reviews.indd


Book Reviews 363 

to continue the work is certainly appro-
priate and a better solution than the an-
nual supplementary volumes of the first 
edition, but basing the ongoing project 
on these four physical volumes demon-
strates a clear lack of editorial focus or 
control. When Allen Kent defended the 
first edition against its reviewers, he failed 
to address their criticisms in any mean-
ingful way, preferring instead to defend 
the idea rather than the reality of what 
was actually produced and thus failed 
to adequately refute the criticisms of the 
fi rst edition.2 The wholesale reprinting of 
earlier entries in the new edition, the lack 
of a conceptual framework on which to 
base inclusion of articles, and the general 
unfocused approach to the field still are 
major issues that have not been faced by 
the editors and lead to the suspicion that 
the projected supplemental material will 
be a series of random articles rather than 
an encyclopedia. 

Other problems were noted by the 
reviewers of the earlier edition and its 
supplements that recur here. One major 
criticism of the first edition was the al-
most gratuitous inclusion of illustrations 
that add nothing to the information but 
greatly increase the bulk (and presumably 
the cost) of the set. This tradition is con-
tinued here, with the odd assortment of 
reproductions of title pages in the article 
titled “Center for Research Libraries” 
(why the cover from the Locomotive Engi-
neers Journal for July 1922?) and the full 
page devoted to the cover of the Croatian 
Library Association Journal or the repro-
duction of the Certificate of Recognition 
awarded to the Jamaica Library Associa-
tion by the International Association of 
School Librarians for hosting a conference 
in 1996. 

A reviewer also can cavil about the 
binding, which probably will not last 
more than a few years in a general ref-
erence collection and the lack of a let-

ter guide on the spines that should be 
required of any alphabetically arranged 
multivolume reference work. But the is-
sue is that although the new edition of 
the Encyclopedia of Library and Information 
Science is more than a The Best of the First 
Edition of ELIS, the enhancements do not 
justify the cost, particularly because any 
collection interested in acquiring such a 
work would already have the fi rst edition 
and its supplements. 

This is a shame. There are articles here 
that individually represent worthwhile, 
and in some areas, major contributions to 
the literature of library and information 
science. They are, it is true, more descrip-
tive than research based and probably not 
publishable in the journal literature, but 
they do provide information of value to 
students and others that would be dif-
fi cult to find elsewhere. It is lamentable 
that these articles do not add up to an 
encyclopedia.—Lee Shiflett, The University 
of North Carolina at Greensboro. 

1. Louise Rosenberg and Gay Detlefsen, 
“Is ELIS Worthy of the Name? —‘No!’” Wilson 
Library Bulletin 47 (Mar. 1973: 598–601. 

2. Allen Kent, “The Editor Replies: Is ELIS 
Worthy of the Name?—‘Yes!’” Wilson Library 
Bulletin 47 (Mar. 1973): 602–4. 

Patricia Okker. Social Stories: The Magazine 
Novel in Nineteenth-century America. 
Charlottesville and London: Univer-
sity of Virginia Pr., 2003. 202p. alk. 
paper, $37.50 (ISBN 0813922402). LC 
2003-6547. 

Professor Okker has given us a small 
book on a big topic: serial fiction in nine-
teenth-century America. Even so, simply 
by raising it, she reminds us that this is a 
major and underinvestigated area in the 
history of the book in North America. At 
the beginning of the new republic, there 
were about twelve magazines competing 
for readers; by the end of the nineteenth 
century, there were more than 3,000—and 



364 College & Research Libraries 

growing. Central to the evolution and 
success of magazines, Okker argues, was 
their increasing openness to serial fiction 
as a way of growing and maintaining 
audiences. The enormous success of 
Dickens’s serial fiction on both sides of the 
Atlantic in the 1840s created a golden age 
of magazine fiction that lasted until the 
very end of the century, when economics 
and immigration changed the editorial 
practices at major magazines. As a busi-
ness plan, serial fiction was deceptively 
simple: capture the audience’s attention 
and hold it as long as possible. It was only 
when selling advertising became more lu-
crative—and easier—than recruiting and 
retaining stables of house authors that the 
business model shifted, and serialized 
fiction went into permanent decline. In 
between, there were many stories to be 
told and Okker offers us a sampling. 

The title of her book alludes to her ar-
gument: serialized fiction was peculiarly 
“social” in that it created and spoke to 
communities of readers. But doesn’t all 
fiction, all literature, do that to one extent 
or another? What Okker has in mind here, 
however, is the observation that with 
serialized fiction you get communities of 
people reading the same thing at the same 
time. Or at least, such is the argument. 
The problem is that it is not an argument 
at all but, rather, an assumption; and on 
this assumption the edifice of the book is 
built. Indeed, the generic problem with 
studies such as Okker’s is that there really 
is no good body of evidence to which a 
scholar can turn that would document the 
existence of “communities of readers.” 

Index to advertisers 
AIAA cover 3 
Annual Reviews 272 
CHOICE 319 
Greenwood Publishing cover 4 
Haworth Press 275 
Modern Language Assoc. cover 2, 271 

July 2004 

Who were they? Where were they? And, 
most important of all, what difference 
does their existence or nonexistence make 
anyway? 

