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460 College & Research Libraries September 2007 

changing the very foundation of digital 
libraries and scholarly communication. 
She envisions digital libraries becoming 
more user-centered, as “bridges” are built 
to encourage the migration of digital 
objects from the digital library context 
to individual and collaborative digital 
workspaces and classrooms. 

 This work is a successful, substantial 
snapshot of digital library development, 
and one relatively unblurred for having 
been taken of a subject not only in motion, 
but motions. So much is occurring in the 
digital library world that the provision 
of an organized, coherent overview is 
more than welcome.—Kevin Cherry, East 
Carolina University. 

Doubleday, Richard B. Jan Tschichold, De-
signer: The Penguin Years. New Castle, 
Del.: Oak Knoll; Aldershot, U.K.: Lund 
Humphries, 2006. 218p. alk. paper, 
$39.95 (ISBN 1584561785; 0853319464). 
LC 2006-284193. 

On my first extended stay in the United 
Kingdom in 1966, I remember my surprise 
and chagrin at seeing row upon row of 
repetitively designed paperbacks lining 
the shelves of London booksellers. They 
were, of course, acres of Penguins—and 
all of the monotonous subspecies thereof. 
What a dull and curiously boring country 
I had found myself in: bland food, bland 
streetscapes, bland weather, and now, 
bland books—the final insult to my lively 
adolescent sensibilities. I should have 
spent my “junior year abroad” some-
where more colorful.

 Happily, I eventually grew up and 
came to appreciate, even cherish, those 
seemingly humble volumes for what they 
were and remain: masterpieces of design 
and typography. (I should also add that 
I have successfully outgrown my mono-
chromatic view of the United Kingdom.) 
The understated elegance and beauty of 
Penguins in their heyday was in no small 
measure due to the impact of one of the 
20th century’s giants of book design, Jan 
Tschichold. In a brief but eventful three 
years (1947–1950), the German typogra-

pher did what a native son could probably 
not have: brought order, discipline, and 
classical balance to the design formulary 
of the Penguin imprint. 

 It must have been diffi  cult to have 
been a German in Britain in the immediate 
postwar years. But to have been a German 
brought in to reform and overhaul the 
entire design and production operation 
of a huge, mass-market publisher must 
have been a major challenge. Tschichold 
described this challenge forthrightly: 
“The man who controls typographical 
design in an English publishing house is 
called the typographer. The typographer’s 
communication with printers and binders 
is by letter. Penguin Books uses a large 
number of printing and binding firms 
all over the British Isles. Distances are so 
great that visits even to a firm in London 
are only occasionally possible … Correc-
tions can hardly ever be made quickly … 
But now, along came a man who not only 
wanted nearly everything changed, but 
also, in this most conservative of coun-
tries, produced an entirely new set of ty-
pographical rules.” This was not a recipe 
for a long and happy stay. Indeed, his 
collaborator at Penguin, Eric Frederiksen, 
remarks in a letter printed as one of the 
appendices to this volume that Tschichold 
“knew exactly what he wanted and how 
to carry matters through in his own way: 
a rather German way and very different 
from the English, which often made him 
feel uncomfortable and lonely … I am 
sure his stay in England would have been 
happier had he only tried to understand 
better the special way of living, so con-
trary to strict German att itudes.” That 
Tschichold accomplished as much as he 
did in a mere three years only underscores 
his well-earned eminence in the history of 
design and typography.

 Created in 1935 by Allen Lane, Pen-
guin Books took as its motto, “Good 
Books Cheap.” However, the genius of 
Lane was not just in producing an af-
fordable product, but to produce a thor-
oughly “branded” one as well. Branding 
is something we hear and read much 



of today: every organization, group, 
company, and corner deli wants to wrap 
itself in some sort of “branding” design 
that makes it instantly recognizable in 
a crowd. Lane realized the power and 
allure of this decades ago, and made 
Penguin one of the first major businesses 
to exploit “branding.” The decentralized 
nature of the Penguin operation, though, 
meant that the design and execution of the 
branding was dependent on a host of local 
customs and craft conventions that could 
be charmingly idiosyncratic. Moreover, 
branding’s Achilles heel is its tendency 
to become stale. Over time it needs re-
freshing to retain its ability to att ract and 
keep a customer base. Postwar Britain 
encouraged recovery and regeneration 
across a broad front. Lane, ever the astute 
businessman, seized the moment.

 What Jan Tschichold brought to the 
task of reforming design and production 
standards and practices at Penguin were 
two things: a thorough grounding in the 
history of printing that expressed itself in 
a profound love of all that seemed true 
and right in the past and a Continental 
instinct for centralization and standard-
ization. In an article in the Penguin house 
organ, Signature (1947), Tschichold noted: 
“The typographer must use the accumu-
lated experience of typographic history 
when giving instructions about chapter-
openings, or paragraphing, or the layout 
of plays or poetry. Only the most careful 
and critical study of the best typography 
of the past will enable him to notice the 
details that make such a diff erence to 
the whole.” He saw himself, in his role 
at Penguin, as working directly in a line 
that went from Aldus through Elzevir to 
Didot. Only the best of the past could save 
the present from a permanent descent 
into shabby, inferior products. Closer to 
home, the model provided by the Insel 
Verlag earlier in the century was proof 
that quantity need not trump quality. The 
genius of Tschichold was to find a way 
of doing this within the constraints of 
Penguin’s branding and format require-
ments. He was not given a lot of wiggle 

Book Reviews 461 

room, but he made the most of what was 
handed to him.

