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published and unpublished, and he has also 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 



or other early Ohio Valley printers. The 
early tribulations of the frontier printer and 
his ultimate emergence as a community 
leader follow a fairly routine pattern. Char-
less is almost a prototype, although the oth-
ers are all worthy of a biography. Professor 
Kaser refers to Joseph Charless as "a rela-
tively unimportant man." Viewed from a 
perspective of world history, this comment 
is true; but viewed from the history of Lex-
ington or St. Louis, Charless was an im-
portant man, a founding father of the com-
munity. Henry Clay thought Bradford and 
Charless were important enough to include 
them on his select list of card-playing com-
panions. 

With this captious note the present re-
viewer has exhausted any adverse criticism 
of Professor Kaser's work. Step by step, 
from the parish register of Killucan in 
County Westmeath, through the advertise-
ments of Charless' St. Louis hostelry in his 
own Missouri Gazette, the source material 
on Charless has been excavated, interpreted, 
and put together to give a full picture of one 
of St. Louis' most important early citizens. 
As a practitioner of "the black art" Charless 
was a typical frontier printer and publisher 
but this role takes away none of his indi-
viduality. 

The chapter on "The Kentucky Country" 
fills in the history of early printing, book-
selling, and publishing in Lexington with 
several important details. If this chapter is 
any measure of the accuracy of other sec-
tions dealing with Charless against a local 
background (Ireland, Pennsylvania, or Mis-
souri), Professor Kaser's use and interpreta-
tion of his sources cannot be questioned. 
The portrait of St. Louis in the first half of 
the nineteenth century is a chapter of west-
ern history which ought to be a point of 
departure for studies of the plains, Rockies, 
and far west. The merchants, factors, trap-
pers, military men, politicians, and adven-
turers who created the mosaic of early nine-
teenth-century St. Louis are a part of this 
colorful picture of the first city of the trans-
Mississippi west. The Story of Charless' feud 
with Thomas Hart Benton is a minor classic 
of American politics and journalism. 

There are two appendices, one on Char-
less' family, giving short biographies of each 
of the five children, and the other giving a 
list of Charless imprints. Locations and full 

bibliographical descriptions of the latter 
would have been helpful, but most of this 
information can be found elsewhere and 
inclusion in this work would have expanded 
it to a point beyond which the commercially 
oriented university presses will not go with-
out fat subsidies. Perhaps such a subsidy 
should be sought unless we want to wait for 
the next depression when we will again have 
an employers' market. There is a full index. 

If the proto-typography of every North 
American jurisdiction were as well docu-
mented as is that of St. Louis with this 
study, life would be far easier for students 
of nineteenth-century American publishing, 
printing, and bookselling. The Ohio Valley, 
the "old Southwest," and the plains, Rockies, 
and Pacific coast urgently need this type of 
study. There are many rather superficial 
masters' essays and articles in state and 
regional historical journals on the life and 
work of individual early printers, but studies 
of the scope and quality of Professor Kaser's 
work are the exception. We may hope that 
a trend has been started with this work.-
Lawrence S. Thompson, University of Ken-
tucky. 

Medical Librarianship; Principles and 
Practice. By John L. Thornton. New 
York: Philosophical Library, 1963. 152p. 
$4.50. 

The disclaimer on the dust jacket of this 
book, that it "is primarily for the newcomer 
to medical librarianship," is scarcely ade-
quate to excuse the thinness of its contents. 
It is largely reportorial, citing miscellaneous 
facts and figures about hundreds of insti-
tutions, publications, and medical bibliog-
raphers. The Medico-Chirurgical Society of 
Aberdeen was founded in 1789, and among 
other things preserves the minutes of the 
society since that date; in 1947 the British 
Medical Association launched two abstract-
ing journals, one of which lasted for only 
a few years; the name of Conrad Gesner's 
uncle was Hans Frick. These nuggets are 
interspersed with frequent rhetorical ques-
tions, pious homilies, and conventional ex-
hortations. One-sixth of the volume is de-
voted to an alphabetical listing of 700 med-
ical libraries, with dates of founding. 

There is naturally a British bias to the 

152 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES