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Descriptive Bibliography and Library
Cataloguing
by
G. Thomas
Tanselle
In a celebrated essay in 1941 on "The Crisis in Cataloging,"[1] Andrew D. Osborn remarked, "The relationship between cataloging and bibliography has been a difficult one to define" (p. 400). Indeed, anyone who has investigated the history of attempts to define it will regard this comment as a considerable understatement: the matter is intrinsically complex, but to make matters worse bibliographers and cataloguers have often been unsympathetic, or even hostile, toward each other's practices and approaches. Yet descriptive bibliography and cataloguing, as Osborn continues, "have many points of contact and many elements in common. Their history has been intertwined in many respects." The two are naturally related pursuits, and the interests of all who are concerned with books are best served by a spirit of cooperation between them; the split which threatens to make them continually more incompatible does no one any good. Both have become specialties, with the familiar result that communication is hampered; and those working in each field go their own way, without being well informed about, or perhaps even interested in, what is happening in the other. Bibliographers and cataloguers, and many other people as well, constantly consult both catalogues and bibliographies; the two kinds of works are necessarily different, having different aims, but they are both parts of a larger undertaking—the recording of intellectual products and their physical embodiments. A user of these works should ideally be impressed more by their compatibility
The present moment is particularly appropriate for an increased effort at mutual understanding. For their part, bibliographers have shown in recent years a renewed interest in the production of lists which do not entail full physical descriptions. D. F. McKenzie, for instance, has suggested that bibliography can perhaps best serve the study of history and literature "by returning . . . to the more directly useful, if less sophisticated, activity of enumerative 'bibliography.'"[2] And David F. Foxon has stated "the case for another species of bibliographer whose role lies somewhere between the enumerative and the descriptive";[3] after explaining the rationale of his own English Verse, 1701-1750: A Catalogue, he adds:
Conversely, cataloguers now more than ever need to examine descriptive bibliography for possible techniques or procedures that could be incorporated with advantage into their own work. Cataloguing in recent years has been at a critical juncture in its history, with the emergence of increasing possibilities for international standardization and cooperation as reflected in the extent of the agreement reached at the 1961 International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in Paris. The publication of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (1967), based on the Paris principles, and the development of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (1971), designed to make the elements of a catalogue description recognizable through punctuation, as well as the distribution of MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) magnetic tapes,[5] have served to indicate the enormous influence which cataloguing procedures can have and to provide an occasion for rethinking those procedures. Although it is unfortunate that these standard codes were promulgated without consideration of the contributions which descriptive bibliography might make, it is not too late to incorporate alterations in them, if changes are found to be desirable. Relatively speaking, we are still at the beginning of the tenure of these rules; and, if further improvements can be made in them by drawing on the experience of descriptive bibliography, this is the time for effecting those changes.
Cooperation between bibliographers and cataloguers, however, can be significant only if the relations between their activities are clearly recognized. I should like to begin by looking into this relationship, attempting to define the position each occupies in the whole realm of bibliographical study. Then, on this tenth anniversary of the appearance of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, I propose to examine some of those rules from the point of view of the descriptive bibliographer. As a result, I hope that it will be possible to survey with understanding various suggestions for cataloguing "rare" books and to point out some ways in which the approach of bibliographers and that of cataloguers can be brought closer together without placing an unfair burden on cataloguers.
I
The distinction between catalogues and bibliographies is an elementary one; yet it is not always kept clearly in mind by those engaged in bibliographical activity. Of course, one person can call his work a "catalogue" and mean something entirely different from what someone else means by "catalogue." Neither person is necessarily confused in his thinking; each is merely using a different definition of "catalogue." Such differences are always possible where matters of definition are involved. But I am not speaking here of the definitions of particular terms; rather, I am concerned with two different concepts, regardless of what they are labeled. One kind of record of books[6] —which it is convenient to call a "catalogue"—is concerned with the particular copies of books that happen to be in a given collection (a private library, an institutional library or special collection within it, a dealer's stock, and the like) or that constitute a specifically defined assemblage (items brought together for an exhibition or an auction, for instance).[7] Another kind of record of books—which it is convenient to call a "bibliography"—is concerned with books which are related in some way, but not with specific copies of those books. In other words, an entry in a catalogue refers to a particular copy of a book; an entry in a bibliography refers to any copy of that book. This distinction can best be illustrated by noting that the goal of descriptive bibliography is the description of an "ideal copy" of each book, a term carefully defined by Fredson Bowers (Principles, pp. 113-123) to refer to the complete state that the printer or publisher "considered to represent the final and most perfect state of the book." An ideal copy is not necessarily free of textual errors, but it is free of those physical deficiencies which would prevent its representing a standard form of the book as published. It is therefore an abstraction, for conceivably all existing copies of a book might be defective in one way or another, but a description of an ideal copy could still be constructed by combining details observable in the defective copies. A description of an ideal copy sets a standard against which individual copies can be measured;
Simple as this distinction essentially is, it raises some complicated questions which have been much discussed. Sometimes, there is a tendency to think that the amount of descriptive detail is a part of the distinction.[9] But it should be clear that both catalogues and bibliographies can run the gamut from the sparse to the elaborate. Some catalogues, like Allan Stevenson's volume of the Hunt catalogue (1961), include fuller physical descriptions than are found in a great many descriptive bibliographies. And some catalogues, like William A. Jackson's Pforzheimer catalogue (1940), involve comparisons between copies in the collection and other copies, so that the precise nature of the copies in the collection can be more clearly specified; in this way a catalogue can actually record the characteristics of an ideal copy, but so long as the object of description is one specific copy the work remains a catalogue. Naturally, as the quantity of detail declines, the differences between the entries for a given book in a catalogue and a bibliography are likely to become slighter—or nonexistent. If an entry consists of nothing more than a simple listing of author, title, and date, such an entry for a book in a catalogue could not be distinguished from the same style of entry for that book in a bibliography
Another question which complicates one's thinking about catalogues and bibliographies is the determination of what is meant by "book"—of what, in fact, is being recorded. The word "book" is sometimes used to refer to a physical object (or a group of physical objects, such as all those comprising one edition); at other times it refers to the work (the verbal construction) embodied in the pages of the physical book. Clearly this distinction is basic, and the nature of a bibliographical record is determined by whether that record is principally concerned with books or with works. It might at first be supposed that a catalogue inevitably deals with books, not works, since it lists specific copies. Unquestionably a catalogue must involve this element; but many catalogues of books are used as guides to the works on a given subject, and their compilers sometimes have this function in mind and provide annotation which emphasizes it. Seymour Lubetzky, in Principles of Cataloging (1969), has offered a careful analysis of the book-vs.-work distinction in the context of library cataloguing (pp. 1-17).[11] First he sums up the perennial debate over whether a library catalogue should be a "finding list" or a "reference tool," whether it should merely locate certain books for its users or provide a guide to the works incorporated in those books.[12] Later he
The division between books and works is analogous to Lloyd Hibberd's separation of the field into "physical bibliography" and
Reference bibliography can simply be regarded as primarily concerned with works, physical bibliography as primarily concerned with books. The approach in each case will determine what details are reported and how they are treated; but it should not be surprising that some of the same details will turn up in both kinds of bibliographies, since the two approaches are complementary. I take it that Hibberd is making the same point when he says, "And though divergent in purpose and scope, the two divisions start from the common basis of systematic compilation and end in reciprocal fructification" (p. 133). Du Rietz, too, wishes to show the intimate relationship between the two, but in stressing the physical elements in reference bibliography he makes reference bibliography in effect a preliminary step leading toward, or a less thorough form of, physical bibliography.[17] He is unwilling to let the word "bibliography" move beyond its
The relationships I am describing can perhaps be clarified by a
diagram:
There is no question that the differing approaches of reference and physical bibliography have frequently produced incompatible results in the past. Du Rietz has said that bibliography and information science are "notoriously at loggerheads in all matters terminological" and that "the libraries will apparently remain an unavoidable battle-field for the combatants until some modus vivendi may be achieved" (pp. 26-27). The libraries are at the center of this debate precisely because they attempt, through catalogues and indexes in whatever form, to offer a guide both to the books in their holdings and to the works contained in those books. Of course, any cataloguer or bibliographer confronts this issue to some degree in his own work, but institutional libraries, because they process large numbers of books, naturally become the most prominent illustration of the problem. The real point of contact between the two approaches (or the
II
It is obvious that many more books are catalogued with fairly brief entries by librarians than are accorded detailed descriptions by bibliographers and that there are many more library cataloguers at work than there are descriptive bibliographers. It is not surprising, therefore, that more attention has been given over the years to the principles and practices of library cataloguing than to those of descriptive bibliography.[22] The present Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR) have developed from a tradition that can be traced back to Panizzi's British Museum rules of 1841 and includes Charles A. Cutter's Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue (1876), the American and British Library Associations' Catalog Rules of 1908, the "Preliminary American Second Edition" of those rules in 1941, the Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the Library of Congress (1947, 1949), and the A. L. A. Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries (1949).[23]
Chapter 6 of AACR, on the "descriptive cataloging" of separately published monographs, is naturally the focus of attention for the descriptive bibliographer. Perhaps the best way to begin an examination of its approach is to look at Rule 141, on "collation."[28] Traditionally what is called the "collation" in a library catalogue card or entry consists of three parts: pagination, illustrations, and size. The "preliminary note" to this rule emphasizes its concern with physical details: the "collation" is called "the cataloger's description of the
The rules for recording pagination (or foliation) reflect the same ambiguity. First one is told (141B1a) that the "extent of a work" is to be indicated in terms of pages, leaves, or columns, depending on the method followed in the book being catalogued. The implication is that the cataloguer is concerned with the characteristics of the physical book, since the method of numbering employed in a given book is not related to the extent of the work; if the sole interest were in indicating extent, all figures for all books could be converted to a single unit, such as pages. The same impression is conveyed by the further rule (141B1b) that arabic or roman numbers or letters are to be used, following the practice of the book. But this rule ends with the statement that "Pages or leaves numbered in words, or in characters other than Arabic or Roman, are designated in the collation in Arabic figures." Thus the emphasis has shifted to an indication of the extent of the work, eliminating a report of the actual system of numbering used. What is the rationale, one may ask, for allowing the nature of the characters employed in numbering the pages or leaves of a given book to determine whether the cataloguer reports in his entry a characteristic of the book (the actual system used) or a characteristic of the work (its extent, measured in convenient terms)?
