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Sources, Treatment of Text, Acknowledgments
Sources. The surviving papers relating to Ray's work on these lectures fall into
five categories: (1) correspondence with officials at Oxford, friends, and librarians—
the last group of letters including some of the lists of books he wished to see and some
of his orders for slides; (2) holograph notes made at libraries and at home while
examining primary and secondary material, along with holograph lists of books and
preliminary drafts of scattered paragraphs; (3) a partial first typescript, with extensive
holograph revisions; (4) multiple copies of the final typescript, including the
one annotated for use in delivering the lectures, which shows that the last illustration
and the associated comments were added at a late stage (six of the small revisions
made on that copy were actually incorporated into the typing of most of the other
surviving copies—a situation reflecting the fact that the typing had been done on a
magnetic-card typewriter and that small alterations could therefore be made without
the need for retyping the unaltered text); (5) photocopies, occasionally annotated,
of secondary material. As Ray's literary executor, I have all these papers in my possession
at present. The slides that Ray used in the lectures, except for ten that are
apparently lost (1.6, 1.9, 2.6, 2.12, 2.33, 3.13, 3.16, 4.40, 5.1, and 5.20 in the list of
illustrations below), are now the property of the Pierpont Morgan Library, where
Ray's entire collection of books, manuscripts, and art is housed. Ray's own comments
on his sources appear in the lectures on pp. 20-21 and 89-90. In my introduction, I
have incorporated, as section I, a slightly revised version of the biographical sketch
that I originally wrote as part of the introduction to a collection of Ray's essays,
Books as a Way of Life (New York: Grolier Club and Pierpont Morgan Library,
1988), a volume that includes a checklist of Ray's writings.
Treatment of text. I have followed the text of the final typescript as revised in
Ray's hand for delivery, with two classes of exceptions. (1) I have not accepted those
revisions clearly intended only for oral delivery, such as those aimed at speeding up
the reading (deleting first names, shortening titles, omitting dates) and those with
direct reference to the occasion (such as thanking the audience or noting his visit to
the Bodleian, both of which I have quoted in the introduction above). (2) I have
made some four dozen alterations of my own, only ten of which go beyond the correction
of typographical errors or the adjustment of formal features for consistency:
I have substituted "A year" for "Two years" at 23.28, "before these words were published"
for "however" at 24.26 (in order to recognize the discrepancy between the
date at the end of Clément-Janin's text and the printing dates of the two volumes
as given in the colophons), "several" for "six main" at 25.15, "former" for "latter"
at 32.27, "leaves" for "pages" at 59.25, "vignette" for "plate" at 63.25, "the last" for
"these" at 79.11, and "fewer" for "less" at 22.26 and 84.10; and I have inserted "these"
at 82.29. The documentation remains in the form Ray used, except that arabic
numerals have replaced roman and some inconsistencies have been regularized—
primarily his inconsistent citation of page numbers (sometimes in parentheses in the
text and sometimes in footnotes that consisted solely of page numbers where no author
or title reference was needed: all such page references are now in the text). The
list of secondary works cited and the list of illustrations have been added; they do not
exist in any form in Ray's papers.
Acknowledgments. Gordon Ray would have wanted to thank the Oxford officials
who handled the arrangements for his visit (including Rosemary Schwerdt and
J. P. W. Roper) and the staff members of libraries where he worked, including Julian
Roberts (Bodleian), the late Kenneth A. Lohf (Columbia), the late Robert L. Nikirk
(Grolier Club), Colta F. Ives and William Bond Walker (Metropolitan Museum of
Art), Anna Lou Ashby, Paul Needham, and Charles Ryskamp (Morgan), Donald
Anderle (New York Public Library), Michael T. Ryan (Stanford), and Ralph Franklin
and Marjorie G. Wynne (Yale)—as well as Eleanor M. Garvey and Roger E. Stoddard,
who arranged for a Harvard book to be deposited at the Grolier Club for his
loan of many books and for other kindnesses, including a reading of the typescript;
to Dr. Jack Eisert for the loan of five books; to the late Lucien Goldschmidt for much
advice and for reading the typescript; and to the late Jean Gaylord, his secretary at
the Guggenheim Foundation. No doubt he would have acknowledged still other
persons whose help I am not aware of.
My own thanks go, first of all, to the following institutions and individuals for
permission to reproduce—on the website of the Bibliographical Society of the University
of Virginia and (in several instances) in the present volume—the images made
from material in their collections: Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript
Library (Jean Ashton); Houghton Library, Harvard University (Hope Mayo); Pierpont
Morgan Library (Charles E. Pierce, Jr.); New York Public Library (David
Ferriero, H. George Fletcher, and Thomas Lisanti); and Stanford University Library
(Roberto G. Trujillo and Sean Quimby). I also thank Dr. Jack Eisert for permission
to reproduce four illustrations from books in his possession. For help with questions
regarding permission or citation, I thank Eileen Sullivan (Metropolitan Museum of
Art), Rebecca Warren Davidson (Princeton University Library), and Vincent Giroud
and Ellen Cordes (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University—
which, through the good offices of Vincent Giroud, provided newly scanned images
to replace Ray's slides). (For the specific illustrations that come from each source, see
the index to the list of illustrations below; more detailed credit lines accompany each
image on the website and each plate in this volume.) For generous assistance of various
kinds, I wish to record my indebtedness to Anna Lou Ashby, John Bidwell,
Justin Caldwell, Stephen C. Massey, Constance McPhee, Paul Needham, and J.
Fernando Peña. Finally, I give particular thanks to four individuals at the University
of Virginia who played major roles in helping this work reach publication:
Matthew Gibson and Cindy Filer Speer of the Electronic Text Center, who oversaw
the careful transfer of the slide images and captions to the Bibliographical Society's
website; Elizabeth Lynch, assistant to the editor of Studies in Bibliography, who—
in addition to her usual expert proofreading and checking—performed the tasks of
matching each slide with its discussion in the text, verifying the vertical and horizontal
orientation of each image on the website, locating further information about
many of the books from which the slides were made, and writing a preliminary draft
of the list of illustrations; and David L. Vander Meulen, editor of Studies in Bibliography,
who gave his characteristically detailed and perceptive attention to this
work.
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