Rare Books and Special Collections

摘要

Rare Books and Special Collections provides, in a dense volume the size of a city telephone directory, a highly personal view of the special collections profession. The author's aim is "to tell you what you need to know, whether you are a librarian ... a bookseller, an archivist or collector, a historian, or anyone else who wants to know what there is to know that could be useful" about this profession. (p. 483) What turns out to be "useful" is the history of rare books libraries and special collections, their present state, their administration, and the analog and digital artifacts that come under the care of librarians and archivists. One of the profession's own, Sidney E. Berger has been a practicing special collections librarian and a library administrator for nearly thirty years, as well as a teacher, scholar, bibliographer, collector, papermaker, printer, and antiquarian bookseller. He has produced a comprehensive reference work on the subject of rare books and special collections that doubles as a memoir. It tackles every major issue while presenting a detailed and comprehensive view of the book as a physical object: its paper, printing, binding, and more. Berger has had practical, hands-on experience "in all aspects of books, from their creation to their institutional care." (p. xii) It is a massive undertaking to lay out all the knowledge required to administer a special collections department in an institutional setting and to really know about the objects themselves. Berger has succeeded in doing this.