Customer Reviews

A Passion for Books.

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I like to mark the end of the old year and the start of the new by reading a book about books. Though it wasn't entirely what I was expecting, "A Passion for Books" by Lawrence Clark Powell was on the whole a fine way of celebrating our shared love for books.

Powell was the university librarian at UCLA for many years, and most of this collection of essays is intended one way or another for professional librarians. Even in the early 1950s, when these writings were first published, people were apparently predicting the imminent obsolescence of books. Powell is having none of it, and he combines his passionate defense of books as a medium with severe criticism for librarians who do not see themselves, first and foremost, as "bookmen." More than cataloguers, more than "resource technicians," more than information-studies technocrats, Powell wants librarians to be evangelists sharing their passion for books and for reading. Of a class he taught at Columbia, he writes that he wanted to convince his students that

"...librarianship is a humane art, not a mechanistic science.... I insisted that librarianship is a calling, similar to the ministry, that gives rich returns to those who give their lives to it.... I preached the only gospel I know: that books are basic and that people are good, and that to work with them both is the best of all possible lives" [p. 155]."

Powell was writing for librarians, and so a good deal of the content of this book is not immediately relevant to book-loving non-librarians like me. But I still found this a fine book in which to spend some time. Powell's devotion to books is stronger even, I venture to say, than his devotion to librarianship (my review title comes from a phrase he uses in description of himself). And since we have that in common, I found this little volume a good way to spend a few hours at the turn of the year.