College and Research Libraries


566 I College & Research Libraries • November 1976 

gued in the Library Assistant: .. If I want a 
book I am justified in regarding your disap-
probation, however reasonable in your own 
eyes, as irrelevant." But British librarians 
of opposite persuasion have allowed only 
married couples to borrow the Kinsey Re-
port, and they have repeatedly justified 
their opposition to .. inferior" children's 
books with a familiar refrain: .. There is no 
ban on Enid Blyton, we just do not buy her 
books." 

Thompson's book is a testament to the 
durability of that hearty British species, the 
writer of letters to the editor, but therein 
lies its not inconsiderable fault. It consists 
largely of quotations-from the daily press 
and library journals-whose mind-numbing 
repetitiousness makes the reader wish the 
author had chosen other, more readable 
means to document his case. The title is 
misleading; the book skips over the first 
four decades of the century in a scant ten 
pages.-Roger L. Funk, Assistant Director, 
Office for Intellectual Freedom, American 
Library Association. 

Lewis, Felice Flanery. Literature, Obscen-
ity & Law. Carbondale and Edwards-
ville: Southern Illinois Univ. Pr., 1976. 
297p. $12.50 . . (LC 75-42094) (ISBN 0-
8093-07 49-9) 
Academic librarians usually feel them-

selves above the continuing battle between 
the censor and the advocate of intellectual 
freedom. By definition, they say, the aca-
demic library is the place where no censor 
is either welcome or effective. But, upon 
consideration, it is easy to identify many 
ways in which the supposedly seamless 
web of academic librarianship could be--
and frequently is-breached. Every type 
of librarian needs to know as much as pos-
sible about the past history and likely fu-
ture trends of both the publication of and 
judicial restraints on literary works dealing 
with sex. 

It is rather surprising that Dr. Lewis 
(Dean of Conolly College, The Brooklyn 
Center, Long Island University) has herein 
written the very first book to deal with all 
... . . works of imaginative literature . . . 
known to have been the subject of obscen-
ity litigation in the United States ... ," as 
well as related judicial opinions. Despite 

what the popular belief seems to be, Dean 
Lewis stresses the well-documented fact 
that·· ... censors have not discriminated be-
tween outstanding cultural contributions 
and . . . worthless pornography," although 
judges usually have, especially at the Su-
preme Court level. 

In highly readable fashion Dean Lewis 
reminds us that a great many of our leading 
litterateurs-including Whitman, Dreiser, 
Cabell, Faulkner, Sinclair, Farrell, Cald-
well, Hellman, Edmund Wilson, and 
O'Hara-have faced the censor's censure. 
The record is not one to make freedom-lov-
ing Americans proud, but it is useful to 
have it available through this volume. Near-
ly one-third of the book's text (seventy-
eight pages) is devoted to detailed descrip-
tions and/ or illustrative quotations from 
fiction, poetry, and drama involved in 
American obscenity cases since 1890 
(which, the author claims, was the begin-
ning of both a sexual revolution in Amer-
ican fiction and of the first really substan-
tial effort to censor by law and legal action 
such fiction without regard to literary mer-
it). 

Her book is comprehensive and clear but 
could have profited from more attention to 
the efforts of those groups and individuals 
who led the anticensorship fight-the 
American Civil Liberties Union (one brief 
reference) and the American Library As-
sociation (unmentioned), for example. 
There is a great deal included on the ef-
forts of the so-called ••antivice" groups. 

But, as a pioneering and thorough work 
in a highly significant field for librarians 
and others devoted to intellectual freedom, 
it deserves a place on the shelves of every 
academic librarian and library.-Eli M. 
Oboler, University Librarian, Idaho State 
University, Pocatello. 

Kochen, Manfred, ed. Information for Ac-
tion: From Knowledge to Action. (Li-
brary and Information Science Series) 
New York: Academic Pr., 1975. 248p. 
$12.50. (LC 75-3968) (ISBN 0-12-
417950-9) 
Among the fifteen papers in this collec-

tion there may be hidden a classic little es-
say that future information scientists will 
cite again and again. Unfortunately, such