College and Research Libraries 234 I College & Research Libraries • May 1975 libraries-took greater interest. There is still far too much needless duplication of library instruction effort in the U.S. How- ever, the recent news that the Council on Library Resources has funded Project LOEX (the Library Orientation/Instruc- tion Exchange at Eastern Michigan U Di- versity) is encouraging. Lubans' book should help create a common information base for library instruction librarians na- tionwide.-Allan ]. Dyson, Head, Moffitt Undergraduate Library, University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley. Jones, John Bush, ed. Readings in Descrip- tive Bibliography. Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Pr., 1974. 208p. $9.00. Liebert Herman W. Bibliography Old & New: (Bibliographical Monograph Se- ries, no.6) Austin: Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas, 1974. 25p. Readings in Descriptive Bibliography will never find a place on "Fritz" Liebert's bookshelves. With the exception of two or three of the essays comprising the Read- ings, all the others are anathema to Lie- bert's way of thinking of bibliography. And the former director of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library does have some definite feelings concerning the "new" bibliography. I choose the word feelings in- tentionally, because it is precisely the ab- sence of this quality in most contemporary bibliographers-such as those collected here-which Liebert laments. "Bibliophily is the parent of bibliogra- phy," Liebert reminds us at the close of his volume comprising the Third Annual Lew David Feldman Lectureship in Bibliogra- phy. As such, "writing about books and discriminating among them came later, and its vitality still depends on love of the book." Careful to place the master-Fred- son Bowers-above reproach, Liebert re- proves those of his disciples whose investi- gations relate solely to the physical aspects of the book without revealing anything sub- stantive about either its contents or the au- thor. "But the book is only a physical con- tainer," he chides, "and the recitation of the facts of its production, when they reveal nothing about its contents, belongs to the history of technology." Technology is quite pronounced in a number of the essays in Jones' anthology. They total fourteen, and all have appeared before. The editor has brought them togeth- er to update and consolidate much of the work done in descriptive bibliography since the publication of Bowers' Principles of Bibliographical Description twenty-five years ago. Jones envisions the readers to consist of practicing bibliographers, grad- uate students in literature (he himself is on the English faculty at the University of Kansas), and a third category consisting of professional librarians, printing historians, collectors, and dealers. The scope is broad, both in terms of con- tent as well as objective. The essays are ar- ranged in two groups-those of a general nature which touch on all periods of bib- liographical study; those with a more spe- cific orientation, ordered chronologically ac- cording to the modes of book production to which they apply. It would serve no practical purpose to describe and analyze (no pun intended) critically the essays themselves. Mter all, half of them first appeared more than ten years ago. And as for Jones' selections- well, one man's meat is another man's poi- son. Surely, even Herman Liebert would find palatable Bowers' familiar arguments in the latter's "Purposes of Descriptive Bib- liography, With Some Remarks on Meth- od," as he would William Todd's piece showing how descriptive techniques, cou- pled with the study of book reviews, can aid in the discovery of hidden editions and impressions of eighteenth-century texts. And certainly one would have to be a clod, pure and simple, to quarrel with Allan Stevenson's brilliant detective story on the dating of books through the study of water- marks and their variant states. Two of G. Thomas Tanselle's entries, however-one, a minutely detailed and highly technical proposal for a methodology for the description of paper, and the other a survey of techniques for recording press figures, including a comprehensive and sys- tematic set of tables-assuredly would be more difficult to stomach. David Faxon's "On Printing 'At One Pull' and Distinguish- ing Impressions by Point Holes," too, would unquestionably cause some dic;tress. Quite unashamed, Faxon readily acknowledges the use of a machine, the famous/ infamous Hinman collator, in the course of his re- searches. Indeed, one might very well be- come surfeited with the plethora of tech- nical cant exhibited in a number of the es- says and, along with the proponents of bib- liography "old" style, push back from the anthology as he might from a table heaped high with undigestable food. No, there is little chance that Jones' ef- forts will find a place on the shelves of those who hold that contemporary bibliog- raphy is plunging headlong along paths in- creasingly more involuted and attenuated. But neither do I suspect that Liebert's slim but delightful volume will receive much at- tention by other than a handful of Jones' intended audience. Each will have its own partisan readership. While this situation might be lamented, it is not unexpected. For indeed, Fritz Lie- bert is not the first to conclude that the best bibliographer, after all, is "the simple scholar (armed only with spectacles to pro- vide 20/20 vision) who examines books without benefit of machines, but with knowledge and judgment." But if the prac- titioners of the "new" bibliography are fre- quently guilty of comma-catching and perhaps too often find themselves address- ing each other instead of seeking out a wider audience, surely the studies and con- clusions, say, of an Allan Stevenson in the fields of paper and watermarks constitute sufficient historical evidence to demand the attention of all interested parties, whether they subscribe to bibliography "old" or «new."-]ohn F. Guido, Curator of Rare Books & · Special Collections, State Univer- sity of New York at Binghamton. Lombardi, Mary. Brazilian Serial Docu- ments: A Selective and Annotated Guide. (Indiana University Latin Ameri- can Studies Program) Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Pr., 197 4. 445p. $13.50. As Brazilianists are sometimes painfully aware, that country's "federal agencies have been created, dissolved, and reorganized under a bewildering variety of names which has complicated identification and location of their official publications" ( p.xx). Insofar Recent Publications/ 235 as these actions have affected the agencies' serial publications, we can all be grateful for the ·appearance of Mary Lombardi's guide, whose purpose is "to serve as a bib- liography of Brazilian serial documents as they relate to their issuing agencies" (p.xxi). This volume contains entries for 1,367 serial publications of Brazil's federal gov- ernment (excluding federal universities) . The author has chosen to interpret "serial" broadly, for which users of the volume will certainly be grateful; she has not, moreover, limited herself to those serials being pub- lished at the time of her research (through the end of 1971), although she had orig- inally intended to include only titles which had not ceased prior to 1961. However, she has excluded three types of publications: those intended for strictly administrative or internal use; periodicals providing trans- lations of foreign articles for the Brazilian scientific and technical community; and those which are primarily acquisition lists for departmental libraries, unless such seri- als contain material of permanent research value. Those who have used Latin American Serial Documents: Brazil, compiled by Rosa Q. Mesa (1968), will wonder about differ- ences between it and the Lombardi bibli- ography. In scope, the major difference seems to be that serials issued by federal universities appear in the former but not in the latter; conversely, Lombardi has a number of entries not in Mesa, perhaps be- cause no holdings were reported by Ameri- can institutions. There is a difference in arrangement: Mesa follows Library of Con- gress entry, but Lombardi places publica- tions under their issuing agency. The 1968 volume is a union list giving holdings in se- lected major U.S. libraries, while the new bibliography does not have this feature. But this reader feels that, in part, the two volumes complement each other: there will probably be a numher of instances when the inquirer will need to consult both. Since Lombardi's arrangement follows the organization of the government itself, the book divides into four broad parts: the nation as a whole, the legislative, .execu- tive, and judicial branches; however, Part III (the executive) contains, as expected,