If the numeration in a book is divided into two or more series, the
The handling of various special problems connected with pagination further reveals this awkward mixing of approaches. When there is no numbering in a book at all, the printed pages are counted and the number placed in brackets—or, if the figure is over 100, the number may be estimated (141B2). And when there are several (more than three) "numbered main sections," the numbers on the last numbered page of each section are added together and presented in the form "968 p. in various pagings" (141B3b). Both these rules obviously emphasize the work, not the book. Why, then, is the numbering of the individual main sections to be reported when there are no more than three of them, with other lesser sections recorded in the form of a total, as in "xiv, 226, [44] p." (141B3a)?[33] The fact that
Two other rules about pagination deserve to be commented on. One describes the treatment of works in more than one volume (141C): when the pagination of the volumes is separate, only the number of volumes is to be recorded; but when the pagination is continuous, it is to be added in parentheses, as "2 v. (xxxi, 999 p.)." This rule is doubly peculiar. In the first place, it is difficult to understand why the physical division into two or more volumes renders a reference to pagination unnecessary, when pagination—rather than "1 v."—is considered the appropriate way to indicate the extent of a work in one volume. After all, some two-volume works are shorter than some one-volume works.[34] Second, it is not clear why the continuity of pagination is a reason for recording the paging; the pagination is either worth listing or not worth listing, but the fact that it starts over in the second volume does not make it irrelevant. The logic is even further confused in the statement that "Separately paged preliminary matter in volumes after the first is ignored unless it is important; if it is important, the work is not considered as being paged continuously"—in which case the pagination is not noted at all. One is left with the anomaly that the presence of "important" matter in a separately paged preliminary section in the second volume of a two-volume work is a reason for eliminating the record of pagination entirely.[35] Surely this is a prime example of the situation in which
The other pagination rule which requires particular comment deals with incomplete copies (141B12): "If the last part of a work is wanting, and the paging of a complete copy cannot be ascertained, paging is given in the form 179+ p., with note of the imperfection." Aside from the illogical reference to "the last part of a work," when a book can be defective in other places as well, the problem with this rule is its conception of the function of a catalogue listing. Whereas the rules previously discussed have shown some confusion about the distinction between books and works, this rule reveals some indecision about whether the undertaking is a catalogue or a bibliography. The implication here is that the pagination of a complete copy, when known, is recorded in the collation line (presumably with a note somewhere pointing out the defect in the copy under examination). But if these are catalogue rules—not rules for bibliographies, which refer to ideal copies—the basis for each entry must be the book present in the collection being catalogued.[37] The emphasis may be on the content of the book rather than on its physical features, but any physical features mentioned must conform to the characteristics of the specific copy at hand. Details about the characteristics of a complete copy may be useful, but they are strictly supplementary. Perhaps the role of the Library of Congress in supplying printed catalogue cards to other
The second element in the collation, following the designation of the pagination or foliation or number of volumes, is a brief reference to any illustrative matter in the book. It consists of nothing more than the abbreviation "ill.", "unless particular types [of illustrations] in the work are considered important enough to be specifically designated"; when that occurs there are several specific terms, like "diagrams," "maps," "music," or "portraits," to choose from (141D1a). As with pagination, the intent is obviously to suggest something about the content of the work, not to record the precise physical structure of the book; but the emphasis here is on the nature of the illustrations, not their extent. A later rule (141D4) does permit specifying the number of illustrations, but only if they are numbered or "if the number can readily be ascertained"; and any numbers given are to be arabic and are not to appear in brackets even if the illustrations themselves are unnumbered. This rule, unlike the rules for pagination, reveals no indecision regarding aims, for the focus is entirely on content: such physical details as the manner of numbering the illustrations are not allowed to intrude into a statement about the illustrations. A problem arises, however, from the fact that the previous part of the collation, the pagination statement, may also refer to plates (141B1d) and to music (141B10) when they occur in separately paged or unpaged sections or on pages not otherwise covered by the
The third part of the collation is an indication of size, consisting of the measurement in centimeters (rounded off to the next higher full centimeter) of the height of the binding (141E1). This measurement is of course a physical detail, but it is only one of several measurements
The rules for description in the North American Text of AACR developed from—and remained close to—those in the 1949 Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the Library of Congress. And both these codes represent a considerable simplification of what had been proposed in 1941 in the "Preliminary American Second Edition" of the A. L. A. Catalog Rules. The pagination rules set forth there result in such illustrations as "xii p., 5 l., [3], 219 p." and "v, 365, [3] p., 2 l."— which suggest careful attention to physical details but are nevertheless intended to indicate the extent of the work, not of the book. One rule, for instance, states that "Blank leaves at the beginning of a book are not counted even if they have apparently been included in the paging"; and another requires that intermediate unpaged matter be reported as leaves "when some or all of the leaves are blank on one side, except that unpaged matter continuing the text from a preceding numbered page is given as a page, even if printed on a leaf one side of which is blank" (rules 271-272). Despite the elaboration of rules such as these,[43] the system does not manage unambiguously to convey just which pages contain printed matter (the number of blank pages in the groups designated as leaves in the illustrations cited above is not determinable from the formulas)[44] —and it certainly does not provide a register of all the pages in a book. Dissatisfaction with these proposed rules was fortunately widespread and began even before their publication, for a note facing the title page of the 1941 volume
Cataloguers and librarians themselves have been uneasily aware that the collation statement is a trouble spot, the treatment of which has never been satisfying. Herman H. Henkle, in the Studies of Descriptive Cataloging (1946) which formed part of the deliberation leading up to the 1949 Library of Congress Rules, summed up the problem:
Of course, as these comments suggest, it is not merely the collation line which reveals a confusion between books and works. I have concentrated on that part of the entry, particularly the pagination statement, as a telling illustration of the problem; but the problem is not confined to that element. For instance, the treatment of the title pages of books bears some awkward traces of a concern with physical detail. The basic rule for the "transcription" of title makes clear that a literal transcription is not intended, for exactness is required only "as to order, wording, spelling, accentuation, and other diacritical marks" but "not necessarily as to punctuation and capitalization." Furthermore, if "diacritical marks are omitted from the title page, they are added in conformity with the usage in the text" (134B1). The emphasis is clearly on the content of the title, not on its formal presentation or typographic layout. Yet when long titles are abridged (as they are "if this can be done without loss of essential information"), three dots are required to mark the ellipsis (134B2). This requirement is understandable when part of the title quoted follows the omission, for not to indicate the omission in such instances would simply be irresponsible quotation; but when the omission occurs at the end of the quoted part of the title, one could argue, as with ordinary quotations within a text, that the ellipsis dots are unnecessary. The recording of the title is admittedly a special type of quotation, since punctuation and capitalization need not be followed; but it nevertheless is a quotation (concerned with words and the accompanying marks conventional to the language), not quasi-facsimile transcription (concerned with the typography and layout in which those words and marks are presented).[52] Other recorded details, aside from titles (main titles, subtitles, series titles, and so on), need not be regarded as quotations, however, but as reports of information. Therefore, when the author's name is provided as the heading for the entry, it seems unnecessary to repeat the name following the title, as the basic rule requires (134D1).[53] The concern of this rule is obviously not with the physical form of the title page, because it recognizes that the
The treatment of some parts of the title page reflects this principle more firmly than that of other parts. If a subtitle, for example, is printed at the head of the title page, above the title, it is silently transposed to a position following the title in the entry (134C4b).[54] And the imprint is regularized into the order place-publisher-year, regardless of the order on the title page, and neither this rearrangement nor omissions of words need be specified (136A, 136C1, 138A).[55]
It should come as no surprise that the emphasis of library cataloguing, as reflected in AACR, is on what may be called reference bibliography, where the primary concern is the intellectual content of books. Of the two conventional divisions of library cataloguing, subject cataloguing—or classification—obviously deals with content; what may be less clear at first is that the other division, so-called descriptive cataloguing, does so as well.[59] Because descriptive bibliography treats of books as physical objects, some confusion may be caused by the use of the term "descriptive cataloguing" to denote an activity which does not. The difficulty, however, is not entirely one of terminology. The present cataloguing code, AACR, in all its versions, states that "The collation is the cataloger's description of the physical work and is limited to standard bibliographical terminology" (132A; 1967 texts, 131).[60] Yet, as this examination of the rules for collation indicates,
III
How to reconcile the practices of descriptive bibliography and library cataloguing in the area where the two fields overlap is a problem which has exercised many people over the years. If the Anglo-American code reflects little awareness of the issue, there has nevertheless been a succession of librarians who have touched on the matter, generally in connection with the cataloguing of rare books. Whereas one tradition of bibliographical writing, developing through Pollard, Greg, McKerrow, and Bowers,[62] has taken up the problems of description for those concerned with the physical book (and the use of physical evidence in historical and literary studies), another tradition has consisted of librarians writing for other librarians about the physical details appropriate for inclusion in the catalogue entries for certain classes of material. The two traditions intertwine occasionally, and such men as Esdaile, Cowley, Dunkin, Alden, and Bennett, addressing themselves to library cataloguers, are fully aware of the other tradition of writing about the description of books. Their discussions are worth surveying, as significant attempts to bring the two approaches together, even though their attention is primarily directed toward rare books and special collections, not toward the larger problem of general cataloguing.
