Edward Edwards

Abstract

For over a hundred years the development of “public libraries” (that is libraries administered by local authorities, not the equally “public” libraries such as the British Museum) has been hesitating, blind, clumsy and uneven; but it is refreshing to remember that all along there have been people who have made a legend of the first librarian of Manchester. Dr. Munford has now done librarianship and history a great service by his latest book recently published by the Library Association. Edwards was not a good librarian, but had a vision of the desirable and possible future of libraries which only now is shown to be valid. The vision and the failures justified the publication of the new life of him, which completely supersedes Thomas Greenwood's book of 1902. Probably no other librarian has left behind him such a mass of letters and diaries as Edwards provided and no previous biographer of a librarian has so methodically and meticulously struggled with a mass of manuscripts such as those which confronted Dr Munford. It is hard to imagine that any other book of similar size has given so many footnotes (all assembled at the end of the book, to the amazing number of 1,564) as references to the material on which Dr. Munford has based his statements. This “portrait”, complete—“warts and all”—would not have been possible if the British Museum and the Manchester Public Libraries had not religiously preserved the great collection of Edwards's diaries and correspondence.

Citation

CASHMORE, H.M. (1964), "Edward Edwards", Library Review, Vol. 19 No. 7, pp. 490-493. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb012408