The history of printing, books, and libraries, is confined only to a limited extent within the boundaries of individual countries. There are, indeed, few historical developments which have played a more universal role, in reaction against all kinds of particularism, than type design, printing, book production, publishing, illustration, binding, librarianship, journal ism, and related subjects. Their history should be assessed and studied primarily in an international, not in a local, context. The bibliographical resources, however, which the historian of these sub jects has at his disposal correspond hardly at all to the essentially inter national character of the object of his studies. Since the appearance of the retrospective bibliography of BIG MORE and WYMAN, covering the subject comprehensively up to 1880, the only current bibliography has been the lnternatwnale Bibliographie des Buch-und Bi bliothekswesens. Covering a representative part of newly published liter ature, it appeared from 1928, but did not survive the Second World War. More recently, several useful, but limited, bibliographies have appeared.

In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.

Over the past ten years the attention given in British universities to the study of southern Africa has grown rapidly. In 1969 a symposium held under the auspices of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (ASAUK) to review the state of current work on southern Africa in Britain and in Africa itself revealed the diversity of research in progress, as well as practical and political problems involved in such research.

Today’s libraries and museums are heavily indebted to the passions and obsessions of numerous individual collectors who devoted their lives to amassing collections of books, manuscripts, artworks, and other culturally significant objects. Collecting the Past brings together the latest research on a wide range of significant British collectors from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, including Hans Sloane, Sarah Sophia Banks, Thomas Phillipps, Sydney Cockerell, J. P. Morgan Jr., Alfred Chester Beatty and R. E. Hart. Contributors to the volume examine the phenomenon of collecting in a variety of settings and across a range of different materials. Considering the aims and motives that led these collectors to assemble such remarkable collections, the book also examines the history of these collections after the collector’s death. Particular attention is given to the often complicated relationship between collectors and the public institutions that subsequently came to house their collections. Situated within the framework of cultural collecting more generally, this book offers an authoritative series of essays on key collectors. Collecting the Past should be most interesting to researchers, academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of museum studies, book history, manuscript studies, museum history, library history and the history of collecting. Professionals in libraries, museums and galleries will also find the volume of great interest.