Indiana Magazine of History

264 Indiana Magazine of History After the war Colonel Posey became “Thomas Posey, Gentle- man,” who married “an eligible widow of means,” fathered nine children (p. 1101, and had “no difficulty settling comfortably” at “Greenwood,”Spotsylvania County, Virginia (p. 1131, where Posey children had an able series of tutors, including William Wirt and Archibald Alexander. “The Poseys,” Alexander observed, “though somewhat decayed in wealth, maintained much of the style which belonged to old Virginia families” (p. 117). In 1802 the Poseys trekked to western Kentucky and resettled at “Longview” on the colonel’s 7,000-acre military grant in Hender- son County. Kentuckians sent Posey to their state Senate, and in 1808 he ran for governor. Another war hero, Charles Scott, de- feated him, partly because of Posey’s federalist sympathies and his ultra-federalist friends, one of whom, Joseph Montfort Street, married his daughter. Frustrated by defeat, Posey went to Louisiana, and Governor William Claiborne appointed him United States senator for a brief term. President James Madison then appointed him territorial governor of Indiana, where Posey revitalized the militia and urged the legislature to improve roads and schools. “Countless” militia mus- ters in “drizzle, sleet, and snow” impaired the governor’s health “grievously” (p. 212). With Indiana’s statehood in 1816, Posey ran against Jonathan Jennings for governor and lost, 5,211 to 3,934. He ended his career as Indian agent, operating from his lodging above Hyacinth Lasselle’s inn in Vincennes. After Posey’s defeat for Congress in 1817, the author concludes, rather wistfully, that in Indiana “the coattails of gentry leadership had turned into an electoral albatross” (p. 250). ROBERTG. GUNDERSON,emeritus professor of speech communication and of history, Indiana University, Bloomington, is author of The Log Cabin Campaign (1975) and The Old Gentlemen’s Convention (1961). David Anton Randall, 1905-1975. By Dean H. Keller. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1992. Pp. xii, 235. Illustration, notes, index. $39.50.) Walk across Indiana University’s Bloomington campus and you may pass the Lilly Library, a 1960s two-story limestone block building on the south side of the Showalter Fountain. This book is for those who wonder about the people who built the magnificent collections behind that facade. Although David A. Randall died in May, 1975, some readers may well remember him as the Lilly librarian who came to the Bloomington campus in 1956 having pre- viously served as a bookseller in the Rare Book Department of Scribner’s Book Store. During his Lilly Library career Randall re- cruited such notable catalogers as Josiah &. Bennett, and he ac- quired collections ranging from the wondrous (for example, George Book Reviews 265 A. Poole’s with its New Testament portion of the Gutenberg Bible) to the whimsical (for instance, Ian Fleming’s manuscript materials relating to his James Bond series). All these he added, of course, to Josiah K. Lilly’s books and manuscripts on science, especially medicine, and American literature. The first part of this work, actually a succinct, single chapter of twenty pages, provides a brief biographical sketch of Randall’s New York apprenticeship under Max Hartof: “I worked harder, earned less and learned more in the three years I spent with him than [in] any other comparable period” (p. 6). Indicating that he intended to establish a free-standing rare book library on the Bloomington campus, Josiah K. Lilly personally asked for Randall as librarian, and the next twenty years saw the Lilly Library issue striking exhibition catalogs and double the existing collection’s size. With brief headnotes by the compiler, the second part of this slim volume reprints twenty-four of Randall’s most important es- says and articles, including several still worth reading-notably, his notes on rarity, auction cataloging policies, and “The Adven- ture of the Notorious Forger.” Readers wishing to delve deeper into Randall’s writings will appreciate part 3, the more-than-160-item chronological checklist of his works, including his highly readable and opinionated autobiography published as Dukedom Large Enough (1969). In summary, Randall’s Indiana University legacy, made pos- sible by Lilly’s funds, is the establishment of one of the great American collections of rare books and manuscripts. If these be the terms of greatness for a bibliographer-collection growth and influ- ence in his chosen field-then Randall certainly deserves his place in Scarecrow Press’s Great Bibliographers series. JOHNRICHARDSON, JR., is associate professor, Graduate School of Library and Infor- mation Science, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of eight books, including Spirit of Inquiry (1982) and Gospel of Scholurship (1992). Thomas Say: New World Naturalist. By Patricia Tyson Stroud. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Pp. xv, 340. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.) In the early nineteenth century Americans were eager to make new contributions to knowledge. Their eagerness extended to science as to other fields, and the years 1800-1840 witnessed the emergence of new societies and periodicals devoted specifically to science. Thomas Say, a Philadelphia naturalist, played an important role in the new developments. In this biography Patricia Ty- son Stroud examines Say’s life and work and in so doing identifies important features of American science in the early nineteenth century. Say was among the founders of Philadelphia’s Academy of .

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