Reviews.indd


192 College & Research Libraries March 2008 

supports European culture and invention 
and that advertising (in these media and 
on the Web) can be problematic, given 
the naïveté of some users. Jeanneney does 
not reject public-private partnerships out 
of hand but clearly is in favor of giving 
primary control of intellectual capital to 
public institutions and governments. In 
a chapter entitled “Hyperpower,” Jean-
neney links Google’s potential dominance 
with U.S. political hegemony. He com-
ments on the Bush presidency, American 
support for the death penalty, the invasion 
of Baghdad and the looting and loss of 
Iraq’s cultural treasures, and the United 
States’ general go-it-alone attitude on 
issues such as the environment and the 
international criminal court. Jeanneney 
is wearing his politics on his sleeve here, 
I think, but he uses all this to suggest that 
the United States and Europe are fun-
damentally different, and that a similar 
dominance of the Internet by Google will 
lead to “unilateral control over the think-
ing of the world,” and even censorship. 
Europe must present some competition 
to Google and to the dominance of the 
English language across the globe, not just 
through digitization but also through the 
creation of a European search engine. 

Another of Jeanneney’s prime concerns 
is Google’s “apparent indifference to … 
long-term preservation and conserva-
tion.” This, he says, has long been the 
mission of public institutions, and Jean-
neney challenges them to take on what 
Google cannot or will not. Google and, by 
extension, the Internet are experiencing 
the “arrogance” of all new media, which 
believe that they will sweep away all that 
came before. What Jeanneney off ers is 
a “cultural and industrial project” that 
builds upon the existing strengths of our 
cultural institutions and the people who 
work in them. Instead of mass digitiza-
tion, Jeanneney suggests careful selec-
tion of materials; instead of “massive 
amounts of disorganized information,” 
he proposes the Ariadne’s thread of clas-
sification of some sort. National libraries, 
publishers, government funding agencies, 

and all book people need to be involved 
in this effort. 

Some readers of this book will not be 
convinced by Jeanneney. Some readers will 
fail to see any nuance in his argument. At 
times, he is too Eurocentric (and perhaps 
a bit defensive?); at times, this reader won-
dered whether we have the time, money, 
and luxury to proceed in the ideal fashion 
Jeanneney proposes. But Jeanneney’s book 
invites librarians and the library profession 
to consider the ways in which the Google 
project has the potential to transform 
research, reading, and notions of intellec-
tual property for good or ill. Will Google 
become a version of Borges’ “Library of 
Babel,” or make information universally 
available to those whose call it is to shape 
information into knowledge?—Cecile M. 
Jagodzinski, Indiana University. 

Markham, Sheila. A Book of Booksellers: 
Conversations with the Antiquarian Book 
Trade 1991–2003. 1st pbk. ed. London: 
Sheila Markham Rare Books; New Cas-
tle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2007. 323p. $29.95 
(ISBN 1584562072). LC 2007-18615. 

There is a long tradition of anecdotal his-
tories of British booksellers, a profession 
which from the beginning seems to have 
attracted eccentrics in inexhaustible vari-
ety. An early specimen of the genre was 
the autobiographical Life and Errors of John 
Dunton, Late Citizen of London, published in 
1705, a gossipy and highly diverting look 
at the world 300 years ago through the 
eyes of a widely traveled London book-
seller. Recalling his visit to colonial Boston 
in the 1680s, Dunton by turns praises and 
lambastes the booksellers, printers, and 
other merchants he meets there. Typical of 
Dunton’s mixture of praise and invective is 
his note about Minheer (=Mr.) Brunning, 
“a Dutch bookseller from Holland”: 

He never decries a Book, because 
’tis not of his own printing; there 
are some Men that will run down 
the most Elaborate Pieces, only 
because they had none of their MID-
WIFERY to bring ’em into publick 



Book Reviews 193 

view, and yet shall give the greatest 
Encomiums to the most Nauseous 
Trash, when they had the hap to be 
concern’d in it. 

In other older works on the trade, we 
discover that London booksellers of the 
17th and early 18th centuries were as ob-
sessive about their calling as they still are 
today. In Chambers’ Book of Days (1862–64), 
we read this characterization of Dunton’s 
second wife, Sarah: “She seemed to be his 
first wife in a new edition, corrected and 
enlarged, or rather, in a new binding.” 

The genre lives on—as does the pro-
fession, the Internet notwithstanding. 
The present volume is a collection of 
fifty interviews with mostly English an-
tiquarian booksellers (though Americans 
and Japanese are also represented) con-
ducted between 1991 and 2003 by Sheila 
Markham, herself a prominent rare book 
seller in London. Peculiar anecdotes and 
unconventional personalities abound 
in this volume, no less than they do in 
Dunton’s work of three centuries ago. 
If there were any doubt in the reader’s 
mind as to what is in store upon open-
ing this book, it is dispelled on the first 
page of the volume’s very fi rst interview, 
a conversation with the curmudgeonly 
Peter Eaton (1914–1993), one of London’s 
most successful and infl uential postwar 
booksellers. Talking about the good old 
days, when the “pickings” were good and 

Index to advertisers 
ACRL 187 
ALA-APA 116 
ALA Joblist 198 
AMS Press 154 
Annual Reviews 100 
Archival Products 186 
CHOICE 103 
E-Image Data cover 4 
Emery-Pratt 174 
IGI Global 99 
Perry Dean Architects 131 
Serial Solutions cover 3 
U. of Arizona Libraries cover 2 

the life of the bookseller was easy, Eaton 
recalls a conversation he had with 

…the librarian of Rochdale, where 
they had a statue of Hitler in the 
town square, and people used to 
throw books at Hitler for a waste 
paper drive. This librarian picked 
out one or two incunabula like 
that. There were a lot of pickings in 
those days. 

