Newark Public Library Research Articles

"Censor It Out": The Missing Chapters of Operation Shylock

Abstract: This essay considers how specific instances of censorship and self-censorship may have influenced Roth's choice of a "missing chapter" as a powerful ending for Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993). By drawing from recently disclosed archive material at the Philip Roth Personal Library, I provide evidence of the author responding to the contemporary debate over free speech and reconstruct how his references to recent occurrences of textual suppression shaped his "unfinished" novel. I focus primarily on three sources that Roth read for research during the composition of Operation Shylock : The Sanctity of Speech (1986) by Yisroel Kolman Krohn and Yisroel Meir Shain, On Clowns (1992) by Norman Manea, and "Truth Whereby Nations Live" (1988) by Peretz Kidron—all in Roth's Personal Library at the Newark Public Library. A comparison with selected passages from these and other nonfictional texts reveals Roth's career-long interest in how different forms of political, social, and textual repression have been working in the context of Jewish writing and across Jewish institutions, in the US and abroad. It also underscores that the novel—far from being merely self-referential—was meant to represent censorship as accurately as in the historical examples one could easily find outside the book, in the political events of the late twentieth century.

Responsible Mischief: Roth as Reader

Abstract: Roth, as we know, had many identities, but he was always a reader. This paper explores how literature helped him forge an identity, starting in adolescence, his book-besotted college years, and beyond. Like all great writers, Roth was a great reader, consuming novels, stories, and essays in great, gluttonous gulps. Roth read for many reasons, some banal, some surprising, but in a life of flux, books were a constant. They offered pleasure, stimulation, and distraction. In a way, Roth's longest, deepest relationship was with literature. What he read nourished what he wrote; indeed, Roth's books would have many blank pages if one removed the literary allusions. The intimate connection between the man, his reading, and his writing is what we'll explore—in several ways. First, through a discursive peek into Roth's vast library, donated to the Newark Public Library and carefully preserved per Roth's instructions. Second, by reading Roth's own testimony, in interviews, public events, and private correspondence. By way of context, we'll consider libraries—what they reveal, what they conceal—and the paradoxical nature of reading itself. Finally, we'll shine a bright biographical light on Roth himself. Using his reading as a lens, we'll explore periods of formation and transformation, including the late-life changes that produced his haunted (and haunting) final novels. Throughout our investigation, we'll attempt to answer a single question: how was Roth-the-reader different from the other Roths we've come to know?

Introduction: Writers Who Write About Roth

IntroductionWriters Who Write About Roth Miriam Jaffe (bio) Please excuse that I must be brief here, for we have delightfully reached the edges of our permissible word count, but any summary of this special issue is so much less valuable than the experience of the whole. When the editors asked me to prepare a special issue ahead of the Society's 2023 conference, "Roth@90," we landed on the theme "Writers Who Write About Roth." I believe this volume delivers on that theme with variety. From my perspective as a literature scholar turned social scientist, my hope was for the issue to serve as an archive that would help tell the stories of the Society and our passionate work. The first several essays represent writers who write about Roth in the vein of traditional scholarship. Ira Nadel's work on Roth and poetry gives an explanation to why I've always been, first and foremost, drawn to Roth for the cadence of his syntax. Nadel's piece was made possible, in part, by the new Philip Roth archive at the Newark Public Library and thereby ushers in a new era of Roth Studies. As part of that new era, scholars James Duban and Brittany Hirth contend with Roth's reputation among allegations of what Duban calls "sexual deviancy." After these pieces, Andy Connolly and Louis Gordon combine traditional scholarship with personal reflection, describing how their identities foundationally influenced their academic approaches to Roth. Continuing with the phenomenological approach, Debra Shostak and Victoria Aarons offer a deep conversation about their lived-experience as Roth scholars; then, an outpouring of Roth-inspired trajectories, from the current Society President, Matthew Shipe, as well as a network of writers from around the world who are drawn together through writing about Roth's writing: Gustavo Sanchez Canales, Martyna Bryla, and Pia Masiero from Europe, and Gurumurthy Neelakantan from India. Together, they catalog something important about what matters in Roth Studies across continents. Finally, since we opened this call to all writers who write about Roth, we were delighted to receive the personal narratives of Ross Berger, a creative writer and video game designer, and the novelist [End Page 5] Alexandra Marshall, who will be featured as a keynote speaker during our Roth@90 conference. I'd like to thank Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer for their preface, which sets the collegial tone of this issue, as well as for the opportunity to edit this special issue ahead of the Roth@90 celebration in my home state of New Jersey, and in my ancestral home of Newark. This volume is a celebration in its own right, a love letter from the Roth Society to Roth and to each other. [End Page 6] Miriam Jaffe Miriam Jaffe, Phd (English), MSW, has been teaching at Rutgers University since 2001. Her Roth publications focus on autobiographical gestures, automortography, narrative medicine, Black-Jewish relations, and gender. A New Jersey native and Roth Society program director, Miriam is engaged in projects with the Philip Roth Library at the Newark Public Library. Copyright © 2023 Purdue University