 Richard B. Doubleday’s account of 
Tschichold’s interlude at Penguin does not 
work well as history. For that, the reader 
should still rely on the dependable work 
of Tschichold’s younger colleague, Ruari 
McLean. A designer by profession, Dou-
bleday teaches in the Fine Arts program 
at Boston University. He has no real sense 
of how history “works” and no apparent 
interest in narrative. The business of the 
book barely inserts its base agenda into 
the text. The author glides over or totally 
ignores his protagonist’s actual experi-
ences at Penguin in favor of pott ed sum-
maries of printing history. But he can be 
forgiven all this because his real interest, 
as a designer and a teacher of design, is in 
the books themselves. Much of his com-
mentary on Tschichold’s actual work is 
little more than a summary of fonts, point 
sizes, layout, and the like and will be of 
little interest to those outside his métier. 
However, he—and Oak Knoll—have 
larded the book with a bountiful harvest 
of marvelous plates that allow the reader 
to appreciate the skill, care, and exquisite 
craftsmanship of a master designer. This 
is a book where the plates themselves 
must stand in for thousands of words.

 The amount of work Tschichold took 
on at Penguin was staggering. Not only 
did he have to redesign the core Penguin 
lines, he also had to take care of the nu-
merous ancillary branches as well: Peli-
can, King Penguin, Penguin Classics, and 
the multitude of expanded specialty series 
that targeted niche audiences in music, 
travel, architecture, poetry, contemporary 
issues, arts and crafts, reference, and 
other subjects. Each had its own distinct 
“look and feel” within the larger system 
of Penguin branding. And to do this 
in the context of a group of hidebound 
professions and trades that did what 
they did from time immemorial is truly 
quite extraordinary. While Tschichold 
pleaded poverty as his reason for leaving 
Penguin and the United Kingdom—the 
pound had collapsed—one suspects that 



462 College & Research Libraries 

Switzerland, a less challenging, more 
welcoming world, might have been the 
greater impetus. 

 Doubleday’s book comes with a suite 
of appendices culled from the archives 
and a full bibliography of and about 
Tschichold.—Michael Ryan, Columbia 
University. 

Edwards, G. Edward, and Patricia 
Layzell Ward. Leadership Basics for 
Librarians and Information Professionals. 
Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2007. 246p. 
alk. paper, $40 (ISBN 0810852292). LC 
2006-26885. 

According to a recent New York Times 
article, more than 25 percent of librar-
ians will reach the customary retirement 
age of 65 by 2009. Many respondents to 
a recent ALA survey are not willing to 
wait even that long: almost 30 percent of 
those who plan on retiring by 2010 are 
ages 45 to 54. This means that many of 
us may soon find ourselves, by accident 
or ambition, in a leadership position. If 
you are reading this and thinking, “But I 
took that management course in library 
school,” this book, which explains that 
management and leadership are not the 
same, is for you. It includes discussions 
of leadership, borrowing terms and ad-
vice from business gurus such as Peter 
Drucker, and emphasizes the qualities 
of—and gives practical advice for—lead-
ers in the library profession. The book’s 
three sections are titled “Background,” 
“Developing Leadership Skills,” and “The 
Experience of Leadership.” The inclusion 
of practical tips for the workplace, in addi-
tion to advice for personal development, 
make the work an eff ective combination 
of self-help and textbook.

 Librarians Evans and Ward open 
by explaining the diff erences between 
a manager and a leader, and many of 
the contrasts are nuanced and thought 
provoking (for example, “The manager 
does things right; the leader does the right 
thing”). They emphasize a vexing prob-
lem: though most leaders come from 
the ranks of management, the qualities 

September 2007 

required in the two positions are almost 
complete opposites. Acknowledging that 
leaders come from diff erent backgrounds, 
the authors inform the prospective or new 
leader what to do, using general tips that 
could work in many situations, starting 
with how to weather others’ expectations. 
Sometimes they offer unusual advice such 
as asking the opinions of ex- and nonusers 
of the service or department. 

In this first section, the authors ana-
lyze the traits of a good leader including 
traditional academic dissections of the 
field such as the Behavioral Approach. 
This is followed by indirect advice from 
Rudy Giuliani and Irish explorer Ernest 
Shackleton on how to lead in the post-
9/11 world. The traits mentioned serve 
as a checklist of qualities to develop or 
hone. Along with inner strengths, the 
authors wisely mention practicalities, 
such as frontline experience, that will 
help in gaining the acceptance of others. 
Emphasizing that a good leader brings 
out the best in his or her followers, they 
describe the differing characteristics of 
the various generations in the workplace 
today, and how these parties can be en-
couraged to accommodate each other. 
While Evans and Ward maintain that 
“everyone has leadership potential,” they 
acknowledge, in a section that asks, “Do 
You Want to Become a Leader?,” that it 
is not for everyone. They describe the 
difficulties involved (such as the eff ect on 
one’s personal life) and provide tips and 
tools for self-assessment. 

Sprinkled throughout the book are in-
formation boxes: those labeled “Try this” 
invite readers to, for example, consider 
more and less successful leaders; others 
quote or paraphrase “The Expert[s]”; 
“Check This Out” boxes contain anno-
tated citations; and other random boxes 
are labeled as appropriate.

 The book’s no-nonsense approach 
continues in the second section, which 
begins with an explanation on how to lead 
a team, and continues with information 
on developing one’s political skills (start 
on day one!), and how to think and act