1. The work of special collections librarians
1. "Rare Book Librarianship: A Special Intensity," ed. Terry Belanger [articles by John Bidwell, William Keller, Ruth Mortimer, Daniel Traister, and Peter VanWingen], Wilson Library Bulletin, 58 (October 1983), 96-119.
   More than a decade old, these essays still provide varied perspectives on the functions of special collections in a variety of institutions.

2. Roderick Cave. Rare Book Librarianship, 2nd ed. (Hamden, CT, 1982).
   Cave's textbook is increasingly out of date. Moreover, it was always too perfunctory in its treatment of the issues it discusses. Yet it at least raises many basic issues of special collections theory and practice and offers an introductory context for thinking about them. It does so in a lead-footed fashion, yet, as the only even approximately reliable text on the subject that exists, it remains worth reading. [NOTE: A. B. Scham, Managing Special Collections [New York 1987] is NOT an "even approximately reliable text on the subject." If this is the only text you can find locally, just say no: choose ignorance.]

3. Rare book and manuscript libraries in the twenty-first century, ed. Richard Wendorf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1993) -- two issues of the Harvard Library Bulletin (n.s. 4:1-2) reprinted in hard cover format.

4. Daniel Traister. "The Rare Book Librarian's Day," Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship, 1:2 (1986), 93-105.
   A demystifying view of the quotidian realities of the profession of special collections librarianship. Reprinted in Library Lit. 19 -- The Best of 1988, ed. Jane Anne Hannigan (Metuchen, NJ, 1989).

5. Lucy L. Gordan. "Life in the Berg Collection," Wilson Library Bulletin, 68 (April 1994), 26-31.
   The activity of a specific special collections unit within a large research library environment.

6. Rosann M. Auchstetter. "The Role of the Rare Book Library in Higher Education," College and Research Libraries, 51 (May 1990), 221-30.
   Auchstetter may not know what to do with the issues she raises, but she at least raises important issues for anyone working with special collections in an academic context.
2. Recent concerns

1. "Recent Trends in Rare Book Librarianship," ed. Michèle Valerie Cloonan, [constitutes the whole issue of] Library Trends, 36:1 (Summer 1987).
   1987 no longer seems as "recent" as it once did; but the articles by Stephen Paul Davis, John B. Thomas, III, Daniel Traister, Stephen Ferguson, Martin Antonetti, Laura Linard, and Samuel A. Streit continue to be variously rewarding. Bring a handkerchief if you plan to read Margaret S. Child on "NEH Support for Special Collections": it is to weep.

2. Michael T. Ryan. "Developing Special Collections in the '90s: A fin-de-siècle Perspective," Journal of Academic Librarianship, 17:5 (November 1991), 288-93.
3. General background and Philosophy
1. Daniel Traister. "Rare Books and Special Collections," World Encyclopedia of Library and Information Services, 3rd. ed. (Chicago 1993), 698-703.

2. Daniel Traister. "What Good Is an Old Book?" Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship, 7:1 (1992), 26-42.

3. Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 59-67 (rpt. New York: Schocken, 1969, same pagination)
   The clever student will also take this opportunity to read the same author's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in the same volume. And will then re-read it.

4. If your bibliographical and historical backgrounds are weak, you might also want to look at the following materials (but bear in mind that these matters are background for this class, not its subject!):
   • Philip Gaskell. A New Introduction to Bibliography. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972 (corrected edition 1974 [New York 1975]).
     Gaskell gives an extensive technical introduction to historical bibliography. Once again, PLEASE NOTE that its contents will NOT be discussed in class. If you bog down in the earlier sections, skip to the machine-press period -- or just skip around: don't let the book intimidate you.

   • Daniel Traister. "Book," International Encyclopedia of Communications, Erik Barnouw, Editor in Chief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), I:209-17.
4. Special collections in the popular press

Here is a representative variety of journalistic treatments that variously view rare book libraries, librarianship, and libraries and their problems, and some related issues, like collecting and collectors. These are worth reading -- if only because they suggest the strict limits of most of your audience's knowledge of what you do and why you do it.

