Obituary: Howard Winger, Graduate Library School

Howard W. Winger, Professor Emeritus in the Graduate Library School, died March 5 in his home in North Manchester, Ind. He was 80.

A historian of books and libraries, Winger joined the Chicago faculty in 1953 as Assistant Professor and was appointed Professor in 1968. He served as Dean of Students in the Graduate Library School from 1953 to 1956 and as Dean of the school from 1972 to 1977. He retired in 1981.

He was the author of Printers' and Publishers' Devices (1976), and he edited and contributed to numerous other books, including Iron Curtains and Scholarship: The Exchange of Knowledge in a Divided World (1959), Seven Questions About the Profession of Librarianship (1961), The Medium-sized Public Library: Its Status and Future (1963), Area Studies and the Library (1966), The Deterioration and Preservation of Library Materials (1970) and American Literary History, 1876-1976 (1976).

Winger was managing editor of the Library Quarterly, an international journal of investigation in library science, during several periods in his career -- from 1961 through 1972, in 1975, from 1980 through 1985 and from 1988 through 1989. He also was a contributor to many scholarly and professional journals, and more than 50 of his essays -- particularly those on 16th-century printers' devices -- have appeared in the Library Quarterly. He wrote the chapter on books in the 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

"Howard remained a humanist in a graduate school that came to have an increasingly quantitative orientation," said Abraham Bookstein, Professor in the Humanities. "An example of this is the fact that for the many years he edited the Library Quarterly, he balanced the journal's often mathematical articles with cover designs featuring drawings of the elegant early printing devices about which he wrote so eloquently. I will always remember the encouragement he gave to me as a young quantitative scholar."

Winger received his A.B. in 1936 from Manchester College, his B.S. in 1945 from George Peabody College for Teachers and his M.S. in 1948 and his Ph.D. in 1953 from the University of Illinois at Urbana. He then taught at the University of Illinois and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining the faculty at Chicago.

His memberships in various professional associations included the Association of American Library Schools, where he was the founding editor of the Journal of Education for Librarianship, the association's official journal.

He is survived by his wife, Helen, four sons and one daughter.