College and Research Libraries


The A ge of the Scholar. By Nathan M. 
Pusey. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U ni-
versity Press, 1963. 210p. $4.50 ( 63-
19146). 

Harvard's president would be among 
those who discount as a literary form the 
presidential address, a kind of Gebrauch-
.smusik of the calling. Born of occasions as 
distant as the dedication of a children's hos-
pital and a University of Delhi convocation, 
these addresses offer, in graceful, elegant 
language, an index to the major concerns of 
the universities of the times: complexity, 
size, the impact of the practical and of 
government, the relation of research to 
teaching, the competition of sciences with 
the humanities. 

Although, like his colleagues, President 
Pusey hints at an apprehensiveness about 
the size, complexity, and expense of main-
taining libraries, his description of the val-
ues of reading and books will comfort li-
brarians and reinforce their belief in their 
vocation: 

Basic to all but the most elementary learning 
is reading. This is undoubtedly why it is prop-
erly a matter of concern to teachers from the 
first grade throughout the whole of formal edu-
cation. But what is not so widely recognized is 
that in most cases the quality or lack of quality 
in a mental life perhaps owes as much to what 
one customarily reads as to any other one thing. 
It is for this reason that, though the simplest 
kind of reading may be acceptable fare for 
children at certain stages of their development, 
it is certainly not a sufficient staple for the 
intellectual fare of adults. Nor are newspapers 
or the average run of magazines sufficient by 
themselves-that is, apart from the supple-
mentary influence of major books. Despite all 
our antipathy to "bookishness," there is a dis-
turbing truth here which we shall overlook at 
our peril. 

What we are depends in a very considerable 
measure on the intellectual experiences we have 
had, or have not had-on the meaning we have 
found in life or have not found. Such experi-
ences do not necessarily have to be found in 

Book Reviews 

books, but it is chiefly in books, in the best 
books, that the most illuminating human experi-
ences are apt to be found .... 

If this be true, then to live apart from books 
is not to turn toward life but deliberately to 
cut one's self off from significant understanding 
of it. And this is what will happen if we turn 
too far from the verbal, that is, from languages 
and literature, in our educational practices . 
Books, as another has said, are men thinking. 
They are also at their best the work of the men 
whose thoughts are most worth knowing. For 
their thoughts are the kind of thoughts that can 
both engender in us joy in new awareness and 
stretch our thinking ( p. 36-37) .-Donald 
Coney, University of California, Berke_ley. 

Collier's Ency clopedia. New York: Crowell-
Collier Publishing Co., 1964. 24 vols. 
Annual. (64-10285). 

Any major encyclopedia is impressive in 
the sheer weight of statistics it can muster 
in its self-description, and Collier's is no ex-
ception. A fact sheet distributed by the 
publishers, for example, reveals that the 
present revision contains more than eight-
een thousand pages, twenty-one million 
words, and four hundred thousand entries 
in its index to twenty-six thousand articles. 
It presents more than seventeen thousand 
illustrations, sixteen hundred maps , and 
eleven thousand five hundred items in its 
bibliography. It was prepared by more than 
five thousand authors and editors. Without 
question, "monumental" is an appropriate 
adjective to apply to Collier's Encyclopedia; 
not many of its competitors can top these 
figures. 

More meaningful, however, in examining 
a particular edition of an encyclopedia are 
the numbers that can be used to describe its 
revision. No major encyclopedia, of course, 
can afford to prepare complete new editions 
more frequently than once in a lifetime, but 
a process of continuous updating .goes on in 
all of their editorial offices. The 1964 "edi-
tion" of Collier's, we are told, contains 
eighty-one new articles, three hundred new 

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