reviews Book Reviews 91 gogic legal system.” Despite its impor- tance, a search of Library Literature for the years between 1980 and 2000, reveals only 726 citations for the term “ethics,” com- pared with 7,015 for “service,” 6,872 for “Internet,” and 2,234 for “selection.” In- formation professionals have a long way to go to reach the ideal ethical level that the author advocates in this book. This well-written book is highly rec- ommended for both new and experienced library professionals. Readers will appre- ciate the author ’s easy-to-read writing style, personal touch, and insightful ob- servations.—Sha Li Zhang, Wichita State University. Heesen, Anke te. The World in A Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. Trans. Ann M. Hentschel. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 2002. 237p. alk. paper $60 cloth, (ISBN 0226322866); $20 paper (ISBN 0226322874). LC 2001-052763. [Origi- nally published as Der Weltkasten: die Geschichte einer Bildenenzyklopädie aus dem 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1997.] In The World in A Box, Anke te Heesen, a research associate at the Max Planck In- stitute for the History of Science in Ber- lin, explores an obscure eighteenth-cen- tury picture encyclopedia for children from nearly every possible angle. Al- though this might sound tedious, the re- sult is a fascinating book, accessible to both expert and layperson, that consti- tutes a landmark contribution to the study of the German Enlightenment, especially in the areas of intellectual history, educa- tional theory, and children’s literature. Although these features may provide rea- son enough for interest among many li- brarians, the relevance of this volume to our profession is dramatically increased by te Heesen’s inclusion of numerous in- sights into the Enlightenment approach to the organization and classification of knowledge that remain relevant to us to- day. The object of te Heesen’s analysis is Die Bilder-Akademie für de Jugend (The Picture Academy for the Young) published in in- stallments on a subscription basis by Johann Sigmund Stoy of Dresden be- tween 1870 and 1874. In its complete form, Stoy’s Picture Academy is made up of a single volume of fifty-two copperplates, most likely one for each week of the year, and two volumes of explanatory text. In- dividual installments arrived as a collec- tion of unbound pages, including both copperplates and explanatory text. Each copperplate is divided into nine fields, a large one in the center surrounded by eight smaller ones, each containing one or more illustrations. The pictures in the central field depict a biblical event or per- sonality chosen to illustrate the central theme of each plate; pictures in the sur- rounding fields reflect the application of that theme to each of the eight categories into which Stoy divided all human knowledge. The text volumes begin with a discussion of the purpose of the work, an explanation of its organization, and several recommendations for its use as a teaching tool, followed by commentary on each copperplate. Of special interest is Stoy’s recommendation that subscrib- ers encourage their children to cut out the illustrations, attach them to cards, and file them in a box divided into nine compart- ments representing the fields into which each copperplate is divided. In addition, he recommended that children collect other illustrations related to each theme and add them to their box, resulting in a collection representing everything they needed to know about the world, liter- ally the whole “world in a box.” The World in a Box is divided into three sections: Book, Image, and Box. The first focuses on the physical nature and publi- cation details of the Picture Academy; the background and qualifications of its au- thor; the historical and intellectual con- text in which it was produced; and its re- lationship to the special storage box men- tioned above. Individuals interested in the history of children’s literature, the nature of the publishing industry in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and related developments in pedagogical 92 College & Research Libraries January 2003 theory will find much to digest in this section. Of interest to a broader audience will be te Heesen’s discussion of the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with bringing order to the world of knowledge through the creation of universal classifi- cation systems, which emerged in the con- text of a dramatic increase in the amount of information available about the world. In this preoccupation, one can perhaps see the seeds of later attempts to create com- prehensive classifications of knowledge, culminating in the creation of the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classi- fication systems at the end of the nine- teenth century. In addition, it is difficult to avoid seeing parallels in these attempts to bring order to the world of knowledge with the struggles our profession contin- ues to face with creating some sense of order out of the World Wide Web. In the second section (Image), te Heesen focuses on the copperplates and the images they contain. She notes that most of the images were borrowed from other sources, as was much of the ex- planatory text; she analyzes the ways in which the images were organized on the copperplates, especially in cases where the thematic relationships are difficult to identify; and she documents how the images reflect many of the artistic and emblematic conventions of the Enlight- enment, including the ways in which humans are depicted. The difficulties te Heesen identifies with how some of the copperplates are organized are similar to some of the difficulties Web designers face in creating pages that are intended to con- vey large amounts of information in a relatively limited space, such as an aca- demic library’s home page. In the final section (Box), te Heesen demonstrates how the box into which children were encouraged to file their pic- tures