Home November 2002 Vol 63 No 6 Kister book review

College and Research Libraries
November 2002, Vol. 63, No. 6

Book Review

Kister, Kenneth F. Eric Moon: The Life and Library Times. Foreword by John N. Berry III. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002. 442p., alk. paper, $30 (ISBN 0786412534). LC 2001-7509.

Kenneth Kister, of Kister’s Best Encyclopedias renown, has tackled the fertile, but seldom tilled, field of library biography. What makes Kister’s biography particularly interesting is the fact that its subject, the legendary Eric Moon, is still very much alive and kicking. That having been said, Kister does not shrink from telling all he has gathered from more than a hundred hours of interviews with Moon himself and his second wife, Ilse, but also with his family (including his mother Grace and his younger brother, Bryan), and friends and colleagues (notably, Patricia Glass Schuman, John N. Berry III, E. J. Josey, and Arthur Curley, all of whom eventually served as president of the ALA). Although Kister lets Moon and others tell their sides of the story in their own words, he remains very much in control of the content and direction of the narrative.

Eric Edward Moon, the first of two sons of working-class parents Ted and Grace (Scott) Moon, was born March 6, 1923, in Yeovil, an old town in the south of England about sixty miles west of Southampton, the large port city where he attended elementary and secondary school, found his first library job, and married his first wife, Diana. After graduating from secondary school, Moon realized that he had no chance of getting a university education, a dream not easily attained by the British working class, particularly in the late 1930s.

His first job, in 1939, was as junior library assistant at the Southampton Public Library. While there, he passed the elementary exam of the Library Association, the first rung of the library professional ladder in England. In 1941, at age eighteen, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force and served for the duration of World War Two in England; Comilla, East Bengal (then in India, now Bangladesh); and Singapore. After being discharged in the summer of 1946, he returned to Southampton.

In May 1947, Eric married Diana Mary Simpson, also a junior library assistant in Southampton. Moon decided to attend one of the new library schools, Loughborough College, that had been created after the war to prepare returning veterans for taking the Library Association’s registration examination, another of the qualifying hurdles for librarians in the United Kingdom. There, he thoroughly enjoyed his studies with mentor Roy Stokes. Moon passed the registration exam in the summer of 1948 and took a second year at Loughborough to study for the fellowship examination and earn the prestigious title of Fellow of the Library Association (FLA). Between the summer of 1949 and June 1958, he served as librarian in Hertfordshire (Bushey and Oxhey); Finchley, north of London; Brentford and Chiswick, west of London; and Kensington in London’s West End, before leaving England for his first job in North America, as chief librarian in Newfoundland, Canada.

Having been an active member of both the “staid” Library Association and the “feisty” Association of Assistant Librarians (Kister’s adjectives) while in England, Moon joined the Canadian Library Association shortly after arriving in Newfoundland, where he served from June 1958 until October 1959. He was wooed away, with absolutely no reluctance on his part, from his position in Newfoundland by Dan Melcher of Bowker in New York. Melcher was eager for him to take over the helm of the then stodgy, establishment-oriented Library Journal, founded in 1876 by none other than Melvil Dewey. Moon joined the ALA and remained an active member throughout his career.

While editor of Library Journal, from late autumn of 1959 to the end of December 1968, Moon was able to use LJ as the medium for addressing social and political responsibilities of librarianship—which the complacent ALA would have been more than happy to ignore—including civil rights, intellectual freedom, poverty, gender discrimination, government secrecy, and the Vietnam War. In 1965, Moon became a member of the Bowker board of directors and a citizen of the United States.

Moon’s zeal for reforming the ALA continued unabated, and in 1965, he was elected to the ALA Council. He served on the council from 1965 to 1972, from 1976 to 1979, and from 1982 to 1986. During his last few months at LJ, about a year after Bowker was bought out by Xerox, Moon met Ilse (Bloch) Webb, then a librarian at the College of William and Mary, at a party in the notorious LJ suite at the 1968 ALA Annual Conference in Kansas City, Mo. Thus began a deep friendship between Eric and Ilse, who were both unhappily married at the time. After a nearly three-year affair, concluding with his divorce from Diana and Ilse’s divorce from Ken Webb, they were married in 1971.

Moon had left LJ in late December of 1968 and in the spring of 1969 began negotiations with Ted Waller of Grolier Educational Corporation to take over Scarecrow Press (then a Grolier subsidiary) as its chief editor. He officially took over the reins of the small and struggling press on July 1, 1969, after the ALA Annual Conference in Atlantic City, during which the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) was founded. Moon, who was instrumental in the founding of the SRRT, remained a loyal member and supporter throughout his library career.

While still at Scarecrow, Moon transformed this small library press into the major publishing venture in librarianship that it is today. In no small way due to his business acumen at LJ and Scarecrow, Moon was inaugurated in 1977 as ALA president at the annual conference in Detroit. The theme for his ALA presidential year, to advocate an egalitarian national information policy, was never fully realized because of the protracted scandal centering on the release of the film Speaker, intended to champion First Amendment rights, but which offended the black leaders and membership of ALA along with defenders, black and white, of the civil rights movement.

Moon retired from Scarecrow at the end of 1978 at age fifty-five, and the couple moved to Florida. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Eric remained involved in writing and speaking, while Ilse returned to work, serving as executive secretary of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) from 1988 to 1992. In 1993, Scarecrow published a collection of his writings and speeches entitled A Desire to Learn: Selected Writings. Eric, who turned 79 in 2002, and Ilse, his wife of more than thirty years, are now enjoying a well-deserved retirement in Florida, filled with golf, travel, reading, and family.

An example of Moon the mentor is Robert McFarland Franklin, founder of McFarland & Company, Inc., in Jefferson, North Carolina, publisher of this biography and Moon’s number two man at Scarecrow Press during most of the 1970s. Leaving Scarecrow in March 1979, about a year or so after Moon, Franklin had supervised publication of McFarland’s first six books by September 1980.

Kister’s in-depth biography of Eric Moon is well written, impeccably documented, and extensively indexed. It should be in the collections of academic libraries throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, particularly those serving institutions with graduate programs in library and information science.—Plummer Alston Jones, Jr., East Carolina University.