reviews.indd


Book Reviews 

Briscoe, Peter. The Best Read Man in 
France: A Cautionary Tale. Rockville, 
Md.: Borgo Press (an imprint of Wild-
side Press), 2007. 119p. $12.95 (ISBN 
1434400808). 

No one would deny that the “digital turn” 
taken by libraries over the last twenty 
years has deeply transformed today’s 
bibliothecal landscape. However, com-
mentators on the current library scene 
differ greatly in assessing the implications 
of this transformation for the general 
cultural role of libraries. Some view the 
increasing emphasis on provision of 
electronic resources as an opportunity 
for libraries to have a hand in shaping 
the course of the latest “information age,” 
or, at least, as a concession that they must 
make to a technology-driven environment 
if they are to remain relevant. Others 
fear that the shift in libraries’ focus from 
the printed page to the computer screen 
might contribute to untoward cultural 
consequences such as a decline in reading; 
loss of contact with the cultural heritage 
mediated by books; and, more generally, 
the etiolation of our sensibilities and val-
ues. Peter Briscoe, associate university 
librarian emeritus at the University of 
California, Riverside, decidedly belongs 
to the latter camp. He has previously 
voiced his unease about the increased 
digitization of libraries and affi  rmed the 
importance of careful reading in a handful 
of articles and a brief monograph entitled 
Reading the Map of Knowledge: The Art of 
Being a Librarian (2001). In the book under 
review, he presents a heartfelt critique of 
the digitization of libraries and defense 
of traditional book culture in the form of 
a novella embodying a “cautionary tale 
about the demise of the printed book, 
the decline of reading, and the confl ict of 
print and digital culture.” 

The novella centers on the fi gure of 
Michael Ashe, an antiquarian book-
seller living in Los Angeles. Erudite, 

worldly, and something of 
an epicure, Ashe specializes 
in selling rare French- and 
Spanish-language publica-
tions, a line of work that 
takes him frequently abroad 
to the bookshops of Paris 
and Mexico: a bibliophile as well as a 
businessman, he admires and maintains a 
personal collection of works by and about 
the great seventeenth-century French 
savant, bibliophile, and librarian Gabriel 
Naudé. As the story opens, Ashe is dis-
concerted by the fact that he is receiving 
fewer orders from customers, especially 
libraries. A visit to the local university 
library is symptomatic of this decline: its 
avuncular and scholarly foreign acquisi-
tions librarian has been replaced by a 
young, ambitious, and technocratic up-
and-comer enamored of things digital, 
whose mission is to shift the focus of the 
library’s acquisitions budget from books 
to electronic resources. As the business 
climate continues to deteriorate, Ashe 
receives an unexpected offer from this 
librarian to buy a collection of French 
scientific works on the Americas so that 
its antique tomes can serve as a cosmetic 
backdrop to a public ceremony celebrat-
ing a major donation to the university 
library for new “state-of-the-art” facilities. 
Despite misgivings, he agrees to sell; the 
ceremony succeeds splendidly; and he 
finds himself entering into a personal 
relationship with the young librarian. 
All goes well until Ashe learns that his 
new girlfriend is overseeing a project to 
digitize the collection that he had sold 
to the university library, a process that 
will require the permanent disbanding 
of some of the volumes. He must now 
choose between his bibliophilic principles 
and his relationship with a lover whose 
values are diametrically opposed to his 
own. Ashe maintains his integrity with 
an act of resistance that saves the collec-

554 



Book Reviews 555 

tion, and, as the novella closes, we find 
him more committed than ever to his 
precarious bookselling business and in an 
incipient relationship with a woman who 
appreciates and shares his bibliophilic 
passions. 

This simple plot serves as the frame-
work for neatly interwoven episodic 
vignettes and dialogues between Ashe 
and other characters within which the 
primary themes of the novella unfold. 
Several episodes strongly affirm the 
importance of books as carriers of a deep 
cultural heritage that not only serve as 
tangible witnesses of a fascinating and 
instructive past, but as valuable sources 
for enriching our own outlooks on the 
world. Others assert the value of book col-
lections and present them as extensions 
of their owners’ personalities. Reading 
is extolled as a “way of knowledge” that 
refines our minds and cultivates our sen-
sibilities. Indeed, books and the culture 
surrounding them are portrayed as a 
necessary component of a truly humane 
way of life, a point made by the warm and 
gracious personal relationships obtain-
ing between the bibliophiles in the story 
and their appreciation of the fi ner things 
in life. By contrast, the electronic media 
are presented as purveyors of a shal-
low and mediocre culture productive of 
“aliterates” and “barbarians” with short 
attention spans and an undiscriminating 
desire for the latest information regard-
less of quality. 

The tension between print and digi-
tal culture is thus presented as a battle 
between the forces of cultural light and 
darkness, with libraries serving as a key 
institutional player within this struggle. 
Briscoe’s basic message seems to be that, 
whereas libraries have historically been 
the natural allies of the bibliophilic forces 
of light, their recent turn toward fund-
ing for digital resources to the detriment 
of book acquisition and preservation is 
turning them into abettors of the forces of 
darkness. He attributes this development 
to libraries’ acquiescence to the economic 
power of the electronically-oriented 

“information industry,” which is work-
ing solely in the interests of “corporate 
America.” As a consequence, libraries, 
once “cathedral[s] of knowledge” that 
counted preservation of the cultural re-
cords encoded in print as a cardinal point 
of their mission, are, in his view, aban-
doning a traditional core function and so 
betraying their own basic values. 

