College and Research Libraries


with the selection of bibliographies nor 
with their relative importance but this vol-
ume should nonetheless be a useful tool in 
training new searchers and should be espe-
cially useful in small and medium-sized li-
braries. Large libraries might well wish for 
a greatly expanded list of bibliographies 
containing fuller information. All libraries 
might question the value of the comparison 
of searchers' markings and outstanding or-
der file arrangements, although this might 
be valuable in the classroom. A new edi-
tion might include an introduction contain-
ing general searching principles as well as 
a chapter on modifications in searching and 
problems encountered with computerized 
order records.-Connie Dunlap, University 
of Michigan. 

The Brothers Harper. By Eugene Exman. 
New York: Harper & Row, r1965 1• xvi, 
415pp. $7.95. (65-14651). 

Welcoming a businessman's history of his 
firm in which factual data is thoroughly ex-
plored, well organized, and carefully docu-
mented-such is a rare pleasure, surpris-
ingly rare indeed even for the output of so 
literate a group as publishers. Mr. Exman, 
recently retired as a vice president of Har-
per's has here retold the story of the firm 
from its beginnings around 1820 to the dis-
astrous fire of 1853. He approaches his 
subject with great seriousness of purpose 
and with an almost Germanic propensity 
for raw data-evidence rather than hypoth-
eses, details rather than conclusions, names 
rather than personalities. His presentation 
is long and involved, but in time it comes 
to impress one as being specially appro-
priate to its subject. 

Mr. Exman's announced objective is "to 
keep green the memory of the four brothers 
and their extraordinary partnership." Mter 
contemplating their sullen faces and read-
ing about their uneventful careers, one is 
led to conclude that Mr. Exman is indeed a 
good organization man. Not that his heroes 
are without glory: they carved their niche 
in our country's cultural history with a 
shrewdness which one can not help but ad-
mire. Working quietly and with a unity of 
purpose, they formed a powerful dynasty: 
so far as we will ever know, their four 
wives never fought, and nephews when 
they came of age were taken into the firm 

Book Reviews I 143 

with no grumblings from their uncles. Mr. 
Exman has tried his best to discover the 
individualities of the four brothers-Fletch-
er the friend of authors, Wesley the printer, 
John the bookkeeper, James the personnel 
manager-but their uncommunicative ways 
leave us agreeing with their adage that 
"any one of us is Harper, and the other 
three are the brothers." 

What was their commitment to the cul-
tural world they served? Why did they deal · 
in books, rather than in nails or mortgages 
or potatoes? What was their attitude toward 
the content of their editions? Did they be-
lieve in virtue rewarded, naively equating 
literary merit with large profits? Or did 
they see irreconcilable extremes, in the 
manner of some pessimistic Romantic di-
chotomy, their strategy being one of com-
pensating for a few good works with a mass 
of potboilers? Did they believe in a "long 
haul" theory, balancing in their catalogue 
the probable immediate favorites with the 
potential long-term classics? Or were they 
satisfied to leave all such matters to the 
gods and the critics, issuing almost anything 
and predicating their firm's growth on new 
audiences-such as were quickly develop-
ing in the West and through their own 
school district series? Such questions, how-
ever simplified and rhetorical, reflect on the 
larger question which we must ultimately 
ask about any publishers-in what ways 
were they a cause, and in what ways mere-
ly an effect, of the cultural life of the pub-
lic they served? 

"The secret of a successful book house 
was to play the p~rt of the benefactor of 
the man of letters" -such is the dictum of 
William Tryon (Parnassus Corner, p. 101), 
and while James T. Fields broadcast it 
widely and convincingly enough to carry 
his firm to a remarkable success, it also 
carried him down to the depths of a fear-
some battle with one of his disgruntled 
authors, the redoubtable Gail Hamilton. In 
comparison, the assault on Harpers, by 
Theodore Sedgwick Fay, described by Mr. 
Exman, approaches slapstick. In their ex-
ternal dealings, the Harpers were usually 
too clever to leave themselves vulnerable to 
serious attack; and, within the firm, they 
changed quietly with the times, in contrast 
to the violent personal upheavals of Fields' 
later business career. Fields preached end-



144 I College & Research Libraries • March, 1966 

lessly and argued persuasively for the cause 
of culture; but it was probably Harpers 
whom authors knew as the firm that spoke 
with its pocketbook. 

