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 | Studies in bibliography |  |
Compiling English Verse, 1701-1750
By the time the Wise discoveries were in print, Foxon was launched
on his catalogue of English verse. In the early fifties, after the publication
of Donald Wing's short-title catalogue, 1641-1700 (New York,
1945-51), the Bibliographical Society had been considering the possibility
of preparing a similar catalogue for the eighteenth century. A
working-party was set up, under Harold Williams, to see whether the
project should be taken further and Foxon took on the responsibility
of estimating how many entries there might be. When it was decided
not to go ahead with the proposed project, Foxon decided to embark
on his own verse catalogue for the first half of the century. What he
decided to aim at was `a short-title catalogue with frills' (English Verse,
1701-1750, xi): something that offered more bibliographical information
than STC and Wing, but less than Greg's Bibliography of the English
Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1939-59). The project
would give him more scope for bibliographical sophistication than his
cataloguing at the Museum, and allow him to pursue his long-standing
interest in the poetry of the period.
As Foxon records in the preface to his catalogue, a stimulus for his
work was Fredson Bowers's paper on his proposed bibliography of the
1952.[19] `This lecture was my inspiration', he declared nearly twenty
years later.[20] Foxon decided that, like Bowers, he would consult multiple
copies, but that, whereas Bowers intended to use microfilms, he would
use the position of signatures as a means of identification:
The points that impressed me most were the number of unrecorded variants,
issues, and even editions which could be found only by personal examination
of multiple copies, and his argument that the more copies a bibliographer
has examined, the more safely can his descriptions be condensed. It
became clear to me that though my catalogue could not provide full bibliographical
descriptions, any attempt to produce a reliable work must involve
seeing as many copies as possible myself and not relying on published catalogues
or other second-hand sources. As a check against concealed editions,
reset sheets, and reissues I decided to adopt Falconer Madan's practice of
recording the position of signature letters relative to the text above them, a
method of identification I had already come to trust and one which was far
cheaper and easier than the use of microfilm.
Although Foxon recognized the limited precision Madan's method gave
him, he continued to value its economy and utility.
Foxon's first task was to make a skeleton catalogue with pencil entries
(including shelfmarks where available) in preparation for detailed
information in ink when he had seen the copies. He used forms on
pressure-sensitive pads of six slips each, ordered from the Stationery
Office. The slips (8″ x 5″) consisted of eight central boxes (4 full-length
and 4 half-length), with the borders forming larger boxes (1″ deep at
the top, 1½″ wide at the side). In the centre top went the title; to the
left the date; to the right the location. In the central division were recorded:
imprint; collation; pagination; half-title, errata, frontispiece,
advertisement, watermark, press-figures; ornaments; miscellaneous. The
recording of first lines began later, proposed by someone during Foxon's
stay at Harvard—he always regretted that he could not acknowledge his
debt by naming the proposer. The top slip would be used to create the
main entry in the catalogue, the five subsidiary slips to create the indexes.
Foxon began his work by reading the Cambridge Bibliography of
English Literature, before moving on to author-bibliographies and
Dobell's poetry catalogues from before the War. He read in the BM
Catalogue and visited the Bodleian at weekends to consult the catalogues
there. An interest from the beginning was printer's ornaments,
which in this period provide opportunities for printer identification.
difficult to get the quality of pictures he wanted, but it was soon clear
that a photographic record of all printer's ornaments would be too expensive
and cumbersome. During his period at Harvard in 1959, however,
he had access to a Polaroid camera with close-up lens, which helped
him to identify Edinburgh piracies in the period, piracies that had, for
example, perplexed the bibliography of Pope. The files of these ornaments
have been given to the National Library of Scotland.
Serious work on examining books for the catalogue began only on a
visit to North America from 1959 to 1961. For this Foxon applied for a
Harkness Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund. These annual
awards enabled about thirty British men and women in their late twenties
or early thirties (Foxon was a little old at thirty-six) to go to America
for a year or more. The scheme was administered with personal and
financial generosity. It provided around $300 a month, a rented car for
six months (Foxon had a special arrangement for a year), and appropriate
introductions. Foxon went for eighteen months, carrying his catalogue
slips in a single large suitcase inherited from his father-in-law.
Nominally he was at Harvard and Yale, but he managed to fit in many
of America's scholarly libraries in his nine months of travel between the
two. It was an exciting time to be in the States, coinciding with John
Kennedy's nomination for the presidency, and Jane and Deborah came
out to join Foxon for a three-month holiday. They met in Quebec and
drove across America to California and back.
| Studies in bibliography | |