College and Research Libraries


The American Reading Public: What It 
Reads; Why It Reads: From Inside Ed-
ucation and Publishing: Views of Pres-
ent Status and Future Trends, The 
Daedalus Symposium, with Rebuttals 
and Other New Material. Edited by 
Roger H. Smith. New York: R. R. Bow-
ker, [1963 1• 268p. $7.95. (63-22265). 

Except for a minority of essays concern-
ing the use of books in the teaching field 
The American Reading Public includes little 
to justify its title. For the most part it is a 
record of men eminent in publishing and 
closely allied fields indulging in a sort of 
communal omphaloskepsis. The result is an 
articulate, erudite, even informative collec-
tion, but it tells about the American reading 
public only by inference. 

The chief virtue of The American Read-
ing Public is not that it says much that is 
not generally known, but that it presents its 
case (or cases) in polished prose rather than 
in the jargon of the educator, the social 
scientist, or the pollster. Reuben A. Brower's 
"Book Reading and the Reading of Books" 
deserves the widest possible audience. Dan 
Lacy's "The Economics of Publishing, or 
Adam Smith and Literature" is very nearly 
a definitive statement. So is Roger Shugg's 
"The Professors and Their Publishers." Her-
bert R. Mayes's "Reflections-On the Mag-
azine Past, on the Magazine Future" is one 
of the two contributions in the volume that 
lacks literary polish, but as an unabashed 
love letter to the magazine as an institution 
it is delightful in its own way. Daedalus' 
review of Catch-22 is already well on the 
way towards becoming a classic. Its inclu-
sion as the endpiece of this volume is well 
advised. 

What do we learn here? That the teaching 
of reading needs drastic improvement. That 
paperbacks are the boon and the glory of 
American publishing. That publishing is a 
business. That the system (if such it may be 
called) for distributing books is abysmally 
bad. That bookshops are too few. That pa-
perbacks are a boon and a blessing. That the 
potential market for books is growing. That 

Review Articles 
libraries must have broad financial support 
by government. That paperbacks are a boon 
and a boomerang. That American book re-
viewing is bad and getting no better. That 
Catch-22 is a pretentious exercise in bad 
writing. 

The preoccupation with the difficulties of 
the publishing business grows a little stale. 
(Frederick A. Praeger's statement of his 
personal view of publishing is therefore re-
freshing indeed.) So does the preoccupation 
with paperbacks; that revolution now has 
been long accomplished. In what sort of 
ivory executive suite has Marshall Best 
(chairman of the executive committee of 
Viking Press) been if he really believes his 
remark that "libraries, which some authors 
regard as their stake in immortality, cannot 
now use paperbound books"? Excoriating 
the review media is flaying a dead horse. 

It has all-at least, nearly all-been said 
before, but it is said extremely well and in 
a single package in The American Reading 
Public. 

Of special interest to members of ACRL 
because of the association's sponsorship of 
CHOICE should be the essays on reviewing 
by Henri Peyre and John Hollander, both of 
Yale. Peyre is at his usual best in being 
charmingly erudite. Hollander is equally 
entertaining and a bit more specific. One 
passage in his essay certainly deserves quot-
ing as setting a goal for CHOICE if that 
magazine is to be anything more than The 
Booklist junior grade: 

What is needed is a weekly periodical devoted 
to book reviews (and perhaps to film, music, 
and art chronicles also), and with a circulation 
well over one hundred thousand across the 
country. It should have an editorial board to 
produce the publication, and a separate advis-
ory board, working part time, to do the -yital 
work of assigning space to books, and reviews 
to reviewers, as well as combing the nation for 
competent, spirited, and willing reviewers. 
These would probably continue to be academ-
ics, journalists (although I suspect fewe~ of 
them than are currently put to work at review-
ing by the newspapers), and novelists; scienti~ts 
who can and do write would have to be recrmt-

518 C 0 L L E G E A N D R E S EAR C H L I B R A R IE S 



ed from the pages of professional journals like 
Science. Payment for writing would have to ex-
ceed the literary quarterlies by at least fivefold. 
None of the reviewers would have to be put in 
the position of being "regulars," lest they stag-
nate, nor must they be overworked, lest they 
come to view writing for the magazine as a 
chore. The orientation of the whole enterprise 
must by no means be exclusively literary, and 
its commitment should always be to the life of 
the mind, its sole raison d'etre. 

