Nicolas Barker, OBE FBA, has made many contributions to the study of the book. In celebration of his 70th birthday, the British Library has published a selection of his essays that show the range of his interests in a number of related fields: books and texts; books and people; typography and early printing; the history of the book; bookselling; and forgery. None of these essays has previously been reprinted and collectively they offer a series of authoritative insights into various aspects of the book as physical and cultural artefact. The collection is prefaced by an introduction by Alan Bell, former Librarian of the London Library.

Portelli offers a new and challenging approach to oral history, with an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective. Examining cultural conflict and communication between social groups and classes in industrial societies, he identifies the way individuals strive to create memories in order to make sense of their lives, and evaluates the impact of the fieldwork experience on the consciousness of the researcher. By recovering the value of the story-telling experience, Portelli's work makes delightful reading for the specialist and non-specialist alike.

In the spring of 1968, the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) voted to remedialize the first semester of its required freshman composition course, English 101. The following year, it eliminated outright the second semester course, English 102. For the next quarter-century, UW had no real campus-wide writing requirement, putting it out of step with its peer institutions and preventing it from fully joining the "composition revolution" of the 1970s. Fleming shows how contributing factors--the growing reliance on TAs; the questioning of traditional curricula by young instructors and their students; the disinterest of faculty in teaching and administering general education courses--were part of a larger shift affecting universities nationally. He also connects the events of this period to the long, embattled history of freshman composition in the United States.

History has always been more than just the past. It involves a relationship between past and present, perceived, on the one hand, as a temporal chain of events and, on the other, symbolically as an interpretation that gives meaning to these events through varying cultural orientations, charging it with norms and values, hopes and fears. And it is memory that links the present to the past and therefore has to be seen as the most fundamental procedure of the human mind that constitutes history: memory and historical thinking are the door of the human mind to experience. At the same time, it transforms the past into a meaningful and sense bearing part of the present and beyond. It is these complex interrelationships that are the focus of the contributors to this volume, among them such distinguished scholars as Paul Ricoeur, Johan Galtung, Eberhard Lämmert, and James E. Young. Full of profound insights into human society pat and present it is a book that not only historians but also philosophers and social scientists should engage with.

A collection of four studies (three of which were given as the 1994 U. of Pennsylvania Rosenbach Lectures), each addressing how the forms that transmit text to readers or hearers constrain the production of meaning. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Helmut Krone led the Creative Revolution which changed advertising. Forty years after he'd created the Volkswagen Beetle campaign it was voted `the most famous campaign ever'. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. He has been inducted into Art Directors' Halls of Fame from New York to Berlin. Before Helmut Krone advertising art direction was either `old' commercialised art or `new' graphic design. And advertising was thought of as salesmanship. His thinking led into account planning, affected marketing and changed the design of ads. Krone gave us ads which command attention, are witty, understated and demand complicity to decode. He questioned all of advertising's formal devices: logotypes, headlines, body-copy and studio photography. He explored the tensions between the meanings of words and the meaning of images - still the way modern advertising gets us to realise new thoughts. The book shows nearly all of Krone's print work: graphic designs which modernised advertising and art direction - and changed graphic design.

Berdyaev considered the philosophy of history as a field that laid the foundations of the Russian national consciousness. Its disputes were centered on distinctions between slavophiles and Westerners, East and West. The Meaning of History was an early effort, following World War I, that attempted to revive this perspective. With the removal of Communism as a ruling system in Russia, that nation returned to an elaboration of a religious philosophy of history as the specific mission of Russian thought. This volume thus has contemporary significance. Its sense of the apocalypse, which distinguishes Russian from Western thought, gives the book its specifically religious character.

In drawing attention to the fundamental elements of form inherent in all graphic and sculptural art, Van James opens our eyes to the alphabet of the language of form. Through the simplest of indications, we find ourselves able to read the meaning of works of art from other cultures and times. We begin to know these cultures and peoples in ways we could not know through oral and written language alone. Likewise, we can begin to read the language that Mother Nature speaks through the form of every created object and being. We can join those on the cutting edge of a new science that investigates the spiritual forces at work within physical phenomena through exact perception of qualities of form. For everyone who is fascinated by nature, art, and life in different cultures.

Batteau argues that the negative stereotypes of Appalachia have often masked its better regional qualities and distinctions, and in fact have worked to create a social boundary based on superiority over mountain people. In turn, this stereotype allows the marketing of local resources for outside profits. Recently, the "bad" images have been played upon in popular culture to project a notion of wilderness innocence and a renaissance in the perspective of the invented Appalachian "difference."