Barry Neavill's Modern Library Publications
Barry Neavill is one of ModernLib's greatest ongoing sources of information. Here's a list of publications that every Modern Library collector will find invaluable.
- The Modern Library Series: Here is Barry's 1984 Ph.D. dissertation submitted to the University of Chicago's Graduate Library School in which he "seeks to explain the Modern Library's success and eventual decline at three levels: the social and intellectual context in which the Modern Library existed, the prevailing institutional patterns of the book industry and the economics of the book trade over the course of the Modern Library's existence, and the internal history of the series itself." Not the multi-thousand page bibliography that he's been working on, but still 573 pages (unbound 8.5" X 11" pages) of great stuff for the Modern Library fanatic. You can order it online with a credit card from University Microfilm. (Cost varies depending on the format ordered.)
The folowing articles are all available without cost:
- “The Modern Library Series: Format and Design, 1917-1977,” Printing History 1 (1979): 26-37. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/slisfrp/56
- “The Modern Library Series and American Cultural Life,” Journal of Library History 16 (Spring 1981): 241-52. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/slisfrp/54
- Review of Jay Satterfield, The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 98, no. 4 (December 2004): 541-47. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/slisfrp/60
- “Publishing in Wartime: The Modern Library Series during the Second World War,” Library Trends 55 (Winter 2007): 583-96. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/slisfrp/62
- “Canonicity, Reprint Publishing, and Copyright,” in The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, vol. 1: Authors, Publishers and the Shaping of Taste, edited by John Spiers (Basingstroke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 88-105. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/slisfrp/52
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