• Nicholson Baker's essays, "Discards" and "Books as Furniture," now appear in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1995; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 125-181; 182-203.

• Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg. "The Rare Book Game," Forbes (28 October 1985), 336 ff.

• Damon Darlin. "A String of Firsts," Forbes (11 October 1993), 160-161.

• Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Belle of the Morgan," House and Garden (October 1991), 73-4 ff.

• Merle Severy. "Shakespeare Lives at the Folger," National Geographic (February 1987), 244-59.

• "Treasures on Campus," Southern Living (October 1987), 66-71.

• "Old Books Make Rare Gifts," Southern Living (February 1990), 26-7.

• Lawrence Goldstone and Nancy Goldstone, Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World (1997; rpt. NY: Griffin, 1998)

• A special -- but fascinating -- sub-topic under this heading is studied in:
  Arlene Schmuland, "The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography," American Archivist, 62:1 (Spring 1999), 24-73.

5. Special topics
• Daniel Traister. "Seduction and Betrayal," Wilson Library Bulletin, 69 (September 1994), 30-33 [theft].

• Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion (New York: Doubleday, 1997) -- now out in paperback, this is a very recent exemplar of a very large genre of memoirs by rare booksellers.

• The most important book of this sort -- not a memoir -- is Edwin Wolf 2nd, with John Fleming, Rosenbach: A Biography (Cleveland: World, 1960).
  If you find yourself especially interested in this genre, the instructor also recommends (from a different but related field) the wonderfully written and very funny S. N. Behrman, Duveen (many editions).

• Philip Weiss. "The Book Thief," Harper's (January 1994), 37-56 [Stephen Blumberg].

• Calvin Trillin. "Knowing Johnny Jenkins," The New Yorker (30 October 1989), 79-97 [forgery, fraud, chicanery -- what The New Yorker used to call, with lexical precision, "crime and rascality"].

• Lisa Belkin. "Lone Star Fakes," The New York Times Magazine (10 December 1989), 66 ff. [forgery].

• Readers who enjoyed Trillin and Belkin will want to read extensively in the literature surrounding the Mormon/Evans 1 forger, Mark W. Hoffman, who found in the manufacture of special collections materials sufficient cause for multiple murder. The less bloody (and hence far funnier) story of Thomas J. Wise is told by John Carter and Graham Pollard, An enquiry into the nature of certain XIXth century pamphlets (many editions).

1. Bibliography

Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (above) is, quite simply, basic to all further historical and bibliographical inquiry. Read it. Buy it. Then read it again. If you find yourself exceptionally excited by this book, then you will want to read R. B. McKerrow's 1927 OUP-published Introduction to Bibliography. Follow it up with Fredson Bowers' Principles of Bibliographical Description. These works all exist in many editions; Oak Knoll now makes them available in paperback reprints. Then try as many of the works of G. Thomas Tanselle as you can acquire. Tanselle's articles appear in every issue of Studies in Bibliography, the annual publication by The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virgina, and elsewhere. The UVaPress has published several collections of his articles. His brief Rationale of Textual Criticism appeared from the University of Pennsylvania Press (1989).

Criticism of this tradition is mounting. It comes especially from such modernists as Herschel Parker and Jerome McGann, but also (and more damagingly) from within the field of Tudor/Stuart drama, Shakespeare particularly, around which the Anglo-American bibliographical/textual tradition originally coalesced (in the work of Pollard, Redgrave, McKerrow, and Greg, from whom Bowers and Tanselle derive in a direct line of apostolic descent). These critics and their criticisms need (and deserve) careful attention. The work of Steven Urkowitz on Lear and other multi-text Shakespearian plays may serve as an initial representation of much additional work in this kind. These writers throw their bombshells from outside the perimeters of the traditional bibliography -- although a bibliographically-oriented scholar like Peter Blayney, also worth attention, is by no means as "outside" it as a theater-history/production-oriented scholar such as Urkowitz is. No matter: they and their peers have had a devastating impact on the arena where the premises of traditional bibliography were developed, and thus upon its very premises themselves.