Eugenics in New Jersey: How the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics Perpetuated Eugenics throughout the State

The Paul A. Stellhorn Undergraduate Paper in New Jersey History Award was established in 2004 to honor Paul A. Stellhorn (1947-2001), a distinguished historian and public servant who worked for the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Committee (now Council) for the Humanities, and the Newark Public Library. The Award’s sponsors are the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance; the New Jersey Historical Commission, New Jersey Department of State; Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; and the New Jersey Caucus of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. Click here for more information. The following paper by Borowski was an undergraduate thesis submitted to the American Studies Department at Rutgers University. Dr. Carla Cevasco advised.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer Soon after news broke of the scandal of blake bailey, philip roth's official biographer, we were inundated with many versions of the same question: Will Philip Roth be "canceled"? The question seemed to be motivated by a concern that Bailey's scandals with women—grooming and sexual assault, to name a few—would be connected to the scandals of Roth himself. It is, if not ironic, then at least telling, that Roth famously wrote about "cancel culture" before it entered our lexicon. His 2000 novel, The Human Stain, for example, features a protagonist, Coleman Silk, who is canceled (to use the language of the twenty-first century) for misusing the word "spooks" when describing three prodigal students he never met. Twenty years later, readers, academics, journalists, and fans started to wonder whether the same was true for Philip Roth regarding his poor choice in biographer that, some said, reflected his attitudes toward women. This fallout occurred shortly after the Newark Public Library launched its unparalleled Philip Roth Personal Library—featuring volumes from Roth's home libraries—and leaders in the city of Newark began planning a Philip Roth Festival to commemorate what would have been Roth's ninetieth birthday. In response to these questions about the future of Roth's legacy, we gave a resounding answer: No. Of course, Roth will not be "canceled." There was no way we could imagine one of the most important writers of his generation going away any time soon, and surely not in response to scandalous books, or scandals surrounding books. Then again, of course we can never be sure. History, and literary legacy, are equal measures fickle and unpredictable. But we think it is safe to say, at least by the printing of this issue, that Roth remains more relevant than ever. As a powerful indication of how Roth has not lost value in the academy, in 2020, the Philip Roth Society decided to present the Siegel/McDaniel Award for graduate research to two candidates because of the high quality of the papers in the competition. Both Siegel/McDaniel winners printed in this issue submitted outstanding essays concerned with how Roth's work is in conversation with a younger generation of writers and important new fields in cultural studies, such as food and affect. A close reading of all of the essays in this issue not only shows that Roth is not canceled, but also why and how that must be so. The essays, while not comprising a special issue or planned to take such a unifying approach, all address versions of the same themes: Roth's perpetual questioning of the status quo, his infamous bristling at rules and conventions, his keen awareness of the link between thought and [End Page 1] embodiment, his celebration of critical thinking, and his worries about the effects of accepting bad policy and misreadings of our founding documents as truth. These themes, of course, made Roth famous in the 1960s, when the US and the world were on the verge of social and political upheavals. A generation later, we seem on the precipice of another significant turning point, when we still need thinkers and activists to take to the streets and the page. Roth knew this better than anyone. In the wake of scandals all over the world, not least of which have been televised in the United States as the country attempts to grapple with the 2021 coup at the Capitol and the conservative backlash at the Supreme Court, the scholars published in the pages of this journal continue to find value in Roth's uncanny ability to showcase the best of us, even when writing about the worst. We hope you take heart in reading the essays in this issue, essays that at once recognize the significance of the written word and the literary language of revolt. In this way, we will have done our own small part to help reposition Roth as an indispensable voice, not only in 1959 or in 1969 or in 1995 or in 2010, but right here, today, when we once again seem to be on the verge of transformational change...

