A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, and: A Companion to the History of the Book, and: Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade (review)

Two of the three books reviewed here—A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 and A Companion to the History of the Book—do not concern themselves in a major way with the history of libraries. Their focus is the relatively young interdisciplinary field that has come to be called history of the book, and each puts forth essays written by many scholars in history, literature, and librarianship. That said, it is difficult, if not impossible, to decouple book history from library history. The third title, Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade, proves this point and demonstrates that any focused scholarship about books, book collecting, and the book collections that are the result of that collecting must touch on the history of both private and public libraries. The scholar of library history will be well served to treat both A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 and A Companion to the History of the Book as reference tools to be kept at hand for their readable and accessible essays, arranged by topic, and the accompanying notes and helpful bibliographies.

The single nod A History of the Book in America makes toward the history of libraries in nineteenth-century America is an essay entitled simply "Libraries" (in chapter 9, "Sites of Reading") by the respected authority on the history of Harvard University Library, Kenneth E. Carpenter. In some sixteen dense pages Carpenter surveys the 1840–80 period during which American libraries of every form grew at a rapid rate. He draws to our attention school district libraries, Sunday school libraries, and social libraries—those nineteenth-century institutions perhaps long forgotten but very important to readers in their day—while not neglecting the origins during the same time period of free public and academic research libraries. Nor does he neglect the story of the founding of the American Library Association in 1876. The endnotes for this chapter provide thorough documentation for the arguments made by Carpenter. The section of the book's concluding "Bibliographical Essay" that relates to chapter 9 names in its first paragraph seminal works in the library history field, including the writing of Wayne A. Wiegand, whose contribution figures in A Companion to the History of the Book. This paragraph also points to further research and writing that should be done, such as updating the surveys of American library history that were published in the mid-twentieth century and providing better access to source materials available to support research in library history.

Unfortunately, A Companion to the History of the Book, a broad survey of the field, devotes only one of its forty chapters specifically to library history. In chapter 39, "Libraries and the Invention of Information," Wiegand is forced to condense fifty centuries (3000 BC–AD 2000) of the history of library development into eleven pages of text. By necessity, this is a very shallow overview that traces the growth and history of libraries from those in the ancient world to religious libraries of the Middle Ages and then to the development of national...