reviews.indd


When Miskolczy leaves those works in 
Hitler’s library that contain Hitler’s notes, 
he is forced into mounting speculation. Of 
this there is perhaps too much, frequently 
punctuated by the usual “must haves” 
and “could haves.” At times, Miskolczy in-
dulges in acts of psychoanalysis not really 
justified by the evidence. The result is a text 
that is overwrought and overlong, with its 
interest declining in direct proportion to 
the author’s need to rely on his own intu-
ition rather than Hitler’s extant notes. 

The jacket blurb asks rhetorical ques-
tions: “How and why did such rabble 
obtain such immense power? How did the 
cult of the self and the cult of the individual 
become indivisibly intertwined with an 
exalted death cult and the fear of death si-
multaneously?” This work does not answer 
these barely intelligible questions. In his 
turn, Miskolczy promises “new insights,” 
but these are largely a matter of added 
detail because the analysis breaks no new 
grounds but, rather, tends to confi rm con-
ventional wisdom about those fi gures and 
ideas that influenced Hitler. Thus, eleven 
pages are devoted to discussing how Hitler 
saw Richard Wagner as a major intellectual 
ancestor. 

Nonetheless, at least in its fi rst half, 
this is an interesting, occasionally pro-
vocative work, not least for the fact that, 
with all that has been written about Hit-
ler, so little use has been made of these 

Index to advertisers 
ACRL 453, 462 
AIAA 371 
Annual Reviews cover 3 
Archival Products 438 
CHOICE 426 
EBSCO cover 2 
Greenwood Publishing 367 
Haworth Press 368 
Optical Society of America 399 
Scopus cover 4 
TechBooks 383 

Book Reviews 459 

materials that, whatever their limitations 
as sources, deserve at least some of the 
treatment that Miskloczy fi nally accords 
them here.—David Henige, University of 
Wisconsin—Madison. 

James Moran. Wynkyn de Worde, Father 
of Fleet Street. 3rd. London; New 
Castle, Del.: The British Library and 
Oak Knoll Press, in association with 
the Wynkyn de Worde Society, 2003. 
70p. $22.95 (ISBN 1584561041). LC 
2003-53595. 

This new edition of Moran’s brief 1960 
retrospective of the early printer Wynkyn 
de Worde includes a bibliography of 
works on de Worde and comes blessed 
with an appreciative preface by John 
Dreyfus. Notwithstanding both, it is hard 
to fi gure out why yet another edition of 
this small biography is needed. With its 
unfortunate title (a teleological double 
entendre), Moran’s study remains a use-
ful and serviceable guide to the life of the 
ambitious Flemish printer whom Caxton 
imported to help launch the black arts in 
England in the later fifteenth century. But 
I doubt that there is a recall queue for it at 
your local college library. So why do we 
need this, its third instantiation? 

Moran was, among other things, a 
printing historian of a traditional sort. He 
was interested in output and paper and 
fonts, in the nuts and bolts of the business 
of making books. Typography was his 
forte, and he contributed a series of valu-
able works on the subject in the 1960s and 
1970s. But his oeuvre belongs to an earlier 
moment in the history of the history of the 
book, a moment when there really was no 
“history of the book” in the sense in which 
we have it today. Although, as John Drey-
fus points out in his preface, Febvre and 
Martin’s L’Apparition du livre (A. Michel) 
came out in 1958, it took a good twenty 
years for scholars to assimilate its lessons 
and approaches to the history of the book. 



460 College & Research Libraries 

In the meantime, “the history of the book” 
remained the province of antiquarians, 
book collectors, curators, and sundry 
printers—a dedicated band of amateurs 
who, nonetheless, did much of the basic 
spade work for later academics. 

By contemporary standards, Moran’s 
review of de Worde’s career seems almost 
quaint, circumscribed as it is by the narrow 
horizons of Moran’s own interests and his 
understanding of his task. It relies heavily 
on a book I can recommend, H. S. Bennett’s 
English Books and Readers 1475 to 1557 (Cam-
bridge 1989). For Moran, de Worde was the 
first printer in London to truly take advan-
tage of the new technology as a medium of 
popular communication. Over the course 
of his career, he churned out hundreds of 
titles aimed at a more popular market and 
so became, for his biographer, the “precur-
sor” of the Fleet Street baron. 

As William Caxton’s “journeyman,” 
de Worde enjoys his own cult follow-
ing today. There is a Wynkyn de Worde 
Society in the UK, and it seems to have 
underwritten some of the costs of the 
reissue of the present work. Perhaps its 
members are the driving force behind the 
volume. However welcome the bibliog-
raphy by Lotte Hellinga and Mary Erler, 
though, I cannot really urge anyone to 
rush out and buy this slim monograph. 
Librarians and scholars coming to it from 
the perspective of current work in the his-
tory of the book will probably be neither 
impressed nor enlightened. In its day, it 
was a welcome addition to the literature. 
It is good to have it in our libraries. But 
I find it difficult to make the case for its 
enduring presence today.—Michael Ryan, 
University of Pennsylvania. 

Sauperl, Alenka. Subject Determination 
during the Cataloging Process. Lanham, 
Md.: London: Scarecrow, 2002. 173p. 
alk. paper, $47.50 (ISBN 0810842890). 
LC 2001-57698. 

September 2004 

This reviewer, who finds it diffi  cult to dis-
like any book, was disappointed by this 
one. Based on the author’s doctoral dis-
sertation (University of North Carolina, 
1999), the work reports on a study made 
to identify and examine the cognitive 
processes involved in the assignment of 
subject headings through a case study of 
catalogers. The thought processes that 
go into subject cataloging have received 
sparse attention and the topic is deserv-
ing of scholarly exploration. This study 
makes a definite contribution to the 
quite limited body of literature. Sauperl’s 
failure to explain certain aspects of her 
research methodology frequently causes 
the reader to become puzzled, however, 
if not frustrated. The printed text itself 
could have been improved by careful 
editing and some rewriting. 

The work is organized into seven 
chapters. An introduction discusses the 
purpose of the study and very briefl y de-
scribes the research strategy. The second 
chapter reviews the treatment of subject 
determination as presented in cataloging 
and indexing textbooks and discusses 
the previous research concerned with 
subject analysis and indexing. The inclu-
sion of indexing research strengthens the 
study and is to be applauded. The third 
chapter describes the research methodol-
ogy. Chapter four, “Twelve Personal Ap-
proaches to Subject Cataloging,” presents 
the case studies. Being ninety-fi ve pages 
in length, it forms the core of the book. 
Chapter five summarizes what was 
learned from the case studies. Chapter 
six presents a model for subject analysis. 
Chapter seven discusses the author ’s 
findings in relation to earlier studies 
and the implication of those findings 
for cataloging education and cataloging 
in libraries. The section concerned with 
previous research has a fair amount of 
redundancy with chapter three. Although 
repetition of this nature is not uncommon