Thus, Okker does what so many oth-
ers in her situation have done: she argues 
inferentially from the text to the reader, 
a practice that scholars such as Roger 
Chartier have been trying to wean us 
from for many years now. Undeterred, 
Okker narrows a very large field of pos-
sible examples to a mere handful of case 
studies, beginning with Jeremy Belknap’s 
The Foresters in the late eighteenth cen-
tury and concluding with William Dean 
Howell’s A Modern Instance, at the end of 
the nineteenth century. Along the way, 
she considers fiction by Ann Stephens, 
William Simms, Martin R. Delany, and the 
prolific Rebecca Harding Davis, surely the 
queen of the magazine novel.

 With each of her writers, Okker stalks 
a similar topos, tying texts to social, 
political, and cultural contexts: the rati-
fication of the Constitution; gender and 
fashion; sectionalism and slavery; and 
the marketplace and the fate of literature. 
In general, her readings seem balanced 
and grounded, and she almost succeeds 
in making minor talents such as Belknap 
actually interesting. That magazine fic-
tion in the nineteenth century connected 
with the ebb and flow of events of the 
day, hot-button issues, and smoldering 
anxieties seems clear from Okker’s patient 
reading of her sources. But it is one thing 
to relate texts to contexts; it is quite an-
other to explain how they were received 
and why. Okker’s book is valuable not 
for what it wants to say about “reading 
communities” but, rather, for what it has 
to say about relationships among writers, 
editors, and magazine publishers in the 
long nineteenth century. As a contribution 
to the history of the book, Social Stories 
is worth a read if only for its ability to 
throw light on an understudied, but 



important, niche in nineteenth-century 
publishing.—Michael Ryan, University of 
Pennsylvania. 

The Strategic Stewardship of Cultural 
Resources: To Preserve and Protect. 
Ed. Andrea T. Merrill. New York: 
Haworth, 2003. 237p. alk. paper, cloth 
$59.95 (ISBN 0789020904); paper $39.95 
(ISBN 0789020912). LC 2002-155851. 

A collection of twenty-two papers pre-
sented at a symposium on the preserva-
tion and stewardship of cultural heritage 
resources hosted by the Library of Con-
gress in October of 2000 appears as essays 
in The Strategic Stewardship of Cultural 
Resources. Editor Andrea T. Merrill of the 
Office of Security at the Library of Con-
gress selected and arranged the essays in 
the following general groupings: 

• Challenges and risks associated 
with cultural stewardship; 

• Evaluation and strategies for secu-
rity and preservation programs; 

• Aftermath of theft, disaster, vandal-
ism, deterioration, and bad press; 

• Funding strategies for preservation 
and security; 

• Security and preservation risks and 
challenges in the digital environment; 

• Innovations in preservation and se-
curity: buildings, people, and collections. 

Given the importance of these topics 
and their valuable insights, this volume, 
copublished simultaneously as the Jour-
nal of Library Administration (vol. 38, nos. 
1–2/3–4, 2003), is recommended reading 
for anyone who works in archives, librar-
ies, museums, corporations, churches, 
and historical societies, large and small, 
and who shares the challenges addressed 
in its pages. In short, anyone who is in 
the business of safeguarding special col-
lections will benefit from these detailed 
discussions on an unpopular and fre-
quently overlooked aspect of preserva-
tion, that of security. As James Billington 

Book Reviews 365 

stated so beautifully in the preface, “we 
all share a common responsibility to 
preserve the breadth and depth of the 
human record.” 

Although not appropriate as a textbook 
because its focus is limited to certain 
aspects of archival management, any syl-
labus for a course in archives and records, 
or preservation and conservation, should 
find this volume under “Recommended” 
or “Required Readings.” At the very least, 
many of these essays should be welcomed 
into the canon of preservation literature.

 If preservation and protection didn’t go 
hand in hand, this book could easily have 
been titled Strategic Models and Measures 
for the Security of Cultural Resources. What 
seemed to be a shotgun wedding at first, 
the link between the two became clearer 
the more I read. We learn that a secure en-
vironment deals not only with safety, but 
also with carefully controlled environmen-
tal conditions, including the development 
of a solid knowledge of the structures 
that house our collections (familiarity 
with architectural details—blueprints or 
photographs); identification of unmarked 
keys; designation of responsible persons 
for various emergency response details; 
training of all staff in the ability to detect 
possible suspicious patrons; as well as 
in the detection of the tell-tale signs of 
deterioration such as mold, acidification, 
vinegar smells, insect activity, or rodent 
droppings. It is emphasized repeatedly 
that every library employee needs to un-
derstand that he or she has a role to play 
in safeguarding materials. 

Andrea Merrill has worked for years 
in the Office of Security at the Library 
of Congress, for which she prepares a 
variety of articles and reports related to 
the library’s security program. Moreover, 
she has edited several major exhibitions at 
various Smithsonian museums. However, 
Merrill’s editorial skills notwithstanding, 
nowhere in the book do we hear her voice,