Files on Parade: A Memoir by William B. ReadyReview by: Lawrence Clark PowellThe Library Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1, Proceedings of the Forty-Second Annual Conference ofthe Graduate Library School, May 13-15, 1983. Publishers and Librarians: A Foundation forDialogue (Jan., 1984), p. 129Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4307712 .

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REVIEWS 129

products have become not only popular in the printing industry but also familiar items on supermarket shelves.

Supplemental to the chapters are 5 essays by other writers on their experience with paper and other mills as well as family reminiscences. The illustrations and maps help in the better understanding and clarification of many details. In general, this monograph is a typical local and family history centered on pa- permaking in a region which is the cradle of the American paper industry. It adds a new and interesting chapter to the beginnings and development of papermaking in this New World.

Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, University of Chicago

Files on Parade: A Memoir. By WILLIAM B. READY. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982. Pp. vi+268. $16.00. ISBN 0-8108-1516-8.

This review is written as the ALA prepares to meet in Los Angeles, and I am led to recall the conference there thirty years ago when incoming president Robert Downs asked Will Ready to give the keynote address.

I was mesmerized by it, eloquently given by an Irishman born in Wales who came to librarianating, as he called it, via soldiering in the British army (hence his title), library education in Cardiff, and history teaching in Minnesota. He then taught bibliography at the Berkeley library school under Danton and was currently acquisitions librarian at Stanford under Swank.

All of which made him a library exotic. I recognized my platform better and hustled down and told him so. He was soaked in literature and the other arts. He was an actor and a spellbinder, and I was both dazzled and wary. We became arms-length friends. After all, Stanford was one of the few competitors UCLA feared, and I knew that I was no match for Ready's "craft and sullen art." Yet I also recognized that our work needed such transfusers of imagination, daring, and drive.

Ready went on to increasingly bold coups at Marquette and McMaster in Hamilton, Ontario, bagging such prizes as the Tolkien and Bertrand Russell papers. We never met again. My interests led to library education and South- western literature and history. I left it to Bob Vosper to more than double the UCLA holdings I had gathered in my tenure as librarian.

Ready retired from McMaster in 1979 at age sixty-five, settling in Victoria, British Columbia, where he wrote this memoir. It was published after his death in 1981, with a foreword by Graham Hill, his successor at McMaster. Ready was survived by his wife Bess and their five children.

He also left this rich, reflective, honest, and generous book. Over it looms the Olympian figure of Keyes Metcalf, Ready's prime mentor. Even of colleagues he did not admire, Ready found something kind to say, such as Donald Coney's passion for reading. I do not know of any better autobiography by a librarian in giving the flavor, humor, and variety of a life with books in the service of readers and researchers.

Who has lived so rich a career as Will Ready? Who has recalled it as well as this someways wild and always wonderful Celt? I am at a loss for answers.

Lawrence Clark Powell, University of Arizona, Tucson

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