Testaments Betrayed: A Response to Those Wishing to Preserve Roth's Private Papers and Make Them Readily Available to Researchers

Testaments BetrayedA Response to Those Wishing to Preserve Roth's Private Papers and Make Them Readily Available to Researchers James Duban (bio) Well before he died, philip roth relied on litchfield, connecticut, resident Russ Murdock—friend; stonemason; property caretaker; later, power-of-attorney holder over part of Roth's land and home; and ultimately Roth's gravestone sculptor—to burn "piles of pages […] in big bonfires in his backyard." Murdock did so faithfully, without, he reportedly said, even having "snuck a peek at what Roth brought him" (Zax). Such was friendship; such was integrity. Estate executors Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier should now similarly honor Roth's directive to destroy the personal papers Roth made available to Blake Bailey for the purpose of researching and composing Philip Roth: The Biography (2021). Although contrary opinion exists in calls for document preservation and scholarly access, Golier and Wylie might well grant Roth's wish: "There is a good chance we will destroy them. […] Andrew and I will decide when the time comes" (qtd. in Shephard). My own call for the destruction of the papers pertains—in the current absence of documentation to the contrary—to Roth's explicit wish for their destruction (as quoted below), and to the heretofore unnoted thoughts about "testaments betrayed" by Roth's longtime friend and fellow author, Milan Kundera. One might first dispel the claim that "[i]t's unclear what Roth's actual directives were" (Atler and Schuessler), along with passive-voice speculation that Roth's executors "are interpreted to be under Roth's direction to destroy archival material after it was seen by Bailey" (Helmore). To the contrary, Roth was unequivocal: "Once Blake Bailey has got what he needs, I've asked my executors—my agent, Andrew Wylie, and a friend who's a psychoanalyst, to destroy them after my death. I don't want my personal papers dragged all over of the place. No one has to read them" (qtd. in Kaprielian). [End Page 84] Little matter to some. As if multiple wrongs make a right, scholars cite precedent for ignoring the mandates of authors to destroy their papers: witness Virgil, Kafka, Hardy, Nabokov, and Larkin. Equally predictable in the world of polite scholarly discourse is the much-quoted lament that Roth's disposition prevents "access to these materials to add layers to the conversation" ("Statement"; see also Alter and Schuessler, Helmore). Roth, however, clearly favored monologue, not dialogue. Indeed his 2012 statement (above) from the Paris Review came in response to the explicit question, "How have you started to prepare your archives for after your death?" Roth's response contained no ambiguity. Even less compelling as a rationale for access—as pertains to Bailey's possible surrender of intimate material—is the accusation that Roth constructed "a deeply control-oriented arrangement" (Kelly). Perhaps he did; but what of it? What injunction concerning intellectual property or selective confidentiality does not do the same? And if such resolve is a disappointment to some, then more's the credit to an author who, fearing post-mortem ransacking by biographers, turns the tables on their invasion and leaves them to lament that "[d]arkness is never the proper condition for scholarly work, and in this case the glance has been cast back to the interpreter" (critic qtd. in Helmore). Checkmate! Game, Roth. Postmortem narrative consciousness at its best (see Parrish 127-28; Helmore). As suggested, however, and with recourse to the writings of Milan Kundera, more is at stake than Roth's "ghosting" home invaders. His championing of Kundera, and other writers from the Soviet-dominated "other Europe," is well known. Moreover, many books by Kundera have ended up in the Philip Roth Personal Library of the Newark Public Library. Among them is the British edition and translation of Testaments Betrayed, which has pertinence for the ultimate fate of Roth's personal papers. An apt introduction to Testaments Betrayed are the outlooks of Roth's close friend Bernard Avishai and of Roth scholar Timothy Parrish. The latter, in response to the fate of Roth's personal papers, has recently remarked, "the less we know of Roth's life the better his books seem"; hence, "Roth...

New Jersey Online: Affective Histories in Newark’s Digital Archives

This article examines how Newark’s affective histories and narratives of racial violence are being reproduced in the city’s digital archives. This article examines two digital archives, Old Newark and the Newark Public Library’s My Newark Story, to explore how emotion is used by individuals and institutions to narrate Newark’s 1967 riots and the city’s subsequent waves of white flight, immigration, and systemic neglect. The article argues that while Old Newark serves as a space for former white Newarkers to express feelings of nostalgia, loss, and displacement that often cast themselves as the victims of diaspora and marginalization, My Newark Story functions as a corrective project that resists the centering of whiteness and feelings of victimization that have haunted Newark’s history.

