Required Reading
Copies of all required readings will be kept on site for student use.
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Course: Book Coolecting: History & Techniques
Faculty: Bruce Whiteman, William Andrew Clark Library, UCLA
Required Readings:
John Carter and Nicolas Barker. ABC for Book Collectors. 8th ed. New Castle: Oak Knoll Press; London: The British Library, 2004. (Available on the Web at http://www.ilab-lila.com/images/abcforbookcollectors.pdf, but please buy a copy.)
Nicholas Basbanes. A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Recommended Additional Reading:
John Carter. Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1948. (Out of print, but available inexpensively through Amazon, ABE etc.)
P.H. Muir. “The Nature and Scope of Book Collecting.” In P.H. Muir, ed., Talks on Book-Collecting Delivered Under the Authority of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association. London: Cassell and Co., 1952, pp. 1-23. (Ask the instructor for a photocopy.)
A.N.L. Munby. “Floreat Bibliomania,” in his Essays and Papers, ed. Nicolas Barker. London: The Scolar Press, 1977, pp. 37-41. (Ask the instructor for a photocopy.)
Bruce Whiteman, “’Only Copy Known’: Random Reflections on Rarity.” In Robert H. Jackson and Carol Z. Rothkopf, eds., Book Talk: Essays on Books, Booksellers, Collecting, and Special Collections. New Castle: Oak Knoll, Press, 2006, pp. 11-28. (Ask the instructor for a photocopy, or available through Oak Knoll or Amazon.)
Edwin Wolf II and John L. Fleming. Rosenbach: A Biography. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1960. (Out of print, but available inexpensively through ABE.)
Further Reading
Please ask the instructor for a lengthy list of further reading suggestions.
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Course: Book Illustration: Processes to 1900
Faculty: Terry Belanger, Rare Book School
Required Readings:
Before coming to class, please read (and, preferably, reread) all of:
Gascoigne, Bamber. How to identify prints, second edition (London [and NY]: Thames and Hudson, 2004).
Gascoigne is both comprehensive and excellent. It costs $50 list, but check BestWebBuys or a similar Internet bookfinder to get the lowest online price, currently (11/17/04) Amazon's $22. Many museum bookshops carry copies of the book, and in any event it should be relatively easy to get via interlibrary loan. There are plenty of copies of Gascoigne available in class, but you may wish to bring a copy with you to your session, so that you can review various sections of the book outside of class, between sessions or overnight.
I'll be referring constantly to Gascoigne in class, and you will get a lot less out of this course if you have failed to look seriously at the book before coming to RBS.
You may also want to take a good look at an excellent general history of prints and printmaking:
Hults, Linda C. The print in the Western world: an introductory history (Madison, WI: Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1996); $70 list.
Hults' admirable book provides a starting point from which to acquire a broad overview both of separately published prints and of prints in books.
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Course: The Book in the West, With an Emphasis on California
Faculty: Gary Kurutz, California State Library
Suggested Course Readings:
Megan L. Benton. Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. See entries under Valenti Angelo, Grabhorn Press, John Henry Nash, and book clubs.
Lawrence Clark Powell. California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State. Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1974.
Lawrence Clark Powell. Southwest Classics: The Creative Literature of the Arid Lands. Pasadena: Ward Ritchie Press, 1974.
Madelein B. Stern. Antiquarian Bookselling in the United States: A History from the Origins to the 1940s. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985. Chapters on San Francisco and Los Angeles.
John Tebbell. A History of Book Publishing in the United States. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972. Vol. I: pages 498-507.
Also helpful: any of the recent Western Americana catalogs issued by William Reese, Dorothy Sloan, and Michael Heaston. All are loaded with useful information on great Western books.
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Course: Descriptive Bibliography
Faculty: Carl Berkhout, University of Arizona
Course Readings:
Belanger, Terry. "Descriptive Bibliography." Book Collecting: A Modern Guide. Ed. Jean Peters. New York and London: Bowker, 1977. 97-115.
Read this and the next two items first for good, clear explanations of the chief concerns of this course as written from slightly different perspectives and with different emphases.
Williams, William Proctor, and Craig S. Abbott. "Analytical Bibliography" and "Descriptive Bibliography." An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. 3rd ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1999. 14-33 and 34-53.
Greetham, D. C. "Making the Text: Bibliography of Printed Books" and "Describing the Text: Descriptive Bibliography." Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. New York and London: Garland, 1992. 77-151 and 153-68.
