 | Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography |  |
Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography
by G. THOMAS TANSELLE
DURING A FORTY-YEAR PERIOD, FROM
1966 THROUGH 2006,
I published a series of essays
covering every aspect of de-
scriptive bibliography. Taken together, these essays
form
a comprehensive treatise on the subject. Although this con-
solidated work
significantly revises Fredson Bowers's
Principles of Biblio-
graphical Description
(1949) and stands on its own, I regard it not simply as
a replacement
for the Principles but as a companion piece to that
book.
After all, a classic can never be entirely superseded, and the Principles
will always be worth reading for many specific
passages and for the at-
titude it displays: every detail is a reflection of the
view that descriptive
bibliography is a form of historical scholarship. No one can
come away
from the book without understanding that descriptive bibliography is
not
just a guide to the identification of first editions (though it serves
that
purpose) but is rather a history of the production and publication of
the
books taken up and thus a contribution to the broader annals of printing
and
publishing.
Nevertheless, any work from as long ago as 1949 is likely to
require
some adjustments, and my essays provide a rethinking and redefinition
of
some basic concepts, particularly ideal copy, issue,
state, and format. I have
also proposed a simpler and
more logical system for noting inserted leaves
in collation formulas and have
offered more detailed suggestions for de-
scribing paper, type, non-letterpress
material, and publishers' bindings.
Two matters barely commented on by Bowers are
given extensive discus-
sion in two of my essays: the incorporation of the results
of bibliographical
analysis (that is, analysis of typesetting and presswork) into a
descriptive
bibliography, and the considerations involved in the overall
organization
of a bibliography (along with the numbering of its entries and the
record-
ing of copies examined). I have tried throughout to express, more
fully
than he did, the rationale lying behind the inclusion of every element
in
a description and the manner of presenting such features. (My
detailed
criticisms of certain proposals, both by him and by others, are meant
to
illustrate these rationales in practice.)
Another important difference between Bowers's and my
treatments
is that he segregates his discussions of fifteenth-, eighteenth-,
and
nineteenth-/ twentieth-century books into three separate (and
relatively
short) sections, whereas my organization (according to the elements in
a
description) reflects the view that basic principles and procedures apply
to
all periods, regardless of the changing book-production details that have
to
be reported. His emphasis on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books
emerged from
his own experience at the time (he later became thoroughly
acquainted with
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books), but it leaves
the Principles somewhat unbalanced. A prominent feature of his work is
the
fifty-eight-page treatment of the formulary notation for recording a
book's
structure, which is impressive in the quantity and range of situ-
ations that it
cites. This full account, however, has caused many people
to think of the collation
formula as complex and difficult, and my own
discussion of it emphasizes how very
simple it is. (Some books do have a
complex structure, and analyzing it may be
difficult; but once that result
has been achieved, constructing the formula to
represent it is straight-
forward.) Despite the differences between Bowers's and my guides to the
subject, I hope that mine is
like his in showing how descriptive bibliogra-
phy is an essential pursuit of
scholarship in the humanities.
My essays do not call for revision, in the sense that I still believe in
the
approach and suggestions expressed in each one. But a considerable
amount of work
has been done in this field since most of the essays were
written, and a knowledge
of that work would usefully supplement the essays.
Accordingly, I am gathering here
some notes on recent activity—"recent"
referring, for each topic, to anything
published in the years since my essay
on that topic first appeared. These notes are
not meant to be comprehensive
surveys but only accounts of the publications that I
consider most worth dis-
cussing or mentioning. Sometimes I have to disagree with
points that have
been made, and at other times I am glad to welcome ideas that are
valuable
additions to what I wrote. (Further items through 2002 can be
found in the
2002 revision of my Introduction to
Bibliography: Seminar Syllabus, available as
a Book Arts Press paperback and
on the Rare Book School website.)
My notes below are grouped under fourteen headings. First come
five dealing with
general matters: introduction to the field and its history
(pp. 3–11); its relation
to library cataloguing (pp. 11–14); the concept
of ideal copy
(pp. 15–21); the meanings of edition, impression, issue,
and
state (pp. 21–25); and tolerances in reporting details
and the necessary
equipment for doing so (pp. 25–27). The remaining nine cover
more
specific subjects: quasi-facsimile transcription of title pages and other
text
(pp. 27–29); collations of gatherings, pages, non-letterpress
insertions,
and contents (pp. 29–34); formal (pp. 35–37); paper (pp. 37–50;
typog-
raphy and layout (pp. 50–58); typesetting and presswork (pp. 58–64);
and jackets (pp. 69–89: color, pp. 71–74; patterns, pp. 75–88; jackets,
pp. 88–89); and overall arrangement, including the list of examined cop-
ies (pp. 89–93). Although the designation of format often precedes the
collation of gatherings, this order otherwise approximates the sequence
conventionally followed in a description.
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD
My general introduction to descriptive bibliography, entitled "A Des-
cription of
Descriptive Bibliography," was delivered as an Engelhard
Lecture on the Book at the
Library of Congress on 13 September 1991. It
was published in
1992 both as a pamphlet in the Viewpoints Series of the
Center for
the Book in the Library of Congress and as an article in Studies
in Bibliography (45: 1–30); and it was republished in
1998 in my Literature
and Artifacts (pp.
127–156). Four years before my lecture, David L.
Vander
Meulen had delivered an impressive Engelhard Lecture, Where Angels Fear
to Tread: Descriptive Bibliography and Alexander
Pope, which, like mine, pro-
vides a rationale for the activity of describing
books, showing its role as
history and biography, and thus its place in humanistic
scholarship. (In
2014 I pointed out the classic status of his lecture
in an introduction to a
new edition of it.) Since the time of these two lectures,
nothing compa-
rable has been published, and very few general accounts of any kind
have
appeared. The most important is by Vander Meulen
himself, "Thoughts
on the Future of Bibliographical Analysis" (Papers of the Bibliographical So-
ciety of Canada, 46 [2008],
17–33); although its emphasis is on analytical
bibliography, analysis and
description are inextricable, since the former
must underlie the latter, and Vander
Meulen's humanistic approach pro-
vides the best kind of grounding. (See also my Bibliographical Analysis: A
Historical Introduction,
2009.) My 2014 Winship lecture, A
Bibliographer's
Creed, is not primarily about descriptive bibliography, but
it includes a sec-
tion (number 14) that offers a concise statement of what makes
descriptive
bibliography a genre of historical study and why it is a basic one.
David J. Supino's
2007 Breslauer Lecture (for the
American Trust for
the British Library), Collecting Henry James: A Transatlantic Journey
(2008),
complements Vander Meulen's Engelhard
Lecture in being another ac-
count of the connections between collecting and
descriptive bibliogra-
phy, by a person who sees that variants and non-firsts are
essential to
the story that publishing history tells about an author's relation to
the
reading public. Other collector-bibliographers have also written about
their
experiences and made the same points. One of them, Jack W.
C.
Hagstrom, in "Thoughts about Contemporary Author
Bibliographies"
(Gazette of the Grolier Club, n.s., 50
[1999], 27–34), stresses the value of
are alive. For similar reflections, see Steven E. Smith's "Roy Fuller: A Bib-
liographer's Thoughts on Collecting (or Vice Versa?)" (The Private Library,
4th ser., 5 [1992], 35–47); and B. C. Bloomfield's Brought to Book: Philip
Larkin and His Bibliographer (1995). All these accounts, though not compre-
hensive (or intended to be), do admirably convey a sense of what descrip-
tive bibliography is for and what goes into the making of a bibliography.
Another commendable essay, published the same year as my lecture, is
T. H. Howard-Hill's "Enumerative and Descriptive Bibliography," in The
Book Encompassed, ed. Peter Davison (1992), pp. 122–129; it provides a
reliable survey of some of the developments in the field in the second half
of the twentieth century. (In the same volume, my essay called "Issues in
Bibliographical Studies since 1942," pp. 24–36, covers similar ground in
its section on descriptive bibliography, pp. 25–29; this essay is reprinted
in my Essays in Bibliographical History [2013], pp. 53–67.)
I should perhaps mention that I commented on descriptive bibli-
ography in The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers
(1993), pp. 40–48 and
134–137, and wrote an introduction to the
1994 printing of Bowers's
Principles of Bibliographical Description (reprinted in my Portraits and Reviews
[2015], pp. 325–333). B. J. McMullin also discussed the influence of the
Principles in "Bowers's
Principles of Bibliographical Description" (Bibliographi-
cal Society of Australia and New Zealand
Bulletin, 15 [1991], 53–59); and I
commented briefly on its
historical place in "Bowers's
Principles at Fifty"
(Studies in
Bibliography, 52 [1999], 213–214). Anyone using the Principles
should be aware of the variants reported by Vander Meulen in "Revision
in Bibliographical Classics:
'McKerrow' and 'Bowers'" (Studies in Bibli-
ography, 52
[1999], 215–245). The relation of descriptive to
enumerative
bibliography (touched on in note 52 of my lecture)—including the
role
of description in the research for the great "short-title catalogue"
projects
(culminating in the online English Short-Title
Catalogue)—is discussed in de-
tail in my "Enumerative Bibliography and the
Physical Book," published in Scholarly Publishing
in Canada and Canadian Bibliography (volume 15 of
Canadian Issues), ed. Paul Aubin et al.
(1993), pp. 145–159, and reprinted
in my Literature
and Artifacts (1998), pp. 186–199.
