College and Research Libraries


Charles Evans, American Bibliographer. 
By Edward G. Holley. (Illinois Contri-
butions to Librarianship, No. 7.) Urbana: 
University of Illinois Press, 1963. 343p. 
$7.50. 

Here, at last, we have a very full, detailed 
biography of one of the great figures of 
American bibliography. The childhood, edu-
cation, and early influential friendships are 
investigated, and their relation to the ma-
ture and old man pursued. 

An orphan at nine, Charles Evans re-
ceived most of his formal education at the 
Boston Asylum and Farm School for In-
digent Boys. One can hardly imagine a less 
likely school for a bibliographer. At sixteen 
he went to work in the Boston Athenaeum 
as an apprentice in the library presided over 
by William Frederick Poole and later by 
Charles A. Cutter. This first job is the key 
to his whole life. While Poole lived, he con-
tinually advised and helped Evans. 

Dr. Holley has had the use of all of the 
important sources for this biography, both 
published and unpublished, and he has also 
been careful to interview members of Ev-
ans's family as well as others who knew and 
worked with him. Yet some questions re-
main unanswered, and may remain so al-
ways. Why was Evans so stubborn in stick-
ing to bibliographic practices against which 
he was constantly warned by those whom 
he respected and trusted? Why did he in-
variably antagonize those in authority over 
the libraries he headed? This cost him his 
employment not once but several times, 
until at last he was no longer employable. 
By then his influential friends were dead. 

How did he and his family live? From 
1902 until his death in 1935 he held no 
salaried position but rather devoted his time 
to his great bibliography. Several times this 
work was stalled until his friends helped 
him borrow money to print the next volume. 
The profits from the venture could not have 
sustained the family. Dr. Holley has seen 
the Evans ledgers and bank books but does 
not tell us much about the family income. 
Perhaps the sources are unclear. 

One rather serious piece of misinforma-

MARCH 1964 

Review Articles 
tion is the statement, on page 250, that 
Evans worked on each volume separately, 
and that he left, at his death, only a hand-
ful of titles for the 1801-1820 period. As a 
matter of fact, there are seventeen corset 
boxes full of his manuscript slips, repre-
senting many, many thousands of titles _ of 
that period, in the possession of the Ameri-
can Antiquarian Society. One explanation of 
this error is that the slips had not yet been 
found in an old trunk at the time Dr. Holley 
was in Worcester, but the reviewer saw and 
used these slips three years ago. 

No one interested in American bibliog-
raphy can do without this definitive biog-
raphy of Charles Evans. One can only wish 
that Dr. Holley were a more felicitous writer 
and had edited this dissertation more rigor-
ously before its publication. Much impor-
tant information is relegated to the very 
voluminous footnotes, while at the same 
time, a good bit of trivia remains in the 
text. It probably is not cricket, however, to 
carp about style when presented with such 
a thorough, searching biography of an im-
portant American librarian and bibliogra-
pher. Dr. Holley deserves our thanks for his 
contribution to library history.-Richard H. 
Shoemaker, Rutgers University. 

Joseph Charless, Printer in the Western 
Country. By David Kaser. Philadelphia: 
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963. 
160p. $4.50. (63-15011). 

With this biography of Joseph Charless of 
Dublin, Pennsylvania, Lexington, Louisville, 
and St. Louis, David Kaser makes another 
solid contribution to the history of printing 
and publishing in nineteenth-century Amer-
ica. Charless is best known as the first Mis-
souri printer, indeed, the first printer of the 
trans-Mississippi west (but not the first 
printer of the Louisiana Territory, since 
Braud, Boudousquie, and James Lyon had 
worked in New Orleans long before Charless 
saw St. Louis) . 

The story of Joseph Charless is not much 
different from that of John Bradford, Elihu 
Stout, Matthew Duncan, William Maxwell, 

151