Bowers, Fredson. "Purposes of Descriptive Bibliography, with Some Remarks on Methods." The Library 5th ser., 8 (1953), 1-22. Rpt in Readings in Descriptive Bibliography, ed. John Bush Jones ([Kent, OH]: Kent State Univ Press, 1974), 12-41.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. "Tolerances in Bibliographical Description." The Library 5th ser., 23 (1968): 1-12. Rpt in Readings in Descriptive Bibliography, ed. John Bush Jones ([Kent, OH]: Kent State Univ Press, 1974), 42-56.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. "A Description of Descriptive Bibliography." Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992): 1-30. Rpt in Tanselle, Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the Univ of Virginia, 1998), 127-56.
A complete backset of SB is available online at etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva, which merits a grateful bookmark and frequent visits.
Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Winchester, UK: St Paul's Bibliographies; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 1995.
Carter, John, and Nicolas Barker. ABC for Book Collectors. 8th ed. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2004.
Not required but highly recommended as a convenient, readable glossary of terms. Although Barker's recent contributions are substantial and worth having, very cheap copies of earlier editions by Carter alone (since 1952) are temptingly easy to find.
Bowers, Fredson. Principles of Bibliographical Description. With introduction by G. Thomas Tanselle. Winchester, UK: St Paul's Bibliographies; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 1994.
Buy this book first (about $30) but read it last from this list, allowing yourself ample time for its increasingly dense 500 pages, and then bring it with you to the course. Along with a packet of other materials, it will be the course's nominal textbook. In the end it will serve better as a reference work, however, so do not be discouraged by the difficulty of your first efforts with it. Being able to reread Bowers in full comfort and confidence is in fact a pretty good way of stating a central objective of this course.
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Course: Introduction to Special Collections Librarianship
Faculty: Susan M. Allen, Getty Research Institute; Lynda Claassen, University of California, San Diego
Course Readings: Please read/become familiar with the following before coming to Los Angeles.
Building on Strength: Developing an ARL Agenda for Special Collections; Working Symposium on the Future of Special Collections in Research Libraries (June 2001). Keynote by David H. Stam, "So What's So Special?" and presentation by Robert L. Byrd, "One Day ... It Will Be Otherwise: Changing the Reputation and Reality of Special Collections."
http://www.arl.org/special/stam.html
http://www.arl.org/special/byrd.html
Carter, John. ABC for Book Collectors. 8th edn, by John Carter and Nicolas Barker. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2004. Indispensable and highly enjoyable. Also available directly from Oak Knoll Books, or it may be downloaded online as a .pdf file.
Panitch, Judith M. Special Collections in ARL Libraries: Results of the 1998 Survey Sponsored by the ARL Research Collections Committee. Washington, D.C.: Assocation of Research Libraries, 2001. Executive summary at http://www.arl.org/collect/spcoll/panitch/execsum.html.
"Research Libraries and the Commitment to Special Collections," ARL Task Force on Special Collections, December 17, 2002. http://www.arl.org/collect/spcoll/principles.html.
Traister, Daniel. "The Rare Book Librarian's Day. " Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarianship 1, no. 2 (1986): 93-106.
What's So Special About Special Collections? Inaugural issue of RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 1, no. 1 (2000), especially Werner Gundersheimer's article "Against the Grain" available at http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/134/folger.html; and Dan Traister's polemical essay, "Is There a Future for Special Collections? and Should There Be?".
Your Old Books (Chicago: ALA, 1994). http://www.rbms.nd.edu. Publications; Pamphlets and Brochures. Written for a general audience; useful introduction to concepts and categories of rare books and book values, and to FAQs rare book librarians regularly get about these topics.
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Course: The History of the Book in Hispanic America, 16th- 19th Centuries
Faculty: Daniel J. Slive, UCSD; David Szewczyk, The Philadelphia Rare Books and Manuscripts Company
Calvo, Hortensia. “The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America.” In: Book History Vol.6 (2003), 277-305.
Johnson, Julie Greer. The Book in the Americas: The Role of Books and Printing in the Development of Culture and Society in Colonial Latin America. Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 1988.
Mexican Art & Life No.7 (July 1939).
Published in the 400th anniversary of printing in Mexico, the entire issue is devoted to the book in Mexico from pre-Hispanic manuscripts through the early 20th century.
Thompson, Lawrence S. Printing in Colonial Spanish America. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1962.
Additional recommended readings will also be provided.
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Course: Preservation Stewardship of Library Collections
Faculty: Mark S. Roosa, Pepperdine University
Course Readings:
Please read/become familiar with the following before coming to Los Angeles.
