Editor’s Note

Abstract

The opening essay of this issue, Daniel J. Bradbury’s “Barbarians within the Gate: Pillage of a Rare Book Collection?,” emanates from the June 1993 Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference in New Orleans. The subject of that meeting was “Mainstream or Margin: How Others View Special Collections,” and this essay views special collections from the perspective of an administrator who faced the unenviable task of selling off most of his rare book holdings.

Many collections need to be weeded occasionally. But some may see the “weeding out” of an entire rare book collection from a library to be a radical and . . .