The Origins of Centenary Collegiate Institute: A Story of Industrialization, Wealth, and Natural Resources

The Paul A. Stellhorn Undergraduate Paper in New Jersey History Award was established in 2004 to honor Paul A. Stellhorn (1947-2001), a distinguished historian and public servant who worked for the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Committee (now Council) for the Humanities, and the Newark Public Library. The Stellhorn Awards consist of a framed certificate and a modest cash award, presented at the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Annual Conference. The Award’s sponsors are the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance; the New Jersey Historical Commission, New Jersey Department of State; Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; and the New Jersey Caucus, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. The Stellhorn Award Committee members are Richard Waldron (chair), Mark Lender, and Peter Mickulas. The advisory committee consists of Ron Becker, Karl Niederer, Elsalyn Palmisano, and Fred Pachman. Click here for more information. The following paper was one of two 2020 winners.

Springwood Avenue Rising: Race, Leisure, and Decline in the 1970 Asbury Park Uprising

The Paul A. Stellhorn Undergraduate Paper in New Jersey History Award was established in 2004 to honor Paul A. Stellhorn (1947-2001), a distinguished historian and public servant who worked for the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Committee (now Council) for the Humanities, and the Newark Public Library. The Stellhorn Awards consist of a framed certificate and a modest cash award, presented at the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Annual Conference. The Award’s sponsors are the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance; the New Jersey Historical Commission, New Jersey Department of State; Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; and the New Jersey Caucus, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. The Stellhorn Award Committee members are Richard Waldron (chair), Mark Lender, and Peter Mickulas. The advisory committee consists of Ron Becker, Karl Niederer, Elsalyn Palmisano, and Fred Pachman. Click here for more information. The following paper was one of two 2020 winners.

Beatrice Winser: Librarian, Museum Director, and Advocate for Women’s Equality

Beatrice Winser (1869-1947) was a woman of fierce intelligence who used her extraordinary aptitude for managing organizations to help establish both the Newark Public Library and the Newark Museum. In 1915, Mayor Thomas Raymond appointed her to the Newark Board of Education, making her the first woman to serve on a Newark board or commission, in what she said was “quite a victory” for suffragists. She was called “the busiest woman in Newark” by a local newspaper in the 1930s when she served simultaneously as Librarian and Director of the Newark Museum, as trustee of Dana College and later the University of Newark, and leader or participant in a host of other projects and organizations. When the newly formed University of Newark conferred an honorary doctorate on her in 1937, in the same group with Louis Bamberger, she was cited as “an ideal public servant and a luminous personality.”This paper draws on the extensive archival materials about Beatrice Winser at the Newark Public Library, the Newark Museum, and the New Jersey Historical Society to discuss her pioneering work with the Newark Public Library and her advocacy for women’s rights in the first decades of the 20thcentury.

Propaganda, Censorship, and Book Drives: The Newark Public Library in World War I

This article examines the activities of the Newark Public Library during World War I as a means of highlighting the significant role American libraries played in promoting the nation’s war effort. During the war public libraries were usually the most important information centers in their communities. They distributed books, pamphlets, and posters in support of a wide range of government initiatives, they organized war-related exhibits and classes, and they collected vast amounts of reading material for libraries at military camps. Newark’s chief librarians, John Cotton Dana and Beatrice Winser, oversaw many such patriotic initiatives, but they also became involved in more controversial campaigns to employ women librarians at military camps and to resist wartime calls for censorship of unpatriotic literature.

Stories of the City: Newark, Newest Americans, and Hyperlocal Forms of Digital Public Humanities

