Death of a Reference Book Pioneer
I only learned today that Matthew J. Bruccoli, a renowned F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar and one of the founders of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the classic reference series from Gale, passed away in early June. (Michael Rogers, in his Library Journal article about Bruccoli’s death, called the DLB “hands down the greatest literary reference work ever produced.”) Here is the New York Times obituary about Bruccoli.
When I was employed at Gale, I occasionally had the pleasure of working with the manuscript of one or another of the DLB volumes (which eventually grew into a multitude of some 400). I was always struck by the quality of the text and illustrations alike; reading an article about some important author, you were also treated to photographs of hand-written manuscript pages, book covers, and letters. In other words, the volumes offered a good deal of illuminating primary sources in addition to document analysis–just the kind of thing we are doing with our Milestone Documents series, only in a more focused way.
In recent years Bruccoli argued passionately that the decline in print reference as a library staple was harmful to libraries and to the civilization at large. (Here’s an old blog post I wrote about one such Bruccoli missive.) He obviously loved books, libraries, literature, and history, and his life’s work seems to have reflected these interests to the very end. I’m sorry I never knew him.