One might expect that the Oxford and Cambridge "companions" to
book history would
offer dependable brief introductions to descriptive bib-
liography, but that is
unfortunately not the case. The Oxford Companion to
the Book,
ed. Michael F. Suarez and H. R.
Woudhuysen (2010), finds no
place in its two volumes for an
essay on descriptive bibliography (though
there is one on textual criticism).
Instead, the subject is treated only in
short scattered entries in its alphabetical
section—entries that are often
of little use, as when issue
is said to be "distinct from the basic form of the
ideal copy" and state to comprise "variants from the ideal copy not cov-
Howsam (2015), does contain an essay by Suarez called "Book History
from Descriptive Bibliographies" (pp. 199–218); but despite its inclusion
of some good points, it turns out to be unsatisfactory. That a descrip-
tive bibliography tells the story of a literary career and provides a partial
history of publishing in the period it covers has been widely understood
since Michael Sadleir's bibliography of Trollope in 1928. This observa-
tion cannot be made too often, however, and Suarez effectively conveys
an enthusiasm for descriptive bibliographies and shows how they can be
a "highly addictive" genre for reading. It is regrettable, therefore, that
he begins with slighting comments on collation formulas as "weird" and
uncongenial to humanists who may have trouble with mathematics; and
he says he will not discuss such formulas in his essay. As a result, he leaves
out what is the heart of every description, the detailed report of a book's
physical structure. Although he recognizes how format relates to a book's
"expressive form," he misses the opportunity to draw out the textual and
production implications of collations of gatherings, especially when read
in conjunction with lists of contents and associated pagination. (See be-
low under "Collation.") Furthermore, Suarez's title, with its preposition
"from," is troubling in its suggestion that descriptive bibliographies are not
themselves book history but rather are a source for it. This idea permeates
the essay in repeated expressions such as "what descriptive bibliography
can do for book historians" (p. 201). When he speaks of "bibliographical
information turned into book-historical knowledge" (p. 204), he is depict-
ing descriptive bibliographies as repositories of facts ("information") that
can become "knowledge" in the narratives that book historians write. Yet
this view is at odds with his emphasis on how one can read bibliographies
as literary and publishing histories. His piece fails to make clear that de-
scriptive bibliographies, like all other historical writings, are not mere as-
semblages of data but are the shaped products of informed judgment.
Several manuals of bibliographical and textual study that include
short treatments
of descriptive bibliography have done somewhat bet-
ter in explaining the field, but
none is entirely satisfying. For example,
D. C. Greetham's
chapter "Describing the Text: Descriptive Bibliogra-
phy" (pp. 153–168) in his Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1992,
1994) is
limited to title-page transcription, signature collation,
pagination register,
and list of contents; and the discussion of format in the
previous chapter
(pp. 119–132) is not always clear and includes diagrams that are
some-
times useless (figure 18) or misleading (figures 24 and 27). Mark Bland's
A Guide to Early Printed Books
and Manuscripts (2010) gives intelligent atten-
tion to book
structure but falters in dealing with attachments and non-
letterpress material in
collation formulas (see "Collation" below). Betterl
than these two is the chapter on
"Descriptive Bibliography" (pp. 36–56)
Craig S. Abbott's An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (first
published in 1985), though its treatment of type, paper, and binding is
perfunctory. A fourth general manual, Neil Harris's Analytical Bibliography:
The Alternative Prospectus (2002, 2004, 2006; published only online in con-
nection with a course at the Institut d'Histoire du Livre at Lyon), deserves
mention here, despite its brief attention to descriptive bibliography (in
comments on Bowers's collation formulas), for its unusual insights, engag-
ingly presented.
It is a good sign that two recent books aimed at rare-book librarians
have given
serious attention to descriptive bibliography. Steven K.
Gal-
braith and Geoffrey D. Smith's
Rare Book Librarianship: An Introduction and
Guide
(2012) includes in its second chapter ("Rare Books as Texts and
His-
torical Artifacts") a discussion of matters relevant to descriptive
bibliogra-
phy (especially "Basic Descriptive Bibliography," pp. 76–96 of the
online
version). But Sidney E. Berger's comprehensive Rare Books and Special Col-
lections (2014) gives
far more instruction in descriptive bibliography, both
in chapter 4 ("The Physical
Materials of the Collection," pp. 77–172),
which includes extensive discussions of
paper, type, and binding, and
in chapter 9 ("Bibliography," pp. 249–296), which
deals with format,
transcription, and collation, among other topics. His thorough
treatment
(which surpasses the accounts in the manuals mentioned in the
preceding
paragraph) deserves a wider audience than just rare-book librarians.
In my Engelhard Lecture, I commented on many examples of descrip-
tive
bibliographies (and cited numerous others), and those references could
now of course
be supplemented from the extensive work that has been ac-
complished since then.
Pride of place in such a listing should probably go
to A Catalogue
of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Library:
BMC, Part XI:
England
(ed. Lotte
Hellinga, 2007), the triumphant conclu
sion to the series that
began publication under A. W. Pollard's direction
in
1908. Although it is a catalogue—describing a
single collection—it de-
serves inclusion here for its masterly technique of
bibliographical descrip-
tion, particularly notable for the use it makes of Paul Needham's analysis
of the paper of incunables. Another
outstanding descriptive catalogue is A
Catalogue of Books Printed
in the Fifteenth Century Now in the Bodleian Library
(by Alan Coates et al.; 6 vols., 2005), which is distinctive for its
attention
to textual matters. One more excellent catalogue to be singled out is
John
Meriton's
Small Books for the Common Man (with Carlo
Dumontet, 2010),
which provides detailed and illustrated
descriptions of 761 eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century chapbooks in the National Art
Library, London.
It is a model for dealing with ephemeral
publications, supplemented with
an extensive account of the bibliographical
practices employed (giving
careful thought to format and paper); it also offers a
lengthy essay gener-
physical details in the descriptions (documented with sixteen tables).
A further major accomplishment is Stanley Boorman's
Ottaviano
Petrucci: Catalogue Raisonné (2006),
which includes a long discussion of bib-
liographical method. Mention should be made
of four other large works,
impressive even though their entries are often not as
fully descriptive as
one might wish (sometimes reflecting the large number of items
to be ac-
commodated): David Hunter's
Opera and Song Books Published in England,
1703–1726
(1997), Carol Fitzgerald's
"The Rivers of America": A Descriptive
Bibliography (ed.
Jean Fitzgerald, 2001), David N. Griffiths's
The Bibliogra
phy of the Book of Common Prayer,
1549–1999
(2002), and Roger E.
Stod-
dard's
A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American
Verse
Printed from 1610 through 1820
(ed. David R. Whitesell, 2012). (For critical
comments
on the Griffiths work, see B. J.
McMullin's extensive review in
The Library, 7th
ser., 6 [2005], 425–454.)
In author bibliography, five new landmarks for the pre-1850 period
are
Jean S. Yolton's
Locke (1998), William B. Todd and
Ann Bowden's
Sir
Walter Scott (1998), David Adams's
Diderot (2000), J. D.
Fleeman's
Samuel
Johnson
(ed. James McLaverty, 2000), and Mark
L. Reed's
Wordsworth
(2013). All these extraordinary works
have successfully met the consider-
able challenges posed by those authors; among
their varying excellences
is the significant attention paid to press figures. Yolton even provides, in
a few instances, tables showing the
distribution of figures in outer and
inner formes (though it must also be noted that
sometimes, for sizable
books with a great many figures, only generalizations, rather
than full
records, are given). Impressive works inspire remarkable reviews,
which
are themselves valuable contributions to the literature of the field.
The
most notable examples are Paul Needham's of the
Bodleian catalogue
in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America, 101 (2007), 359–409
(the
climax of his series of lengthy analyses of other incunable catalogues
[80
(1986), 500–511 87 (1993) 93–105; 91
(1997), 539–555; 95 (2001) 173–
239]); B. J. McMullin's of the Todd-Bowden Scott
in Bibliographical Society
of Australia
and New Zealand Bulletin, 23 (1999),
78–106; and David L.
Vander Meulen's of the Fleeman Johnson
in The
Age of Johnson, 13
(2002),
389–435.
Anthony James West's project for describing all copies of the
Shake-
speare First Folio, as finally carried out by
Eric Rasmussen and five
assistants in The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue
(2012), is
essentially an exhaustive record of copy-specific
information; it must be
accounted a greatly flawed landmark, despite the sound basis
established
by West (see especially his piece in The Library,
6th ser., 21 [1999], 1–49),
because those to whom he entrusted the work
were not up to the task (see
the devastating review by Ian
Jackson in Papers of the Bibliographical Society
two-volume The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book (2001–03),
though it does contain many additional details. Another book that calls
attention to itself by its size and the importance of its subject is Ann Jor-
dan Laeuchli's A Bibliographical Catalog of William Blackstone (ed. James E.
Mooney, 2015). Although it serves by default as a bibliography of Black-
stone, it is not one; instead, as the title indicates, it is a catalogue—of
Yale's collection, supplemented with items from other collections. It lacks
many of the features expected in a bibliography, but on the level of a cata-
logue it is commendable (and includes collations of gatherings, though
generally without identification of formats).
