Radical Collections: Re-Examining the Roots of Collections, Practices and Information Professions ed. by Jordan Landes, Richard Espley (review)

This volume of papers, published in 2018¹ by the University of London’s School of Advanced Study at Senate House Library, is the product of a 2017 conference held at Senate House Library, entitled Radical Collections: Radicalism and Libraries and Archives. Its editors, Jordan Landes and Richard Espley, are academics and librarians employed at Senate House Library as a research librarian and Head of Modern Collections, respectively. Contributors to this volume, who were presenters at this one-day conference, are a mix of librarians, archivists, and academics based predominantly in the United Kingdom and also in Ireland and the United States of America. Given the varied backgrounds of the contributors and their topics of discussion–content of relevance to the library, archives, and museum professions in particular–one might expect the intended readership for this volume to be equally varied. Six papers and an editor’s introduction form the entirety of this book, and I discuss them in the order in which they appear.

In the introductory paper, editor Jordan Landes provides background for the papers to follow, describing the focus of the Radical Collections conference call as a consideration of four questions (p. 1): Who works in archives and libraries and who uses them? What is in collections? How are they being organized? What now in libraries, archives, and the information profession as a whole? The conference organizers’ focus was intentionally broad, with an emphasis on collecting and collections rather than types of institutions. The overarching theme of radical collections relates in part to the Senate House Library’s mandate to acquire books, archival materials, and ephemera originating from radical socio- political movements of the 20th century. Landes also gives an extensive summary of the conference, its participants, and their presentation subjects, acknowledging the limitations of a one-day conference to be comprehensive in scope and highlighting the lack of diversity in its roster of all-white presenters.

Indeed, one can recognize the origins of this publication, as the experience of reading these papers resembles that of attending a conference featuring presenters with different subject areas and levels of scholarship, united by a loosely defined theme. The broadness of the conference theme is a liability when condensed into a short, six-paper publication and is complicated by different interpretations of radical, the meaning of which is dependent on context and the positionality of the writer and the reader. Other volumes of papers on the same theme have grappled with the use of this term in a more fulsome, deliberate, and interrogative manner,² and while some authors in this collection take that approach, others either define radical materials simply as those that challenge the status quo or make no extended reference to concepts of radicalism at all.

The first paper, by academic Mairéad Mooney, “Radical or Reactionary? James Wilkinson, Cork Public Library and Identity in the Irish Free State” (pp. 9–21), provides a history of the Cork Public Library under the stewardship of its Protestant librarian during times of social and political change in early 20th- century Ireland. Using historical research, the author describes the challenges of creating library collections for Irish children in post-independence Ireland, where a desire to acquire pro-Ireland library materials was complicated by the absence of an Irish publishing industry. However interesting this history–including the fact of Wilkinson’s status as a Protestant librarian in the Irish Free State–Mooney’s question about Wilkinson’s intentions (radical or reactionary) as a manager of the library’s collections is both impossible to answer and beside the point: the author presents his decision-making as likely pragmatic and uncontroversial. Wilkinson simply appears to have been a dedicated and well- respected librarian who had no choice but to stock his library with British books because there was little else available.

The second...