This we may suspect, but can never 
prove: the Harpers knew all too well that 
good business required holding one's cards 
close to one's chest. (Among Mr. Exman's 
least successful chapters, for instance, is his 
sixth, in which he attempts to demonstrate 
how his fum "launched" American authors.) 
In the absence of much evidence to the 
contrary, we must presume that the record 
of Harpers is best reflected in its publishing 
record: the brothers were astute, hard-
working, and relatively scrupulous business-
men, whose diversified competences includ-
ed the selection of good literary texts, but 
whose modest intellectual accomplishments 
and interests discouraged them from pro-
viding much of any cultural leadership. Mr. 
Exman is thus both justified and successful 
in preparing a book that never inspires a 
warm veneration or sympathy for the broth-
ers, but passively and cumulatively induces 
a cold respect for their ability to flourish in 
one of the more formidable areas of the 
business world.-Donald W. Krummel, The 
Newberry Library. 

Focus on Information and Communica-
tion. Ed. by Barbara Kyle. London : 
ASLIB, 1965. viii+ll3p. 14s. 

Recently, according to Miss Kyle's intro-
duction to this volume, ASLIB sponsored a 
conference on classification as an interdis-
ciplinary study at which papers were pre-
sented in such diverse fields as botany, 
mathematics, and anthropology. The inter-
disciplinary approach to classification 
aroused so much interest that Miss Kyle has 
brought together a collection of seven pa-
pers, by six scholars, from widely differing 
areas of research as "a further attempt to 
provide for ASLIB members a selection 
from authors in peripheral fields and to in-
troduce these authors to each other and to 
ASLIB's field of endeavour." The philos-
ophy behind this collection is characteristic 
of the work of ASLIB members whose ap-
proach to classification has always been 
more interdisciplinary than that of their 
American colleagues. However, the confer-
ence held at Syracuse University last July 

on the sociological foundations of access to 
knowledge may hopefully be regarded as 
suggesting that American librarianship is 
beginning to tend more toward the inter-
disciplinary view. 

Only three of the seven papers in this 
collection have been previously published, 
and none is by a librarian, though all have 
something of importance to say to librar-
ians, and such serious students of British 
librarianship as Foskett, Farradane, and 
Miss Kyle herself are deeply indebted to 
their authors. 

The collection opens with an essay by 
Rupert Crawshay-Williams on a linguistical-
ly based method for resolving controversies 
in science and the philosophy of science as 
to the correctness of empirical statements or 
judgments when the facts themselves are 
not in dispute. The relevance of this essay 
to classification theory lies in the insight it 
can give for the answering of such ques-
tions as: Is mathematics to be classified 
with the sciences? Is a species a natural 
group or a construct of the human mind? 

The second paper in the series (by 
James K. Feibleman) on the integrative 
levels in nature and in the sciences, and 
the technological applications that derive 
from them, has strongly influenced D. J. 
Foskett's studies of the integrative levels in 
bibliographic classification. 

Perhaps more obviously related to library 
problems than some of the other essays in 
this volume are the two on computers. The 
first, by A. R. Meetham of the National 
Physical Laboratory at Teddington, deals 
with the problems of developing machine-
generated indexing vocabularies. The essay 
by W. T. Williams of the faculty of the 
University of Southampton on "Computers 
as Botanists" is an exposition of the advan-
tages offered by the computer in the per-
formance of certain intellectual tasks, par-
ticularly that of extracting from a complex 
mass of data some underlying pattern or 
formulation of general principles. His essay 
could as well have been entitled "Comput-
ers as Classifiers." He finds, however, that 
man enjoys three advantages over the com-
puter "which he may well retain even into 
the far distant future" -he weighs less than 
any computer yet designed; he requires far 
less energy than does the computer; and he 

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