Of the numerous descriptive bibliographies of later nineteenth-
and
twentieth-century authors published since 1991, I wish first to
cite six
dealing with major authors because they illustrate with particular
force
what can emerge from the hands of serious collectors—who continue to
be,
as they always have been, a major source of author bibliographies (as
indeed are
some of those mentioned above, such as Reed). Two of these
six bibliographies are
outstanding three-volume works: Kenneth Black-
well and
Harry Ruja's
Bertrand Russell (with the assistance of Bernd
Froh-
mann, John G. Slater, and Sheila Turcon;
1994) and Ronald I. Cohen's
Churchill (2006). The other four, in single volumes,
also treat extensive
bodies of work: Joel Myerson's
Whitman (1993), Jack W. C.
Hagstrom and
Bill Morgan's
James Merrill (2009), David A.
Richards's
Kipling (2010), and
the 2014
revision of David Supino's
Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue
of a Collection of
Editions to 1921
(first published in 2006). All were
writ-
ten by collectors, but the
Russell
shows the results of cooperative activity
in connection with
an editorial project and archive (the Russell Archive
at
McMaster University)—a "symbiotic" relationship, according
to the
introduction to the bibliography. Of the five Russell bibliographers, one,
John G. Slater,
formed the major Russell collection now at the
Fisher
Library of the University of Toronto; the other four participated over
a
quarter-century in filling out the other great collection, at McMaster
University. Both the
Russell
and the
Churchill
are notable for the depth
and intelligence of their
coverage of every aspect of a vast oeuvre and are
especially rich in their
contribution to publishing history and biography.
The level of understanding is
indicated by this statement in the introduc-
tion to the
Russell: "Compiling the formula, and examining it for
irregu-
larities, can be informative of the final stages of a book's composition,
in
both the authorial and book-making senses of the word" (p. xxxiii).
Kipling was also prolific, and the Richards bibliography uses
an in-
serted CD for certain categories of material and for color
illustrations.
The inconvenience of this arrangement is outweighed by the wealth of
in
formation that apparently could not feasibly have been provided in print,
of the Hagstrom-Morgan Merrill is shown by its inclusion of dust-jacket
blurbs written by Merrill, quotations from him in writings by others, and
a section of "Inscriptions in Books Recorded in Book Dealers' or Auction
Catalogues"; and Myerson's Whitman is notable for its handling of later
printings and its use of copyright records and deposit copies. Supino's
work, as its modest title indicates, claims only to be a catalogue of his
James collection; but the collection includes multiple copies, variants, and
non-first editions and impressions, and he has added to his descriptions
extensive accounts of printing and publishing history based on research
in the publishers' archives. In this instance, a descriptive catalogue of a
collection supersedes the previous bibliographies of its subject. Dealers,
as well as collectors, are in a privileged position for access to the copies
needed for a descriptive bibliography, and perhaps the most impressive
example of a recent bibliography written by a dealer is Jon Gilbert's Ian
Fleming (2012); it is a monumental book of 692 very large pages, providing
detailed treatment of later printings and publishing history, along with
many color illustrations of bindings and jackets.
Among the other post-1991 bibliographies worth singling out for
par
ticular features are Wayne G. Hammond's
Tolkien (with the assistance of
Douglas A.
Anderson, 1993) and Pierre Coustillan's
Gissing (2005), both of
which contain many
narrative accounts. George Miller and Hugoe Mat-
thews's
Richard Jefferies (1993) is noteworthy for its
thorough treatment of
typography, layout, binding, and periodical contributions, its
record of
copies with dated inscriptions, and its prefatory discussion of the
scarcity
of some nineteenth-century editions—which includes a statement
that
should be widely publicized: "Variation is the rule, not the exception,
in
books of the nineteenth century and well beyond. … Sometimes it is
difficult to find
two [copies] exactly alike in all respects." One noticeable
trend in recent years
has been the increased attention to dust-jackets
(which some bibliographers formerly
refused to treat at all). A few ex
amples (out of many), in addition to the
bibliographies already cited, that
contain thorough jacket descriptions are Wayne G. Hammond's
Arthur
Ransome
(2000),
Brian Hubber and Vivian Smith's
Patrick White (2004),
and Jack De Bellis and Michael Broomfield's
Updike (2007).
Of the major series of descriptive bibliographies—Soho, Pittsburgh,
and St. Paul's—the first publishes new titles
only rarely; the second
ceased publication in 2002; and the third,
St. Paul's, was purchased in
1997 by Oak Knoll Press, which is now the leading publisher of
descrip-
tive bibliographies. Some of the Oak Knoll titles
bear a joint imprint
with St. Paul's (as they had since
1991); some are advertised as being part
of the "Winchester
Bibliographies of Twentieth Century Writers"; and
some have a joint imprint with the
British Library. A few of Oak Knoll's
designated as such, for they are uniform in having a large page size and
a CD inserted in a pocket at the back; examples are the Updike just men-
tioned, Steven Abbott's Gore Vidal (2009), George W. Crandell's Arthur
Miller (2011), and C. Edgar Grissom's Hemingway (2011). An unfortunate
characteristic of this "series," however, is that in most cases signature
collations are not included.
Some of the post-1991 bibliographies in the major series are
the
following:
SOHO: Neil Brennan and A. R. Redway's Graham Greene (1992) and William S. Peterson's Betjeman (2006);
PITTSBURGH
: Joseph R. McElrath, Jr.'s
Frank Norris
(1992), George W. Crandell's
Tennessee Williams (1995), Rodger
L. Tarr's
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1996), Richard J.
Schrader's
Mencken (1998), and Matthew J.
Bruccoli and Park Bucker's
Joseph Heller
(2002), plus Myerson's
Whitman, already cited;
ST. PAUL'S
and
OAK KNOLL:
Leila Luedeking and Michael
Edmonds's
Leonard
Woolf (1992), Sylvia
Harlow's
W. H. Davies (1993), George P.
Lilley's
Anthony Powell
(1993), Robert
Cross and Michael Perkin's
Elspeth Huxley (1996), John J.
Walsdorf's
Julian Symons (1996), Gillian
Fenwick's
Orwell (1998), John Windle
and Karma Pip-
pin's
Dibdin (1999), Donald D.
Eddy's
Richard Hurd (1999), Robert
Cross and Ann
Ravenscroft Hulme's
Vita Sackville-West (1999), Peter
J. Mitham's
Robert Service (2000),
M.
Clark Chambers's
Kay Boyle (2002), William
Baker and John C. Ross's
George Eliot
(2002) and Pinter (2005), Philip W. Errington's
Masefield (2004), Eugene
LeMire's
William Morris (2006), William Baker and Gerald N. Wachs's
Stoppard (2010), Maura
Ives's
Christina Rossetti (2011), Jack
W. C. Hagstrom and Joshua S. Odell's
Thom Gunn
(vol. 2, 2013), and Michael Broomfield's
Robinson Jeffers (2013), plus several
already
mentioned (those on Hemingway, Kipling, Merrill, Miller,
Ransome, Tolkien, Up-
dike, Vidal, and White).
A few other worthy bibliographies, not in these series, are Bill
Morgan's
Allen Ginsberg (1995), Steven E. Smith's
Roy Fuller
(1996), Walter Smith's
Elizabeth Gaskell (1998), Carl
Spadoni's
Stephen Leacock (1998), Robert
W.
Mattila's
George Sterling (2004), Rand
Brandes and Michael J. Durkan's
Seamus Heaney (2008), Catherine M.
Parisian's
Frances Burney's "Cecilia"
(2012), and Carl Spadoni and Judith Skelton Grant's
Robertson Davies
(2014), with its extensive
production details.
All these post-1991 titles obviously constitute only a selective
record,
intended to supplement the one in my 1991 Engelhard Lecture
(primarily
in notes 33–47 and related text). A few fuller, though more
specialized,
accounts have appeared. For earlier work, I referred in my lecture to
my
1968 survey of descriptive bibliographies of American authors
(note 41)
and my 1975 one on eighteenth-century books (note 37)—both
reprinted
since then in my Essays in Bibliographical History
(2013), pp. 137–160 and
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1995 (1996), pp. 220–234. Entitled
"Primary Bibliography: A Retrospective," it assesses eight series (including
Soho, Pittsburgh, and St. Paul's, along with some that offer only enumera-
tion, not description) and provides convenient lists of titles in each series.
In the 2002 revision of my Introduction to Bibliography, I included a selective
list of some 125 descriptive bibliographies published between 1908 and
2002 (section 4C, pp. 176–179)—as well as a list of writings about descrip-
tive bibliography (4B, pp. 168–175). The most extensive listings (as I noted
in 1992) appear in my Guide to the Study of United States Imprints (1971) and
T. H. Howard-Hill's Index to British Literary Bibliography (1969–2009).
I have held any reference to Paul Needham's
Galileo Makes a Book
(2011) until my concluding
comment because it serves as a model of what
descriptive and analytical bibliography
at the highest level can accom-
plish. It is a book-length account of a single
edition, Galileo's
Sidereus
Nuncius of 1610. Besides an exemplary
physical description, accompanied
by notes on eighty-three examined copies, it
provides a detailed narrative
of the composition of the work and the production of
the book, using (and
carefully explaining) the relevant techniques of
bibliographical analysis. It
demonstrates not only how analysis and description are
intertwined but
also how the two together contribute to intellectual history.
RELATION TO LIBRARY CATALOGUING
I published "Descriptive Bibliography and Library Cataloguing" in
Studies in Bibliography, 30 (1977), 1–56; it was reprinted in my
Selected
Studies in Bibliography (1979), pp.
