reviews Book Reviews 289 Read? Briscoe appears to suggest that librarians need to read voraciously and constantly in their fields in order to main- tain and expand their knowledge in the service of their patrons, and then he pos- its the question of how an employed li- brarian can find time to read and continue learning without guilt (if one buys into such a concept; I don’t) and without feel- ing like a thief of time. He does not really answer his question, nor does he clarify why it is that he believes that librarians do not read. I suspect that many library administrators expect the same of their staff that Briscoe expects of librarians— that they will read onsite and off, dog- gedly pursue, even as “homework [Briscoe’s word],” the definitive answers to reference questions that they encoun- ter daily, and maintain physical and in- tellectual contact with books. Yet, increas- ingly, bibliographers and reference librar- ians are expected to continue in their pri- mary duties while teaching; taking on bibliographic instruction; writing grant proposals; managing projects; soliciting gifts; sitting on committees; participating in (and organizing and chairing) local, national, and international workshops and conferences; spending countless hours in HR training as new administra- tors attempt to put their own stamps on the libraries; doing outreach; responding to new programs and initiatives that they were not informed were coming down the pike; continuing their education; and writing and publishing. Read? Yeah, we also read. But I find that the best librarians, the most well rounded and the most interesting, are those who read outside their fields so that they can function as informed and intel- ligent, not to say interesting, human be- ings. No doubt most of them—most of us—do read, but we do it on our own time, not on the library’s time, and not necessarily when the administrators are watching us to see if we do, indeed, read. Briscoe correctly states that, like fac- ulty, the most important thing librarians bring to their jobs, their careers, is their personal knowledge. But unlike faculty, who generally teach a few hours a week and take sabbaticals, spring break, semes- ter break, Christmas break, and summers off, librarians have to acquire and expand their knowledge while working thirty- five to forty hours a week and trying to have a life. And we do it. But I wonder why Briscoe thinks librar- ians don’t read. Does he question them? Does he watch them? He states that when he sizes up another librarian (and why does he do that?), one of the things he wants to know is whether that librarian depends on the library for knowledge. When that librarian leaves the library, “is there a book under his arm? It’s the book- ish habit that matters.” If my supervisors asked me, outside a social situation, if I read or what I’m reading or whether my books come from the library, they might be surprised at my vehemence in refus- ing to let them in on my private, off-duty, unpaid social and intellectual life. But they would not ask me. Briscoe is right, of course, that librar- ians need to read to keep up with their professions and to carry out their duties. Most professionals need to, and it can be assumed that they do. But none needs to be known to read in order to be “worthy of the name.” This is a thought-provoking pamphlet that many librarians might find a jumping-off point for thinking about what they understand their place to be in the library profession. For the nonlibrarian, it is important that this pamphlet be under- stood to be just one librarian’s view.— Raymond Lum, Harvard University. Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Pr., 2001. 177p. $22.95, alk. paper (ISBN 0300088094). LC 00-11668. I recommend this delightful history to any reader with an interest in the classi- cal world. Perhaps only a veteran such as Lionel Casson, Professor Emeritus of Classics at New York University, could produce a book that wears its learning so lightly. In this age of the 500-page behe- moth, what a pleasure to read a book that 290 College & Research Libraries May 2002 weighs in at a mere 177 pages, including illustrations, scholarly notes, and index! Casson discusses not only physical librar- ies and their collections, but also meth- ods of acquisition (mostly copying, do- nation, and looting), funding, staff, readership, and services. In eight chronological chapters, Casson surveys the history of libraries—as well as literacy, books, and reading—from about 3000 B.C. to the early Middle Ages. The first chapter describes the clay tablet col- lections of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Three chapters are devoted to classical and Hellenistic Greece, and three to republican and imperial Rome. There is a chapter on the change from the papyrus roll to the codex and a brief con- cluding discussion of the early Christian era. Although books and reading had flourished in ancient Egypt, too, little is known about them. Casson does not deal with the ancient civilizations of India or China. He is masterful within his chosen field of Greece and Rome, with an obvi- ous affection for the Greeks, whom he de- scribes as “endowed with a high level of literacy and an abiding interest in intel- lectual endeavor.” Ancient historians draw on many types of evidence to piece together a story: literary works, inscriptions, graffiti, pa- pyri, visual arts, and archaeological ex- cavations. Because of the durability of clay tablets, we can reconstruct the con- tents and organization of libraries in the ancient Near East, where basic classifica- tion and cataloging began. The first sys- tematically collected library was that of the Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, around 650 B.C. The invention of alphabetic writing by the Phoenicians (c. 1000 B.C.) paved the way for broader literacy and the development of libraries as collections for research, enlightenment, and recreation. Increased schooling pro- duced an audience in Athens for books of poetry, drama, philosophy, history, sci- ence, and even cookery. Aristotle’s large, well-organized