Stories of the City:Newark, Newest Americans, and Hyperlocal Forms of Digital Public Humanities Jim McGrath (bio) Newest Americans, directed by Tim Raphael, Julie Winokur, and Ed Kashi, Rutgers University–Newark Center for Migration and the Global City, Newark, New Jersey, ca. 2015–present, newestamericans.com (October 2018). Newest Americans introduces itself as a digital project telling "Stories from the Global City."1 Institutionally supported by Rutgers University–Newark, the digital project aims to "generate fresh narratives and insights about our emerging minority majority population and the nation it is transforming."2 The tools it selects to tell these stories are multimodal: while Newest Americans borrows the structure and layout of a magazine, its features materialize in the forms of short documentary films, annotated digital maps, oral histories, spoken word poetry, blogs, graphic novels, and mixed-media mosaics. Its methodologies are invested in pluralities: its narratives are polyvocal, its images of place juxtapose archival materials from the past with records of the city in the present day, its collaborators are made up of academics, journalists, filmmakers, students, artists, and neighbors. In the late 1990s, over one hundred oral histories were gathered in the Krueger-Scott Oral History Collection, perspectives of "African American Newarkers who had migrated to the city between 1910–1970, as well as those whose local roots spanned generations."3 These important documents of local history were collected in preparation for Newark's Krueger-Scott African American Cultural Center, a long-planned revitalization of the "Krueger Mansion" (named after the building's original builder and owner, nineteenth-century brewery owner Gottfried Krueger) once owned by Louise Scott, a local African American "beauty culture entrepreneur and millionaire."4 Unfortunately, the proposed Cultural Center never materialized, and the oral histories were shelved and forgotten, placed in shoeboxes at various Newark cultural institutions.5 [End Page 301] In 2008 Samantha Boardman, then a doctoral candidate at Rutgers–Newark, came across a collection of cassettes containing oral histories of African American Newark residents, "part of an unaccessioned collection at the New Jersey Historical Society archive."6 Boardman, in collaboration with "the efforts of the Rutgers University–Newark Center for Migration and the Global City—in partnership with the [Rutgers Newark] Graduate Program in American Studies, Dana and Alexander Libraries, Newark Public Library, Newark Museum, New Jersey Historical Society and Randforce Associates," worked to digitize, index, catalog, and archive this collection.7 Digitization work began in earnest in 2011 and involved a large team of American studies graduate students writing item summaries and metadata content, working with Krista White, a digital humanities librarian at Rutgers–Newark, to move materials into the Rutgers University Community Repository. The Krueger-Scott Oral History Collection went live in 2016, a launch timed to coincide with "We Found Our Way: Newark Portraits from The Great Migration," a physical exhibition of photographs and other materials related to the oral history collection, curated by Boardman.8 The time, labor, and collaboration involved in the digitization, preservation, and publication of the Krueger-Scott Oral History Collection is worth documenting as a demonstration of how long and involved this important work can be, efforts that are not always part of the scholarly records of academic publication, scholarly activities that are often devalued or de-emphasized in graduate training contexts and tenure evaluations. Archival materials are an important component of Newest Americans, as past histories of Newark and its residents documented in the Krueger-Scott Oral History Collection are remediated, recontextualized, and ultimately reinvigorated in several projects published by the initiative. The project's director, Tim Raphael (who is also director of the Center for Migration and the Global City at Rutgers University–Newark and an associate professor of theater in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media), has noted that one of the aims of Newest Americans is to do the work of "activating the archive." Identifying a "fetishization of archives" that privileges collection and preservation but often ignores "how you actually get those archives out into the hands of people in ways that are useful to them," Raphael and his collaborators are invested in moving beyond "the province of scholars" in the work of curating, interpreting, and even remixing archival materials...

Newark’s 1974 Puerto Rican Riots Through Oral Histories

This article includes contents of recorded oral histories from Sigfredo Carrion, William Sanchez, Gustav Heninburg, and Raul Davila recounting the events that took place in Branch Brook Park in 1974; events also known as the Puerto Rican Riots. These events were witnessed by members of the Puerto Rican community living in the city at the time, as well as respected members of the city council and leaders of social activist groups. These oral histories were carefully read and analyzed in order to construct a brief and comprehensive retelling of those events for those unfamiliar with the subject. Much of the evidence used was found in the New Jersey Hispanic Research and In-formation Center located at the Newark Public Library. This article also examines the frustrations and concerns facing the Puerto Rican community as told by those who experienced them firsthand, and explains the breaking point that led the community to finally come together and de-mand their voices be heard. The results of this uprising led to the creation of local organizations, such as La Casa de Don Pedro, and the construction of a more visible Puerto Rican identity with-in the city.

Do You Just Love Philip Roth?

Do You Just <i>Love</i> Philip Roth?

The Awakening of the Social Conscience: Jane Maud Campbell, 1869–1947

Jane Maud Campbell’s career demonstrated her commitment and passion for library services with immigrants and minorities as one of the first advocates for multiculturalism in librarianship. She began her career working in the Newark Public Library and soon was employed as the librarian of the Passaic Public Library. She was the first woman employed by a state library commission to serve the needs of immigrants in Massachusetts. A prolific writer and champion of immigrants’ rights within the American Library Association, she served for a brief time on the ALA Committee on Work with the Foreign Born in its initial years. She spent the later years of her career as a public librarian in Lynchburg, Virginia, during a period of segregation in the South. She worked around the edges of the law to make library service available to the African American community of Lynchburg.

