What We Wrote About and Who We Were: Historical Writings in JLH/LandC, 1966-2000

It has been said that the mansion of history contains many rooms. If this is so, then we can safely assume that the room devoted to the history of libraries and librarianship is one of the smaller ones, probably back in a corner somewhere. But despite its size, our little room contains a great deal of interesting intellectual furniture constructed painstakingly over the past several decades by a small cadre of historians—some amateur, some trained—dedicated to the task of explicating our library past. One of the major vehicles for sharing our research has been the venerable journal Libraries & Culture and its predecessor, the Journal of Library History. Ever curious about how we communicate what we know about our lively discipline, I decided to take a closer look at JLH/L&C from its inception in 1966 through the end of the century to discover what kind of historical topics were explored within its pages. 1