is far more than a mere curiosity. Instead, it epitomizes the widespread Enlightenment notion that the very act of categorization and classification was es- sential to the intellectual development of children and that using all the senses, in- cluding touch, enhanced the effects of this process. In addition, te Heesen notes that many Enlightenment intellectuals be- lieved that it was the destiny of Europe- ans to bring moral, intellectual, and so- cial order to the world and that their chil- dren must be trained to fulfill that roll. From this perspective, it becomes clear that Stoy intended his Picture Academy not only as a source of knowledge, but also as a tool for teaching children how to bring order to the world. She also dem- onstrates how Stoy’s “world in a box” is a reflection of the Enlightenment’s fasci- nation with the creation of natural history cabinets, collections of specimens stored in an array of compartments and draw- ers, each carefully labeled and indexed. As te Heesen notes, the largest and most elaborate of these cabinets were direct precursors of many important European museums of the nineteenth and twenti- eth centuries. In discussing the purpose of these cabinets, te Heesen makes the following observation: “The sense and purpose of order is to be able to recall with ease where each object can be found.” With only slight modifications, this state- ment might well apply to a library’s Web site. By imposing at least some degree of order on the chaotic world of information, we hope that our Web sites will enable individuals to find the information they need as efficiently and effectively as pos- sible. It could therefore be argued that we are responding to today’s information crisis in a manner similar to the approach taken by intellectuals of the German En- lightenment when faced with their own information explosion. It remains to be seen whether we will be any more suc- cessful than our predecessors. In sum, I believe that The World in a Box will be of great interest to many in our profession. Its value is significantly enhanced by the inclusion of a number of high-quality illustrations, including many from the Picture Academy itself. Also included are exhaustive footnotes; a de- tailed appendix of bibliographic data on the Picture Academy; an extensive bibliog- raphy, including several primary sources; and a thorough index. As indicated in the Book Reviews 93 acknowledgments, work on the transla- tion gave te Heesen the opportunity to update several footnotes and references to reflect more recent scholarship, al- though she does indicate “the English edition remains essentially the same as the German edition.” The University of Chicago Press is to be commended for making this wonderful work available to a wider audience by means of this high- quality English translation.—Wade Kotter, Weber State University. Helfand, Jessica. Reinventing the Wheel: Volvelles, Equatoria, Planispheres, Fact- Finders, Gestational Charts . . . . New York: Princeton Architectural Pr., 2002. 159p. alk. paper $24.95 (ISBN 1568983387). LC 2002-532. For too long, we have chosen to identify printed matter that does not neatly fit our categories of cataloging and description as “ephemera,” that is, material that is transitory by design and thus neither in- trinsically important nor worth the labor of cataloging. We have, in effect, institu- tionalized a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, ephemera—postcards, menus, advertise- ments, broadsides, pamphlets, and the like—have become the unloved orphans of research libraries. We have squirreled them away unsorted in filing cabinets and boxes, when we have saved them at all. Sometimes we wish that they would just go away. According to the OED, an ephemera (or an ephemeral) is an insect (or some- thing else) that lives for only a day. And yet, the very ephemera that are barely visibly on the edges of our radar screens have been around for a lot longer than a day. Our collections contain “ephemera” that are hundreds of years old. And, if we toss in papyrus grain receipts, at least two millennia old. Why, then, continue to con- fer on them a pejorative label? Ephemera do survive and often are eloquent pieces of historical documentation. This by way of introducing you to a book that might slip past you, Jessica Helfand’s beautifully designed and pre- sented introduction to her collection of printed ephemera. Helfand collects those marvelous rotating wheels that can do anything from basic arithmetic to casting horoscopes and beyond. These are the nineteenth- and twentieth-century de- scendants of volvelles. Rare book librar- ians will be familiar with volvelles as the intricate paper dials in sumptuous early modern astronomy books. There they served both decorative and practical func- tions, allowing readers to manipulate the dials to calculate astronomical phenom- ena and predict events. The last days of the Ptolemaic universe generated increas- ingly complex and ingenious sets of volvelles. Anyone who has ever thumbed a copy of Peter Apian’s Astronomicum Caesareum (1540) will know what I mean. The evolution of volvelles from arti- facts of the printed book to freestanding versions generated an increasingly di- verse repertoire of superimposed printed circles. As the author notes, “Twentieth- century volvelles—often referred to as ‘wheel charts’—offer everything from in- ventory control to color calibration, mile- age metering to verb conjugation. They anticipate animal breeding cycles and cal- culate radiation exposure, measure choco- late consumption and quantify bridge tips, chart bird calls, convert metrics, and calculate taxes. There are fortune-telling wheels and semaphore-charting wheels; emergency first-aid wheels and electronic fix-it wheels; playful wheels that test pho- netics and prophylactic wheels that pre- vent pregnancy.” Fine, but so what? Why take this stuff seriously? For two reasons, I think. 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