Since the advent of scholarly publishing many years ago scholars have relied upon the existence of rationalized venues for their scien tific research and scholarship. Indeed, professional life, if not exist ence, may well depend upon a foundation free of destructive intru sion or philistine interests. As libraries have attempted to cope with rising costs of serials and library service, journals have seen massive increases in costs along a long spectrum of economic measurement. Stresses and concerted attempts at keeping the economic whirlwinds from blowing away the temple of knowledge have left many librar ies holding their own, only to wonder within the inner sanctum what remains to be seen. Not long ago a masterful and deeply committed attempt to meet at least some of academe's needs led to a rebirth, in nearly Alexandrine terms, of scholarship, at least as it manifested itself in journal form. Many journals have inhabited the shelving ranges of many libraries only to be lost, in a purely illusory sense. Dusty and lost to memory, titles such as Mind and the American His torical Review were relegated to a shadow life on shelves and in li brary facilities not often visited. Today such is no longer the case?and for very excellent reasons. If the above scenario is a little overdrawn, it remains closer to the truth than not. As JSTOR has grown in use and more titles have been added at specific intervals, the richly layered database
{"title":"Tradition and Protean Nature--Journals and Scholarly Communication: A Review Essay","authors":"J. Hérubel","doi":"10.1353/LAC.2006.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/LAC.2006.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Since the advent of scholarly publishing many years ago scholars have relied upon the existence of rationalized venues for their scien tific research and scholarship. Indeed, professional life, if not exist ence, may well depend upon a foundation free of destructive intru sion or philistine interests. As libraries have attempted to cope with rising costs of serials and library service, journals have seen massive increases in costs along a long spectrum of economic measurement. Stresses and concerted attempts at keeping the economic whirlwinds from blowing away the temple of knowledge have left many librar ies holding their own, only to wonder within the inner sanctum what remains to be seen. Not long ago a masterful and deeply committed attempt to meet at least some of academe's needs led to a rebirth, in nearly Alexandrine terms, of scholarship, at least as it manifested itself in journal form. Many journals have inhabited the shelving ranges of many libraries only to be lost, in a purely illusory sense. Dusty and lost to memory, titles such as Mind and the American His torical Review were relegated to a shadow life on shelves and in li brary facilities not often visited. Today such is no longer the case?and for very excellent reasons. If the above scenario is a little overdrawn, it remains closer to the truth than not. As JSTOR has grown in use and more titles have been added at specific intervals, the richly layered database","PeriodicalId":81853,"journal":{"name":"Libraries & culture","volume":"41 1","pages":"233 - 257"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/LAC.2006.0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66797644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The figures range from portraits of notable individuals connected to the library, such as the eponymous Harry Elkins Widener, to architectural schematics, outmoded library documents such as a “stack pass,” and, of course, interior and exterior shots of the Widener itself. The illustrations serve to make the accompanying narrative more concrete and tangible than it might otherwise have been. In general, this is an interesting and well-executed book. The text suffers from uneven proofing, as evidenced by the surprising number of spelling errors that slipped through. A more serious issue has to do with a lacuna in the information. The book repeatedly draws attention to the fact that for much of its early history the library was closed to women (vii, 86, 113, 115, 126). It therefore seems a curious omission that it never mentions when or how these restrictions were lifted. Suddenly on page 143 a quoted letter refers to “the coeducational nature of the reading room” as an established fact, which is the first that the reader learns of this development. Similarly, the changes wrought by the opening of the stacks are discussed without giving any more specific information about the circumstances of that change than that it happened at some unspecified time during the tenure of Keyes Metcalfe. Despite these oversights, Widener: Biography of a Library will be useful to anyone interested in the history of Harvard, the development of large academic libraries in the twentieth century, or the Widener in particular. If the tone is more emotional than analytical, that is no great flaw in a book intended to celebrate the Widener’s turbulent years of service. The author writes, “Widener’s story is that of higher education in the midst of the social, political, and cultural tumult of the twentieth century; it is a story best told by more accomplished voices than mine” (x). Perhaps one of those voices will take up this modest refrain and raise it to further heights.
