The Manley Art of Librarianship

The knock on Will Manley's columns is that he writes about things he knows nothing of, that he sits down at the word processor and flies by the seat of his pants. No less than Library Journal's John Berry wrote an editorial on the very subject. Not this time! The Manley Art of Librarianship is a serious (well, serious for Mr. Manley) celebration of the...art, I guess you could call it, of...o.k., librarianship's the only right word. The process of bringing books and people together, he calls it. It even includes the infamous sex survey that led to his discharge from Wilson Library Bulletin. It is not one of the McFarland-Manley (Handman, Lee) "Un-" series around which so much undeserved fame has arisen. Libraries are being replaced by "multimedia centers" and "learning materials centers." High tech is doing the talking. So Will interrupts to offer sound advice for maintaining the art of the profession in an environment increasingly hostile to books.