RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage reviews books, reports, new periodicals, databases, websites, blogs, and other electronic resources, as well as exhibition, book, and auction catalogs pertaining directly and indirectly to the fields of rare book librarianship, manuscripts curatorship, archives management, and special collections administration. Publishers, librarians, and archivists are asked to send appropriate publications for review or notice to the Reviews Editor.
Sidney E. Berger. The Dictionary of the Book: A Glossary for Book Collectors, Booksellers, Librarians, and Others, 2nd ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).
“Any profession and avocation develops its own terminology,” reads the opening sentence to the introduction. This is, as the edition statement notes, the second edition of Berger’s work. It is a close second, as well, the initial publication appearing in merely 2016. The initial publication of any reference work is built as much on faith as on fact: faith that a need for the work exists, that one’s idea is large enough or focused enough to grasp a field adequately. Only after a work becomes accessible does an author get to see how much was missed, needs to be extended. The second edition becomes the standard for measuring a work’s actual usefulness. After taking an extended time to read, compare, and this updated edition, readers need not be concerned that the second edition of Berger’s volume was hasty. It is a suitable update to a terrific resource.
Digital resources have exploded since the creation of computer networks in the 1970s, and the Web browser in the early 1990s. For more than a century before the Web became ubiquitous, summative or tertiary publications such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, and indices, were foundation stones int the cultural value of libraries. The library was a destination for research because it had these tools on hand. As recently as a generation ago the scope of a library’s reference section ranged far and wide, drawing in something of everything so that nothing was left out completely. When a library was the only effective source of data and information, its reference section was the equivalent of an index to human knowledge. Today networked digital sites provides a ready-reference resource so vast, so instantaneous, and yet so cluttered with irrelevance and clogged with commerce and opinion and propaganda, that using the Web like a reference tool is as likely to be as frustrating or misinforming as it is useful. Many commercial reference platforms collate a wide host of individual publications. Beyond them, crowd-sourced wikis usefully compile suitable background information. Unfortunately, wikis tend usually to be inadequate substitutes for actual scholarship, though the general adoption of editorial functions within wikis has improved publicly contributed content. There is, however, no substitute for genuine expertise and careful scholarship. However broad or deep the Internet and digital resources, libraries remain places of books.
Like the first edition, this second edition reflects its title precisely, presenting browsers with several thousand alphabetical entries reflecting terms used in papermaking, printing, binding, publishing, description, and bookselling. More of an encyclopedia than a traditional dictionary, the book’s strength is in each entry’s contextualization of the terms presented. Most entries include descriptions and examples, both historical and contemporary. The second edition is not merely a revision but also an expansion. In this version the editor has increased the number of entries in the work by well over five hundred, adding nearly 250 pages to the work. Entries borrow liberally (and credit appropriately) from similar descriptive works. In the process the editor has improved the internal reference apparatus, replacing the first edition’s use of the traditional abbreviation “q.v.” referring to another entry in the work, by instead setting cross references in small caps.
Five appendices collate specific disciplinary terms in the Dictionary, one each listing terms used in paper and papermaking, type and typography, and binding. Two others address bookseller clubs and societies and provide a quick summary of the very challenging world of traditional print-paper sizes. One of the greatest assets offered by the book is the bibliography, twenty-two pages virtually circumscribing extant work on paper, printing, book, and bookselling terms, including links to digital versions when the work is available online.
As good as the book is, like any work it still possesses shortcomings, most of them physical rather than editorial. The book retains the tall format that makes storing it on bookshelves something of a problem, but one which libraries will encounter so long as on-demand printing remains a viable manufacturing platform. Scores of new images provide visual reference for individual entries. The illustrations, though generous and well suited to the entries they supplement, reproduce rather poorly, especially if they are snapshots. This is certainly the result of on-demand print technology rather than an editorial shortcoming. The challenge of poor reproduction, however, is a reality readers will likely endure increasingly often in the world of modern books. Unfortunately on-demand printers do not generally offer paper meeting ANSI standards for permanence. Certified paper was widely adopted before the demise of short-run offset printing, but a quick check with a phenolphthalein pen reveals that the paper in the book is at least alkaline.
Unsurprisingly the work slants toward the codex form and book history, culture, and practice of Western Europe and North America. While a few readers may regard that as cultural snobbery or worse, the simple fact is that there is a relatively small body of scholarship available in English in African, Middle Eastern, or East Asian book history, but digital resources have begun filling in those gaps. Though trade linked both hemispheres for centuries, perhaps due to language barriers there was comparatively little interaction of books and book forms during the period. To my knowledge there has never been a dictionary or encyclopedia of the book that is globally inclusive. Perhaps a third edition can begin integrating the Incan quipu, the living-book griot of West Africa, acknowledge the genuine origin of moveable metal type in Korea’s thirteenth-century Goryeo dynasty, and publication of likely the first book printed on paper from moveable type: the Jikji (1377).
This second edition of Berger’s Dictionary of the Book is a timely update, essential for any collection aspiring to acquire and describe printed work for what it represents, beyond whatever practical uses the items served for its contemporary user. We still need reference volumes like this. The roles that reference material serves in a library may not have changed but the volume of print reference material within libraries has shrunk dramatically in a generation, and reference practice in the digital infosphere or digisphere has grown and changed. The number of general tools has declined with the rise of digital publications, but the importance of specialized tools has increased. Those who work in cultural heritage surrounding the written word are fortunate to have this second edition of Berger’s Dictionary of the Book. I consider it greatly superior to similar dictionaries from earlier years. Glaister’s Encyclopedia of the Book (1960; the most recent edition 1996) or Haller’s Book Collector’s Fact Book (1976) remain useful but are dated, sometimes imprecise, and occasionally outright erroneous. Both are out of print and are also documents of their time. The work continues to stand tall (metaphor as well as description) alongside the current ninth edition of the classic John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors, despite its own updates by Nicholas Barker and current expansion in the hands of Simran Thadani (2017).
The result is a book useful for not only collectors and librarians, but those pursuing book history and print culture as well. The long list of abbreviations provides a good key for deciphering old catalogue descriptions. I encourage exactly the groups for whom the volume was written, to buy and use this book. Doubtless the author is at work on a third edition. All I can say, is good show. I will look forward to a similarly enlarged third edition when the time comes. The volume claims to be written for “booksellers, collectors, and librarians.” The librarians won’t be a problem; they’ll see how important this work is. I only wish that self-existent sales utilities like Amazon or Ebay would acknowledge that their mandated but uncontrolled descriptive terms stink, and that eager sellers would replace that sloppy wording with the ABA standard terms—and that the numberless host of amateur sellers which energetically offer “vintage books” would learn to use a descriptive work such as this.
- Richard L. Saunders, Southern Utah University