Rare Book Librarianship

by Roderick Cave

Hardcover in very good condition, with unclipped dust jacket in good condition. Creasing to the jacket edges, and interior is foxed throughout. Board corners are bumped, and page block is lightly tanned and foxed. Pages and text are clear and unmarked throughout. LW

Genres: Librarianship

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Joshua · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of this book went in one ear and out the other. It's not that it didn't have anything meaningful or important to offer the reader, the problem was that so much of the material has become outdated, and working in a Public Library where we have a Rare Book Room I was hoping for some guidance or insight into managing materials. I don't even have my MLS and I knew most of the stuff in this book.

[Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was good at the time, but is now horrifically outdated. Most useful as a "how it used to be done" resource these days.

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

My boss said that she read this book years ago as part of her course on rare books at UCL. While it was quite old she thought it still had good things to say about preservation and storage so we added it to the reference books in our reading room and I thought I'd read it. I have to say that even rarebook librarianship has changed quite dramatically in the past 25 years. There was a great deal of this book that was simply not how things are done, from talking about buying books, to the way books are catalogued, postal enquires, typewriters in the reading room, microfiche and of course no mention of online catalogues or digitised resources! He also under emphasised the importance of subject cataloguing as part of the importance of rare book librarianship, though he thought that this might be changing. However, there were still several areas that seemed to hold true. I think the chapters on exhibitions were the most relevant still. I found that a lot of the practices that we do at King's were outlined in this chapter, not just exhibitions, but also lectures and exhibition catalogues and events to raise publicity for the collections. This was by far the most interesting part, while the chapters on conservation and preservation were also relevant they didn't have much new information. The chapter on training of rare books librarians was also quite interesting, Cave thought they should be trained seperately to normal librarians and given different areas of study and would benefit from working in the rare books trade. (Though this was largely due to the large interaction with the rare books trade that he saw taking up much of the rare books librarian's time.) The writing style was quite vicious in places. He wasn't afraid of scorning what he considered to be "amaturish" booksellers who he saw as merely being a nuscience, rather than providing for a specalist market. It was an odd little book, it was very good in places, but also totally irrelevant in others. Still probably a good one to have read for future career aspirations

[Saadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my complete review of Rare Book Librarianship here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CAA_fGHHrTe/