College and Research Libraries


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 



material, but even so one is surprised to find 
the chapter on "Libraries in Hospitals" deal-
ing with all sorts of libraries, medical school 
libraries as well as medical sections of pub-
lic libraries. There is little in the chapter on 
"Cataloguing and Classification" except out-
lines of various medical classification 
schemes, the finding that in 1957 nine out 
of 109 British medical libraries were using 
sheaf catalogs, and the fact that author cata-
logs are essential. 

Mr. Thornton, the medical librarian at St. 
Bart's in London, has provided us with some 
useful works, but the book under review is 
not one of them. It is to be feared that the 
hope expressed-"that all medical librarians 
will find material for discussion in the sum-
maries of controversial topics"-is entirely 
vain.-Frank B. Rogers, University of 
Colorado Medical Center. 

Repertoire des Bibliotheques d':Etude et 
Organismes de Documentation. Publie 
sous l'egide de la Delegation Generale a 
la Recherche Scientifique et Technique. 
3 vols. Paris: Bibliotheque N ationale, 
1963. 1233p. 85 n.f. 

This guide presents information on nearly 
twenty-four hundred French scholarly li-
braries and documentation centers. Since 
the present work will, for most purposes, 
replace the Repertoire des Bibliotheques de 
France (3 vols., Paris: Bibliotheque Na-
tionale, 1950-51), the user's first reaction is 
to compare it with its predecessor. At the 
outset he notes the basic similarity: a direc-
tory of libraries and documentation centers 
with information presented on a fixed num-
ber of points and with an index to facilitate 
use. The differences between the two com-
pilations fall into three groups: ( 1) scope, 
(2) information presented, and ( 3) arrange-
ment. 

The later directory has a narrower scope 
than the earlier; it includes only scholarly 
libraries and documentation centers and 
thus contains no information on the central 
lending services of the departements or on 
certain municipal libraries (even for those 
which are included there is no mention of 
lending and children's services or of branch-
es) . Beyond metropolitan France two li-
braries (in French Guiana and Guadeloupe) 

MARCH 1964 

are included as well as one in Monaco, but 
gone of course are listings for Algeria. Nei-
ther Martinique nor Reunion (both in the 
earlier list) figure here. Nevertheless, total 
coverage has increased from 1634 to 2382 
institutions, or about 45 per cent. 

Each entry contains the following infor-
mation: name of library or documentation 
center; name of parent organization to 
which it belongs; address, telephone num-
ber, cable and teletype address; hours of 
service and dates of annual closing; purpose 
and activities of parent organization; lend-
ing policies; subject strengths and special 
collections; statistics ( 1960) of volumes, 
additions, periodicals currently received and 
of other forms of material held; classifica-
tion used; catalogs available; documenta-
tion (i.e., special bibliographical tools and 
services to facilitate the reader's work); 
translation services; union catalogs to which 
information is supplied; publications; photo-
duplication services; historical data and ref-
erences. Although this corresponds generally 
to information found in the 1950-51 guide, 
three items (reading rooms; administration, 
including the names of the director and 
department heads; and source of funds) 
have been dropped, while three ( classifica-
tion, documentation, and translation ser-
vices) are new. The fullness of entries var-
ies, those for the larger libraries being long-
er and more complete than those for the 
smaller. As one might expect, the longest 
entry (I, 60-72) deals with the Bibliotheque 
Nationale; divided into eleven sections, it 
covers general information and the library's 
departments (viz., Maps, Acquisitions, Prints, 
Printed Books, Manuscripts, Oriental Manu-
scripts, Numismatics, Music, Serials, and the 
Annex at Versailles). The average listing 
seems to require between one-quarter and 
one-half page. In a few cases the Repertoire 
merely serves to indicate the existence of a 
collection, since little information is pro-
vided other than that access is strictly lim-
ited. 

Users of the earlier compilation will re-
call that it devotes one volume to Parisian 
libraries, one to those in the provinces, and 
one to documentation centers. The new ver-
sion incorporates the last category into the 
first two groups. The first volume, however, 
now comprises not only organizations in 
Paris but also those in the two surrounding 

153