Arundell Esdaile, in A Student's Manual of Bibliography (1931), one of a series originally called "The Library Manuals," does attempt to encompass all kinds of cataloguing and begins his chapter on description with this statement: "Every catalogue-entry is a description of the book catalogued; but according to the purpose of the catalogue is the degree of elaboration of the description" (p. 248). What this pronouncement overlooks is the fact that a given purpose may be served by differing degrees of detail. By stating that "purpose" and "degree of elaboration" fluctuate together, it postulates a situation in which a shift in the aim of an entry entails a quantitative, rather than qualitative, shift in the annotation. Esdaile's four levels of description reflect the difficulties of this position. His "minimum entry" consists of nothing but title and author's name and is thus an
Eight years later, J. D. Cowley addressed another book, Bibliographical Description and Cataloguing, to library-school students, setting out specifically to help them "distinguish sufficiently between what is appropriate to cataloguing and what is suitable in a published bibliography" (p. v). In a carefully considered introductory chapter, he segregates, much more successfully than Esdaile, the aims, and resulting methods, of physical and subject bibliography. Recognizing that differing aims dictate the nature of the details to be included in an entry, not their quantity, he says, "Minute description of the physical form of the material is therefore out of place" in a subject listing; "Description of physical features need only be sufficient to secure identification of the work or the edition which is described" (pp. 6-7). That is, the number of physical details can be reduced not because a subject list is a less detailed descriptive bibliography but because it is not concerned with physical books, except as necessary to locate the physical embodiments of works; if annotation is to be provided, it should be of a different kind.[65] Having laid this admirable foundation, Cowley is disappointing in his ensuing recommendations, as they relate to the stated problem of "what is appropriate to cataloguing and what is suitable in a published bibliography." His real interest is in the latter, and virtually his whole work is devoted to detailed descriptive bibliography (it is the most thorough pre-Bowers exposition of the subject). As far as library cataloguing is concerned, he is content to accept uncritically the Anglo-American code then in effect. At the start, he says that for subject bibliography "a simple catalogue entry, constructed according to one of the recognized codes of rules, is the best form of description" (p. 7). And in his chapter on format and collation, after eighteen pages on a method of format designation and a formulary for the recording of pagination and signatures, he appends four lines: "In short entries or entries for subject bibliographies the
In 1951 Paul S. Dunkin's booklet on How to Catalog a Rare Book was published by the American Library Association. Like Cowley, Dunkin does not attempt to correlate reference and physical bibliography. Routine cataloguing has to do with subject matter: "People want to find an ordinary book because they want to read it. Simplified cataloging serves well enough for such a book because it gives a call number and tells what the book is about" (p. 1). A rare book, on the other hand, is of interest as a physical object: "If people wanted only to read it, a microfilm or reprint would do. The fact that the rare book is valued as a material object must be the keynote of any useful approach to rare book cataloging." The booklet proceeds to offer an introduction to title-page transcription, determination of format, and the recording of signatures and pagination—the "cataloging problems peculiar to rare books" (p. 2)—without further considering what rationale underlies the segregating of certain books for this treatment.[66] Indeed, the cataloguer is not supposed to think about this question: "it is not," he says, "the cataloger's job to decide if a book is rare; that has been decided before the book reached his desk." But someone had to make a decision, for the dividing line between "rare books" and others is not self-evident, nor therefore is the division between books of interest for their content and books of interest as physical objects. Obviously any book can be of interest for either reason; but despite the title of his opening chapter, "Whys and Wherefores," Dunkin does not conceive of his task as involving any examination of such matters. Instead, he concentrates on particulars of form and is at pains to show that the recording of physical details need not
In contrast, John E. Alden, in his excellent essay on "Cataloging and Classification" for the Association of College and Research Libraries' Rare Book Collections (1965),[72] stresses the mutually fruitful relationship that can exist between the two groups. He calls rare-book cataloguing "bibliographical cataloging" (p. 68) and sees the cataloguer as a person with "a great opportunity to render a particular, not to say unique, service to the scholar—the opportunity to describe individual books analytically and to achieve significant patterns either by the correlation of these descriptions or, by means of classification, by the correlation of the books themselves" (p. 65).[73] But in order to play this creative role, Alden believes, the cataloguer must also learn from the scholar and keep abreast of developments in analytical bibliography and textual study. To say that the rare-book cataloguer can ignore those developments or that he can follow the standard cataloguing
The approach which Alden describes in general terms is the one which underlies the detailed specifications set forth by Josiah Q. Bennett in his impressive booklet on The Cataloguing Requirements of the Book Division of a Rare Book Library (1969).[75] Bennett's thorough treatment of the form and nature of the elements required in an adequate catalogue entry for a "rare book" is concerned both with upholding scholarly standards and with recognizing practical realities. It is grounded in the belief, first, that library cataloguing of rare books—which necessarily emphasizes physical details—need provide only enough information for identification, not the greater quantity required for true description (e.g., pp. 8, 29); second, that careful initial cataloguing is more economical than the repeated investigation which would otherwise be necessary to answer inquiries or check
It is beyond the scope of his essay to pursue the implications of this remark outside the rare-book field—that is, outside the area where interest in the physical book predominates. But his underlying concern with the split between the two ways of looking at books permeates his discussion, and the general problem is treated with understanding and insight in his opening section, on the "Rationale" of rare-book cataloguing, and in his closing section, on "The Indicated Symbiosis." The two groups that must learn to be symbiotic are of course those persons interested in information and text retrieval on the one hand and those interested in "bibliographical data retrieval," as Bennett puts it, on the other. The average library cataloguer holds a belief—
It is natural that discussions of the relation between reference and physical bibliography have generally addressed themselves to problems of rare books and special collections. Cataloguing codes from Cutter to AACR have generally included a section on incunabula,[78] thus tacitly admitting to any user of the codes that certain situations demand fuller attention to physical details than the basic rules allow for. But since no clear dividing line separates "rare books" from other books, the thoughtful reader of these codes will be moved to reexamine those basic rules. Bennett has shown what can be done with a minimum of effort to convert a standard entry into a satisfactory entry for a "rare book"—a book, that is, the physical features of which are, or can be anticipated to be, of interest because it falls into a category of books frequently approached in that way. Any book, however, no matter how unlikely the choice, may be studied as a physical object, the product of a certain moment in printing and publishing history.
I should like to suggest a way of answering this question, taking the statement of pagination as my illustration—both because I concentrated on pagination in my comments on the Anglo-American rules and because the record of pagination is (among the elements included in an LC entry) of particular interest to physical bibliographers. Some of the problems involved in integrating the approaches of reference and physical bibliography toward pagination can be suggested by the practices of two bibliographers, one attempting to incorporate into a descriptive bibliography the pagination formula employed on LC cards and the other trying to devise a formula for brief catalogue entries that would have the precision expected by descriptive bibliographers. Donald Gallup, in his bibliographies of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, gives pagination in a system adapted from the 1949 Library of Congress Rules. He says, "I have modified the system, which ignores blanks and leaves containing only advertisements, in order to account for all leaves, although blank pages are not mentioned."[79] When the preliminary pages add up to the total implied by the first numbered page, they are not specified; but when there would be a discrepancy in the numbering, the preliminaries are specified in leaves, with an indication of which are blank: "1 blank leaf, 3 leaves, 9-29 pp." At the end of a volume, a single blank verso is not mentioned ("29 pp." implies that page 30 is blank), but a single unnumbered verso with printed matter is indicated ("29, [1] pp."). When more leaves follow, the number is recorded, with those blank on both sides being labeled
Rolf Du Rietz's experiment, in his Bibliotheca Polynesiana, illustrates a somewhat different problem. His goal is to work out a pagination formula for reference bibliography—not, like Gallup, for physical bibliography. Yet he believes, with Gallup, that all leaves must be accounted for; he believes, in other words, that a pagination statement for reference bibliography must be more than an approximate indication of the extent of a work—it must be an accurate representation of the physical book in terms of pagination. "One of the aims of a page formula," he says, "must always be that of making possible references to any pages in the unit described, and to meet this and the other purposes of a page formula, it is absolutely necessary to assume a purely analytical approach to the problem of collational formulas for the purposes and needs of reference bibliography" (p. xli). The formula he proposes (and uses in his catalogue) is made up of two elements:
Du Rietz is right to observe that the pagination formulas in library catalogue entries frequently do not reflect any clear understanding of the purposes they are to serve.[83] But his own proposal seems to me, both on theoretical and on practical grounds, not to provide the answer. The theoretical problem results from his unwillingness to let the pagination formula in reference bibliography refer solely to the extent of the work. So long as one insists that the formula have a physical orientation, even in a reference context, and yet does not require it to conform to the practices of descriptive bibliography, the purposes of the formula are bound to be somewhat confused. Du Rietz asserts, "Since hardly any of the thousands of page collations for reference bibliographical purposes that are every week constructed all over the world are analytically conceived, it follows that they might as well have been left unwritten and that they mean a tremendous waste of time, labour and money" (p. xl). Then he adds, "I do not say that a page-collation formula in reference bibliography should conform to the standards required for the pagination formulas supplementing the analytical formulas in descriptive bibliography." Why not? Is it not also a waste of time to have people learn an intermediate system, when an unambiguous system already exists for recording pagination from a physical point of view? The theoretical consideration is thus linked to the practical one: any solution to the problem of appropriate pagination formulas must be based on a realistic assessment of the feasibility of its adoption. The farther it departs from standard practices, already widely understood, the less its chances of ready acceptance, unless what it proposes is so obviously necessary that no resistance
Let us postulate a book which would have the following pagination formula in a descriptive bibliography (following Bowers's Principles): pp. [i-v] vi-viii [ix] x-xi [xii-xiii] xiv-xvii [xviii-xx], [1] 2-275 [276-277]
I am not suggesting, however, that a full pagination formula of the kind employed in descriptive bibliography is appropriate for the majority of entries in a library catalogue or a checklist at the end of a book or any other bibliographical work emphasizing reference bibliography.[90] My point is that whenever a library cataloguer or reference bibliographer wishes (for whatever reason he finds persuasive) to include information about the physical details of pagination, he would be better advised to adopt the formula of descriptive bibliography than to settle for some intermediate scheme which only partially accomplishes his purpose. But the corollary is that in most instances, when he is concerned solely with reference bibliography, he need not complicate his statement at all with physical details. For the hypothetical book under discussion, why could he not simply say "xvii, 284 pp." (or, adding the two figures, "301 pp.")?[91] According to the Anglo-American rules he would have to say "xvii, 283 [1] p.," including the "[1]" only because the 284th page, containing part of a checklist, would be referred to in a note. Or if the printed matter in the preliminaries extended to page [xix], why should he not say "xix, 284 pp." (or "303 pp.")? If reference bibliography is a legitimate pursuit, as it plainly is, there is no reason to insist that entries devised for reference purposes should satisfy the demands of physical bibliography. Where library cataloguing rules for pagination have generally gone astray is in paying too much attention to the physical details of pagination when the interest of the entry is in the extent of the work. Why should a work be labeled as "283 p." merely because the last page number is "283," when the last page of printed matter is actually the 284th page? If the concern is with the extent of the work, that extent might as well be recorded as accurately as possible, especially since the presence or absence of a printed page number is a detail of
It is true, as Du Rietz says, that "One of the most urgent needs of reference bibliography is the working out of adequate rules for page collations" (p. xl). What I have tried to suggest here is that a sensible solution can only flow from a clear understanding of the aims of and relations between reference and physical bibliography. Pagination is not the only problem, and I hope that what I have said offers an approach, a way of thinking, which can be applied to other elements of an entry, such as the recording of dimensions or the quoting of
Much has been made of the difficulty of the formulas and terminology employed in descriptive bibliography and of the fact that a library cataloguer cannot speak to the user of the catalogue through a preface explaining his system.[94] But the standard formulas of descriptive
Notes
Library Quarterly, 11 (1941), 393-411. The historical position of this essay is commented upon in some of the works mentioned in note 23 below, especially those by Dunkin. Earlier Osborn had touched on "the very important question in cataloging theory as to the relation between bibliography and cataloging" and called for a "new theory of the dictionary catalog," in "Cataloging Costs and a Changing Conception of Cataloging," Catalogers' and Classifiers' Yearbook, 5 (1936), 45-54 (esp. 48-49).