The late Donald F. McKenzie threw his bombshells from within the perimeters of the tradition, a feat which makes his work seem almost "more basic" (as if such a category were imaginable). See both his Panizzi Lectures (a more or less recent exemplar) -- now available in paperback as Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge 1999) -- and his "Printers of the Mind" (an older one; the article appeared in the 1969 volume of SB). It would be very difficult to overstate the impact (or, for that matter, the pleasures) of these two works, particularly that of the Panizzi Lectures.

2. History of books and printing

S. H. Steinberg and Rudolf Hirsch have written basic surveys of book history in the West. The former surveys the entire field, the latter the early modern period. Recent trends in book history develop themes enunciated in the basic works of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. CUP also publishes an abridged Eisenstein entitled The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983 et seq.) -- now a Canto pb. The interested student will want also to read such recent scholars as Robert Darnton; Roger Chartier; Brian Richardson; Peter Beal; Harold Love; and Arthur Marotti -- names that are exemplary, NOT exhaustive! On a more elementary level, Frederick Kilgour's The Evolution of the Book, his recent (1998) OUP survey, and Joseph Blumenthal's two picture books, as well as that by Norma Levarie, can be helpful.

Two new series -- there are others for other languages and countries -- worth ongoing attention have just begun to appear from Cambridge University Press. They are:

• A History of the Book in America. Volume 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (1999)
• The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume 3: 1400-1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (2000)

Christopher De Hamel's History of Illuminated Manuscripts (Boston: Godine, 1986; 2nd ed. London: Phaidon, 1994) is a good introduction to the history of the book in the West before the invention of printing from movable type.

3. Special collections librarianship

Rare Book Collections: Some Theoretical and Practical Suggestions for Use by Librarians and Students, ed. H. Richard Archer (Chicago: American Library Association, 1965).

Now very old, this collection continues to have some useful essays; see, e.g., John Parker's "The Rare Book Library and the Public," pp. 108-120.

Rare Book and Manuscript Librarianship, the journal of the Rare Book and Manuscript Section, ACRL/ALA, and American Archivist, published by the Society of American Archivists, are worth ongoing consultation. Occasional articles in each will repay close attention.

4. Special topics

Daniel Traister, "Publication of Reference Tools for Special Collections," Reference Librarian, no. 15 (1986), pp. 89-107.

Deaccession of special collections materials is the focus of Deaccession in Research Libraries: Papers Read at a Symposium Held at Brown University, June 11, 12, 1981 (Providence, 1981), with subsequent reports by Samuel A. Streit in AB Bookman's Weekly and by Daniel Traister in American Book Collector, n.s. 2:5 (September-October 1981), 35-43; and additional discussion (by Streit, Traister, and Desmond Neill) in Wilson Library Bulletin, 56:9 (May 1982), 658-672.

NOTE: Both Cave and Gaskell contain additional bibliographies that interested readers should pursue. See also (as a supplement to Cave) the now unfortunately out-of-date pamphlet by Murray C. T. Simpson, Rare Book Librarianship: A Select Annotated Bibliography (Leeds: Department of Librarianship, Leeds Polytechnic, 1976).

5. Current awareness

The book reviews and the advertisements in The Library, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Printing History, Book History, Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship (on the verge of undergoing a change-of-title; keep posted), College and Research Library News, Journal of Academic Librarianship, and in such broader-based and -ranging periodicals as the (London) Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lingua Franca, the (London) Times Higher Education Supplement, and even, faute de mieux, The New York Times Book Review, all repay regular attention.

Increasingly, the electronic networks are providing information about the availability of new materials (and sooner or later there will be an electronic list -- as there is now for classical and medieval studies -- that reviews such new publications); in the interim, however, subscribe to ExLibris, ARCHIVES, BIBSOCAN, LIS-RAREBOOKS, and SHARP as daily current awareness tools. The first two lists, for example, are now used as theft alerts in addition to their other functions (although specialized lists have emerged for this topic, as well).

6. A special note of warning

Traister reviewed A. M. Scham, Managing Special Collections (New York: Neal-Schuman, 1987, paper $35) in LRTS, 32:1 (January 1988), 83-5. This review was unkind and blunt. You might wish to consult it before spending your own or your institution's money on this book -- or before you waste any time reading it, for that matter.

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