Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland ed. by Karen Attar (review)

T he appearance of the third editionof the Directoryis a major event for the UK’s professional grouping of rare books librarians. The editor, Karen Attar, is highly respected in her field and this work has been a labour of love for her over some years. It is regrettable, therefore, that this reviewer has to question not just the content and format of this volume but the very rationale for its existence.

When I started work as a rare books librarian in 2001, I was shown a copy of the second edition of the Directoryin an early training session. Even then, in the early days of online reference sources, it seemed a somewhat old-fashioned concept, and indeed I do not recall making use of the book then or since. Barry Bloomfield’s second edition was published in 1997, just before the information world changed so utterly. Nearly twenty years later, what justification can there be for a third edition of a printed guide to collections of rare books around the UK and Ireland?

Attar acknowledges that this new edition appears in the context of an online environment with ESTC, COPAC, and rich websites of individual repositories; the justification for the Directoryis that it brings ‘everything together’ (p. xi). However, the fact is that this third edition contains less content than the second edition, presumably in large part because many respositories (including my own) did not contribute to what they saw a pointless exercise in re-working information already available online. Attar describes this as a ‘trimmed down’ edition, which contradicts John Feather’s claim in the foreword that it offers ‘a more comprehensive coverage of the field’. It does not. Appendix 1, ‘Possible Special Collections’, lists names of repositories which appeared with descriptions in the second edition, but which did not participate in the information gathering for this edition. Then there are the numerous collections which are omitted entirely—particularly, it has to be said, relatively modern and active libraries such as the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh or Seven Stories in Newcastle. These libraries would certainly claim to hold rare and unique material (although it might not be very old), and it would not have been difficult to find information about their holdings. So as a guide the book’s value is limited.

Some of the further justifications of the book also do not stand up to scrutiny. Attar starts by suggesting that this book could be used to help researchers locate Civil War pamphlets or to answer the question ‘Is Thomas Carlyle’s library preserved and available in the public sphere?’ ‘Civil War pamphlets’ is not a term in the index, and the entry for Carlyle’s House on pp. 151–52 does not tell you what proportion of his library is preserved or how it is available via the National Trust. It is suggested that the book will help people find items in uncatalogued collections and that it will also help find information not presented in online catalogues—‘provenances, bindings, publishers, and so forth’ (p. xi). That would depend on an excellent index—but unfortunately the index is not. Of three random examples chosen from the Edinburgh University Library collections, two were spelled incorrectly (Halliwell-Phillipps and Speirs Bruce). So this is not going to help the researcher significantly. But then who is actually going to use this publication?

The price is something of a clue. No individual researcher will pay £175, so this is never going to be a field guide. Nor, for that matter, will it be easy for librarians to buy such a book for personal use. This book is a book by librarians for purchase by libraries, where it will sit unused in...