The question of what the basic values 
of a librarian should be is another central 
theme in the novella. Briscoe adroitly 
handles it in a series of historical “flash-
backs” vividly recounting the life and 
character of Ashe’s hero, Gabriel Naudé 
(1600–1653). A scholar-librarian dubbed 
by the encyclopedist Pierre Bayle (1647– 
1706) as the “best read man in France,” 
Naudé is today perhaps best known 
among librarians both as the author of 
Advis pour Dresser une Bibliothèque (1627), 
a classic treatise on establishing a com-
prehensive library that covers collection 
development, book organization, circula-
tion, and dealings with patrons, and as 
the motive force behind the collection of 
some 40,000 volumes for the Bibliothèque 
Mazarine, which, at his urging, became 
the first library in France to be open to 
the public (1643). Briscoe presents Naudé 
as an exemplum of what he believes the 
ideal librarian should be—erudite and a 
lover of books; open-minded in his rejec-
tion of censorship; public-spirited in his 
awareness of his cultural responsibility 
qua librarian; and utt erly devoted to the 
collection of books entrusted to his care. 
In elevating the life of a seventeeth-cen-
tury French scholar-librarian as a heroic 
example to twenty-fi rst-century readers, 
he is, in effect, arguing that there are pe-
rennial values of librarianship transcend-
ing any particular socio-historical context 
and inviting present-day librarians to ask 
themselves if they are living up to those 
ideals. This is not the only place where 
Briscoe holds up the past as a mirror to the 
present: his recounting of the dispersal of 
the Mazarin library in 1651 in the wake 
of political troubles and Naudé’s desper-
ate efforts to keep the collection intact is 



556 College & Research Libraries 

clearly intended to serve as a parallel to 
the virtual despoiling of libraries that he 
believes is occurring today. 

From the foregoing remarks it should 
be obvious that Briscoe has written a 
provocative novella, one that does not 
shrink from addressing diffi  cult issues 
about the fate of books and the traditional 
culture-preserving role of libraries and 
librarians in the digital age. In many 
respects, The Best Read Man in France 
is too provocative for its own good: its 
Manichean vision of the relationship 
between print culture and digital culture 
is rather simplistic and often threatens to 
slide into caricature; its jeremiads about 
the decline of intellectual standards are 
overdrawn; and its polemical and elitist 
undertones, rather unappealing. If one 
reads it not as a tract for the times, but 
as the work of fiction that it is, one will 
find that, despite its somewhat uneven 
execution, it has much to off er—vivid and 
loving descriptions of diff erent aspects 
of the world of antiquarian books and 
its denizens; a kaleidoscopic selection of 
interesting bibliographical and historical 
lore; and a sympathetic portrayal of a 
historically important and fascinating, yet 
all-too-neglected pioneer in librarianship, 
all contained within a story writt en in 
brisk prose that can be dispatched within 
a couple of hours. However, the whole is 
definitely less than the sum of its parts 
and it is unlikely that readers will find 
this book to be more than a brief diversion 
from more substantial fictional and non-
fictional fare.—Thomas Dousa, University 
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

Clark, William. Academic Charisma and 
the Origins of the Research University. 
Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago 
Press, 2006. 662p. alk. paper, $45 (ISBN 
0226109216). LC 2005-15152. 

Earlier reviews have made much of 
Clark’s opening statement, “this is an odd 
book.” It is not. It is a diffi  cult, frustrating, 
and long book, but not odd. The book first 
was born as a doctoral dissertation for 
UCLA in 1986, but has little of the stylistic 

November 2007 

taint that typifies such productions. Wil-
liam Clark examined the development of 
the German university from the medieval 
period to the nineteenth century—a de-
velopment that has had profound effects 
on the evolution of universities through-
out the world and particularly in the 
United States. 

The modern American university has 
been described as a nineteenth-century 
German university atop a seventeenth-
century English college. This description 
is still a reasonably accurate characteriza-
tion. Undergraduate education lives on 
the same grounds as graduate research 
in an uneasy relationship in which the 
purposes and priorities of both are an-
tithetical. The values of undergraduate 
programs are education. Those of gradu-
ate programs are research. 

Prior to the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century in the United States, 
students seeking education beyond the 
ritualized classical curriculum in Ameri-
can colleges had to look to Europe, and 
particularly to Germany, for something 
beyond the strict confines of Greek, Latin, 
and mathematics passed on to succeeding 
generations of students through memo-
rization and recitation in the classroom. 
Through the nineteenth century, thou-
sands of Americans went to Germany to 
complete their education in the German 
state universities and found there a new 
vision of learning and freedom that was 
impossible in the American colleges of the 
time. American colleges had developed a 
curriculum that inexorably led from the 
basic introductory classes to the culminat-
ing class in moral philosophy in which 
the president of the college demonstrated 
inevitably that all of human knowledge 
leads to whatever dogma were pro-
pounded by the protestant denomina-
tion controlling the college. Americans 
studying in Germany, on the other hand, 
found a freedom from this predictability 
in the skeptical inquiry promoted by the 
research focus of the universities. 

From the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, criticism of the collegiate struc-