Or in the interview with Norfolk 
bookseller Simon Gough, who claims 
he “left school somewhat under a cloud 
after blowing up the sewers.” Later, at an-
other school, Gough “brought the safety 
curtain down on the Principal’s head,” 
for the man “was being an intolerable 
bore and asking for worse.” Can all these 
stories possibly be true? But more to the 
point: does it really matter? If they help 
us capture the personalities of these fifty 
remarkable individuals? Si non è vero, è ben 
trovato, and weaving a good tale is part of 
the bookseller’s craft. One is reminded of 
Geraldine McCaughrean’s 2001 novel A 
Pack of Lies, in which a mysterious man 
helping out in an antique shop persuades 
customers to buy old pieces of junk by 
embedding them in fascinating stories. 
It’s the stories that the customers take with 
them as they leave the shop: the artifacts 
themselves are almost incidental to the 
aura that surrounds them. 

Several of those interviewed consid-
ered librarianship at some point—and 
chose not to pursue it. Anthony Rota 
(whose 1998 book Apart from the Text I 
reviewed on these pages several years 
ago) reveals that a couple of library posts 
have “tempted” him over the years: “I 
would enjoy building a collection with 
someone else’s money.” (Is that what we 
librarians do?) And apparently Barbara 
Grigor-Taylor’s mother urged her to be-
come a librarian rather than embark on a 
risky career in the bookselling trade. But “I 
wouldn’t, because I’m a confi rmed retail-
er.” Almost everyone interviewed emerges 
like John Dunton does from his memoirs: 



194 College & Research Libraries 

as impassioned, opinionated, devoted 
to the trade and, with few exceptions, 
blessed with narrative abilities and an 
extraordinary sense of humor. With Eric 
Moore—founder in 1965 of Eric T. Moore 
Books in Hitchin, Hertfordshire—readers 
of these interviews will probably agree 
“that bookselling is the most humane, 
sociable, ill-organized, yet absorbing form 
of commerce to be found anywhere.” 

So, is “ill-organized” a distinguishing 
characteristic of the bookseller profession 
and even a source of pride? In one of the 
funniest but also most illuminating inter-
views of this highly enjoyable volume— 
Markham’s conversation with Eric Korn, 
the London bookman once known for his 
“Remainders” column in The Times Liter-
ary Supplement—we come to understand 
that “ill-organized” may in fact be just the 
self-deprecating way in which the very 
best booksellers describe how they lead 
a customer from book to seemingly unre-
lated book, often based on only a single 
minor physical or textual detail the books 
have in common—“minor,” that is, except 
in the eye of the prospective customer. 
Korn, asked about the “unusual degree of 
free association” that seems to character-
ize his thinking and writing style, suggests 
that this is “the one advantage of having 
an undisciplined mind…. If you’re heavily 
structured …it’s harder to fi nd profitable 
cross-fertilization.” Peter Eaton celebrated 
his own powers of association by creating 
whimsical exhibits of curiosa in his book-
shop, displaying things like “the clock that 
belonged to the people who put the engine 
in the boat Shelley drowned in.” (Or was 
this example just made up?) 

Crisscrossing associative fi laments link 
the thousands of books on the bookseller’s 
shelves in a dense net of intertextuality, a 
net that may exist solely in the bookseller’s 
mind and can be only inadequately rep-
resented or replaced by catalog searches 
or even keyword searching in a full-text 
environment. This may explain, at least 
in part, the disdain many antiquarian 
booksellers have for computers and the 
Internet. It’s not primarily the economic 

March 2008 

survival aspect that is at work here. 
(Though Korn does quip that admitting 
computers into bookshops is “rather like 
turkeys cultivating cranberries.”) In the 
end, it’s the particular kind of wilderness 
guide service that only a truly knowledge-
able bookseller can provide that explains 
the resistance of the guild to “embrace” 
change. This refrain is heard throughout 
Markham’s book. Nigel Burwood, owner 
of Any Amount of Books on London’s 
Charing Cross Road, asserts that it “would 
have been better for the book trade if the 
Internet had never been invented.” Yet all 
the same, Burwood and other booksellers 
interviewed on the pages of this book have 
leapt into the new environment with both 
feet, since “because it has been invented, 
you have to join in.” And they have done 
so very successfully, while still seeking 
to attract customers to their shops in the 
physical world, where many of the most 
fascinating conversations—and exciting 
discoveries—still take place. 

This book was self-published in a 
hardbound edition limited to 500 copies 
in 2004. It may still be available through 
Sheila Markham’s Web site, but it is hard 
to find through the usual online ordering 
channels. The new paperback edition, by 
contrast, is both available and affordable. 
Those who want to read the interviews 
but place no value on owning the book 
may find many of them at the Sheila 
Markham Rare Books Web site, includ-
ing the interviews with Peter Eaton, Eric 
Korn, Nigel Burwood, and Simon Gough. 
Though they are unlinked, Google knows 
they are there; and librarians, using pas-
sages quoted in this review, should have 
no problem finding them. Nothing beats 
owning the printed book, however, for 
pulling all of this material together and 
keeping it conveniently and reliably in 
one place for a very long time. Physical 
books are like that.—Jeff rey Garrett , North-
western University Library. 

Wiegand, Shirley A. and Wayne A. 
Wiegand. Books on Trial: Red Scare in 
the Heartland. Norman: University