Have we set our sights too low? 
But-and here is the kicker-Mr. Hol-

lander then notes: "At a casual estimate, 
this would cost at least $750,000 a year." 
-Richard Harwell, Bowdoin College. 

Indexing Theory, Indexing Methods, and 
Search Devices. By Frederick Jonker. 
New York: Scarecrow Press, 1964. 124p. 
$4. (64-11785). 

Indexing is not a new subject to the li-
brarian. It is taught extensively in library 
schools, and the professional literature 
abounds with definitive works and ·treatises 
on methods and practice. With the growth 
·of scientific and technical literature and the 
advent of automation, deeper studies have 
been made to increase knowledge and 
understanding of the weaknesses and 
strengths of conventional techniques. Docu-
mentalists have explored unconventional 
avenues of research. The field is therefore in 
a receptive mood to welcome a solid book 
on indexing which sets forth the general 
principles of the science. In this respect, the ' 
text under review falls nowhere near the 
target. 

Rather than advancing a major theory, or 
even evaluating current methods, the book 
only verbalizes some unsteady personal ob-
servations of its author. This alone is con-
fusing because th~ text is couched in the 
author's private, technical vocabulary. He 

. speaks of the "terminological continuum," 
"access guides," "living language," "unper-
muted multiple-criterion classification," "sys-
tematicity," etc. Not one of these words and 
phrases is explained in terms of their rela-
tionship to established definitions or doc-
trine. The bibliography reflects a shallow ap-
preciation of standard source material. 

Evidently only slight attention was given 

NOVEMBER 1964 

to page makeup and editorial organization. 
Several of the illustrations are too small to 
decipher, and some graphs are either partial-
ly or completely unlabeled. A misspelled 
word appears on the table of contents page, 
and others are conspicuous through the 
book. An entire section listed in the table 
of contents is missing from the text.-Jo-
seph Becker, Washington, D.C. 

Library Administration: Theory and 
Practice. By R. L. Mittal. Delhi: Metro-
politan Book Company, 1964. xiv, 514p. 
$5.50 . . 

Believing as he does that the standard 
works in library administration, foreign and 
domestic, have an "alien background" and 
fail to meet the needs of Indian students and 
librarians, the deputy librarian of Panjab 
University library has written this book "to 
present in a compendious form various prin-
ciples and practices concerning [the] ad-
ministration of libraries." 

Mr. Mittal's compendium opens with 
three chapters on the "Philosophy of Li-
brarianship," "Library in Education," and 
"Library Administration: Function and 
Principles." These are followed by a dis-
cussion of principles of personnel admin-
istration and library finance. Some later 
chapters outline in great detail the activities 
and operations of libraries in the manner 
of a staff manual: "Processing Work," 
"Maintenance Work," "Stacking and Shelv-
ing Methods," "Care and Repair of Books," 
"Periodicals Work," "Library Rules and 
Regulations," and "Charging and Discharg-
ing Methods." Toward the middle of the 
book there is a chapter on reference service 
in which the author offers his Odyssey of 
reference books. This change in menu is a 
welcome relief but, in view of the author's 
stated purpose, it is surprising to find his 
annotated list of reference works so heavily 
slanted toward American publications. There 
is an index but no separate bibliography. 

This book, I am sure, will prove a useful 
contribution to Indian librarians and Indian 
students of librarianship. In a sense it is a 
kind of reference work and it suffers some 
of the weaknesses of a reference book which 
was not designed as such. Quotations, for-
mulae, statistics, names, and footnotes shu£-

519