Reviews on N. A. Ruberkin's “Bibliopsychology”

ーa Theory of Readers as a Conceptional Modelー

Abstract

N. A. Ruberkin (1862-1948) was a Russian bibliographer as well as a librarian, who has been famous for the editor of the bibliographies Among books that contained 16,000 titles of Russian literatures.
Upon the basis of a series of the surveys of readers among Russian and Swiss, in 1928 he wrote a book titled Psychologly of readers and books: the outline of bibliopsychology, in which be intended to create a theory on relationship between readers and books, using “muneme theory” that was set up by the R. Semon (1859-1914), a German biologist.
Although the “muneme theory” of the 19th century seemed outdated, Ruberkin's book has not been outdated, which would be due mainly to the following reasons: ① An unique communication theory that under the conception of “book phenomena” put three major components of communication: authors (speakers) —books (words and phrases) —readers (auditors);② Creation of the “readers” as a conceptional model.