Course Texts:
Thomson, Garry. The Museum Environment. 2nd Edition. London: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2005.
Preservation: Issues and Planning. Edited by Paul Banks and Roberta Pilette. Chicago: The American Library Association, 2000.
Preservation of Library and Archival Materials: A Manual. Third Edition. Andover, MA. Northeast Document Conservation Center, 1999.
Additional readings will be assigned from the books listed below. A copy of each of these volumes will be available in class. Select journal articles will also be assigned.
Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Edited by Nicholas Stanley Price, et al. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996
Lavedrine, Bertrand. A Guide to the Preventive Conservation of Photograph Collections. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003.
Caple, Chris. Conservation Skills, Method and Decision Making. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Schweidler, Max. The Restoration of Engravings, Drawings, Books and other works on paper. Translated, edited, and with an appendix by Roy Perkinson. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2006.
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Course: Rare Book Cataloging
Faculty: Deborah J. Leslie
Course Readings:
BRING TO CLASS:
Required:
Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books). Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service, 2007. ISBN: 970-0-8444-1162-0. Available online at http://www.loc.gov/cds/catman.html#rb. Please order early!
Optional:
Examples to Accompany Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books. Chicago. 2nd ed.: ACRL, 1999. ISBN: 0-8389-8014-7. Available from ALA Publishing Services, 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611 for $35.00 [10% discount for ALA members] plus $7 postage and handling [no discount]; telephone credit-card orders to 1-800/545-2433 [press 7 at the recorded message]. The cataloging portion is obsolete with the inauguration of DCRM(B), but we will be looking at title page images in class.
READ BEFORE COMING TO CLASS:
Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1991. ISBN: 0-8444-0690-2. Although superseded by Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books), DCRB provides a good initial familiarization with rare book cataloging, especially for those new to it.
Allen, C.G. "Latin," in A Manual of European Languages for Librarians. 2nd ed. (London: Bowker-Saur), p. 155-179. You may find it useful to have with you in class.
Belanger, Terry. "Descriptive Bibliography," in Book Collecting: a Modern Guide, ed. Jean Peters (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977), 97-115. This is a mandatory text.
Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, rev 1974, &c. 1995 pb version currently in print (Winchester: St Paul's Bibliographies/New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books). Familiarize yourself with the scope and contents of Gaskell before coming to class, read pages 313-320 ("Identification"), pages 328-335 ("Formula"), and as much as you have time for in the first section (pages 1-185).
Leslie, Deborah J. and Benjamin Griffin. Transcription of Early Letter Forms in Rare Materials Cataloging. URL: www.folger.edu/bsc/dcrb/wg2LeslieGriffin.doc
OPTIONAL PRE-COURSE READING:
Bibliographical issues
Stalker, Laura, and Jackie M. Dooley. "Descriptive Cataloging and Rare Rooks," in Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship 7:1 (1992), 7-23.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. "Descriptive Bibliography and Library Cataloguing," in Studies in Bibliography 30 (1977), 1-56.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. "The Bibliographical Concepts of Issue and State, " in PBSA 69:1 (1975), 17-66.
POST-COURSE TITLES OF POTENTIAL INTEREST:
Library systems & records
Raine, Henry, and Laura Stalker, "Rare Book Records in Online Systems," in Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship 11:2 (1996), 103-118.
Guide to Rare Book Records in Online Systems, available online. A bit dated, but still useful in identifying aspects and features of online library systems necessary for appropriate indexing, searching, and display of rare materials and special collections.
Overmier, Judith A. and Elaine M. Doak. "Provenance Records in Rare Book and Special Collections," in Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship 11:1 (1996), 91-99.
Management issues
Bradshaw, Elaine Beckley and Stephen C. Wagner. "A Common Ground: Communication and Allegiance Between Cataloger and Curator for Improved Access to Rare Books and Special Collections," in College & Research Libraries 61:6 (Nov. 2000): 525-534. Although leaving something to be desired in academic rigor, this article provides an overview of some of the issues involved in setting policy.
Taraba, Suzy. "Administering the cataloging of special collections materials," in Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship 7:2 (1992), 87-90.
Special collections cataloging
Russell, Beth M. "Looking for Someone Special : Special Collections Cataloging, 1980-2000," in Library Resources and Technical Services 47:4 (Oct 2003), 149-159.
Lundy, M. Winslow. "Evidence of Application of the DCRB Core Standard in WorldCat and RLIN," Library Resources & Technical Services, v.50:1 (2006: Jan), p. 42-57
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