reviews 292 College & Research Libraries May 2002 munication, a link that is essential to the development of a post-World War Two global exchange of ideas through commu- nication networks. Day analyzes Levy’s use of the word virtual both through an examination of the influence of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guartari on Levy’s work and by an explication of Levy’s arguments concerning the relationship between capi- talism and the construction of information. Finally, Day explores the ways in which Heidegger critiqued information culture’s model of language and truth and Benjamin’s “engagement with the congru- ence of aesthetics, history, knowledge and technical reproduction in the modern phe- nomena of public information.” Day’s cri- tique of Benjamin’s observations from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries is especially pertinent to today as one considers the shattering effects of the in- dustrial age, and in particular, the devel- opment of mass communication’s techni- cal reproduction, on local knowledge. A return to Benjamin’s project has surpris- ing resonance in our present era of “cre- ative destruction,” a term used by Joseph Schumpeter and made current by Alan Greenspan to describe the continuous “scrapping” of old technologies for new ones. This is a pretty demanding book, yet Day is engaged in more than an academic exercise in the hermeneutics of informa- tion. He also challenges our profession to think carefully about the word informa- tion and its use when he writes, “Infor- mation professionals and theorists ques- tion very little what information is, why it should be valued, or why it is an eco- nomic and social ‘good.’” The word in- formation is applied to literacy, equity of access, and freedom, as well as to policy statements and initiatives, yet rarely chal- lenged “with any social, political, and historical depth”; both meaning and con- notation are taken at face value. The Mod- ern Invention of Information is worth read- ing for those who wish to explore its deeper meaning.—William Welburn, The University of Iowa. Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven, Conn., and Lon- don: Yale Univ. Pr., 2001. 324p. $27.95, alk. paper (ISBN 0300088167). LC 00-043721. Historically, librarians have had little tol- erance for notes scribbled in book mar- gins, seeing no pardonable difference be- tween them and other forms of book defacement. Transgressors have not had an easy time of it at the hands of our pro- fessional ancestors. For example, 2,700 years ago, Ashurbanipal’s librarians called down the wrath of Adad and Ishtar on the heads of tablet defacers, and dur- ing the Middle Ages, monastic librarians placed “anathemas” (curses) and other drastic injunctions in books to dissuade potential abusers. Throughout history, it is clear, members of our profession have had nothing but evil thoughts and threats (and replacement fees) for self-styled book improvers, witty emendators, underliners, and moustacheurs. Whether we like it or not, however, marginalia and the many other forms of spontaneous, often subversive reader re- actions found in “author-ized” texts are in and have become the darling of histo- rians and literary scholars. Consider, for example, Alexander J. Peden’s Graffiti of Pharaonic Egypt (Brill 2001), in which demotic scribblings found in Egyptian tombs are described as a “more accurate reflection of the character of the Egyptian era of the pharaohs than the far more polished artistic or literary works” they appear next to. Another recent work, The Medieval Professional Reader at Work, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo (Univ. of Victoria 2001), subjects the marginalia of medieval clerics and scribes (one known only as the “Red Ink Anno- tator,” as if he were some daring and mysterious bandit) to careful and reveal- ing study, yielding a veritable “taxonomy of marginalia in late medieval English manuscripts” and contributing to a “re- covery of medieval reader response.” So is it okay now to scribble in books? Well, if you ask a frontline librarian, no, it still isn’t. Exceptions will be granted Book Reviews 293 only to the long-deceased or to luminar- ies (also dead) the likes of Horace Walpole (known as “the prince of annotators”), Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, or Ezra Pound—all avid writers of marginal notes. But even then, it depends who you ask. Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge one li- brarian has said that he “would spoil anyone’s books if he could get his hands on them.” And yet, as H. J. Jackson docu- ments in her delightful work, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Coleridge was often begged by owners of private collec- tions to write in the margins of books they owned, marks that would then be shown with pride to later visitors, as if to say “Coleridge was here.” We as librarians find ourselves thrust into a difficult situation. On the one hand, we remain charged, as Jackson puts it, with the “defense of other people’s books,” and that means the protection of the pristine page, the property, at least intellectually, of the author alone. On the other, however, books with annotations by important individuals have not only high provenance value for the collector but also may open up, as we are increas- ingly becoming aware, a unique window upon a prominent annotator’s intellectual development. The marginal note can be, as Jackson writes, “invaluable for the un- usually direct access it provides to the author ’s thought processes and secret obsessions.” This makes these notes simi- lar to diary entries, for marginalia, too, are often a “means of introspection and free association of ideas.” But unlike di- ary entries, marginalia stand in direct proximity to the ideas of others that have given rise to them, reflecting a kind of “creative symbiosis” of the annotator’s thoughts with those of the author of the annotated book. So librarians