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