{"title":"A True Politician: Rebecca Browning Rankin, Municipal Reference Librarian of the City of New York, 1920-1952 (review)","authors":"P. A. Jones","doi":"10.1353/lac.2006.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lac.2006.0018","url":null,"abstract":"The figures range from portraits of notable individuals connected to the library, such as the eponymous Harry Elkins Widener, to architectural schematics, outmoded library documents such as a “stack pass,” and, of course, interior and exterior shots of the Widener itself. The illustrations serve to make the accompanying narrative more concrete and tangible than it might otherwise have been. In general, this is an interesting and well-executed book. The text suffers from uneven proofing, as evidenced by the surprising number of spelling errors that slipped through. A more serious issue has to do with a lacuna in the information. The book repeatedly draws attention to the fact that for much of its early history the library was closed to women (vii, 86, 113, 115, 126). It therefore seems a curious omission that it never mentions when or how these restrictions were lifted. Suddenly on page 143 a quoted letter refers to “the coeducational nature of the reading room” as an established fact, which is the first that the reader learns of this development. Similarly, the changes wrought by the opening of the stacks are discussed without giving any more specific information about the circumstances of that change than that it happened at some unspecified time during the tenure of Keyes Metcalfe. Despite these oversights, Widener: Biography of a Library will be useful to anyone interested in the history of Harvard, the development of large academic libraries in the twentieth century, or the Widener in particular. If the tone is more emotional than analytical, that is no great flaw in a book intended to celebrate the Widener’s turbulent years of service. The author writes, “Widener’s story is that of higher education in the midst of the social, political, and cultural tumult of the twentieth century; it is a story best told by more accomplished voices than mine” (x). Perhaps one of those voices will take up this modest refrain and raise it to further heights.","PeriodicalId":81853,"journal":{"name":"Libraries & culture","volume":"41 1","pages":"273 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/lac.2006.0018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66797333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
dates from 1836. The American literary list thus parallels the rise of an emerging society where raw democratic energies and all-consuming material ambitions swept aside static hierarchy and received opinions. Such lists embody a kind of political self-mastery. Taking his cue from Emerson, Whitman in Leaves of Grass embodied a poetics of listing that is rich in sensual detail and incantatory exuberance. With Whitman, the poem as literary artifact became an unprecedented space flung open to objects, details, and references whose artful inclusivity, says Belknap, “becomes universally welcoming, open to all facets of life, according to his vision of a plural America” (74). Whitman’s richly modulated catalogs are, with Emerson’s Essays, radical literary expressions of the American democratic experiment. The lists in Moby Dick, by contrast, supply material density as a counterpoint to an unseen core of metaphysical nothingness. With his lists and symbolism Melville accentuated a Gnostic parable with the practical concerns of a nineteenth-century ship’s chandler and factoids about whales and whaling. And with regard to whales and the symbolism of whiteness, Belknap points out how Ishmael represses the association of whiteness with a book’s blank page despite the fact that “he has elsewhere been so conscious of the figurative aspects of books, swimming through libraries, bibliographically classifying whales” (163– 64). Here again, lists and listing establish connections among the most disparate spheres of existence, from browsing quiet library stacks to witnessing (and surviving) terrifying maritime events. Thoreau’s keen interest in natural history and his familiarity with classical languages helped him transform botanical observations into remarkably thorough lists and catalogs. The ordering of direct observations represented the kind of attentiveness to life and nature that signaled Thoreau’s rejection of occupational practicality (or professionalism) in favor of private self-fashioning. To the nominalism of bare public fact Thoreau opposed particularized facts, facts that “tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought. . . . [T]hey shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic” (197). In both Walden and his journals the catalog and the list record the evolution of an interiorized moral economy rooted in careful observations of the natural world. The list of American writers influenced by Thoreau would require a separate bibliography of American prose in various genres. Belknap has written an engaging survey of lists, listing, and textual catalogs, paying particular attention to their significance in literary production during the American Renaissance. As a rhetorical device the list enabled Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau to transcribe and reorder both private and public experiences. The enormous expressive range of these lists and catalogs—political, symbolic, factual, mythological, scientific, literary, notational—also m
