I’m finishing up a review for The Charleston Advisor of Rotunda, the collection of online editions of scholarly books from the Electric Imprint of the University of Virginia Press (capsule review: thumbs up).

One of the texts is the online edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, originally published in six volumes, edited by Cecil Y. Lang. Both editions feature an “acknowledgments” section, which I will here quote from liberally:

Librarians—warders, in Swinburne’s happy phrase, of the “sevenfold shield of memory”—are the unsung heroes and heroines of civilization as we would like to know it, and they have all, everywhere, given evidence repeatedly of devotion to an ideal of work and learning that the writer of the letters collected here would have admired as much as the writer of this sentence appreciates it. A librarian in Paris once telephoned me in Charlottesville about a comma in an Arnold letter, one in Ottawa telephoned to give me an address that I needed, one in Leeds to say that an item I was looking for was indeed there, one in New York to call my attention to some special information, one in San Marino (California) to answer a question, one in New Haven to reassure me that my patience (!) was paying off. One in Oxford pulled himself away from the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, then in a dead heat, to let me know that I was pursuing a dead end.

…and he goes on in that vein for another paragraph and a half.

I quote this not to puff up my profession, and certainly not to puff up myself, but to remind myself of the importance of that “devotion to an ideal of work and learning” and the possibility of heroism in library work done well.