College and Research Libraries


been an important shift in thirty years 
that begins to come out as Glazier tries 
to return the term small press to its origi-
nal meaning. Little magazines (increas-
ingly a misnomer) have received most of 
the attention while the volume of pub-
lishing has shifted largely to books. 
"Academic quarterly," "alternative" and 
"underground press," or "independent 
publisher" are all too astigmatic or wide-
angle to serve as descriptive terms, in-
cluding as they do, the nonliterary, the 
too-commercial, and the insufficiently 
independent. The problem is that there 
has been a culture shift, and what 
Glazier chooses finally to call small press, 
numbering about 700 at the beginning of 
his period, has been overwhelmed by 
small, independent publishers of New 
Age books, cookbooks, and self-help 
books. While the small press has tripled 
in size, these other publishers have gone 
from nothing to some 12,000 in the same 
period. The noncorporate, locally based, 
small scale press of limited readership 
and uncommodified cultural ideals (de-
scribed here as the epitome of the spe-
cies) has become a minority force even 
on its home ground. Nowhere is this 
revealed more clearly than in the 
sequence of COSMEP catalog listings 
(items 167-170), from the first (a "who's 
who" and a "vital record" of the mimeo 
revolution at a crucial moment) to the 
last (a "disappointment" and captive of 
the "commercially expedient"). In be-
tween, we have the lavishly designed and 
illustrated Whole COSMEP Catalog in 
reverse alphabetic order and the micro-
fiche third version, innocent of editing. 
The fourth is thoroughly professional, 
typeset, paginated, edited, and vetted-
and soulless. Well, this is the history of 
the boomers themselves, who made this 
movement and now have come to 
middle age and power. I hope that 
Glazier's optimism is justified. One 
thing is clear: small presses (and litera-
ture, and we, too) are not what they 
were, whatever they are to become. 

Meanwhile, I've spent hours browsing 
through the entries, and all that familiar, 
funny, laughable, confused, wonderful 
time again. Don't put this book on the 

Book Reviews 359 

reference shelves. Let people check it out 
and take it home with them. -Charles W. 
Brownson, Arizona State University, 
Tempe, Arizona. 

Euro-Librarianship: Shared Resources, 
Shared Responsibilities. Ed. by As-
sunta Pisani. Binghamton, N.Y.: Ha-
worth, 1992. 605p. $49.95 (ISBN 
1-56024-266-3). 
This volume documents the proceed-

ings of a conference held in April1988 in 
. Florence under the auspices of ACRL's 
Western European Specialists Section 
(WESS). Weighing in at a hefty 605 
pages, it comprises some fifty individual 
contributions offering in their totality an 
impressively diverse collection of .topics, 
approaches, languages, and potential 
readerships. According to the brief intro-
duction by Assunta Pisani, the purpose 
of the conference (and presumably of the 
volume) was to foster an exchange of 
information between Western European 
specialists in North American libraries 
and their Old World counterparts, 
centered on the relatively conventional 
theme of efforts to "collect, organize, and 
preserve materials that support re-
search" and a potentially more contro-
versial "examination of both the needs 
for research on Western Europe and of 
the programs underway to support 
these needs." 

So far, so good. Few library collection 
managers with responsibilities that in-
clude Western Europe would dispute the 
need for a cogent and detailed examina-
tion of these topics. And yet, many 
potential readers of this volume will be 
both attracted by the topics and repelled 
by their presentation in the uneven, re-
dundant, and diffuse format of this 
lightly edited collection. 

The compilation's problems are at 
least threefold. First, the spread and dis-
tribution of topics defy clear description. 
The papers are distributed among fifteen 
rubrics, but the intended meaning of 
these rubrics is muddied by their appli-
cation. At least one paper, Herbert Lott-
man's smooth "A Library User's View," 
stands outside these categories altogether; 
another category ("Access: Cooperative 



360 College & Research Libraries 

Microfilming") holds but one five-page 
article on preservation options, which is 
thus segregated from a related category 
("Access: Microforms") with papers 
yielding information about specific mi-
croform projects. Some sections use 
general themes ("Scholars' Sources in 
Western Europe" and "Research Centers 
and Special Collections") to gather short 
descriptions of specific repositories, 
while others, particularly the two deal-
ing with fringe movements, provide 
more substantive essays attacking circum-
scribed problems from various angles. The 
poor interrelating of the parts repre-
sented by the rubrics has the effect of 
dragging the contributions along a very 
bumpy surface indeed. 

A second problem is closely related to 
the inadequate organization of the 
volume: the quality, focus, format, and 
intended readership of the individual 
contributions are inconsistent. The styl-
istic range varies from chatty, fast-paced, 
and even anecdotal to dry and descrip-
tive. Adding to the stylistic diversity, 
seven papers are in French or Italian, 
despite English titles in some cases. Most 
of the first hundred or so pages consist 
of sparse summaries of library services, 
with more than a few qualifying barely 
as abstracts. The middle of the volume 
contains more substantive and imagina-
tive treatments of topics such as regional 
publishing, fringe movements, the 
emigre question, issues of marginality, 
and personal narratives. These contribu-
tions deserve better treatment in a more 
selective and intensively edited volume, 
and the relatively tight focus of these five 
sections may suggest a future project along 
these lines. The last third of Euro-Librarian-
ship is a potpourri of largely descriptive 
papers with a generally traditional focus 
on library matters, such as access to a 
variety of formats and the pricing of li-
brary materials. 

A third issue, quite separate from the 
quality of the proceedings, is whether it 
is necessary to republish them after prior 
publication as volume 15 (1992) of the 
journal Collection Management. The sole 
difference between the two versions of 
these proceedings is the addition of an 

July1993 

index for the book volume. In this light, 
it is worth noting again that the WESS 
conference took place more than five 
years ago, so that one might have ex-
pected more substantial revisions. At 
least, it would have been reasonable to 
excise the eight-page conference schedule, 
including meals, receptions, and spon-
sors for coffee breaks, and improve the 
abstracts provided for some of the 
papers. Moreover, some of the contribu-
tions have already appeared in other 
journals likely to be held in many librar-
ies. A modicum of editorial rigor would 
have greatly increased the appeal and 
readership for these proceedings. And 
yet, despite these faults, RUN and 
OCLC records suggest that many aca-
demic libraries find themselves in pos-
session of both printings of the 
conference proceedings at a total cost of 
nearly $200. Considering the role of 
librarians in the production of this 
volume, this expenditure of library re-
sources for the duplication and redupli-
cation of conference papers of uneven 
quality is ironic. 

In all, Euro-Librarianship will be a great 
disappointment for Western European 
specialists. Despite an impressive list of 
contributors, admirable goals, and some 
undeniably good papers, this volume fails 
to provide either a set of foundation texts 
or a platform for coherent discussion of 
issues in European librarianship. There are 
choice morsels to be found, but the stew is 
toilsome to digest.-Henry Lowood, Stan-
ford University, Stanford, California. 

Hannesdottir, Signln Klara. The Scandia 
Plan: A Cooperative Acquisition Scheme 
for Improving Access to Research Publica-
tions in Four Nordic Countries. Metu-
chen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1992. 340p. alk. 
paper, $42.50 (ISBN 0-8108-2540-6). 
LC 92-1070. 
A group of large research libraries in 

Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden 
established the Scandia Plan in 1956 to 
divide the responsibility of acquiring little-
used non-Nordic (plus Icelandic) materi-
als thought to be important to Nordic 
scholars. Participation in the plan was vol-
untary, and each library had to bear its