{"title":"Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (review)","authors":"B. W. Oliver","doi":"10.1353/LAC.2006.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/LAC.2006.0029","url":null,"abstract":"dates from 1836. The American literary list thus parallels the rise of an emerging society where raw democratic energies and all-consuming material ambitions swept aside static hierarchy and received opinions. Such lists embody a kind of political self-mastery. Taking his cue from Emerson, Whitman in Leaves of Grass embodied a poetics of listing that is rich in sensual detail and incantatory exuberance. With Whitman, the poem as literary artifact became an unprecedented space flung open to objects, details, and references whose artful inclusivity, says Belknap, “becomes universally welcoming, open to all facets of life, according to his vision of a plural America” (74). Whitman’s richly modulated catalogs are, with Emerson’s Essays, radical literary expressions of the American democratic experiment. The lists in Moby Dick, by contrast, supply material density as a counterpoint to an unseen core of metaphysical nothingness. With his lists and symbolism Melville accentuated a Gnostic parable with the practical concerns of a nineteenth-century ship’s chandler and factoids about whales and whaling. And with regard to whales and the symbolism of whiteness, Belknap points out how Ishmael represses the association of whiteness with a book’s blank page despite the fact that “he has elsewhere been so conscious of the figurative aspects of books, swimming through libraries, bibliographically classifying whales” (163– 64). Here again, lists and listing establish connections among the most disparate spheres of existence, from browsing quiet library stacks to witnessing (and surviving) terrifying maritime events. Thoreau’s keen interest in natural history and his familiarity with classical languages helped him transform botanical observations into remarkably thorough lists and catalogs. The ordering of direct observations represented the kind of attentiveness to life and nature that signaled Thoreau’s rejection of occupational practicality (or professionalism) in favor of private self-fashioning. To the nominalism of bare public fact Thoreau opposed particularized facts, facts that “tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought. . . . [T]hey shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic” (197). In both Walden and his journals the catalog and the list record the evolution of an interiorized moral economy rooted in careful observations of the natural world. The list of American writers influenced by Thoreau would require a separate bibliography of American prose in various genres. Belknap has written an engaging survey of lists, listing, and textual catalogs, paying particular attention to their significance in literary production during the American Renaissance. As a rhetorical device the list enabled Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau to transcribe and reorder both private and public experiences. The enormous expressive range of these lists and catalogs—political, symbolic, factual, mythological, scientific, literary, notational—also m","PeriodicalId":81853,"journal":{"name":"Libraries & culture","volume":"42 1","pages":"284 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/LAC.2006.0029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66798202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During her short life (1844–66) Fanny Seward, daughter of Lincoln's secretary of state, William Henry Seward, spent considerable time and energy on her personal library, her diaries, and her creative writing. Fanny Seward's reading was, she suggests in her writing, her dearest pleasure. In her diaries she included lists of books acquired and read, critical remarks on them, and fragments of prose and poetry reflecting her deepening knowledge of literature. This case study of a privileged girl in New York State during the American Civil War years explores interconnections among the many bookish strands in her life and social circle.
{"title":"Growing up with Books: Fanny Seward's Book Collecting, Reading, and Writing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York State","authors":"D. Stam","doi":"10.1353/LAC.2006.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/LAC.2006.0033","url":null,"abstract":"During her short life (1844–66) Fanny Seward, daughter of Lincoln's secretary of state, William Henry Seward, spent considerable time and energy on her personal library, her diaries, and her creative writing. Fanny Seward's reading was, she suggests in her writing, her dearest pleasure. In her diaries she included lists of books acquired and read, critical remarks on them, and fragments of prose and poetry reflecting her deepening knowledge of literature. This case study of a privileged girl in New York State during the American Civil War years explores interconnections among the many bookish strands in her life and social circle.","PeriodicalId":81853,"journal":{"name":"Libraries & culture","volume":"41 1","pages":"189 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/LAC.2006.0033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66798479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
systems via a liaison dynamique. A guide to abbreviations is provided, since the French answer to American slang is acronyms—just as U.S. techspeak “hits a home run” too often for foreign speakers, so the French say, “The DLL decided the DRAC should adopt DSI for their ECM project at the ENSSIB . . .” To each culture its own linguistic weaknesses, then. Schools of information, computer science, and librarianship and any class involving the French or the French language will benefit from books like this. So will any program in cross-cultural studies and the “scaling up” of civilizations to our brave, new, fully globalized digital information world. All these disciplines will need some understanding of how we moved from the little American English-only public Internet, born in the U.S.A. in the early 1990s, to the global matrix backbone of digital information enmeshing so much of the world by the 2000s. How did it get here? How did it develop non-English languages and cultural patterns? The view from overseas is the key: that’s where the foreign users are, and this book shows how they see it.