pri- vate collection is said to have influenced the Library of Alexandria (founded c. 300 B.C.), which attempted to acquire all known works in the Greek language, some 500,000 papyrus rolls. Casson de- scribes with relish the cultural ambitions of the Ptolemies, who lured the intellec- tual stars of the ancient world to the raw new city of Alexandria to form an ancient think tank, the Museum. Zenodotus (“pioneer of library science”) was the first to arrange a collection by subject and then alphabetically by author. Callimachus of Cyrene was a great bibliographer who invented the shelf list. Smaller public libraries also arose in the Hellenistic world (the Greek-speaking world created by the conquests of Alexander the Great). They served aver- age readers, including women. Such li- braries were located in gymnasia (ancient community centers). In Roman times, small libraries could be found in the pub- lic baths (something akin to the early Carnegie libraries with swimming pools). Casson provides fascinating details and anecdotes about popular books and read- ing in Rome, where educated people were bilingual and libraries had separate Greek and Latin sections. Classics such as Homer and Euripides were the most popular authors, but libraries also had holdings of contemporary writers. Casson speculates that theater managers owned large collections of Greek New Comedy, from which they supplied scriptwriters such as Plautus with texts for adaptation into Latin. Later, Roman emperors vied with each other to build more and more sumptuous libraries, and they created a bureaucracy to manage and staff them. Greek-style li- braries had consisted of small storage rooms with adjoining colonnades for read- ing. Roman-style libraries had niches con- taining wooden bookshelves around the walls of their reading rooms, with tables and chairs in the center. These sumptuous libraries were as much for show as they were for reading. But smaller libraries did exist throughout the empire, usually gifts of wealthy patrons. All this was destroyed as the western empire was “ravished and impoverished,” and although some pagan Book Reviews 291 texts were preserved in the palaces and university libraries of the eastern empire, it was in monasteries that a dedication to reading and libraries was reborn. The big technological breakthrough in ancient books was the adoption of the codex, which developed from wooden writing tablets bound together to form a notebook. Parchment soon replaced wood, although papyrus codexes also existed for a time. The Roman satirist Martial (first century A.D.) refers to the new format in the lines: This bulky mass of multiple folds all fifteen poems of Ovid holds. The codex was more compact, durable, and convenient to use but did not com- pletely replace the traditional roll for sev- eral centuries. The fact that Christians used the codex exclusively probably ex- pedited its victory. Casson’s is not the first history of an- cient libraries. James Westfall Thompson’s Ancient Libraries (1940) is a standard, and H. L. Pinner’s The World of Books in Classi- cal Antiquity (1958) is a charming little work for the general reader. But Libraries in the Ancient World is surely the best cur- rent work on the subject. Several studies of the Library at Alexandria have appeared lately, and the British Library recently pub- lished a gigantic illustrated work, The Great Libraries: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, by Konstantinos Sp. Staikos. But Casson’s book would be the choice for the reader who wants not only to learn about ancient libraries, but also to experience the human- ity of the people who lived in societies so different, and yet so close, to our own.— Jean Alexander, Carnegie-Mellon University. Day, Ronald E. The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illi- nois Univ. Pr., 2001. 139p. $35 alk. pa- per (ISBN 0809323907). LC 00-047033. Although “information” receives wide- spread usage among librarians, the word itself has received modest attention in the historical and cultural contexts of library and information science. Ronald E. Day, a professor in the Library and Informa- tion Science Program at Wayne State Uni- versity, has written in The Modern Inven- tion of Information, a cogent analysis of information in a society that takes the very word itself for granted. Day begins this important new book by writing, “No historical account of informa- tion in the twentieth century can turn away from the problem of how a rhetoric, an aesthetic, and consequently, an ideology of information has come to shape late mod- ern history and historiography.” He argues “not only that the history of information has been forgotten but also that it must be forgotten within any ‘metaphysics’ or ide- ology of information, because information in modernity connotes a factuality and pragmatic presence … that erases or radi- cally reduces ambiguity and the problems of reading, interpreting, and constructing history.” Day leads the reader through a careful and close reading of the texts of eminent theorists and philosophers, from Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet to Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, to reveal the rhetorical and historical devices that link science to information in theory and practice. Although sensitive, at times, to histori- cism, Day’s approach to the topic of in- formation is not one of narrative history. A substantial portion of the book is de- voted to an inquiry into the rhetorical strategies utilized by the European Documentalists Otlet and Briet, Warren Weaver, Norbert Wiener, and, more re- cently, Pierre Levy in his theories of cyberspace and “the virtual.” Through examination of key texts by Otlet and Briet, including work by Briet yet to be translated into English, Day presents a framework for reading information as a “trope” for science. Accordingly, informa- tion becomes a rhetorical strategy for de- fining the role and locating the work of librarians and documentalists in scientific discourse and culture. 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