College and Research Libraries erential language-an inability that leaves them blind to the role language itself plays in the organization of reality. In contrast, poststructuralists presup- pose the primacy of language in the for- mation of consciousness, and it is their concepts that Poster subsequently em- ploys to analyze the cultural significance of different types of electronic communi- cations. These later chapters concentrate, in fact, on rather routine elements of postindustrial life and are the book's most engaging. Particu- larly provocative is Poster's treatment of TV ads, which uses Jean Baudrillard's political economy of the sign to argue that television commercials establish "a new linguistic and communications reality." Emphasizing their imaginative splicing of different semantic and visual codes, Poster shows how ads sever words from conventional associations to cre- ate a hyperreality of free-floating signifiers that "promises a new level of self-constitu- tion, one beyond the rigidities and restraints of fixed identity." But while boldly proclaim- ing the liberational dimension of TV ads, Poster also acknowledges their enhanced power of social control, which "makes possi- ble the subordination of the individual to manipulative communications practices." A similar ambivalence governs Poster's discussion of databases, which proceeds under the rubric of Michel Foucault's twin concepts of surveillance and discipline. On the one hand, because databases are free from the spatio-temporal coordinates of speech and writing, they constitute a new language formation that undermines tra- ditional modes of cultural discipline. On the other hand, the "structure or gram- mar" of digital computers is so rigidly nonambiguous that it produces "an im- poverished, limited language that uses the norm to constitute individuals and define deviants." From this latter perspective, databases appear not as the avant-garde of a utopian democracy of free and abundant information, but as a sinister tool of reac- tionary surveillance. This dual perspective is also present in the two concluding chap- ters, which invoke Jacques Derrida on computer writing (including both word processing and electronic mail) and Jean Lyotard on computer science. Book Reviews 301 For librarians, Poster's book is especially valuable for the reflection it encourages about the electronic instruments so impor- tant to our professional lives. Most often, we regard computers as passive tools of our ambitions to serve patrons more effi- ciently and effectively. Poster enables us to understand that these machines are also active forces in our cultural environment, which are subtly but profoundly reshap- ing us in their own image. Sensitivity to this fundamental fact of cybernetic real- ity is, perhaps, no less urgent than mas- tering a new set of commands for the latest database.-William McPheron, Stanford University, Stanford, California. Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Pre- servers of Black History. Ed. by Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, W. Paul Coates and Thomas C. Battle. Washington, D.C.: Howard Univ. Pr., 1990. 236p. (ISBN 8-88258-031-0). LC 90-4458. Like so many facets of black history, black bibliography and book collecting have been neglected areas in American in- tellectual history. Black Bibliophiles and Col- lectors: Preservers of Black History is one of the recently published books that attempts to remedy this deficiency. This collection of essays and commentar- ies was originally presented at Black Bib- liophiles and Collectors: A National Symposium, a 1983 conference held at Howard University. Grouped under nine topics treating various aspects of collecting and organizing black materials, the fifteen essays and commentaries by established black scholars, bibliophiles, and librarians are uneven in quality. Many present little new information to anyone familiar with black collections and black scholarship. Some essays, however, will reward even the seasoned practitioner. Together, they provide a useful introduction for the novice to the subject, making the book an essential purchase for library school libraries. The venerable Dorothy Porter Wesley's encyclopedic contribution "Black Anti- quarians and Bibliophiles Revisited, with a Glance at Today' s Lovers of Books," is a fascinating and informative discussion of black collectors from the early nineteenth century to the present. In this peripatetic 302 College & Research Libraries excursion into the history of collecting black materials, Porter unearths the collect- ing activities of such unlikely individuals as antebellum black Philadelphia janitor Joseph Cathcart and Assistant Librarian of Congress Daniel Alexander Murray, as well as today' s younger black collectors. Collector and curator Charles L. Blockson' s "Black Giants in Bindings" is an intriguing autobiographical commentary on his quest as a collector. Likewise, fellow book collector Clarence Holte recounts his experiences in "Incidental Adventures in. Collecting Books." The book's contributors should be urged to expand their essays into full-length books. ''The Robeson Collections: Windows on Black History," by Paul Robeson, Jr., is one of the most significant essays in the collec- tion. The richness and breadth of this im- portant archive are critically assessed in Robeson's astute description of its varied contents. Housed in Howard University's Moorland -Spingarn Research Center, this collection "marks one of the most signifi- cant milestones in the historical documen- tation of black Americans." Black Bibliophiles and Collectors is an im- portant addition to Afro-American bibli- ography and history and American intellectual history. It is unfortunate, how- ever, that this work focuses primarily on collectors and collections in the eastern sec- tion ofthe United States. Among the im- portant black collections hardly mentioned are Tuskegee University's Historical Col- lection, Chicago Public Library's Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American His- tory and Literature, and Detroit Public Library's Azalia Hackley Collection. Also regrettable is the omission of such collec- tors as Monroe Work, Vivian G. Harsh, Era Bell Thompson, and Claude Barnett- Donald Franklin Joyce, Austin Peay State Uni- versity, Clarksville, Tennessee. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Ed. by Roger Chartier. Trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1989. 351p. $45 (ISBN 0-691- 05580-7). LC 89-4043. These nine essays-first published in Paris in 1987 as Les Usages de l' imprime, in May 1991 the series Nouvelles etudes his~oriques­ originat~ in seminars at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Chief responsibility for the collective work lies with Roger Chartier, director of studies at the EHESS, who contributed two of the essays in addition to serving as editor and providing a general introduction to "print culture." Traditionally, print culture-begin- ning with Gutenberg's invention of printing from movable type-has been characterized by the mass production of single texts, often to be read in private by literate individuals. Here, the sixes- sayists expand this culture's boundaries to include printed objects that had pub- lic uses in early modern Europe and, through combination with visual im- ages, brought print culture even to those who could not read. As Chartier ex- plains in his introduction, their method is to favor items that are not books or tracts, to stress "particularity over pre- conceived generalization" by intensive study of single items or well-defined small groups of items, and to investigate thoroughly "the precise, local, specific context that alone gave them meaning." Nine case studies cover text-plus- image in such disparate subjects as Per- rault fairy tales, Books of Hours in the later Middle Ages, heretical writings in eighteenth-century Bohemia, and vari- ous genres from sixteenth- and seven- teenth-century France (including political handbills, religious pamphlets, con- temporary events, marriage charters, and emblem books). These studies achieve unity through their analytical method: the provision of a wealth of evidence as to how texts were tailored for particular publics, how texts were read or otherwise received, and how they relate to the oral traditions out of which many grew. Emphasizing the graphic image as a way into the text, each essay explores the popularization of printed materials and argues that print culture in the fifteenth to early nineteenth centuries was more complex and pervasive-with multiple audi- ences and multiple uses-than had previously been supposed.