37–92. Also in 1977 I published a more
general discussion, which
includes some comments on cataloguing: "Bib-
liographers and the Library," Library Trends, 25 (1976–77), 745–762; re-
printed
in my Literature and Artifacts (1998), pp. 24–40. I
have treatedy
the question of the relation between references to physical books
and
references to verbal works much more extensively in "Enumerative
Bib-
liography and the Physical Book," in Scholarly Publishing in
Canada and
Canadian Bibliography (volume 15 of
Canadian Issues), ed. Paul Aubin et
al.
(1993), pp. 145–159, which is reprinted in my Literature and Artifacts (1998),
pp. 186–199. (This subject was
also briefly discussed by D. W. Krummel
in his guide to
preparing checklists, Bibliographies: Their Aims and
Methods
[1984]: see "The Physical and Intellectual Book," pp.
34–36.)
Since the time of my 1977 essay there has been a great deal of
discus
sion in the library world about the requirements for cataloguing
"rare
books," and in 1986 the Association of College and Research
Librar-
ies (ACRL) began publishing a journal called Rare Books
and Manuscripts
tural Heritage in 2000). Its contents naturally impinge from time to time
on matters taken up in my essay, and three articles can be singled out as
particularly relevant.
The first, by Laura Stalker and Jackie M.
Dooley, is "Descriptive
Cataloging and Rare Books" (7 [1992],
7–22), a careful historical ac-
count of the thinking involved in the various
revisions of the cataloguing
rules that had occurred in the preceding fifteen years.
(It also, in footnote
11, credits my essay with the change made in the title of the
rules for
special-collections cataloguers from "Bibliographic Description" to
"De-
scriptive Cataloging.") The second article is Michael
Winship's "'What
the Bibliographer Says to the Cataloger'" (7
[1992], 98–108)—part of
a special issue on "Descriptive Cataloging of
19th-Century Imprints for
Special Collections," ed. Stephen J.
Zietz. Winship sensibly points out the
overlappings among traditional
branches of bibliography and notes that
library cataloguers' work similarly bridges
these divisions; and he prop-
erly recognizes that the amount of detail in a
catalogue entry is not as
important a consideration as the quality of judgment
involved in deciding
what details are the most significant for a given class of
material. His aim,
like mine, is "to raise issues that may help to improve the
catalog as a tool
for research"; and he believes, as I do, that "our work, both as
catalogers
and as bibliographers, would be better if we were to talk to each
other
more." The third article I wish to note here is James P.
Ascher's "Pro-
gressing toward Bibliography; or: Organic Growth in the
Bibliographic
Record" (10 [2009], 95–110). As his title makes clear,
Ascher proposes a
process of "progressive description" (made feasible by the
computer), in
which records are continually enhanced as more information turns up,
or
certain physical features begin to attract greater interest, or the need
for
particular digital links becomes clearer. Implementation of this
promising
idea would allow "bibliographical awareness in cataloging" not to be
fro-
zen at the time of the initial record but to grow along with scholarship.
My 1977 essay, which includes a criticism of chapter 6 of the Anglo-
American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), appeared a year
before AACR was re-
vised and four years before a manual
specifically designed for special
collections, Bibliographic
Description of Rare Books (1981), was published un-
der the
supervision of the Office for Descriptive Cataloging Policy of the
Library of
Congress. A decade after that, the manual was revised (with
the collaboration of the
Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ACRL)
as Descriptive
Cataloging of Rare Books (1991), and a third edition appeared
in
2007 under the title Descriptive Cataloging of Rare
Materials (Books)—one
of a series of manuals for different classes of "rare
materials." Although
the 2007 manual poses somewhat fewer problems
(from the point of view
AACR, the same kind of confusion is still present.
For example, in the chapter on "Physical Description Area" (pp. 101–
118), the
first rule for recording "Extent" suggests that the emphasis will be
on "physical
description" by focusing on the length of the physical book
rather than that of the
verbal work: the rule is to "account for every leaf
… including leaves of text,
leaves of plates, and blank leaves"; and the
leaves are to be reported by giving
"the last numbered page or leaf of
each numbered sequence" in the same style of
numbering as that used in
the book itself, with a bracketed arabic total for
unnumbered pages, as in
"iii, [1], 88, [2] p." One immediately wonders why this
degree of specific-
ity is needed if the aim is simply to show "extent"—especially
since the
system does not fully concentrate on the practice of the book, as
shown
not only in this simple example (is p. 1 numbered?) but also in
several
other rules, such as this one: "If it is not practical to record all the
se-
quences (e.g., if they are exceedingly numerous)," then one may "Record
the
total number of pages or leaves followed by 'in various pagings' or 'in
various
foliations.'" The treatment of blank leaves raises a fundamental
problem: "include
in the count blank leaves at the beginning of the first
gathering or at the end of
the final gathering when they are present in
a copy in hand or known to be present
in other copies." Aside from the
practical question of how often a cataloguer can be
expected to undertake
the bibliographical research involved in learning about "other
copies,"
there is a basic theoretical question: should not a catalogue entry
always
refer to the "copy in hand"? In the section on "Size and format,"
preci-
sion in physical description is again not the focus. One example:
"when
the height of the publication differs by 3 centimeters or more from
the
height of the binding, specify both." And the brief paragraph on
"biblio-
graphical format" says to record it for hand-press books "whenever
the
format can be determined" (and speaks incorrectly of "quarto and
octavo
sheets"). There is no reason to extend this discussion: enough has
been
said to show that the standard approach to "descriptive" cataloguing
in
libraries remains internally inconsistent and, for the details selected
for
reporting, at odds with the expectations of descriptive bibliography.
Shortly after my 1977 piece appeared, I received a letter from a Texas
librarian complaining that I had not given cataloguers
sufficient credit for
dealing with the physical book. But one of her own statements
illustrates
the problem I was concerned with: "a monograph cataloger catalogs
from
a single copy of a book, but the card in the catalog stands for any
num-
ber of copies which may be on the shelf." This kind of wavering between
the
physical object and the verbal work is what I was criticizing, not the
fact that
cataloguers focus on fewer physical details than bibliographers
library-cataloguing world over whether the emphasis should be on the
work or the "item"—a debate that seems unnecessary to bibliographers,
for whom the subject of an entry must obviously be a physical item,
since only through physical items can verbal works and their variants be
apprehended. After the Texas librarian's imprecision, it is a pleasure to
note Paul Needham's careful distinctions among work, edition, and copy in
"Copy Description in Incunable Catalogues," Papers of the Bibliographi-
cal Society of America, 95 (2001), 173–239 (especially "General Remarks,"
pp. 203–238).
This is the place to mention a recent extensive study of "fingerprint-
ing," since
in footnote 86 I described and criticized that practice—which,
like institutional
library cataloguing, involves the concise reporting of a
few selected features of an
examined copy. The idea is that a record of
the letters (in words of the text) that
appear in specified positions can
serve as a first step in distinguishing one
edition from another. But obvi-
ously such fingerprints are not very precise
indicators, for they cannot
identify impressions, line-for-line resettings, or
resettings of any pages
(or indeed any lines) not sampled. Only a full
bibliographical analysis of
multiple copies could result in a shorthand notation
that might reliably
distinguish editions (and reveal impressions) in cases where the
title-page
details are insufficient. Nevertheless, the idea has had a long history,
and
Neil Harris has now provided a thorough historical
account and assess-
ment of it: "Tribal Lays and the History of the Fingerprint," in
Many into
One: Problems and Opportunities in Creating Shared
Catalogues of Older Books,
ed. David J. Shaw
(2006), pp. 21–72 (the essay was reprinted in 2007
as a
pamphlet with two pages of errata). A variety of fingerprinting—
noting the first
words on the second leaf recto—is described by James
Willoughby in "The Secundo Folio and Its
Uses, Medieval and Modern"
(The Library, 7th ser., 12
[2011], 237–258).
Finally, I wish to note two recent articles, addressed to library cata-
loguers,
that will be heartily applauded by bibliographers: Carlo Dumony-
tet's
"Nineteenth-Century Bookcloth Grain Classification and the Special
Collections
Cataloguer" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 104
[2010], 105–112), which holds
that "the description of bookcloth grains
ideally ought to become a standard and
integral part of catalogue rec-
ords" (p. 106) and makes suggestions accordingly
(see further below, under
"Patterns" in "Publishers' Bindings"); and Paola Puglisi's "'The Day Has
Not Yet Come …': Book-Jackets in
Library Catalogs" (Cataloging & Clas-
sification
Quarterly, 53.3 [2015], 1–14), which proclaims "the necessity
for
access to the information about a single book's book-jacket directly
from
the library catalog." It is to be hoped that these articles reflect a
trend.
IDEAL COPY
"The Concept of Ideal Copy," was published in Studies in Bibliography,
33 (1980), 18–53, and was reprinted,
in a translation by Katia Lysy, in
Filologia dei testi a stampa, ed. Pasquale Stoppelli
(1987), pp. 73–105. As
I complained there, the phrase "ideal copy" is
unfortunate, and I can
only reiterate, even more emphatically, that it should never
have been
invented. My essay does not appear to have affected, to any
significant
extent, the way the term has been used since 1980; and
countless bibli-
ographies and bibliographical discussions have continued to spread
con-
fusion by assuming that the concept has something to do with
textual
correctness and that any given impression or issue can have only one
ideal
copy. The basic point underlying Fredson Bowers's
discussion was simply
that a descriptive bibliography (as opposed to a catalogue of
a collection)
should not include in its basic descriptions any features of books
that
result from their post-publication lives. To put the matter the other
way
round, the descriptive bibliographer does record in a basic description
all
the forms that were published (as defined in the next paragraph). The
variant forms
of an impression (including its stop-press alterations) are its
"ideal
copies"—though they should not be called that. If we were to say
that a description
focuses on "copies as published," not on a single "ideal
copy," most of the problems
would go away.
