Purpose, readers’ expectations, project feasibility and standards are the four concerns central to the planning of library exhibition catalogues. If these four are addressed successfully, other issues remain incidental. If there is shortfall in any one of these critical zones, no amount of manipulation of the peripherals can disguise the publication’s weakness.

READERS’ EXPECTATIONS

To issue any catalogue to a public is to subject it to measurement against the particular expectations of that public. When things are done within those expectations—in the treatment of text, illustrations, typography, materials—the reader apprehends the message of the catalogue without interruption. As soon as the boundaries of that universe of expectations are crossed, the reader is distracted. So it had better be done only for good reason, and it is better not to numb the reader by doing it too often.

Each separate public senses what is normative for its field. One sees instantly that the counter-culture newspaper of the 1960s and The New York Times draw their styles from very different visual expectations and that each is generic.

On dissecting the generic rare book and manuscript library catalogue, one might find such elements as the serif type face, often modeled on a European letter from the early centuries of printing; a page grid with rather more generous margins—more like those found in the early books than in the typcial scholarly book of today; an even, cadenced disposition of text and illustration—no fireworks, no surrender to advertising’s insidious demand for novelty; a leaning toward uncoated text paper where feasible (and never a glossy enamel)—with black-and-white illustrations printed in a finer screen than one finds in the average scholarly book,⁶ occasionally enhanced by the duotone process of reproduction; and bindings planned with little thought for life on the rough-and-tumble shelves of a commercial bookshop.

6. For a clarification of technical terms, readers might consult Ruari McLean, The Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980).

This generic catalogue is indeed conservative; it draws on the uses of the past. But is that not eminently appropriate? Do not rare book librarians preserve the very past their publications would do well to mirror?

This is article first appeared in Volume 5, Number 2, 1990 of Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarianship (pp. 77–84).