See p. 61 of his "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices," SB, 22 (1969), 1-75.
See Information on the MARC System (3rd ed., 1973), which includes a checklist of relevant items, pp. 37-44; for the International Standard Bibliographic Description, see note 26 below.
They can, for the moment, be called "books"; I shall take up below the significance of calling them that and the question whether they should at times be called something else.
Although a list of books available from a publisher is often called a "catalogue," it is not a catalogue in the sense defined here; each entry in a publisher's list refers not to a specific copy but to any or all copies of the item in question. (The same might be said of a new-book dealer's "catalogue" listing books which the dealer can procure on demand but which are not actually in stock.)
Rolf Du Rietz has explored this distinction between catalogues and bibliographies in detail in the preface to his Bibliotheca Polynesiana: A Catalogue of Some of the Books in the Polynesiana Collection Formed by the Late Bjarne Kroepelien and Now in the Oslo University Library (1969), pp. xix-xxviii. The principal point I have been making is the one on which his discussion also is based: "the great difference between catalogues and bibliographies in respect of the Platonic 'idea' of the copy behind the description is . . . so obvious, so utterly significant, that it seems the only sound ground upon which to base a definition of the two terms" (p. xxiv). Fredson Bowers makes the same distinction more concisely in "The Function of Bibliography," Library Trends, 7 (1958-59), 497-510 (esp. 500-503).
For instance, Edward A. Petherick said in July 1897 that catalogues were becoming so full of details "that it is difficult to say where cataloguing ends and bibilography begins" (p. 148), in "Theoretical and Practical Bibliography," Transactions and Proceedings of the Second International Library Conference (1898), pp. 148-149. A. W. Pollard, writing on "The Relations of Bibliography and Cataloguing" in the same volume, pp. 63-66, said that the librarian's work "necessarily becomes bibliographical" when his library has two editions of the same work, because he is "bound in some way to show how they differ" (p. 65). Georg Schneider, in Theory and History of Bibliography (trans. Ralph R. Shaw, 1934), where "bibliography" is used only in the sense of a reference list, states that "the entries in catalogs must be brief; entries in bibliographies must be accurate and complete, for they serve to supplement the former" (p. 51). See also Frank L. Tolman, "Bibliography and Cataloging: Some Affinities and Contrasts," Public Libraries, 10 (1905), 119-122; and Henry B. Van Hoesen, "Short Cataloguing and Bibliographical Cataloguing," American Library Institute Papers and Proceedings 1921, pp. 15-41.
In "Bibliography Revisited," Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 89-128, reprinted in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (1975), pp. 151-195, Bowers makes the same point: "The fullest description ever compiled would be a mere catalogue entry if based on the examination of only a single copy" (p. 194). When he goes on, however, to say, "It is the matter of standards of examination, quite apart from the differing forms of the entry, that distinguishes descriptive from enumerative bibliography," the issues become less clear, because "enumerative bibliography" is not synonymous with "cataloguing." Indeed, the preceding sentence has made clear that the form of the entry does not distinguish bibliographies and catalogues, and "enumerative bibliography" here must mean a listing with few details. In that case, one can see what Du Rietz objects to in Bowers's statement: "the very form of the entries," Du Rietz says, "is exactly what determines whether the list (bibliography or catalogue) is of the descriptive or of the enumerative (i.e. reference) kind, the standards of examination behind the form indicating solely the degree of quality of the list" (Bibliotheca Polynesiana, p. lix). Certainly a cataloguer could set for himself as high a standard of examination of copies as a descriptive bibliographer, but the resulting work, containing descriptions of particular copies, would still be a catalogue. It is not the standards themselves which determine the genre of the work produced but the intent of the compiler as to the subject matter of the entries (that is, whether they refer to particular or ideal copies). When Du Rietz proceeds to point out that the "standards of examination are necessarily always more or less poor in entries for descriptive catalogues" and that such entries "must by their very nature always be more or less preliminary," he begins to blur the essential distinction, for it is not in the nature of a catalogue to be preliminary but simply to be a record of specific copies. (Cf. his comments on p. xxi.) If his phrases "necessarily always" and "by their very nature always" were each replaced with "usually" his statement would be a fair generalization about actual practice and would not imply that something in the very concept of a catalogue prevents it from representing more than a certain limited amount of research. (Whether or not Du Rietz should have equated "enumerative" and "reference" bibliography, as he does in the comment quoted earlier, is a separate question; the meaning of "reference" bibliography will be considered below.) In his Principles, Bowers suggests that the term "bibliographical catalogue" be used "when the high requirements of bibliographies have not been completely met either in the number of copies compared or in the method of examination" (p. 5). So long as this term is carefully defined as a technical expression, it can of course serve this purpose. But less confusion would be likely to result if "catalogue" were reserved strictly for works listing specific copies; to employ it in a phrase like "bibliographical catalogue" to designate a work which does not meet the requirements for a descriptive bibliography is to encourage the fallacy that a catalogue is simply an inferior bibliography, rather than a work with basically different aims. Cf. the similar objections raised by Lloyd Hibberd, Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 130, n. 5, and Du Rietz, p. xx, n. 3.
As he puts it, the modern concept of "bibliographic cataloging" reflects the recognition "that the book (i.e., the material record) and the work (i.e., the intellectual product embodied in it) are not coterminous" (p. 99). For Rolf Du Rietz's extended discussion of the same distinction, see his essay cited in note 15 below and "The Concept of 'Bibliotype,'" Text, 1 (1974), 78-92 (esp. 82-85). Various earlier writers have of course noted this distinction as well: e.g., see J. D. Cowley, Bibliographical Description and Cataloguing (1939), pp. 6-7; Thomas Franklin Currier, "What the Bibliographer Says to the Cataloger," Catalogers' and Classifiers' Yearbook, 9 (1941), 21-37 (p. 26: "In general it is safe to say that the cataloger should be more concerned with the substance and content of the book than with its physical form and make-up"); Pierce Butler, "The Cultural Function of the Library," Library Quarterly, 22 (1952), 79-91 (p. 88: a book as "so much matter" or as a "system of ideas").
A good historical survey of opinion on this question is provided by Raynard Swank in "Subject Catalogs, Classifications, or Bibliographies? A Review of Critical Discussions, 1876-1942," Library Quarterly, 14 (1944), 316-332.
From p. 97 of the concluding chapter, "Bibliographic Dimensions in Information Control," pp. 97-113, written in collaboration with Robert M. Hayes; this chapter was also published in American Documentation, 20 (1969), 247-252.
"Physical and Reference Bibliography," Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 124-134. Hibberd conveniently brings together relevant comments from Fredson Bowers, Verner Clapp, Louise-Noëlle Malclès, and others.
"What Is Bibliography?", Text, 1 (1974), 6-40. Although the discussion which follows takes issue with Du Rietz occasionally, my conclusions have much in common with his. Cf. note 21 below.
Whether enough information is provided to identify texts is another question. The word "text" can have both a concrete and an abstract meaning: it can refer to the inked type-images in a given copy of a book, or it can signify a particular arrangement of words, abstracted from any particular physical embodiment. Du Rietz calls the first an "actual text" and the second an "ideal text," which can be either a "version" or a "work" (p. 11). What distinguishes a version from a work, however, is a difficult matter; see, for instance, G. T. Tanselle, "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," SB, 29 (1976), 167-211.
He does not claim that it is necessarily less detailed, for he notes that the results of both kinds of bibliography can be recorded in lists (p. 23); he does, however, imply an ascending order, leading up from "humble" reference checklists to physical bibliography "on the highest level" (p. 26). He defines reference bibliography as "the activity of collecting, selecting, arranging, and sometimes also commenting upon information relating solely to the existence and relevance of such particular books as are united by a least common denominator selected as the basis for the bibliographer's work" (p. 23). But he goes on to say that the least common denominator is usually of a literary kind and that "the ultimate purpose is to list works." It is difficult to see, therefore, how his definition would operate in practice to keep the focus of reference bibliography on books rather than works.
Hibberd makes the sensible suggestion that the word "description" should be reserved for "external description" and that "internal description" should be called "annotation" (see his discussion of these and the related terms "critical" and "analytical" on pp. 131-132). The ambiguous use of "description" in library cataloguing is commented on below.
Similarly, both catalogues and bibliographies which lack detail can be called "checklists" or "handlists," but their differing functions remain as before. Indeed, it would seem preferable to use "checklist" or "handlist" in such cases, so as to give the reader an indication of the amount of detail to be expected. But "bibliography" has been so widely used for so many years to signify an enumerative list as well as a detailed one that it seems futile at this late date to attempt to alter the usage. Careful writers, however, will continue to make the distinction.
A different sort of diagram, which makes some of the same points, appears in William J. Cameron, Brian J. McMullin, and Joginder K. Sood, The HPB Project: Phase II (1970), p. 3. It, like mine, attempts to show that both reference and physical bibliography can be undertaken at any level of detail, by equating the vertical axis with "elaborateness of description" and the horizontal with "the degree of attention to the physical character of the book on the one hand or to the intellectual content of the book on the other" (p. 2). However, I think that their diagram is somewhat misleading in marking off three levels of detail on the vertical axis, "identification," "description," and "analysis," with "analysis" at the top, because "analysis" is not a parallel concept and does not necessarily represent a greater elaboration of detail. In physical bibliography, analysis is a tool which plays a role in the production of a description; an analytical article may amount to a thorough physical description, or it may be only a partial description, less elaborate than a full-scale description, but in any case the fact that it is in essay form is beside the point. In reference bibliography, a book review—shown in their diagram as the counterpart of bibliographical analysis—is not the only form of content analysis; one-word assessments, such as "important," "disappointing," and "basic," are often attached to the entries in a reference list and are examples of analysis, but they do not make those entries more elaborate than a standard library catalogue entry. Part of the problem, at least on the physical side, comes perhaps from the fact that the Cameron-McMullin-Sood diagram is not concerned with distinguishing between catalogues and bibliographies: it is possible for a physical description based on one copy to result from very little analysis (though some judgment is always involved), but a description of an ideal copy based on many actual copies inevitably results from analysis. Nevertheless, the accompanying discussion, "Principles of Short-Title Cataloguing" (pp. 1-19), offers a thoughtful consideration of certain basic issues, recognizing, for instance, that "bibliographical description pays some attention to the intellectual contents of a book, and descriptive cataloguing [i.e., reference bibliography] often pays attention to some aspects of the physical book" (p. 5). But it is not part of the purpose of the discussion to question the rationale behind present conventions of library cataloguing: "Adequate description of a book from the subject point of view is embodied in library cataloguing" (p. 4).