Defining what "as published" means is straightforward for books pub-
lished in
edition-bindings (that is, most books from the early nineteenth
century onward,
first in boards with labels, meant to be temporary, and
then in cloth): it simply
refers to whatever forms the finished product
(printed sheets and insertions plus
binding) took—even when certain leaves
were expected to be removed (as in Frances Ann Kemble's
Records of Later
Life
[1882], where the second leaf is headed "Slips for Librarian to
paste
on Catalogue Cards"). But for books not published in
edition-bindings
(including most books before the nineteenth century), the
descriptive bib-
liographer's focus must be, as I stated in 1980, on
the structure "specifi-
cally called for by the evidence of the sheets." In the
former case (books
published in edition-bindings), intention plays no role, since
the finished
product may not have fully conformed with what the printer or
publisher
intended; in the latter (books not published in edition-bindings), the
ob-
ject to be described has to be the sheets (and insertions) in their
intended
structure, rather than in whatever arrangements resulted from the
work
of the various binders employed by the printers, publishers, or
booksellers
(not always different persons) or by the owners of specific copies.
The role of intention in these matters can perhaps be clarified by
considering a
passage in David McKitterick's
Print, Manuscript, and the
printing process leads to variability in the printed results, and he there-
fore questions the bibliographer's focus on something as seemingly fixed
as an "ideal copy" (pp. 136–138). Although he speaks of my definition as
"careful," he says that it "cannot embrace one of the fundamental points
about early printed books: that they can remain physically uncompleted
after they have left the printer's or publisher's control." But my definition
does embrace this fact because it refers simply to the forms that "were
released to the public by their producers," however variant or "uncom-
pleted" those forms were. Printers, he says, expected and accepted varia-
tions among copies, and he thus finds the idea of printers' intentions to be
"unrealistic" (unless defined as "heterogeneous compromises"). Printers,
however, clearly did have intentions: to carry out the publishers' inten-
tions (a point discussed further below), if indeed the printers and publish-
ers were not the same people. Those intentions were evidenced by clues in
the printed sheets (both as to the expectation of a particular structure and
as to the acceptance of textual variants). Printers and publishers obviously
recognized that they could not control what would happen to those sheets
in the hands of other people; but it does not follow that bibliographers are
being unrealistic when (for the period before publishers' bindings) they
follow the printed marks of intended structure as a way of distinguishing
forms as meant to be published (including, of course, stop-press variants)
from forms as modified later. Making this distinction does not deny the
variability among copies or the continuity of the whole process (from
printer to reader).
Internal evidence for an intended structure generally takes the form
of signatures,
supplemented by lists of contents (including illustrations)
and indications of
insertion points on separately printed material. In most
cases what the
bibliographer describes differs from the bundles offered
by printers (to publishers,
booksellers, binders, or the public) only in the
placement of cancels (whether
printed on the text sheets or separately
from them) and plates printed by intaglio
processes (or, occasionally, sepa-
rately printed letterpress charts or tables).
Sometimes, however, there is
another source of evidence: printed instructions to
binders. They call for
some comment that I did not provide in 1980.
The main situations in which such instructions occurred have been
surveyed, with
most interesting examples, by B. J. McMullin in
"Print-
ers' Instructions to Binders" (Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America,
104
[2010], 77–104). Besides giving the locations of plates and
cancels
(or any other matter to be inserted), these instructions were used
when
the sequence of signatures was unclear or complex and when the com-
ponents
of a volume were distinct units without an obvious order. (In a
supplementary note
the same year, on pp. 353–359, McMullin gives an
the edge of a cancellans.) The subject of "ideal copy" naturally comes
up in McMullin's discussion, and he concludes (pp. 103–104) that each
bibliographer must decide whether to describe "the printer's ideal copy"
or "the publisher's ideal copy." This conclusion, however, by separating
the printer's and the publisher's intentions, is at odds with the generally
accepted (and I think correct) view that the entities to be described are
either (a) copies as printed, bound, and published (if in edition-bindings)
or (b) copies as intended by the printer and publisher to be formed from
the published materials (if not in edition-bindings).
Furthermore, his statement is misleading in suggesting that the pos-
tulated
decision for bibliographers has a wider area of application than
it actually has.
If, along with McMullin, one were to define the
printer's
ideal copy as "the collection of leaves that the printer intended to
supply
the publisher with (and thence the binder)," there are only two ways
this
assemblage of leaves (that is, sheets) would differ from the materials
for
the "publisher's ideal copy": (1) in its inclusion of binders'
instructions
printed either on an integral leaf that carries no other text (except
possibly
a binding label) or on a separate piece of paper; and (2) in its inclusion
of
any leaves to be canceled, along with their replacements. (Incidentally,
the
last phrase of McMullin's definition should properly
read "to supply the
binders with, sometimes by way of publishers, booksellers, or
individual
owners"—in order to make clear that more than one binder would
have
been involved, and to accommodate the variety of possible sequences,
given
the overlapping of the printing/publishing/bookselling functions.)
When binders'
instructions are printed on a leaf containing other text
(such as a title page, a
table of contents, an errata list, and so forth),
that leaf clearly is part of the
copy intended by the printer and publisher
(or printer-publisher). But when copies
survive with either of the kinds of
leaves mentioned just above (numbered 1 and 2),
the bibliographer would
be justified in not including them in a basic description
(reporting them
instead in appended notes).
In summary it must be said that McMullin's definition of
"printer's
ideal copy" makes the printer's intention more restricted than it
clearly
was. Printers (as their instructions to binders show) were looking
ahead,
just as much as the publishers/booksellers, to the form that readers
were
to receive. In his Foxcroft Lecture of 2012 (What Readers Should Ignore on
the Printed Page: Communication within the Book
Trade, published in 2014),
McMullin at
first recognizes this point: "the ultimate aim of both par-
ties [printers and
binders]," he says, was "to ensure that the purchaser/
reader obtained what the
bibliographer would call an 'ideal' copy" (p. 5).
But near the end, when he asks
whether printed instructions to binders
"form part of the ideal copy," he again says
that "from the printer's point
not helpful to use ideal copy in two ways, especially since the kind of "ideal
copy" that bibliographers are concerned with is the same for printers,
binders, publishers, booksellers, and readers. Binders' instructions thus
pose no challenge to the standard procedure for dealing with books that
were not published in edition-bindings.
One must remember that, in the period before edition-bindings, books
could appear
in a kind of publisher's binding, for booksellers can be as-
sumed to have offered
books in a variety of forms in addition to batches of
sheets—that is, in full
bindings or in gatherings, sewn or not, and with or
without some form of attached
wrappers or boards. This much has long
been recognized in a general way; but the
first person to give the mat-
ter systematic attention and to search extensively for
surviving evidence
is Nicholas Pickwoad, who publicized
his research in a lecture, "Unfin-
ished Business," delivered several times in
2012–15. He has located some
130 examples of what he calls
"incomplete" or "unfinished" bindings,
dating from 1485 though the
eighteenth century. These are book blocks
that are sewn in a permanent fashion and
sometimes have boards at-
tached to them but have not been finished with any
covering material
(though they are ready for that operation). Pickwoad distinguishes
them
from the "temporary" bindings that were already well known—book
blocks with
intact deckle edges, inexpensive sewing structures, and simple
wrappers (or cheap
boards) meant only to protect the sheets until they
could be given permanent
structures and conventional covers. (See Jona-
than E.
Hill, "From Provisional to Permanent: Books in Boards,
1790–
1840," The Library, 6th ser., 21
[1999], 247–273.) Pickwoad suggests the
possibility that these two
categories of "binding" may have constituted
standard practice for the initial
offerings of books in the hand-press pe-
riod. Aaron T.
Pratt has also suggested that books of all genres with short
texts
(especially quartos with fewer than about 96 pages) were generally
sold in
stab-stitched form in shops (see "Stab-Stitching and the Status of
Early English
Playbooks as Literature," The Library, 7th ser., 16
[2015],
304–328).
Examples of unfinished or temporary bindings are understandably
difficult to
locate, since most were not left in their original state. (Some of
the structural
results of the binding process are discussed by Pickwoad in
"Binders' Gatherings,"
The Library, 7th ser., 15 [2014], 63–78.) But
when
they can be identified, the makeup of their sheets can be regarded as
one
of the forms of ideal copy for the books concerned. However, given
their
scarcity (aside from the late-eighteenth- and
early-nineteenth-century
boards-and-label instances)—as well as the possibility that
their makeup
may not differ very often from what the bibliographer would have
defined
Pratt's important research may not affect the collation and contents para-
graphs in most bibliographical descriptions (though they may sometimes
cause a paragraph on binding to be added).
Understanding these points is all the background one needs in order
to see how
pointless most of the discussions of ideal copy are. But the
three
most extensive post-1980 treatments should perhaps be mentioned.
First
is Rolf E. Du Rietz's "Buyer's Emissions and Ideal
Copies" (Text [Upp-
sala], 5.1 [1994], 2–38),
which focuses on books from the period before
edition-binding became standard. In
the language of his classification
scheme, "buyer's emissions" are primarily the
bound copies whose con-
tents were arranged by binders for individual owners.
