reviews.indd Book Reviews Peter Beal. A Dictionary of English Manu- script Terminology, 1450–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 457p. alk. paper, $125 (ISBN 0199265442). LC 2008-295866. Peter Beal has provided the English- speaking bibliographic community with a long-awaited volume to fill a certain gap on the reference shelf: a dictionary of terms for the description of manuscript documents of all types in English. Collec- tors, librarians, archivists, and researchers into the history of books and manuscripts have long enjoyed specialized reference tools in French, Italian, German, Arabic, even Catalan and Georgian, but few in English. That having been said, the vol- umes available for scholarly researchers in these languages have sometimes erred on the side of over-technical writing or terminology. Peter Beal takes as his inspiration the unassuming work first published in 1952, John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors. And as Carter says in his preface, Beal’s volume celebrates its focus and self-limitation: “This is not an ency- clopedia. It is an ABC.” [Carter, p. 12] Peter Beal’s Dictionary similarly makes no encyclopedic claims. He offers a vol- ume devoted to the needs of a variety of audiences, not necessarily scholarly: col- lectors, archivists and special collections librarians, genealogists, and other ama- teurs of textual manuscripts. His prose is correspondingly quite clear throughout. (He is even, for instance, fairly succinct in explaining the differences between DATES in the Gregorian and Julian calendars!) He does not claim to be com- prehensive in coverage, and admits to many self-imposed limits on the volume’s scope. He deliberately chooses the year 1450 as a terminus, leaving the descrip- tion of medieval manuscripts to scholarly specialists; he claims a scant treatment of paleography, with a similar justifica- tion. The book’s particular strengths, terms relating to manuscript practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, follow Beal’s own frankly admitted special interest and knowl- edge, though his coverage does proceed into the twenti- eth century (TYPEWRITER, FILOFAX, or TELEGRAM). Even within those limits, the Dictionary includes more than 15,000 entries (including cross-references), many entries running to several pages. Fully 96 illustrations, nearly all courtesy of Sotheby’s, nicely complement his text, and include objects in the hands of illustri- ous figures from Charles Dickens to Guy Fawkes. A carefully selected bibliography culminates the volume. Beal’s choice (the same as Carter’s) to organize the book strictly in alphabetical order can make it diffi cult to navigate topically. The copious cross-references and “compare” references, though, tend to mitigate this: how else might the user know that the true discussion of an APOCALYPSE only occurs in the entry for ESCHATOLOGY, or that DIFFICILIOR LECTIO POTIOR should be considered in conjunction with UTRIUM IN ALTERUM ABITURUM ERAT (two classic rules for textual criticism)? In addition, the author tends to pack a large amount of topical detail into the more extended entries. The well-couched entry for BINDING, for instance, is the place to find many subsid- iary terms such as boards, buckram, calf, morocco, and paste-downs, though none of these terms may be located via separate entries and there is no index. The entry for BOOK includes several distinct pos- sible definitions of the term. One facet of the PROMPTBOOK entry is an extended key to Early Modern staging shorthand, and fully 16 kinds of WRIT are defined under that entry. This suggests another strength of Beal’s Dictionary: throughout, it is particularly rich in the number of 195 196 College & Research Libraries generic manuscript types for which he provides historical context. One feature of the Dictionary that is both a strength and a weakness is the relentless focus on things British. Carter’s ABC was obviously written for English- speaking book collectors, but he compiled definitions applicable to early books across Europe and elsewhere, including citations to non-English bibliographic tools. Beal’s somewhat more insular ap- proach allows him to focus admirably on the contexts for, and collection of, British manuscripts. Thus, the Dictionary includes helpful entries to orient the reader to more specialized topics such as a PHILLIPS MANUSCRIPT or the BAGA DE SECRE- TIS (Kew Archives manuscripts dealing with cases of treason and other highly sen- sitive documents). Yet this focus can also lead to the omission of similarly important Continental institutions and manuscript genres. The BRITISH LIBRARY gets an entry, but not the Bibliothèque nationale de France or the Vatican; perhaps the only other library mentioned is the Amsterdam home of a large collection of HERMETIC MANUSCRIPTS. Peter Beal’s Dictionary of English Manu- script Terminology, nonetheless, belongs on the shelf of any English-speaking bibliophile. It would be welcome in many libraries’ and special collections’ reference shelves. It does not claim to be an encyclopedia, nor a comprehensive guide to manuscript terminology in English; the field must still wait for one to emerge. What the Dictionary off ers in- stead is a helpful, interesting, and highly readable guide to the contents, contexts, and physical makeup of a wide variety of fascinating, and important, English historical documents.—Timothy J. Dickey, OCLC Offi ce of Research. The Portable MLIS: Insights from the Experts. Eds. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, Conn.: Librar- ies Unlimited, 2008. 296p. alk. paper, $50 (ISBN 9781591585473). LC 2008- 010351. March 2009 The Portable MLIS was compiled to fill what editors, LIS educators Haycock and Sheldon, have identified as a gap in the literature of foundational librarian- ship. The primary goal of this work is to provide a single-volume overview of foundation, practice, and future of librarianship. This collection of 18 essays written by 11 LIS faculty, 7 Academic Li- brary administrators, and a single Public Library administrator, however, does not fulfill this purpose. What the reader does find is a compilation of highly respect- able, valuable, but incomplete perspec- tives and opinions that, while of value to any information professional, also leave unrepresented the other disciplines, such as management and computer science, that contribute substantially to the solu- tion of many contemporary information management challenges. The Portable MLIS is organized as a series of three thematic “parts,” the first of which, “Foundations, Values and Context,” is composed of fi ve chapters. The first of these, by Richard E. Rubin, takes the reader through various histori- cal perspectives on the importance of the library to society. Disappointingly for a chapter positioned to set the tone for the book, a key opportunity is missed to generate much appreciation for cur- rent and future Web-based information management challenges. The increase of user reliance on the Web for information is described unenthusiastically, for example, as among the “clouds on the [profession’s] horizon.” Subsequent chapters in the first section do better to rouse excitement for new professional possibilities. Michael Gorman’s offering on professional ethics and values in a changing world is certainly worthwhile, informed by his long engage- ment with the philosophy of librarianship, but its very particular political formula- tion becomes repetitive and strikes an occasional demagogic chord. Students will be challenged by Kathleen de la Pena McCook and Katharine Phenix’s chapter 3, which traces a progression of the shift from librarianship’s connection to democ-