time measuring strip on horizon ring. Order direct from Denoyer-Geppert. G 2 4 P L 1 5 Blond hardwood $195.00 G24PL15 Mahogany or walnut finish . . 220.00 DENOYER-GEPPERT C O . Globes - Maps - Charts - Atlases 5235 Ravenswood Ave., Chicago 40 N O W AVAILABLE $5.00 Ellsworth, R a l p h E. Planning the College and University Library Building: A Book for Campus Planners and Architects. 111 pages, 23 illustrations. Glued binding. A completely new and comprehensive anal- ysis of the process of planning library build- ings, by the Director of Libraries, Univer- sity of Colorado, one of the leading au- thorities on library planning. Published by Pruett Press 1942 20th St., Boulder, Colorado L i b r a r y d i s c o u n t 1 5 % Expert Service on M A G A Z I N E SUBSCRIPTIONS for ALL LIBRARIES * Faxon's Librarians Guide free on request it For the very best subscription service at competitive prices—ask about our Till Forbidden IBM- RAMAC plan. F. W. F A X O N CO., INC. 83-91 Francis Street B o s t o n 15, Mass. * Continuous Library Service Since 1886