Because "original
emissions" (the forms released by publishers) rarely survive (or
can be
identified) from this period, bibliographers must use "buyer's
emissions"
as sources for ideal-copy descriptions. Du
Rietz apparently believes that
this fact undercuts my idea that ideal copy does not encompass decisions
made by individual
owners or binders. But the precise forms of "buyer's
emissions" are not what
bibliographers would describe (except in notes
on examined copies); rather, they
would use the evidence available in
those copies in order to determine the order of
contents that was intended
by the publisher—a pre-publication event. (Indeed, even
if some "origi-
nal emissions" survived, only those in temporary or unfinished
bindings
would constitute varieties of ideal copies, and the bibliographer's
proce-
dure would otherwise remain the same.) Du Rietz is
correct, when try-
ing to understand my definition of ideal
copy, to suggest that my phrase
"evidence of the sheets" may involve, among
other things, understanding
(in his words) the "generally accepted contemporary
conventions"; but
even so his discussion finally blurs the crucial distinction
between the
forms of extant copies and the forms to be described in
bibliographers'
basic entries. Perhaps the most useful part of his article is his
detailed
consideration of the binding up of serials and of works published in
parts
or fascicles—though he does not make clear that these situations
(where
the publisher has two intentions, one or both of which are often
fully
carried out by the publisher) are very different from the one that is
his
primary concern.
The second extended treatment of ideal copy occurs in Stanley Boor-
man's
Ottaviano Petrucci: Catalogue Raisonné
(2006), an extremely thorough
account of this early sixteenth-century
printer of music. In the 400–page
introductory section (which discusses Petrucci's life and the printing and
publishing conditions of
his time), there is a chapter entitled "Ideal Copy:
Petrucci's View of the Book, Its Character, Function, and
Destination"
(pp. 247–264). It begins with the "bibliographical concept," which
"exists
copy as it was intended to be issued by the printer or publisher" (p. 248).
This definition at first seems excellent, until one learns what "intended"
covers for Boorman. Intention is central to the chapter: as its subtitle sug-
gests, his use of ideal copy is not primarily bibliographical but rather refers
to all the aspects of text and design that the printer felt were essential "to
make people like his books." In a later chapter, "Bibliographical Concepts
and Terminology," the definition of ideal copy embodies this point: "an
ideal copy represents a book as issued by the printer and publisher, once
they were satisfied that the details of appearance and content were as they
wished to see them" (p. 450). (Their satisfaction, of course, does not mean
that they had noticed everything they would have liked to notice; to bring
about such an ideal copy, at least as far as the text is concerned, would
require a critical edition.) One clue to the printer/publisher's intention is
any in-house corrections (stop-press, handwritten, or stamped), and thus
those corrections become, for Boorman, part of ideal copy (even though,
as he later notes [pp. 448, 449], the direction of some kinds of changes
is not always clear). He recognizes that he is using the term "in a slightly
idiosyncratic manner." What his usage amounts to is an expansion of
the concept to encompass a corrected text in addition to (for books not
in edition-bindings) an intended structure. The practical consequence is
simply that a record of in-house corrections appears earlier in each de-
scription (preceding the listing of contents) than is conventional. But the
basic description does what any description of an ideal copy must do (for
books not in edition-bindings): it sets forth the structure that complete
copies should consist of, drawing on the evidence of the surviving cop-
ies, all of which may be incomplete or aberrant; and Boorman carefully
supplements it with detailed accounts of the individual copies. Despite
the problem with his concept of ideal copy, therefore, the descriptions
themselves are admirable.
The third discussion is in Joseph A. Dane's
Abstractions of Evidence in
the Study of Manuscripts and Early
Printed Books (2009), which contains a
chapter called "'Ideal
Copy' vs. 'Ideal Texts': The Application of Biblio-
graphical Description to
Facsimiles" (pp. 77–94). (Dane has commented
on ideal copy
elsewhere, in this book and others, but this chapter is his most
thorough
examination of it.) Although his discussion includes a number of
questionable
pronouncements, he does show some of the inconsistencies
in Bowers's treatment of ideal copy and in comments by
Charlton Hinman
and Michael
Warren about their Shakespeare facsimiles (which
bring to-
gether pages from different copies). He is properly critical of Hinman's
notion that his facsimile of the First Folio presents
"what the printers of
the original edition would themselves have considered an ideal
copy" and
of Warren's belief that his King Lear shows the text "as the printer might
a "corrected" forme is not necessarily more correct at the points of altera-
tion, and in any case a forme (corrected or not) is likely to contain unno-
ticed errors that a printer would not "ideally" intend. The concept of ideal
copy (in either Bowers's or my formulation) has nothing to do with textual
correctness. Dane recognizes this fact here (as he did not in a passage
of his 2003 book, The Myth of Print Culture, where "missing quires" and
"printing errors" are equally to be "filtered out" in describing an ideal
copy [p. 187]). But a greater use of this recognition would have made his
discussion more acute (and considerably more concise). That composite
facsimiles can be regarded as critical editions is an obvious point scarcely
worth extensive comment, though the fact that the editors may think they
have produced ideal copies is of some interest (if irrelevant to the users).
Despite Dane's criticism of some of the ways in which the term ideal copy
has been employed, one leaves his discussion feeling that the usefulness
of the concept has not been clarified.
But the concept itself—when understood as a way of defining which
features of
extant books are to be excluded from descriptions because they
result from the
independent actions of individual owners or the vicissi-
tudes of time—is
fundamental to the work of bibliographers.
EDITION, IMPRESSION, ISSUE, AND STATE
My discussion of the basic classificatory terms in descriptive bibliog-
raphy,
entitled "The Bibliographical Concepts of Issue and State," was
published in Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America, 69
(1975), 17–66.
I concentrated on issue and state because they have been frequently misun-
derstood and
less consistently employed than edition and impression, which
did not seem to require further definition beyond what was
generally
recognized. As explained in the first few pages, edition refers to all copies
resulting primarily (if not always entirely)
from a single job of typographi-
cal composition; and impression (or printing) denotes all copies of an
edition
printed in one continuous (even if multi-day) operation. (It might be
a
good idea for bibliographers to use "exemplars" instead of "copies," since
the
latter implies lack of variation.) But no such clear-cut distinction be-
tween issue and state had been (or has been even
yet) regularly accepted by
bibliographers, though the two refer to equally discrete
situations, which
can be simply stated: an issue is a group
of copies of an impression that
give evidence of forming a consciously planned
publishing unit, whereas
state refers to the kind of
correction that does not call attention to itself
as a marketing effort and that can
only categorize an individual part of a
book (such as a page or a binding), not a
book as a whole (since any given
book may contain mixed states).
This formulation was meant as a clarification of the essential distinc-
tion
between the two concepts that underlay Bowers's complex
definitions,
and it has received some degree of acceptance. The Library of
Congress
and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) adopted
my
approach for their rare-book cataloguing manual (see above, under
"Relation to
Library Cataloguing"), in which the headnote to the glossary
says that the
definitions of issue and state use my
wording. The ACRL also
commended my definitions in its Printing
and Publishing Evidence: Thesauri
for Use in Rare Book and Special Collections
Cataloguing (1986). Other parts of
the book world, however,
still do not employ these definitions consistently.
The introductions to
bibliographies continue to display a multiplicity of
variant definitions, and it is
common to find state used to refer to whole
copies of books.
Of course, almost any definition, if carefully worded, can
be usable, but confusion
is bound to arise when statements from bibliog-
raphies are cited without the
prefatory definitions.
The same kinds of variation in usage also occur in bibliographical
essays. Rolf E. Du Rietz, for example, in "Buyer's Emissions and
Ideal
Copies" (Text [Uppsala], 5.1 [1994],
2–38), argues that state must some-
times apply to an entire
book, as when a plate or leaf is inserted or deleted
"without any kind of
substitution or correction being directly involved"
(p. 10). But the presence or
absence of a plate or leaf may affect only
one point in a book, just as much as a
stop-press alteration or a cancel
does; and when, on occasion, it affects the whole
book, as an inserted
dedication might, it would produce an issue. The kind of
situation Du
Rietz postulates provides no reason for
blurring the sharp line between
issue and state. And Lotte Hellinga, in "Analytical Bibliography
and the
Study of Early Printed Books with a Case-Study of the Mainz Catholicon"
(Gutenberg-Jahrbuch,
1989, pp. 47–96), asserts that "'issue' always means
re-setting of a
substantial section of text" and that "the terms state,
im-
pression, issue, and edition … represent not only
a rising scale of quantity
of change, but also express an increasingly deliberate
involvement of the
printer" (p. 51). However useful these definitions may be for her
discus-
sion, they are not appropriate for general use.
Another nonstandard use of issue occurs as part of Stanley Boorman's
rethinking of the terms of classification in
his Ottaviano Petrucci (2006),
pp. 446–449. He
states, "A single issue comprises all the copies of a book
that were put on sale
under the same arrangements." By saying "a book"
(meaning a work) rather than "an
edition," he is able to make edition
subordinate to issue in some situations, as when later resettings with
the
same date "were intended to be sold under the same arrangements as
the
earlier." Those editions "were, therefore, part of the same issue." The
fact
that printing history and publishing history do not necessarily coincide
make issue (a publishing term) sometimes subordinate to edition (a printing
term) and sometimes not can only produce confusion. In this instance,
for example, "arrangements" is not a term that reflects physical evidence:
there is no way to tell from the books themselves whether or not the later
editions were "put on sale under the same arrangements." Bibliographical
classification, by definition, emerges from the evidence within the physi-
cal object being classified, and resetting of type must be taken as the most
fundamental level. If one has external evidence for linking two editions
as a publishing effort, one can make a statement to that effect; but issue
must be reserved for one kind of physical change within an edition. (How
extensive a portion of text needs to be reset in order to call the result a
different edition is, as Boorman recognizes, a separate question, and one
about which opinions may vary; but he unfortunately chooses to call an
individual reset sheet "a second impression of that part of the book.") As
for state, Boorman understands that "the concept of a single 'state' for a
whole book is meaningless," and he admirably explains the reason.
