Rare Books and Special Collections by Sidney E. Berger (review)

Rare Books and Special Collections provides, in a dense volume the size of a city telephone directory, a highly personal view of the special collections profession. The author’s aim is “to tell you what you need to know, whether you are a librarian … a bookseller, an archivist or collector, a historian, or anyone else who wants to know what there is to know that could be useful” about this profession. (p. 483) What turns out to be “useful” is the history of rare books libraries and special collections, their present state, their administration, and the analog and digital artifacts that come under the care of librarians and archivists. One of the profession’s own, Sidney E. Berger has been a practicing special collections librarian and a library administrator for nearly thirty years, as well as a teacher, scholar, bibliographer, collector, papermaker, printer, and antiquarian bookseller. He has produced a comprehensive reference work on the subject of rare books and special collections that doubles as a memoir. It tackles every major issue while presenting a detailed and comprehensive view of the book as a physical object: its paper, printing, binding, and more. Berger has had practical, hands-on experience “in all aspects of books, from their creation to their institutional care.” (p. xii) It is a massive undertaking to lay out all the knowledge required to administer a special collections department in an institutional setting and to really know about the objects themselves. Berger has succeeded in doing this.

As the work stands in its present one-volume, 500-plus page format, there is repetition: certain topics such as deeds of gift, collection development, and weeding appear repeatedly in different chapters. Special collections librarians and graduate students would be well advised to use this work as a reference tool rather than reading it cover to cover. Though topic coverage is not always obvious from the table of contents, the index is helpful in uniting topics that are scattered across chapters. There are seven helpful appendices, and the endnotes for each chapter are informative and interesting in themselves.

Berger may have been frustrated with the lack of anything comprehensive in the field since the now-outdated Rare Book Librarianship by Roderick Cave (London: Clive Bingley, 1976). The more recent 185-page Rare Book Librarianship by Steven Galbraith and Geoffrey Smith (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited/ABC-CLIO, 2012), reviewed later in the “Briefly Noted” section, covers many of the same topics and perhaps serves better as an introductory textbook for novices, but does not treat specific subjects as comprehensively as the work reviewed here.

Yet, what Berger has written begs to be reorganized, consolidated, or both. As it stands, reading the book is rather like drinking from a fire hose. The information could have been presented in three volumes rather than one. The first volume could have been about rare books and other objects that form special collections. A second volume could address special collections administration. The third volume (or even a separate work) could share the lore and history of rare book libraries, special collections, and their administrations. Berger relates many personal anecdotes throughout the text, often in sidebars, which chronicle the special collections profession over the final quarter of the twentieth century. They provide a window into a special collections department in a large state university and an art research library. This storytelling and historical material could be brought together to give special collections librarians, archivists, and administrators our history. We need to remember how the Research Libraries Group and its RLG Conspectus came to be, the role AB Bookman’s Weekly played in the special collections and bookselling professions, the days before the Internet when antiquarian bookstores and their booksellers were so important to the field, and how dealers’ catalogs served both institutional and private collectors.

In such a massive work as this, it is not surprising to find a few omissions, an occasional error of fact, and some...