Pioneers in Librarianship: Sixty Notable Leaders Who Shaped the Field

English legal scholar Peter Birks commented several years before his death in 2004 on both the utility and lack of utility of alphabetical order for presenting and communicating information. He wrote, “The alphabet can help in finding things, but not in organizing them. It cannot tell you why a whale has more in common with an elephant than a shark.” Judith Flanders, who quotes Birks in her introduction to A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (Basic Books, 2020), comments that “the very benefit of alphabetical order, to our eyes, is that it says nothing at all about the people or objects being sorted.”The present book, Pioneers in Librarianship: Sixty Notable Leaders Who Shaped the Field, presents mini-biographies of names associated with the history of libraries, including several (Carla Hayden; Abdel Kader Haidara, the “heroic librarian of Timbuktu”) who are still alive today. American librarians from the late 1800s to the present are especially well represented. Their names (as you may have guessed already) are in alphabetical order, making for some rather strange bedfellows—Mazarin’s librarian Gabriel Naudé (seventeenth century) immediately following upon Aurora, Illinois–born Ralph Munn, who headed the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; nineteenth-century librarian (and pope) Pius XI right after the twentieth-century African American cataloger Annette Lewis Phinazee.This means that reading this book as a book is almost impossible and is also in no way incentivized by the author. With each chapter we leap from historical period to historical period and from country to country. It’s like reading a directory, that now-obsolete genre replaced in the digital age by Google and other random-access tools. Recalling what Birks and Flanders say above, the presentation of these individuals “says nothing about the people . . . being sorted.” Each subject individual is presented in an enclosed historical context, which we then leave behind when the next article starts. In the opinion of this reviewer, it would have been far more useful and interesting if the author had dispensed with alphabetical order and instead embedded his subject articles in a chronology of librarianship. The fact is that historical achievement can best be understood against a background of a status quo being superseded.Some of his articles do offer the material for bridging to an earlier age or period, or looking forward to the next. The narration of Naudé’s background and the historical context of his contributions is quite good, for example, showing how Naudé led away from the medieval aristocratic library of a ruler’s vanities. All it would have taken was a different arrangement of the author’s material. Occasionally, the subject randomness of alphabetical order does allow for the proximity of two somehow like library personages, for example, Pope Pius XI and the much earlier librarian Bartolomeo Platina (sixteenth century): both Italians, both librarians of the Vatican Library.So if this book comes up short as a narrative, how does it function as a directory, a biographical dictionary, a reference book? Quite well, I would say, at least in its coverage of Americans and Britons. We meet Antonio Panizzi of the British Library and Thomas James, Sir Bodley’s first librarian, along with several other well-known British librarians. In the United States, coverage is extensive, especially of women and minorities historically overlooked, including Puerto Rican librarian Pura Belpré and the abovementioned Phinazee. There are, nonetheless, notable oversights. While this reviewer was relieved to see that the otherwise often cancelled Melvil Dewey was fully represented (including an account of his grave shortcomings), what about his contemporary, the pathbreaking William Howard Brett (1846–1918) of Cleveland Public Library, who championed open, browsable stacks and separate libraries for children led by specially trained children’s librarians, and who founded the library school at what is now Case Western University?It is in the long international history of libraries, however, that the randomness of the author’s subject selection becomes most evident. He may have included Naudé and Panizzi, the low-hanging fruit, but what about Martin Schrettinger (1772–1851), the German inventor of librarianship as a genuine science (Bibliothek-Wissenschaft)? Or, in France, Joseph Van Praet (1754–1837), the “catalogue vivant” and really the last glorious exemplar of the ideals of medieval librarianship? There are especially huge gaps in ancient librarianship. I must mention the absence of the Neo-Assyrian Ashurbanipal (669–631 BCE), for example, whom the author himself mentions in his preface as the builder of the first real library—which, by the way, it was not, considering Sumerian Nippur or Egyptian Edfu, among many others—but then does not devote an article to. Or what happened to Theodoric’s polymath minister Cassiodorus (c. 485–c. 585), the founder of Vivarium, the extraordinary library in southern Italy that united Greco-Roman science and philosophy with the great early Christian writers? Were they not worthy of mention? At times I felt, reading this book, that I was in a Valhalla walking past busts of the great Anglo-American writers of recent times, and then suddenly standing before . . . Dante. Why? I would ask, as I am asking now.Pioneers in Librarianship cannot be faulted for not scrupulously citing its sources, many of which could be, and probably were, found through relatively simple searches. But especially given its high price—and I should add that at $46 even the paperback price is inflated—it cannot be recommended for personal libraries. This reviewer cannot even recommend it for college and university libraries, since the literature on which it is based is easily accessible. Searching for that literature—and finding it—would help build the research skills and the enjoyment of research in future academic librarians rather than suggesting that the search ends in the pages of this book.