Pressing the F1 Key- And Retrieving Each Other

Summary At 3:30 any afternoon of the week, public librarians may feel confident of serving students. Indeed, students comprise a significant portion of public library users, and they require a good deal of attention. Unless librarians work with the schools, though, we do not truly complement the curriculum. The Newark (NJ) Public Schools and the Newark Public Library have therefore embarked on a program of library orientation for teachers. Synergy with instructors has taught public librarians new means of reinforcing learning.

The Newark Public Library

The Newark Public Library

Bad Books in Series: Nancy Drew in the Public Library

Bad Books in Series:Nancy Drew in the Public Library Esther Green Bierbaum (bio) We know that "bad" books—however they are defined—can become best sellers. But has popularity ensured a spot on the shelves of the public library? Children's series books,1 and particularly the Nancy Drew series, can illuminate this question. This paper looks at ideas of "badness," how bad books have been defined and labeled, and, finally, how public libraries in the past have responded to that label. The Public Library Now —and Then These days, public librarians give more thought to being alert to the public's wants and needs than to historic issues of badness. As the "Code of Ethics for Librarians" states, "Librarians must resist all effort by groups or individuals to censor library materials" (American Library Association). By extension, the librarian must also resist imposing personal preferences upon the selection of books; hence, the public librarian responds to the reading interests of the community, even if those interests include Sex, Anne Rice, Batman, and the Baby Sitters' Club. It was not ever thus. In its first half century or more—roughly from 1876 to the beginning of World War II—the public library was envisioned by its supporters and promoters as one of the engines of culture that would meld the disparate elements of the American population into a unified whole, tied with golden cords of education, common language, and civic righteousness. Upon the occasion of the dedication of the Newark Public Library's new building, John Cotton Dana declared: "And so we are, for the first time in all history, building, in our public libraries, temples of happiness and wisdom common to all" (69). In a less lofty mode, J. P. Quincy noted that the library was "the one secular institution which encourages self-development as an aim" (390). [End Page 92] Self-development was an aim; but librarians felt called to "encourage" it to appropriately high planes. Indeed, librarians accepted the role of being lamps unto the feet of the body politic and civic with more zeal than humility. There was a great amount of discussion about what constituted "good" reading and "good" books—good often being determined on the basis of rectitude of content rather than literary grace. As Dorothy Broderick has recently noted, "These librarians knew what was decent and what was improper and they were direct in their commitment to keeping out of the hands of the public anything they felt unworthy" (447). The Effects of Fiction One of the most prolonged and heated deliberations centered on "the fiction question": whether libraries should give shelf room to fiction at all and, if so, to what examples of this dubious branch of literature. In 1876, when Melvil Dewey introduced the first version of his Decimal Classification, American fiction was not even in the question, as evidenced by the fact that he provided no classification number for it, lumping whatever of it might be tolerable in with British fiction. Quincy approvingly quotes Justin Winsor's annual report of the Boston Library regarding fiction: There is a vast range of ephemeral literature, exciting and fascinating, apologetic of vice or confusing distinctions between plain right and wrong . . . which it is not the business of a town library to supply. (395) Winsor was a towering figure in the American library world of the late nineteenth century; his opinion counted. His pronouncement was not a negative speciation devised solely by librarians; Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic were forthright in expressing concern for their neighbors' moral well being, and the Little Colonel and Elsie Dinsmore were among child characters whose authors gave them opportunity to express distress over the novel reading of friends and parents. The dangers of fiction seemed real enough to warrant concern: Physicians versed in the treatment of those nerve centres, whose disorder has so alarmingly increased of late years, have testified to the enervating influence of the prevalent romantic literature, and declared it to be a fruitful cause of evil to youth of both sexes. (Quincy 393) Because of early medical concerns and, later, on the basis of the benttwig theory and other notions of child development...

John Cotton Dana: a contemporary appraisal of his contributions and lasting influence on the library and museum worlds 60 years after his death

John Cotton Dana, who died in 1929, had been Librarian of the Newark Public Library since 1902. Among many other achievements, he was responsible for the development of remarkable art collections in the Library, including a collection of prints, and of a Picture Collection of visual images; the programme of art exhibitions he organised in the Library led to the founding of the Newark Museum. The collections Dana initiated continued to grow after his death, guided by his inspiration: they are of regional and even national importance and, via library networking, serve the whole state of New Jersey; the scope of the print collection has been extended to include several categories of printed ephemera, including shopping bags.

The COM Catalog at Newark Public Library

L'article decrit le catalogue Computer-Output microfiche [COM] de la Network Public Library