should take a deep breath, step back from their role as defenders of the sanctity of the printed page, and con- sider with the author of this book, as the publisher ’s blurb suggests, how marginalia can “add richness to the read- ing experience, bring[ing] the reader into conversation with authors and with read- ers who have come before.” Indeed, it is, above all, as an educated and perceptive reader of marginalia that Jackson presents her thoughts on the topic. She peruses at length, for example, a heavily written-in copy of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) that the British Library pur- chased—for a considerable sum, by the way—from the London bookseller Tho- mas Rodd in 1839. Notes populate the margins on almost every page of this copy of Boswell’s book, providing a rich con- temporary reading of an important source work, yet no one has ever determined for sure who hides behind the mask of “Scriblerus,” as the otherwise anony- mous male annotator refers to himself. It becomes clear in reading down these margins that the annotator knows many of Johnson’s contemporaries person- ally—Burke, Langton, Reynolds, and Garrick among them—and for that rea- son, among others, takes great delight in correcting Boswell’s facts and refuting his opinions. (“Bozzy,” Scriblerus writes at one point with derisive intimacy, “Thou art an absolute Idiot to print this.”) At the end of her exposition, Jackson ven- tures a highly educated guess as to Scriblerus’s real identity—in the process adding whole layers to our understand- ing of Johnson, Boswell, and their recep- tion by contemporaries, but, above all, of the exegetical potential of the marginal note. Index to advertisers Academic Press 274 American Chemical Society 250 Annual Reviews 239 ATLA 227 EBSCO cover 3 Elsevier Science 207 Faxon/Rowecom 208 ISI cover 4 Library Technologies 211 OCLC Online 214 Pacific Data Conversion Corp 260 Primary Source Microfilm cover 2 294 College & Research Libraries May 2002 Jackson gives a similarly detailed read- ing to the scribbled oeuvre of many other famous annotators, among them William Blake, S. T. Coleridge, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Mark Twain, Ezra Pound, and T. H. White. In all, about 200 titles are listed in her bibli- ography of annotated books, each with copy location and annotator’s name. (Doo- dlers are ennoblingly referred to as “extra-illustrators.”) In addition, the rela- tively few instances of published marginalia are included in the separate bib- liography of secondary works, among these the huge corpus that belongs to the Coleridge Collected Works edition published by Princeton University Press. (The sixth and final volume of Coleridge marginalia, Valckenaer to Zwick, was edited by H. J. Jack- son and published by Princeton in Novem- ber 2001.) Jackson’s eleven-page bibliography of secondary sources is also valuable for un- covering a body of literature that will surely inform further study of the topic. This literature ranges from compilations and catalogs of annotated books, such as the British Library’s Books with Manuscript: Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manu- script Notes (1994), to interesting treatments of marginalia in out-of-the-way sources, among them a how-to guide by Mortimer J. Adler (“How to Mark a Book”), pub- lished in 1940 in the Saturday Review of Lit- erature. Only as the present reader finished re- viewing this book did he realize that he had not written anything in its margins. This was a missed opportunity because of all the books that have ever crossed his desk, this one seems in retrospect to cry out to be written in, underlined, dog-eared-generally to receive all the marks of “self-assertive appropriation” dealt with on its pages. Yet another rea- son to look forward to a sequel.—Jeffrey Garrett, Northwestern University. Libraries & Democracy: The Cornerstones of Liberty. Ed. Nancy Kranich. Chicago: ALA, 2001. 223p. $32 (ISBN 083890808X). LC 2001-22974. I think if would be a fair assessment to say that, generally speaking, most Ameri- cans do not spend a lot of time contem- plating the institution of democracy. Let’s face it, the majority of us take it for granted. After the September 11 tragedy, however, I think that many of us have been reexamining what it means to live and work in a free society and more im- portant, what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. If we look at the institutions that embody and best symbolize our democratic ideals, libraries are at the fore- front, especially in their defense of free and open access to information for all people. Nancy Kranich, associate dean of li- braries at New York University and the 2000–2001 president of the ALA, uses this volume to expand on her ALA presiden- tial theme, “Libraries: The Cornerstone of Democracy.” Her book is a collection of twenty essays written by professionals (some notable) in the field of library and information science, in which they share their insights on the role that libraries play in advancing democracy. It presents a historical overview of libraries and de- mocracy in civil society, and addresses issues pertaining to technology, copy- right, censorship, ethics, free speech, and advocacy. The Introduction, written by Kranich, sets the tone of the collection by declar- ing that “libraries serve the most funda- mental ideals of our society as uniquely democratic institutions.” She explains that although citizens may have a rudi- mentary understanding of the relation- ship between libraries and democracy, very little has been written that openly discusses “the meaning of libraries as cor- nerstones of democracy.” Kranich’s goal with this collection is to present a range of perspectives on the role that libraries play in advancing “deliberative democ- racy.” What is achieved is a collection of essays all enthusiastically supportive of libraries and librarians. 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