One prolific bibliographer, Joel Myerson, has explicitly
rejected my
approach to issue in favor of Bowers's. In "Some Comments on the Bib-
liographical Concept of 'Issue'"
(South Central Review, 5.1 [Spring
1988],
8–16), he takes up four "troublesome" kinds of situations, all
of which can
in fact be easily handled under my definitions. His first class of
examples
involves publishers' casings (bindings) and wrappers: copies of a
single
impression put on sale simultaneously in cloth and wrappers, or
published
with different series designations or publishers' names on the
casings,
or released with either British or American prices on the wrappers,
or
made available with different styles (not simply colors) of binding, such
as
cloth, half-calf, or full leather. The fact that there are no changes to
the sheets
in any of these instances should not give one pause (as it does
Myerson) because all the differences clearly identify copies that belong
to
separate marketing units. Myerson's second class of
examples deals with
dust-jackets. He cites instances where only a jacket or a box
shows that
the copies so housed are part of a series; but such indications are no
dif-
ferent from those on casings. In connection with a paste-over cancel of
a
publisher's name on a jacket, Myerson says, "The label
on the jacket spine
represents as clear a decision to issue
the book by another publisher as
would be changing the stamping on the casing or
cancelling the title page,
but do we really want to call this an issue of the book?"
Why not? His
third category concerns special-paper copies, and he is correct to
point
out that sometimes such copies constitute an impression, not an issue.
But
the fact that at other times they can be issues (as when the trimming
of some copies
creates two leaf sizes) is not altered. His final category is
and marketed as such, it is hard to see how they could be regarded as
anything other than an issue (in contrast to the copies that are signed for
particular bookstores or publication parties).
Myerson feels that his examples show how some publication
practices
"put a strain on any definition of issue." Every
classification scheme natu-
rally has to deal with borderline cases, but they do not
"strain" it; rather,
the classification facilitates a course of thinking that makes
the particular
situation stand out clearly. Myerson
prefers Bowers's approach because,
"by restricting issue to the sheets of a book," he "requires other evidences
of
marketing decisions …to be verbally described rather than definition-
ally
categorized." Yet Myerson recognizes that my system also
"allows …
descriptive or explanatory notes." Indeed, I have always maintained
(and
not only in this essay) that bibliographers should never hesitate to
add
discursive explanations in order to make a situation clear, which after
all
is the goal. In the end it hardly matters whether one labels a book
"first
impression, second issue" or "first impression, binding B," for
example,
as long as the significance of either one is explained. Since Myerson un-
derstands that "casings and dust jackets must be
considered as part of
the marketing process," it is odd that he favors an approach
"restricting
issue to the sheets of a book" simply because
it "requires" an attached ac-
count of the other parts of a book that provide
evidence about marketing.
(Four years earlier he had held a different view, allowing
casings to deter-
mine issues, in a review in Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America, 78
[1984], 48.) He is thus
sacrificing the coherence of the concept of issue to
a
presumed advantage in presentation; but any label may at times benefit
from an
explanation, and the label itself should encompass the whole
range of relevant
possibilities. (Matthew J. Bruccoli, in his
"Editorial"
for the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook
1996
[1997], pp. 285–286,
also fails to think
through the concept when he asserts that issue cannot
relate
to bindings because "bindings have no connection with text" and
claims that the
"description of a book and its dust jacket are independent
of each other.")
In 1991, B. J. McMullin (in "Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical De-
scription," Bibliographical
Society of Australia and New
Zealand Bulletin, 15:
53–59) argued that issue, which in the Principles seems to be largely
re-
stricted to reissue, should be expanded to include distinct "planned
units"
that were published simultaneously, such as copies with different
booksell-
ers' imprints or copies printed on different qualities of paper
(sometimes
labeled with printed paper-quality marks on the first pages of
gatherings).
(He also referred in passing to states being
formed by "corrections.") This
recognition of simultaneous issues coincides with a
point I had made in
my 1975 essay (though I explicitly enlarged the
concept to cover publish-
came independently to the same conclusions confirms the suitability of
the definitions I have proposed and continue to advocate. Some years
later McMullin reinforced his view when he studied the phenomenon of
books in colonial series being converted (or converted back) to domestic
issues: he advocated a fuller description of the paper, leaf dimensions, and
bindings of such books as an aid to identification when there are no ver-
bal changes ("Domestic—Colonial—Domestic," Biblionews and Australian
Notes & Queries, 361/362 [March/June 2009], 29–37).
The implications of my definitions for the arrangement (and thus the
entry
numbering) of a bibliography, as well as for the uses of the impor-
tant concept of
subedition (and its relation to geography), all of which
are
taken up in section IV of the 1975 essay, were further discussed in
1984
in my essay on "Arrangement" (see below). In that later
discussion, I also
explained why I think the concept of subedition is preferable to that of plat-
ing
(proposed by James L. W. West III) as a classification between
edition
and impression. And the
brief treatment of ideal copy in 1975, which
serves
its purpose in that context (but which does not explore the problems
pres-
ent in Bowers's handling of the concept), was
greatly expanded five years
later in my essay on that subject (see above). In the
end, despite various
complications that may arise in certain instances, it is
important to keep in
mind the essential simplicity and distinctness of the concepts
underlying
the four basic terms of classification.
TOLERANCES
In "Tolerances in Bibliographical Description" (The Library, 5th
ser.,
23 [1968], 1–12; reprinted in Readings in
Descriptive Bibliography, ed. John
Bush Jones
[1974], pp. 42–56), I attempted to provide a rationale for
thinking
about the degree of accuracy and the quantity of detail appro-
priate for
descriptive bibliographies. These two basic matters required
discussion because not
many bibliographers had given them systematic
thought, and bibliographers still need
to be reminded of their importance.
The number of details covered in a given
bibliography can obviously be
seen by examining the bibliography, whether or not the
bibliographer
has thought coherently about the relative proportions of detail
devoted to
each described feature. (The question of "degressive"
bibliography—that
is, the practice of reducing the quantity of detail for certain
categories of
material—which is mentioned in note 1, is discussed more fully in
my
1984 essay "The Arrangement of Descriptive Bibliographies" [see
"Ar-
rangement" below].) In contrast, the degree of accuracy in
measurements
cannot be known unless it is indicated in an introduction. Including
some
statement like "measurements are made to the nearest sixteenth of an
since I wrote this piece, very few bibliographers have regarded such a
statement as a necessity. Among those few are David L. Vander Meulen,
in his bibliography of Pope's Dunciad (1981 dissertation); David Hunter, in
Opera and Song Books Published in England 1703–1726 (1997); and Roger E.
Stoddard in A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American
Verse Printed from 1610 through 1820 (2012). But in most bibliographies, one
still looks in vain for an indication of tolerances.
A topic that naturally came up in my essay was what system of mea-
surement to use,
and I stated that the bibliographer who employs the
metric system would be "clearly
on the side of the future." In the nearly
half-century that has elapsed since then,
the United States government
seems to have lost whatever interest it once had in
joining most of the rest
of the world in officially adopting the metric system for
general purposes.
(The story has been told in John Bemelmans
Marciano's
2014 book, What-
ever Happened
to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet.) So
one reason
for bibliographers to use it has apparently vanished (though a
candidate
for the 2016 American presidential election brought the
matter up). In
any case, there is no question about the metric system's greater
logic, and
most people, I believe, find it more convenient to work with. If one
wishes,
or needs, to go beyond the nearest millimeter, it is easy for the eye to
de-
tect quarters or thirds of millimeters. My suggestion in this essay of
using
thirds of millimeters for measuring type faces was endorsed by Vander
Meulen in his Dunciad bibliography (1981 dissertation). A simple
solution
to the quandary of what system to use would be for bibliographers
to
report figures in both systems (to accommodate users all over the
world),
placing one figure in parentheses following the other one. If one
works
in the metric system, one can simply divide the number of millimeters
by
25.4 (or the number of centimeters by 2.54) to obtain the figure in
inches;
or if one works in inches, one can multiply by 25.4 (for millimeters) or
2.54 (for centimeters).
Perhaps this is the place to say that bibliographical description does
not require
the use of elaborate equipment
mainly just a ruler, a mag-
nifying glass, and a
micrometer), as Vander Meulen has noted in several
places,
such as "The Low-Tech Analysis of Early Paper" (Literary
Research,
13 [1988], 89–94). In his Engelhard lecture, Where Angels Fear to Tread:
Descriptive
Bibliography and Alexander Pope, published the same
year (and
printed in a new edition in 2014), he summed the matter up
this way:
Though modern devices such as the cyclotron have added exciting new
possibilities
to analysis, I, like most bibliographers, had no access to such aids.
My approach was
distinctly low-tech, but with tools that not enough bibliographers
have learned to
use well: a clear plastic ruler; a magnifying glass, with which I
got a free dictionary;
glass; a loupe with a printed scale for measuring type size; a small flashlight; and a
micrometer for recording paper thickness.