Du Rietz makes a similar point: "What is important . . . is that information science must not be allowed to impose its descriptive standards (or rather, lack of such standards) upon the science of bibliography, or upon current and retrospective national bibliography" (p. 25). Because he believes it to be "quite unreasonable to demand" that information science should deal with books "in a scholarly way and with any pretensions to accuracy," one can understand why he places reference bibliography within the domain of physical bibliography. "The only result," he says, "of separating 'reference' and 'physical' bibliography from each other is that enumerative bibliography will continue to drift away from the only influences that could possibly save its scholarly standards in the long run, namely, the influences of 'physical' bibliography" (p. 22). But this approach only shifts the original problem from "reference bibliography" to "information science"—for one is still left with a field (though it has a different name) in which the overriding concern for works results in an unsatisfactory treatment of books. One can readily applaud Du Rietz's efforts to raise the standards of enumerative bibliography; but incorporating it into physical bibliography leaves one with the question of why inadequate references to books should be tolerated in "information science." Since an interest in works must entail some reference to the books in which they are found, information science (under whatever name) cannot be irresponsible in such references. Du Rietz is right, of course, to point out that essentially physical details form the link between information science and the recording of books; therefore—as both he and I are suggesting in somewhat different ways—those details, when they appear in a context stressing works, should be treated in a manner compatible with (but not necessarily identical with) the way they would be treated in a context stressing books.
Fredson Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949), the culmination of the tradition of descriptive bibliography, does build on the work of several earlier scholars (see note 62 below); but the total number of methodological discussions in this field is relatively small, and the codifications are the products of individual scholars (not of committees and public conferences).
Paul S. Dunkin has provided several useful historical surveys of this tradition, emphasizing the quarter-century preceding AACR (1967): "Criticisms of Current Cataloging Practice," Library Quarterly, 26 (1956), 286-302; "Cataloging and CCS [Cataloging and Classification Section of American Library Association]: 1957-1966," Library Resources and Technical Services, 11 (1967), 267-288; Cataloging U.S.A. (1969), pp. 1-22 et passim; "Two Decisive Decades: Cataloging & Classification—The Big IF," American Libraries, 3 (1972), 775-783; and "From Pig to Man," in Toward a Theory of Librarianship: Papers in Honor of Jesse Hauk Shera, ed. Conrad H. Rawski (1973), pp. 339-349. Other recent surveys include James A. Tait, Authors and Titles (1969); John Horner, Cataloguing (1970), pp. 25-87; P. K. Escreet, Introduction to the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (1971), pp. 17-36; and K. G. B. Bakewell, A Manual of Cataloguing Practice (1972), pp. 14-47. Many of the codes themselves (e.g., those of 1908, 1941, 1949) contain brief historical sketches, as do some of the reports of conferences (see note 25 below). For broader background, see Dorothy May Norris, A History of Cataloguing and Cataloguing Methods, 1100-1850 (1939); Ruth French Strout, "The Development of the Catalog and Cataloging Codes," Library Quarterly, 26 (1956), 254-275; John C. Olney, Library Cataloging and Classification (1963); and Eugene R. Hanson and Jay E. Daily, "Catalogs and Cataloging," in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Allen Kent and Harold Lancour, 4 (1970), 242-305. Among the relevant historical studies which focus on particular periods may be mentioned Jim Ranz, The Printed Book Catalogue in American Libraries, 1723-1900 (1964); Nancy Brault, The Great Debate on Panizzi's Rules in 1847-1849: The Issues Discussed (1972); Charles Martel, "Cataloging 1876-1926," Library Journal, 51 (1926), 1065-69; Jens Nyholm, "The Code in the Light of the Critics," College and Research Libraries, 3 (1941-42), 139-149; Andrew D. Osborn, "Cataloging Developments in the United States, 1940-47," in Actes du comité international des bibliothèques, 13th session (1947), 68-72; Leonard Jolley, "Some Recent Developments in Cataloguing in the U.S.A.," Journal of Documentation, 6 (1950), 70-82; Seymour Lubetzky, "Development of Cataloging Rules," Library Trends, 2 (1953-54), 179-186; Henry A. Sharp, "Current Research in Cataloguing," in Cataloguing Principles and Practice, ed. Mary Piggott (1954), pp. 15-25; Mary Piggott, "Cataloguing," in Five Years' Work in Librarianship, 1956-1960, ed. P. H. Sewell (1963), pp. 225-236, and 1961-1965 (1968), pp. 420-439; A. H. Chaplin, "Cataloguing Principles: Five Years after the Paris Conference," UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries, 21 (1968), 140-145, 149; and James A. Tait, "Cataloguing," in British Librarianship and Information Science, 1966-1970 (1972), pp. 61-67. For comparisons between some major codes (often, however, emphasizing the rules for heading, not description), see J. C. M. Hanson, A Comparative Study of Cataloging Rules Based on the Anglo-American Code of 1908 (1939); Henry A. Sharp, Cataloguing (4th ed., 1948), pp. 284-310; S. R. Ranganathan, Headings and Canons (1955); F. Bernice Field, "The New Catalog Code: The General Principles and the Major Changes," Library Resources and Technical Services, 10 (1966), 421-436, and "Anglo-American Cataloging Rules [Chapters 1-4] Correlated with A.L.A. Cataloging Rules," in New Rules for an Old Game (see note 25 below), pp. 137-159; Claude-Lise Richer, Étude comparative des codes de catalogage de 1967 et de 1949 (1968); and Donald J. Lehnus, A Comparison of Panizzi's 91 Rules and the AACR of 1967 (1972). Lehnus has also studied the writings on cataloguing and constructed a basic list of those most often cited, in Milestones in Cataloging: Famous Catalogers and Their Writings, 1835-1969 (1974). Other convenient checklists appear in Dunkin, Cataloging U.S.A., pp. xv-xxii; Escreet, pp. 368-373; Bakewell, pp. 269-284; and in some of the proceedings of conferences (see note 25 below).
Lubetzky, Cataloging Rules and Principles: A Critique of the A.L.A. Rules for Entry and a Proposed Design for Their Revision (1953); Code of Cataloging Rules: Bibliographic Entry and Description, a Partial and Tentative Draft (1958); Code of Cataloging Rules: Author and Title Entry, an Unfinished Draft, annotated by Paul Dunkin (1960). For both the Stanford and the McGill institutes, there are available a Summary of Proceedings (1958, 1960) and the Working Papers (1958, 1960), the latter containing in each case a general statement of philosophy and purpose by Wyllis E. Wright (and the McGill volume including Lubetzky on "Fundamentals of Cataloging"). The papers from the 1956 Chicago conference are published in Library Quarterly, 26 (1956), 251-366, and separately as Toward a Better Cataloging Code, ed. Ruth French Strout (1957); the St. Andrews volume is Summary of Proceedings and Working Papers (1961). The background of the Paris Conference is covered by Paul Poindron, "Preparation for the International Conference on the Principles of Cataloging, Paris, 1961" (trans. Richard H. Shoemaker), Library Resources and Technical Services, 5 (1961), 225-237; a general account is provided in the same journal by Katharine Ball, "The Paris Conference," 6 (1962), 172-175; the preliminary official report is in Libri, 12 (1962), 61-76; and a critique of the results is offered by Leonard Jolley, "International Conference on Cataloguing Principles: II. Thoughts after Paris," Journal of Documentation, 19 (1963), 47-62. The working papers and summaries of the sessions are published in International Conference on Cataloguing Principles . . . Report, ed. A. H. Chaplin and Dorothy Anderson (1963); a provisional annotated edition of the Conference's Statement of Principles (annotated by A. H. Chaplin and Dorothy Anderson) appeared in 1966 and a final annotated edition (annotated by Eva Verona) in 1971, following a 1969 international conference in Copenhagen to examine the 1966 Principles—as reported in Libri, 20 (1970), 105-132.
The Code and the Cataloguer, ed. Katherine H. Packer, Delores Phillips, and Katharine L. Ball (1969); New Rules for an Old Game, ed. Thelma E. Allen and Daryl Ann Dickman (1967); Seminar on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, ed. J. C. Downing and N. F. Sharp (1969). All three volumes, particularly the first (pp. 3-19) and third (pp. 1-5), contain some introductory historical material; and the checklists in the second (pp. 161-165) and third (pp. 92-95) provide good coverage of the most important publications of the period 1953-69. See also "The New Rules in Action: A Symposium," ed. C. Donald Cook, Library Resources and Technical Services, 13 (1969), 7-41; and Cataloguing Standards: The Report of the Canadian Task Group on Cataloguing Standards (1972).
Changes are also recorded in two series of bulletins: Cataloging Rules: Additions and Changes (for the North American Text) and Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules Amendment Bulletin (for the British Text). The occasion for the publication of a revised North American text of Chapter 6 was the necessity for incorporating into it the newly developed rules for International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), although other changes were made in Chapter 6 at the same time. The purpose of ISBD is to provide standard punctuation in entries (such as an oblique line between the title and the author's name, a colon between the place of publication and the publisher's name, or a period-dash between the title-author statement and the imprint), so that the various elements of an entry can be identified regardless of language and so that the entries are therefore machinereadable. For a good introduction, see C. Sumner Spalding, "ISBD: Its Origin, Rationale, and Implications," Library Journal, 98 (1973), 121-123 (cf. 124-130, 394-395, and 495-496); and George M. Sinkankas, "International Cataloging and International Standard Bibliographic Description," in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Allen Kent et al., 12 (1974), 278-320. The first edition of the ISBD rules (1971) has now been replaced by a "First Standard Edition": ISBD (M): International Standard Bibliographic Description for Monographic Publications (1974). Historical background is provided in Dorothy Anderson, "International Standardization of Cataloguing and Bibliographical Records: The Work of the IFLA Committee on Cataloguing," UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries, 27 (1973), 66-71, 107, and in "IFLA Committee on Cataloguing, 1954-1974," International Cataloguing, 3. no. 1 (Jan./March 1974), 5-8.
Quoted from the jacket of the British Text by R. O. Linden in the Nottingham Seminar (see note 25 above), p. 45. Gorman has also said that "these rules are undoubtedly correct in their general and in their basic conclusions" (p. 32) in his review in Library Association Record, 70 (1968), 27-32.
