Nearing a new mark in its publishing history with the 200th volume in its World Bibliographical Series, Clio Press has embarked on a revised edition course for its series of general country bibliographies published since 1977.
Francis R. McBride’s Iceland is the revised edition of the bibliography compiled and published by John Horton in 1983. Since McBride is honest enough to admit that he is a non‐Icelander and has no formal academic background in Icelandic studies, your reviewer has to admit the same. He even lacks the basic knowledge of the country that McBride must have, because he neither served at the US Air Force base at Keflavik nor visited Iceland for research purposes as McBride has done (at least according to the blurb).
Nevertheless, as a bibliographer and reference librarian, I feel myself entitled to an opinion about the quality and usefulness of McBride’s update.
Iceland is composed according to the well‐known format. A short introduction on the nature of the country and the Icelandic alphabet precede the 40 chapters that cover all aspects of Iceland. Three separate indexes (authors, titles, and subjects) and a map of Iceland complete a volume that has been produced with Clio Press’s usual accuracy and quality.
Compared to the previous edition the number of entries has remained unchanged (970 fully annotated main entries), but over 700 of them are new sources published since 1983. McBride is somewhat vague in his cut‐off‐date. On the one hand, he refers to the 1994‐edition of the Europa Yearbook (entry 943) as a current directory and on the other recommends the publication of the Historical Dictionary of Iceland by Guomundur Halfdanarsson (entry 231) to be published in 1996. If August 1995 is the cut‐off date, as McBride’s introduction suggests, a more recent edition of the Europa Yearbook was already available, whereas Halfdanarsson’s dictionary has still not been published in early 1997. However, these are minor blemishes on an otherwise competent selection.
The volumes in the World Bibliographical Series clearly fill a demand for general bibliographic introductions to the principal English scholarship on countries all over the globe. Depending on their specific regional orientation, libraries are well advised to acquire the pertinent volumes of the series, the revised volume included.
Those libraries already having Horton’s 1983‐volume on their shelves face a more difficult decision. If you specialize in Scandinavian studies, this revised edition is a must‐buy. If you do not, £60 is quite a stiff price. It has to be weighed against the possibilities to track down recent publications on Iceland (and any other subject for that matter) offered nowadays by electronic databases and catalogues in an ever‐growing number.