{"title":"Offrir Internet en bibliotheque publique (review)","authors":"J. Kessler","doi":"10.1353/lac.2006.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lac.2006.0021","url":null,"abstract":"systems via a liaison dynamique. A guide to abbreviations is provided, since the French answer to American slang is acronyms—just as U.S. techspeak “hits a home run” too often for foreign speakers, so the French say, “The DLL decided the DRAC should adopt DSI for their ECM project at the ENSSIB . . .” To each culture its own linguistic weaknesses, then. Schools of information, computer science, and librarianship and any class involving the French or the French language will benefit from books like this. So will any program in cross-cultural studies and the “scaling up” of civilizations to our brave, new, fully globalized digital information world. All these disciplines will need some understanding of how we moved from the little American English-only public Internet, born in the U.S.A. in the early 1990s, to the global matrix backbone of digital information enmeshing so much of the world by the 2000s. How did it get here? How did it develop non-English languages and cultural patterns? The view from overseas is the key: that’s where the foreign users are, and this book shows how they see it.","PeriodicalId":81853,"journal":{"name":"Libraries & culture","volume":"41 1","pages":"290 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/lac.2006.0021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66797672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (review)","authors":"D. Kaser","doi":"10.1353/LAC.2006.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/LAC.2006.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":81853,"journal":{"name":"Libraries & culture","volume":"41 1","pages":"268 - 269"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/LAC.2006.0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66797419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
[of Judaism as documented] . . . in its books and libraries, was in German [i.e., non-Jewish] hands[,] . . . serving as archaic documents of a lost culture” (86). In subsequent chapters the author links other politically motivated efforts to destroy books and libraries elsewhere in the world in support of broader attempts at genocide or ethnocide. Her second chapter documents in considerable detail efforts to use libricide as a prime weapon in the struggle for the political domination of greater Serbia. Subsequent chapters then report seriatim on more recent libricidal activities still ongoing in the Middle East. The author then proceeds to Mao’s Revolution in China (an account that seems to this reviewer to be chronologically misplaced) as well as to other subsequent struggles in war-torn Tibet and Laos. Although this is not a pleasant book to read, Knuth is a careful scholar and an engaging writer. Of the three recent books on this same general theme read by this reviewer, hers is easily the most thorough and compelling. It is comprehensively researched, fully documented, and well annotated.
{"title":"Adventures in Russian Historical Research--Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present (review)","authors":"M. Raeff","doi":"10.1353/LAC.2006.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/LAC.2006.0031","url":null,"abstract":"[of Judaism as documented] . . . in its books and libraries, was in German [i.e., non-Jewish] hands[,] . . . serving as archaic documents of a lost culture” (86). In subsequent chapters the author links other politically motivated efforts to destroy books and libraries elsewhere in the world in support of broader attempts at genocide or ethnocide. Her second chapter documents in considerable detail efforts to use libricide as a prime weapon in the struggle for the political domination of greater Serbia. Subsequent chapters then report seriatim on more recent libricidal activities still ongoing in the Middle East. The author then proceeds to Mao’s Revolution in China (an account that seems to this reviewer to be chronologically misplaced) as well as to other subsequent struggles in war-torn Tibet and Laos. Although this is not a pleasant book to read, Knuth is a careful scholar and an engaging writer. Of the three recent books on this same general theme read by this reviewer, hers is easily the most thorough and compelling. It is comprehensively researched, fully documented, and well annotated.","PeriodicalId":81853,"journal":{"name":"Libraries & culture","volume":"41 1","pages":"269 - 270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/LAC.2006.0031","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66797975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The universe may be defined as a random series of interminable lists. Robert Belknap posits the list and its ordering structure as both a literary and utilitarian construct, with some overlapping and shading among various literary lists that link “dissimilar modes of factual and poetic thinking” (182). To an obvious degree all lists are disjunctive and combinative, “organized blocks of information . . . the sum of its parts and the individual parts themselves” (15). Apparently simple, the list is implicated in a broad array of epistemic, rhetorical, and cultural constructs. Lists usually transform meaning through accretion, juxtaposition, and contrast, to mention only their most salient features. This is an old theme. The Homeric list of Greek forces in book 2 of the Iliad, for example, described the individual ships of a vast naval armada soon to be hurled into war. Bibliographic