Except where otherwise indicated, the text cited and quoted here is the 1974 pamphlet version of the North American Text of Chapter 6 (redrafted by Paul W. Winkler). Certain differences between that version and the North American or British texts of 1967 will be commented on in footnotes; but I have made no attempt systematically to cover all the differences, which have been taken up by D. Whitney Coe in "A Cataloger's Guide to AACR Chapter 6, Separately Published Monographs, 1974," Library Resources and Technical Services, 19 (1975), 101-120. A number of discussions of the differences between the 1967 North American and British texts have been published; for Chapter 6 of AACR, see in particular R. O. Linden's analysis in the Nottingham Seminar (see note 25 above), pp. 45-54.
The 1967 British Text, in this respect, focuses more directly on content by requiring the last page of a section to be recorded (whether numbered or not) and by not requiring brackets for unnumbered pages: "a sequence consisting of the preface and list of contents on pages numbered i-ix, followed on the next recto by a list of tables extending over four unnumbered pages, is described in the collation as xiv p." (143B1c).
The 1967 British Text, again here, is more clearly concerned with content, for it does not make pagination in itself a sign of the importance of a section: it merely says that sequences, numbered or unnumbered, which consist of "inessential matter" are to be "disregarded" (143B1b).
The 1967 British Text does not need to say "approximately" because of its requirement of recording the unnumbered pages at the end of a sequence which are clearly a part of the sequence (143B1d; cf. note 29 above).
The 1967 North American Text had made the inclusion of the pagination for advertisements in such cases optional: "the pagination may be presented in the following form: 124 p. (p. 119-124 advertisements) to alert the reader to the fact that this work might also be described as 118 p." (144A).
Both 1967 texts specify only that "one or more" main sections are to be separately recorded, with a bracketed total for the remaining lesser ones (North American, 142A3; British, 143B3). This rule is somewhat more logical than the 1974 version because it merely differentiates principal from less important sections, rather than setting an arbitrary number of principal sections as the dividing line between two kinds of treatment.
The tradition of giving pagination only for books of one volume goes back at least as far as Charles C. Jewett's Smithsonian Report on the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries (1852, 1853).
The 1967 British Text handles this point more satisfactorily by simply saying that "separately paged sections of preliminary matter after the first volume may be ignored if not important" (143C3). If they are important, recording them poses no problem because the British Text allows for the recording of separate pagination for each volume ("the pagination of each volume may be given in parentheses after the number of volumes"), offering as an example "2 v. (xxxix, 429 p.; [4], 501 p.)" (143C2).
There is further confusion here in the distinction between "bibliographical volumes" and "physical volumes" (141C1). "Bibliographical volumes" are apparently to be regarded as parts or divisions of a work, and they may or may not coincide with the physical volumes in which the sheets containing the work are bound. Thus the rule says to state the "bibliographical volumes" first, as "8 v. in 5"; but actually the physical element is basic in both numbers. A set originally containing eight physical volumes may later be rebound into five volumes, and this sort of notation may be helpful for identification; but if the division into eight means only that the work has eight sections or divisions, there would be no more reason to specify the number of "volumes" than to name the number of chapters. To put the point another way: a single volume may contain a work in which the text is divided into three "Volumes" or "Books"; it may also contain sheets which were printed in such a way as to indicate that they were intended to be bound in three physical volumes. While "3 v. in 1" might be an appropriate way of referring to the latter, it would seem pointless for the former; and this distinction is not conveyed by the concept of "bibliographical volume" in rule 141C1.
The same problem is presented by one of the statements in the "Principles of Descriptive Cataloging" at the beginning of Part II of the North American AACR: "An attempt is made to describe a physically complete copy" (p. 189). Such a statement is beside the point if the copy being catalogued happens not to be complete. The British Text at least recognizes this problem and attaches a second sentence: "When possible the description should be that of a perfect copy. Imperfections in a particular copy are indicated" (p. 159).
Still other pagination rules raise troublesome questions. The rules for treating folded leaves, double leaves, duplicate paging, and two-way paging (141B4, 5, 6, 8) require the mention of these features, as if certain physical details are of particular interest in their own right. Actually, the first two—folded and double leaves—have a bearing on an indication of the extent of the work, since ten folded leaves can be expected to contain more material than ten ordinary leaves, and ten double leaves will contain only half the material that could ordinarily be printed on the same amount of paper (twenty single leaves). But when the foliation or pagination (printed or inferred) in effect converts such leaves to regular units—as when eighteen double leaves are referred to as "[36] p. (on double leaves)"—the specification of the nature of the leaves is superfluous, except as a physical detail. But in a catalogue entry stressing the work, not the book, what is the rationale for requiring this detail in preference to others in those cases where it does not contribute to an understanding of the extent of the work? The other two features—duplicate and two-way paging—are only special cases of the larger problem of separately numbered sequences. It may be, as with other sequences, that it is easier to list the figures separately than to add them together; but the rules do not suggest that the practice is merely one of expediency, not necessitated by the purposes which the entries are intended to serve.
This point is further indicated by the fact that rule 141B1d says, "More than one illustration on a leaf, even if numbered by the printer, does not affect the numeration of the plates as such"—whereas it would obviously affect the numeration of the illustrations. No rule corresponding to 141B1d is present in the 1967 North American Text; the inclusion of this rule in 1974 is an improvement, bringing the North American Text closer to the British, where the distinction between plates and illustrations had been clearer from the beginning. The 1967 British Text defines "plate" as "a page containing illustrative matter" but not forming part of "either the preliminary or main sequence of pages" (143B1b); and it provides for recording the number of plates as part of the pagination statement (143B1b,c, 143B4, 143D1c). The illustration statement is therefore clearly concerned only with the nature of the illustrations, regardless of what pages they appear on, and it is "independent of the statement of pagination" (143D1a).
This unsatisfactory note, repeated verbatim from the 1967 North American Text and the 1949 LC Rules, does not appear in the British Text at all.
Books may of course be shelved according to their size, but their call numbers or shelf marks—not their dimensions—would serve to locate them.
The practice, which has been followed in certain catalogues, of using format designation (like "40" and "80") vaguely to suggest shape is even less defensible than the AACR requirement because it misuses a notation with a long-established meaning in physical bibliography and thereby increases the possibilities for confusion. The Prussian Instructions (trans. Andrew Osborn, 1938) are guilty in this respect, for they recommend that "40," for instance, be used to refer to a height of 25-35 cm. (p. 13). An example of the difficulties which such usage can cause is illustrated by John R. Hetherington in "Signatures and Sizes," TLS, 14 October 1965, p. 928; he summarizes his experiences in one project by saying, "Thus in a field restricted to two titles, books reported to me as sixteenth and seventeenth-century quartos have included folios, octavos, 12mos, and 16mos." A fourth element sometimes required in the collation is taken up in rule 141F: the mention of "accompanying materials," such as a teacher's manual or materials placed in a pocket inside the cover of a book. The logic of attaching this information to the height is not clear, nor is the reason for regarding some items in pockets as illustrations (141D5) and others as "accompanying materials."
Another perplexing rule shows that even fidelity to the printed numbers is not an absolute requirement: in the preliminaries, a single numbered recto (but not verso) which does not match the actual count is to be disregarded (271).
The "5 l." means that "some or all of the leaves are blank on one side" (272); and the "2 l." at the end may mean two printed rectos (the number of leaves is given "instead of several groups of pages in brackets separated by commas") or else three or four printed pages which do not continue the main text (273).
For some reactions to the 1941 rules, see the four papers gathered under the title "Scholarly Libraries and the New Cataloging Rules," College and Research Libraries, 3 (1941-42), 117-138.
See, for instance, notes 29, 30, 31, 35, 37, 39, and 40 above. Seymour Lubetzky speaks of the "noxious compromises" in the North American Text, says that the British "could not bring themselves to go along with the more glaringly aberrant compromises," and urges a revision of the North American Text to "heal the fissure"; see "1976 Minus 6 . . . 5 . . . ," Library Journal, 96 (1971), 450-451. Although he is referring principally to the rules for entry and headings, the North American Text is inferior in the rules for description also.
Seymour Lubetzky, in Appendix E to the same booklet, criticizes "our elaborate collation statement in which we undertake to give an accounting of every page and detail, whereas its real function is only to give a physical characterization of the work" (p. 43). Henkle had earlier reported on the "Library of Congress Conferences on Cataloging, October 18 - November 19, 1943," in Catalogers' and Classifiers' Yearbook, 11 (1945), 68-84, where he says that "librarians have appeared to be excessively preoccupied with the problems of collation" (p. 73).
He explained, "That is to say it sets out to provide a description of a book which can be used as a standard of a perfect copy, by readers far removed from the library." See his The Principles of Cataloguing (1960), p. 133.
This concentration on rules for entry is also a reflection of the fact that the library cataloguer is primarily concerned with the contents of books. Lubetzky has called description "the simpler aspect of cataloging" and the rules for entry "the most critical and complex aspect" (Principles of Cataloging, pp. iv, 18; see also his "Some Observations on the Revision of the Cataloging Code," Library Quarterly, 26 [1966], 362-366). Bakewell asserts, "The collation is certainly the most expendable part of the entry" (A Manual of Cataloguing Practice, p. 4).
"Summary of Proceedings," in The Code and the Cataloguer (see note 25 above), pp. 91-101 (quotation from p. 94). Jack R. Nelson, in his review of the North American AACR, states, "It is this section of the new code, in fact, with which I am least happy. . . . it is very regrettable that in this problem area the new code is so disappointing" (Australian Library Journal, 16 [1967], 119-123).
In his paper on Chapter 6 of AACR in Seminar on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (see note 25 above), pp. 45-54 (quotation from p. 46). He elaborates on the confusion in this way: "pagination and the statement of the number of volumes is a bibliographic statement, the illustration statement is an evaluative statement, and finally size is a bibliographic statement, but different from pagination" (p. 46). But the first and last, as they are set up, are not really "bibliographic"; they are made to serve an "evaluative" function (to use these terms), so the confusion between the two exists within the individual elements of the collation line. Linden, in some of his other comments, seems to imply that physical description ought to be the goal. Thus he says that the listing of the total of unnumbered plates is "a good move in the direction of a true collation statement" (p. 50), whereas a recording of the number of illustrations would give "a false impression of physical makeup" (p. 51). Similarly he comments, "Size has always been something of a dubious item in cataloguing. Quite often it is not strictly a bibliographical statement at all" (p. 51).
Thus the reproduction of an error and its correction in brackets (133A2) is proper—and is not an example of an inappropriate concern for a physical detail— because the meaning of the quoted words is involved.
