To Be Enduring: The National Union Catalog Of Manuscript Collections

IT is WITH PROFOUND DISQUIETUDE, abundant rue, and a shattering sense of shame that I approach my subject. These distressing symptoms are, moreover, only aggravated and further intensified by feelings of pity for your pretty patience and submissive endurance. There is no lack of material, to be sure, but the recital of entries in a bibliography, however exhaustive and detailed it may be, is per se inimical to faultless prose and, at least for me, impossible of dazzling oratorical effect. Worse, it is in itself neither diverting nor inflammatory; it cannot arouse but it can disturb repose. An alternative would be, of course, to select and present "elegant extracts" from the literature, but inevitably you would have heard them all before or read them all before. It is a penalty of the profession of our choice that our lives are spent following one another from meeting to meeting and listening to one another with polite and collective indifference. In consequence, except where brazen flattery is intended, the anthologist's indolent style should be, from humane considerations, daintily avoided, even in pronouncements on the state of the art.