lists in the Alexandrian Library provided access to different versions of Homer’s epics as well as access to Homeric commentaries. For millennia census lists have provided summary information on people and property. Today, lists have exploded on the World Wide Web, shaping our engagement with commerce, art, popular culture, and learning. The list is a ubiquitous feature of cyberspace, generating automatic algorithmic responses to “queries” in electronic library catalogs and Google-like search engines. It is omnipresent in commercial bibliographic databases, online booksellers, and innumerable proprietary websites. Lists are implicated in surveillance; to be added to or stricken off a list might spell disaster or salvation. In a bureaucratic twist on Bishop Berkeley, it might be claimed that to be is to be listed. With the enormous impact of Gutenberg the list, in addition to its diverse imaginative uses, began to function metaphorically as a kind of textual maneuver against information overload and the geographic dispersal of books. Specific examples of this include Rabelais (gastronomy and scatology) and Conrad Gesner (protobibliography). Francis Bacon’s empiricism is in some measure a by-product of his brisk accumulation and listing of facts. The droll logorrhoeic carnival in The Anatomy of Melancholy is heightened by an encyclopedic accumulation of definitions and allusions, presumably enlisted by Burton to elude the onset of melancholy in himself and the reader. A little later nature itself comes under the simplifying gaze of Linnaeus’s famous taxonomic list, a precursor to other scientific lists like the periodic table or what Belknap calls the pragmatic list, “whose finely distinguished categories, with the official validation of science, could be shuffled and arranged with analytical precision” (168). Some five hundred years after Gesner, modern bibliography posits specialized lists to encompass the book as both a material and a cultural/historical artifact. Robert Belknap situates the story of the literary list in the American Renaissance, taking as his starting
{"title":"The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (review)","authors":"Robert N. Matuozzi","doi":"10.1353/LAC.2006.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/LAC.2006.0026","url":null,"abstract":"The universe may be defined as a random series of interminable lists. Robert Belknap posits the list and its ordering structure as both a literary and utilitarian construct, with some overlapping and shading among various literary lists that link “dissimilar modes of factual and poetic thinking” (182). To an obvious degree all lists are disjunctive and combinative, “organized blocks of information . . . the sum of its parts and the individual parts themselves” (15). Apparently simple, the list is implicated in a broad array of epistemic, rhetorical, and cultural constructs. Lists usually transform meaning through accretion, juxtaposition, and contrast, to mention only their most salient features. This is an old theme. The Homeric list of Greek forces in book 2 of the Iliad, for example, described the individual ships of a vast naval armada soon to be hurled into war. Bibliographic lists in the Alexandrian Library provided access to different versions of Homer’s epics as well as access to Homeric commentaries. For millennia census lists have provided summary information on people and property. Today, lists have exploded on the World Wide Web, shaping our engagement with commerce, art, popular culture, and learning. The list is a ubiquitous feature of cyberspace, generating automatic algorithmic responses to “queries” in electronic library catalogs and Google-like search engines. It is omnipresent in commercial bibliographic databases, online booksellers, and innumerable proprietary websites. Lists are implicated in surveillance; to be added to or stricken off a list might spell disaster or salvation. In a bureaucratic twist on Bishop Berkeley, it might be claimed that to be is to be listed. With the enormous impact of Gutenberg the list, in addition to its diverse imaginative uses, began to function metaphorically as a kind of textual maneuver against information overload and the geographic dispersal of books. Specific examples of this include Rabelais (gastronomy and scatology) and Conrad Gesner (protobibliography). Francis Bacon’s empiricism is in some measure a by-product of his brisk accumulation and listing of facts. The droll logorrhoeic carnival in The Anatomy of Melancholy is heightened by an encyclopedic accumulation of definitions and allusions, presumably enlisted by Burton to elude the onset of melancholy in himself and the reader. A little later nature itself comes under the simplifying gaze of Linnaeus’s famous taxonomic list, a precursor to other scientific lists like the periodic table or what Belknap calls the pragmatic list, “whose finely distinguished categories, with the official validation of science, could be shuffled and arranged with analytical precision” (168). Some five hundred years after Gesner, modern bibliography posits specialized lists to encompass the book as both a material and a cultural/historical artifact. Robert Belknap situates the story of the literary list in the American Renaissance, taking as his starting","PeriodicalId":81853,"journal":{"name":"Libraries & culture","volume":"41 1","pages":"283 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/LAC.2006.0026","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66797956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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