There has been much discussion of this point, resulting—in the 1974 version of Chapter 6—in an "alternative" rule 134D1 presented as a footnote. This new alternative rule says that the author statement may be omitted "unless the form of name in the heading is not recognizably the same as that in the book" or unless certain other conditions obtain—almost the same as the basic rule in the 1967 British Text (there labeled 134A). The 1967 North American Text was somewhat more strict in that the names had to be identical, not just "recognizably the same," before the author statement could be eliminated; but at least provision for eliminating the repetition was a part of the basic rule (134A). By relegating this kind of rule to a footnote and making it an alternative to a more rigid rule, the 1974 version has taken a step backward; the acceptance of the British model is sensible, but the resulting rule should have been incorporated into the main text.
In the 1941 proposed code, rule 226 required ellipsis dots to show the omission of words at the head of the title page; and if the omitted material were relevant, it was to be reported in a note, following the body of the entry, beginning with the words "At head of title." Even an author's name appearing at the head of the title in exactly the same form as the one used for the heading of the entry was to be repeated in such a note. This rule clearly shows an exaggerated attention to the form of the title page, since there is no intention of producing an exact transcription in any case. The North American Text of AACR still contains a provision for "At head of title" notes (145 in 1967, 144 in 1974); but the ellipsis dots are not required, and the note is only for relevant information "not transposed to another position in the catalog entry" and thus "not provided for by the general pattern of the catalog entry" (cf. the brief treatment in the 1967 British Text, 145C2).
An illustration of the way in which the imprint statement can be regarded from the point of view of reference, rather than physical, bibliography is provided by Henkle, who refers to the "premise that the principal value of the publisher statement is its contribution to the characterization of the quality, authenticity, or bias of the book" (Studies of Descriptive Cataloging, p. 9).
Indeed, the basic rule for "Date" (139A) requires that precedence be given to the "year of publication of the first impression of the edition," even if the year of a later printing appears on the title page (the example given is "1970, t.p. 1973"). It is proper that entries in a library catalogue should indicate the date of the work (or text); and the rule is in this respect an improvement over the corresponding rule (141A) in the 1967 North American Text, which emphasizes the imprint date and makes no provision for indicating the date of original publication of the edition (the revised rule comes closer to what the British Text recommended from the beginning in its 142A: "The date to be given is the date of the edition, which may be followed by the date of the imprint where the difference is important"). But the date of the impression which the library holds should also invariably be recorded—and not be regarded as an optional item when it does not appear on the title page, to be noted only "if it is important to identify a later impression as such, e.g. because it contains textual variations." (Cf. 135A: "Statements relating to the impression or printing are included only in the case of items having particular bibliographical importance or when the impression or printing has been corrected or otherwise revised.") In most cases one cannot know, without a great deal of work, just what differences may exist between two impressions; therefore, calling attention to the particular impression in a library catalogue entry is appropriate not merely because the business of any catalogue entry is to report on the copy at hand but also because the indication of the impression can always turn out to be important to those who are primarily concerned with the content of the book. For a criticism of the 1967 form of the rule in the North American Text and an argument that library cataloguers should be capable of recognizing a reprint even when not labeled and establishing the date of original publication of the edition, see Robert N. Broadus, "The Problem of Dates in Bibliographic Citations," College and Research Libraries, 29 (1968), 387-392. Ronald Hagler, speaking of the 1967 rule, comments, "I think that, as cataloguers, we continue to suffer from ambivalence about whether we really want to describe the dating of the material or the dating of the particular physical book which we have" (New Rules for an Old Game [see note 25 above], p. 92).
The 1967 North American Text requires brackets around any information within the body of the entry which does not come from the title page (132A1); the alterations in 1974 are a move in the right direction but have not been made consistently. In the British Text, the requirement was never as rigid as that in the North American but does involve inconsistency: the edition statement, the imprint, and the series statement "may be taken from other places in the book without the use of square brackets," but information for the title and author statements may not (132A1). Clearly the title, in this respect, does fall in a different category from the other details, so long as the title is defined (for those books with title pages) as that form of the title which appears on the title page; but the reason for placing the author's name in the same category is not apparent.
Seymour Lubetzky said in 1946 that cataloguing "practice represents the result of an effort to preserve the integrity of the title-page and an inability to do so. . . . the aim of the cataloger should be not to point out the differences of the title-pages but the identity of the books under them" (in Appendix E of Henkle, Studies of Descriptive Cataloging, pp. 44-45).
In the 1949 Library of Congress Rules, the opening section on the "Definition of Descriptive Cataloging" points out that there is "some ambiguity in the use of the term," because the "determination of the form of the headings" is sometimes regarded as a separate activity from "the description of an item" (as in the 1941 preliminary second edition of the A.L.A. Catalog Rules), whereas both are "commonly understood" to comprise "descriptive cataloging" (the whole being distinct from subject cataloguing). This ambiguity, involving the way the divisions of a single professional field are labeled, is in addition to the one I am talking about, which results from the use of the same term in two fields with differing aims.
Statements of this kind are made repeatedly in writings and textbooks on library cataloguing. Cf. Wyllis E. Wright, "Some Fundamental Principles in Cataloging," Catalogers' and Classifiers' Yearbook, 7 (1938), 26-39: "The collation attempts to give, in brief form, a physical description of the volume" (p. 36).
AACR provides a brief glossary (North American, pp. 343-347; British, pp. 266-269), but it does not contain such crucial terms as "edition," "impression," or "issue." For terms not listed, one is referred to the outdated A.L.A. Glossary of Library Terms, ed. Elizabeth H. Thompson (1943), where "edition," for instance, after being defined properly as all impressions from one setting of type, is said to be dependent on format as well. Under "impression," one reads, "If, however, the pages are reimposed to produce a different format, the resultant impression should be considered a different edition." And the confusion is further compounded under "edition": "A facsimile reproduction constitutes a different edition." A catalogue code which assents to such definitions is built on a weak foundation. By "bibliographical terminology" AACR also perhaps means the form for the recording of pagination and size; but to call the recommendations in those areas "standard" is to beg the question, since they do not conform with the practices of those whose principal field of interest is physical description.
In such works as A. W. Pollard and W. W. Greg, "Some Points in Bibliographical Descriptions," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 9 (1906-8), 31-52; Pollard, "The Objects and Methods of Bibliographical Collations and Descriptions," Library, 2nd ser., 8 (1907), 193-217; R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), pp. 145-163; Greg, "A Formulary of Collation," Library, 4th ser., 14 (1933-34), 365-382; Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949), and "Bibliography Revisited," Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 89-128.
Roy Stokes, in his 1967 revision of Esdaile, abandons "the older tradition of descriptive work" characterized by "distinct stages such as Short description or Short standard description" and says, "The description should be as detailed as the purpose of the listing demands, and no longer" (p. 256). In proceeding to point out that an antiquarian bookseller would be likely to emphasize different facts from a bibliographer preparing a subject list, he touches on an important concept that could profitably have been elaborated. (Cutter's 1876 Rules represent the "older tradition" Stokes refers to, for Cutter sets up requirements for "Short, Medium, and Full" entries [p. 9]. Cf. also the work of Pollard mentioned in note 62 above, and the well-known article of Falconer Madan on "Degressive Bibliography," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 9 [1906-8], 53-65. Abandoning such precisely defined steps, however, as Stokes realizes, does not mean that the level of detail cannot be varied under differing circumstances.)
The integrative direction of his effort is suggested by this expression in his chapter on collation: "The bibliographer, who includes the cataloguing librarian" (p. 215).
Cowley goes too far in asserting that these different approaches "must not be mixed" and that they "cannot be combined in one piece of work" (p. 9). But perhaps his extreme position is the effect of a salutary reaction against the much more common error of mixing them indiscriminately and carelessly—without, indeed, realizing that any mixing is taking place.
Except for repetition of the initial distinction: on p. 59 the reader is again told that "the prospective user" of "an ordinary book" wants to know "only what it is about and how much there is of it for him to read," so collation of pagination is sufficient; but a rare book is "valuable chiefly, if not only, as a physical entity," and therefore "the description of a rare book must make the book's physical structure perfectly clear."
The paragraph which contains this statement and concludes with the sentence I quote next was dropped in his 1973 revision, apparently because the point was largely covered in his new preface; in any case, his later writing shows that his deletion does not mean that he had changed his mind.
Dunkin had earlier expressed the view that cataloguers do not interpret evidence (and voiced his dissatisfaction with Bowers's definitions of "issue" and "state") in "The State of the Issue," PBSA, 42 (1948), 239-255. I have commented on his argument in "The Bibliographical Concepts of Issue and State," PBSA, 69 (1975), 54, n. 41. The 1973 revision of his booklet includes a new section (called "Distinctions: Cataloger and Bibliographer," pp. 14-15) summarizing his position regarding "issue" and "state." (On cataloguers as analysts, see also note 92 below.)
And in his checklist, Bowers's Principles is described as an "elaborate and arbitrary codification" (p. 7). In an earlier treatment of some of the same material, "On the Catalog Card for a Rare Book," Library Quarterly, 16 (1946), 50-56, he praises the collation formula of Greg and McKerrow (adding that a catalogue card should use words instead).
It is difficult to see, for instance, why Dunkin's "[A]2 A-Y4" is simpler than Bowers's "π2 A-Y4"; but it is clear that Bowers's form gives rise to less ambiguity.
The other major addition to the revised edition is a simplified method of title-page transcription, which he calls "calculated-risk transcription," resembling the quotation of titles in routine library cataloguing (pp. 36-40). If this method sometimes fails to identify "an edition or issue," the risk is worth taking because "it is not unlikely that the scholar wanting to use the book would insist on making his own judgment about its edition and issue anyhow." This line of argument, of course, could lead to doing nothing; the real question is not whether a user will uncritically accept the information but whether that information is relevant to the purposes of the entry and also falls within the level of detail established for it.
ACRL Monograph No. 27, ed. H. Richard Archer, pp. 65-73. Alden had earlier written the introduction to the 1946-47 Rosenbach Lectures, Standards of Bibliographical Description (1949), pointing out the revolutionary impact of McKerrow's Introduction and the need for agreement on "acceptable minimum standards" for bibliographical description. Although the volume is not primarily concerned with library cataloguing, Lawrence C. Wroth's essay on "Early Americana" does set forth "an intermediate form of entry" (p. 104) more appropriate for a library catalogue than a "full-dress bibliography"; his position is that considerations of time and money demand "brevity and simplicity" in a library catalogue. He is of course principally speaking about degrees of detail in the recording of physical data, but he believes that a full-scale description should also give proportionate attention to the text and its history (p. 106).
Or as he puts it in another place, speaking as a rare-book cataloguer: "we can, in the course of describing what we possess in a significant fashion, provide signposts and achieve a high bibliographical standard" (p. 69).
Similarly, Andrew Osborn writes, "At its best that process [rare-book cataloguing] is a skilful blending of the general techniques of cataloguing and the insights of critical bibliography. Rare-book cataloguing is thus a borderline discipline; if at any time the cataloguing or the bibliographical insights and skills are absent or weak, the results are bound to leave a great deal to be desired." See pp. 126-127 of "Relation between Cataloguing Principles and Principles Applicable to Other Forms of Bibliographical Work," in the Report (1963) of the 1961 Paris Conference, pp. 125-137.
A "revised and corrected" printing appeared in 1972, but the passages quoted below were not affected; however, some of the citations of pages would be slightly different if keyed to the 1972 impression (the references to pp. 41-42, 19-20, 18-19, 46, and 45-46 would become, respectively, 42, 20, 19, 47, and 46).
He makes similar criticisms of the size and pagination rules in "Some Thoughts on the Card Catalogue Description of Incunables," Serif, 10, no. 2 (Summer 1973), 10-18. On the LC page collation: "I still think of it in the old New England phrase—neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring. Even its main attraction, brevity, is not always apparent; and when brevity is brought in by the neck, it is often at such a gross expenditure of accuracy that the line might better be left empty" (p. 13).
Further comment on the need for more bibliographical training in library schools can be found in Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Modern Librarianship (1966), reprinted in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (1975), pp. 75-93. For related comments, see Randolph G. Adams, "Librarians as Enemies of Books," Library Quarterly, 7 (1937), 317-331; Frederick B. Adams, Jr., "Long Live the Bibliophile!", College and Research Libraries, 16 (1955), 344-346; Cecil K. Byrd, "Rare Books in University Libraries," Library Trends, 5 (1956-57), 441-450; Rollo G. Silver, "The Training of Rare Book Librarians," Library Trends, 9 (1960-61), 446-452; Gordon N. Ray, "The Changing World of Rare Books," PBSA, 59 (1965), esp. 117-124; and David C. Weber, "Bibliographical Blessings," PBSA, 61 (1967), 307-314. Roy Stokes is thinking more of deficiencies in bibliographical training than in the cataloguing codes when he says, "In view of the number of years during which we have had cataloging codes, or have been working towards new ones, it is disheartening to think that there are comparatively few libraries which have catalogs of which they might justly be proud"; and he suggests that in certain areas "an acute understanding of bibliography and its problems is essential if anything worth-while is to be accomplished" (p. 585 of "The Teaching of Bibliography," Library Trends, 7 [1958-59], 582-591).
More recently Roderick Cave, in his book on Rare Book Librarianship (1976), has included a chapter on "Processing, Cataloguing and Classification" (pp. 67-82), but it does not contain any detailed consideration of the relationship between standard and rare-book cataloguing. Recognizing that the rare-book department is concerned "with the book as artifact and not just as vehicle for the text" (p. 68), Cave generalizes that "the librarian charged with the responsibility of developing catalogues of a special collection needs to approach his material more in the manner of a bibliographer than of the librarian applying the standard techniques and codes of his profession" (pp. 70-71). It is not the purpose of his discussion, however, to examine what this difference of approach consists of or to question the practices of standard cataloguing. He finds "routine cataloguing" appropriate as the basic cataloguing for a rare-book collection, to be supplemented by special catalogues of definable units within it. These catalogues may sometimes require detailed attention to physical features, but, he says, "The rigour of descriptive bibliography will naturally be the exception and employed normally only in those libraries pre-eminent in a particular field and in which the catalogue descriptions serve as a substitute for a formal bibliography" (p. 72). His comments seem designed as an introductory survey of presently accepted practices, not as an inquiry into the rationale for those practices. Yet his chapter does convey, however indirectly, a sense of the awkwardness of the split between "routine cataloguing" and the "rigour of descriptive bibliography."
It is interesting that Cutter's rules of 1876 refer to a wider range of rare books than incunabula (p. 80), whereas the 1941 and 1949 codes and AACR have a section specifically restricted to incunabula.
Quotations and examples from Gallup are taken from A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (1963), pp. 9-10; but the same discussion can be found in T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (rev. 1969), pp. 11-12.
Of course, the specification of which entire leaves are blank—as in "1 blank leaf, 3 leaves, 9-29 pp."—also shows a concern with content, a concern not carried on into the "3 leaves."
The parenthetical abbreviations are supplying some of the information which would be presented in a contents paragraph in a physical description: "reference bibliography, which usually need not give collational lists of contents in the entries, has to add some brief information about the existence of blank leaves and advertisement leaves at the beginning and end of each pagination sequence" (p. xlii).
"A page formula," he says, "can never be analytical, and need not be so, but nevertheless has to be based upon some kind of analytical investigation, in order to make it quantitatively equal to a real analytical formula" (p. xliv).
At one point he says, more emphatically, that "the collational systems hitherto employed in reference bibliography and library cataloguing do not really serve the purposes they have been supposed to serve," and he doubts whether in some cases "there has been any real awareness of purposes at all" (p. xli).
On this point, he says, "It is a truism, that as long as reference bibliographers remain bibliographically ignorant, their bibliographies and catalogues will be bibliographically worthless, and their collations and classifications useless and unreliable" (pp. xl-xli). He also discusses this matter in PBSA, 64 (1970), 242-250.
Another recent proposal, not concerned directly with pagination, is relevant here as further illustrating the attempt to work out a scheme for concisely including more physical information in a brief catalogue entry. J. W. Jolliffe, in Computers and Early Books: Report of the LOC Project (1974), describes a method for "fingerprinting" books, devised in connection with Project LOC, a project for "investigating means of compiling a machine-read-able union catalogue of pre-1801 books in Oxford, Cambridge and the British Museum" (to quote the title page of the report). The "fingerprint" consists of the characters which appear at specified positions on several specified pages in a given book (according to the standard proposed on pp. 95-99, it would contain sixteen symbols, being the last two or first two characters—for rectos and versos respectively—in each of the last two lines on four precisely specified pages). It is intended as an identifier (easily constructed by a person without bibliographical training) which would be useful in computer sorting, but its supporters see a broader usefulness for it: "it seems clear that the fingerprint may also be of use, in descriptive cataloguing and other library activities in which it will be established by fully trained professional librarians" (p. 95), and "it is to be hoped that it or something like it will become a part of regular descriptive bibliography" (p. 8). Whether such an identifier offers a practical approach for linking entries in library catalogues and in bibliographies is doubtful. One immediately apparent limitation, admitted by its supporters, is that it cannot by itself distinguish among impressions from a single setting of type or line-for-line resettings. Jolliffe has made further comments on Project LOC and on an eighteenth-century STC in his contribution to Eighteenth-Century English Books Considered by Librarians and Booksellers, Bibliographers and Collectors (1976). For some criticisms of the "fingerprint" system, see Donald D. Eddy's comments in that volume. Another approach to computerized short-title cataloguing, the HPB Project, is described by its director, William J. Cameron, in the same volume (cf. note 20 above).
Inferred page numbers may be more conveniently printed in italics than enclosed in brackets. But I have used brackets here, since they are a more widely recognized convention.
It would actually appear to be unnecessary in this statement to specify which numbers are inferred, since the pagination formula provides a full record of that information.
Whether there were two or three blank pages in the group 285-288—that is, whether there were two pages, or only one page, of advertisements—the notation would remain "2 LLBA," and it would not in any case indicate which of the two leaves contained advertising.
One possible exception is the abbreviated version of this descriptive formula which Bowers makes a part of his formulary (p. 462). The system is the same as for the full formula, except that unnumbered pages within a sequence are not noted. Thus the short form for the book postulated earlier would be as follows: pp. [i-v] vi-xvii [xviii-xx], [1] 2-283 [284-288]. Without an accompanying contents note, of course, this form is not entirely unambiguous as a physical record.
It must be remembered that citations in footnotes and in lists at the ends of articles, chapters, and books constitute one of the commonest types of reference bibliography, and any realistic proposal about the form which reference entries should take must involve an awareness of what can reasonably be expected in such cases. Of course, reference bibliography can operate on different levels of detail, and a library catalogue entry may sometimes be more, and sometimes less, detailed than an entry in a checklist; but the realities of the various situations in which reference bibliography is employed must be recognized in any attempt to develop a workable approach to the whole field.
One could argue that the division into roman and arabic figures is a physical detail which need not be perpetuated in a reference entry; on the other hand, one could say that it reveals more accurately the extent of the main body of the work.
The amount of judgment involved in putting down a number other than the last printed one would surely take no more time and be subject to no more errors than is the case in following the present rules. Sometimes the recording of the last printed page numbers has been justified on the grounds that it does not involve the cataloguer's judgment; but, as Henkle points out in his 1945 article (see note 47 above), "It would hardly seem to follow that a principle of book description which requires the least exercise of judgment on the part of catalogers necessarily results in the most intelligible entries" (p. 81). Margaret Mann gives the first chapter of her Introduction to Cataloging and the Classification of Books (2nd ed., 1943) the title "The Cataloger as an Interpreter of Books."
A library cataloguer obviously is restricted in the amount of time that can be spent on an entry; but abbreviating the examination of a book and shortening the resulting entry are not synonymous with abandoning careful distinctions or lowering standards of definition. Paul S. Dunkin has repeatedly argued that, because many more books are recorded in catalogues than in descriptive bibliographies, cross-reference between entries for a given book would be facilitated if the definitions employed were "based on easily recognized physical differences" (that is, rather than on an analytical approach). See the practically identical wording in How to Catalog a Rare Book (rev. 1973), p. 15, and Bibliography: Tiger or Fat Cat?, p. 15; see also my comment in PBSA, 69 (1975), 54, n. 41. Of course, the fact that reference bibliographers outnumber descriptive bibliographers in defining a term like "edition" in a given way does not alter the fact that the subject is one in which the descriptive bibliographer is the specialist.
Dunkin in particular has emphasized these points: see, for instance, "The State of the Issue" (see note 68 above), pp. 252-255; and Bibliography: Tiger or Fat Cat?, pp. 29-33, ending with the statement, "He [the cataloguer] serves everyman; therefore he must use the tongue of everyman." Cf. Foxon, Thoughts (see note 3 above), pp. 22-23.
Tradition and Principle in Library Cataloguing (1966). On tradition in cataloguing, see also Pierce Butler, "The Bibliographical Function of the Library," Journal of Cataloging and Classification, 9 (1953), 3-11. Ann F. Painter says, in Reader in Classification and Descriptive Cataloging (1972), "Probably more than with classification, descriptive cataloging suffers from the secure attitude of 'we've always done it this way and it works'" (p. 155).
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