One might also mention outside calipers, for measuring paper thick-
ness or bulk at
the center, and the Arthur Seibert Emoskop, for greater
magnification. Other useful
equipment, such as the NoUVIR Inner-Page
Transilluminator or the Howard Eaton Pocket
Viewlight (for examining
paper; see "Paper" below) and collators (for comparing text
and other
features of two copies of an edition), can be expensive and not easily
por-
table and should be supplied in special-collections reading rooms.
Two
post-1968 (but now somewhat outdated) discussions are Warner Barnes,
"Optical and Mechanical Instruments for the
Study of Rare Books and
Manuscripts," Direction Line, 10
(Winter 1980), 21; and Paul S. Koda,
"Sci-
entific Equipment for the Examination of Rare Books, Manuscripts,
and
Documents," Library Trends, 36 (1987–88),
39–51. See "Paper" below for
a few comments on Ian
Christie-Miller's equipment for examining paper
(and hidden text); and for
a few further points about micrometers, see
my 1971 essay on paper
(cited under "Paper" below), in note 70 and the
surrounding text. For a fuller
listing of related articles, see my Introduction
to Bibliography (2002 revision), section 9K, pp.
339–343.
In my 1968 essay I briefly discussed title-page transcription, type
mea-
surement and identification, and color specification to illustrate the
idea
of levels, and I referred to the description of paper and of
publishers'
cloth. Two of these topics (type and color) I had previously treated
at
greater length in separate essays, and the others I took up in later
essays,
all of which are cited below. A system of alternative levels, within
which
one can select an appropriate degree of accuracy and quantity of
detail,
is important for helping one to maintain equable proportions
throughout
all the parts of a description—which in turn reflects an understanding
of
a description as a piece of historical writing.
TRANSCRIPTION
The first part of my "Title-Page Transcription and Signature Colla-
tion
Reconsidered" (Studies in Bibliography, 38 [1985],
45–81) explained
why title-page transcriptions are not superseded by photographic
repro-
ductions and indeed why quasi-facsimile transcription is a form of
quoting
that is appropriate for dealing with other parts of books besides title
pages,
whether or not they also happen to be reproduced. Quasi-facsimile
tran-
scription differs only slightly in any case from ordinary quoting
(primarily
by noting line-ends), and it can helpfully be employed, for example,
in
quoting copyright notices, printers' imprints, and section- or head-titles
not only gives more information than ordinary quoting about the physical
presentation of the text but also can promote the discovery of variants by
providing more text for comparison. Bowers's treatment of the contents
paragraph—which recognizes alternative approaches that produce more
compressed listings, not always involving quotation at all—is in line with
my general view that different levels of detail are appropriate on differ-
ent occasions (see "Tolerances" above). Nevertheless, my 1985 comments
show why quasi-facsimile quoting is strongly to be preferred.
The point about the complementary relationship between transcrip-
tions and
photographs applies of course to any form of reproduction, and
therefore it can now
be extended to digital images (regardless of their
quality or the fact that they can
easily be magnified). My 1985 piece al-
luded briefly to the
limitations of all reproductions, and four years later
I published a detailed
examination of this matter in "Reproductions and
Scholarship" (Studies in Bibliography, 52 [1989], 25–54).
B. J. McMullin, in his 1999 review of the Todd-Bowden Scott bibli-
ography (Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 23:
78–106), made a useful suggestion (pp.
85–86) regarding the printing
of quasi-facsimile transcriptions of title pages: that
they not be set with
justified right margins, so that no line-end hyphens would
intrude into
the transcription. Indeed, one could extend it further—to any
quota-
tion, whether in quasi-facsimile or not. (To say this is to raise the
whole
question of line-end hyphens, for the point applies to the
bibliographer's
own prose as well as quotations from the books being described. In
many
scholarly editions, there is a list of those line-end hyphens in the
edited
text that should be retained in quotations; but it is not realistic to
expect
that this practice might ever be extended to all books, though it
would
be logical to do so.)
One other refinement in quasi-facsimile transcriptions should be re-
ported here,
since my reference to it in my 1985 essay could well be over-
looked
(at the end of note 26): David L. Vander Meulen's practice, in
his
Dunciad bibliography (1981 dissertation),
of citing the type-face measure-
ments of the type faces used on each title page.
Measuring to the nearest
third of a millimeter, he reports full height (with
ascenders and descend-
ers), capital height, and x-height, placing whichever
measurements apply
to a given line in brackets at the end of the line. When more
than one
apply, they are given in the above order, without further labeling;
and
when the same measurements apply to more than one consecutive line,
the
report comes at the end of those lines. This approach can obviously
be extended to
any other instances of quasi-facsimile transcription that
involve typographic layout
not covered in the paragraph on typography
(where many recurrent features, such as
the type faces used in the body
described). Anything that increases the visual information conveyed by
quasi-facsimile transcription is to be embraced.
COLLATION
In the second part of my 1985 essay on transcription and collation
(see
above), I pointed out the importance of a record of gatherings
(whether
signed or not) for books of all periods, since the physical structure of
a
book is the most fundamental aspect of its description. I have frequently
used
the term "signature collation" only because it is a conventional one,
even though
what the collation formula deals with is gatherings, not sig-
natures, as I said in
note 63. (A true signature collation would be a com-
plete register of signing—a
fuller one than the kind that has typically
followed the formula in the past.) The
synecdochic use of "signature" to
mean "gathering" is common among printers but is
not (and should not
be) among bibliographers, despite their tolerance of this
phrase. Clearly
a book without printed signatures still has a structure, and a
formula
representing its structure can still be constructed by assigning
consecutive
numbers to the gatherings. Sometimes, indeed, there are printed
signa-
tures that are not related to the actual gatherings; and if there are
no
other printed signatures that do relate to them, the formula would again
have
to be made from assigned numbers. (There are also instances where
more than one set
of printed signatures are present, and if one of them
corresponds to the actual
gatherings, it would of course be used.) A note
should then be appended referring to
the irrelevant printed signatures
(irrelevant for this purpose). These points
probably go without saying
(and I did not mention them in 1985), but
they may be worth noting ex-
plicitly since some attention has recently been given
to the phenomenon
of unused signatures by B.J. McMullin,
in "Gatherings and Signatures in
Conflict" (Script &
Print, 39 [2015], 241–247)—though McMullin
is not
here concerned with the collation formula. (For the bibliographical
uses
of these signatures, see under "Typesetting and Presswork" below.)
Also in the 1985 essay I made a suggestion to correct the only
seri-
ous flaw in Bowers's thorough treatment of the
collation formulary: his
handling of insertions, where he complicated matters
unnecessarily by
attempting to report the signing of insertions along with their
placement.
My suggestion was simply to assign the number "1" to any inserted
leaf
and to number consecutively the inserted multiple leaves at any given
point
(using the conventional comma to indicate disjunct leaves and pe-
riod for conjugate
leaves). (The signing of inserted leaves would then be
noted as part of the regular
statement of signing.) This approach has been
well received, as is indicated, for
example, by B. J. McMullin's approval
58. As a way of testing the system, he asked how one would note "an in-
sertion consisting of an odd number of leaves where the one disjunct leaf
is found in the middle." My answer, eight years later in the same journal
(p. 108), was "1.5, 2.4, 3."
Another matter relating to insertions: in note 52, I stated that an
insertion of
letterpress text between gatherings should be treated as an
independent element and
not be associated with the preceding or fol-
lowing gathering; but I added (based on
Bowers), "except when the link
is definitely
established, as with the same signature." I think it would be
better to say that a
signature is normally the only acceptable link, since
other links would be likely to
involve excessive reliance on intellectual
content, and the formula is not primarily
concerned with content but with
structure. This is not to say that content and
structure are unrelated, for
often one does learn something about the content from
the structure (see
below); and the content may be a help in deciding what belongs in
the
formula (see the next paragraph) and may even sometimes be the only
way (in
books not published in bindings) of determining the correct order
of the gatherings.
But the job of the collation formula is to record the
structure of the "sheets,"
which are usually defined for this purpose as
the folded letterpress gatherings plus
any insertions (normally letterpress)
that contain part of the continuous text. Thus
non-letterpress insertions,
which can be structurally identical to letterpress
insertions, are not nor-
mally included in the collation formula but instead are
recorded in a
separate line (see "Non-Letterpress Material" below). By separating
the
letterpress sheets from engraved (or lithographed) insertions, the
bibliog-
rapher is further clarifying a book's structure.
Although distinguishing letterpress from non-letterpress is normally
clear-cut,
there are situations that call for the bibliographer's judgment
in deciding which
insertions belong in the basic formula. Because I did
not comment on this matter in
1985, and because Bowers's discussion of
it
(Principles, pp. 287–289) is unclear, I shall say a word about
it here. To
begin with, there can be insertions that contain both letterpress and
non-
letterpress, and in these cases one could take the nature of the
letterpress
into account. If it is a caption for, or commentary on, the
non-letterpress
part, one could treat the insertion like any other non-letterpress
insertion
and list it separately from the formula. But if the insertion includes
some
letterpress text that connects with the adjacent text on the integral
leaves,
it could appropriately be treated as an element in the formula. (It
would
be no different from an integral leaf that contains both letterpress and
an
engraving, in instances where a sheet of letterpress was subsequently
run
through a rolling press.) Similarly, in the case of a wholly letterpress
inser-
tion that was clearly a separate production (and possibly of a different for-
the formula would not be in line with the function of the formula, despite
the fact that it is letterpress. The presence of pagination on any insertion
is not enough to settle the matter, even though the resulting pagination
record would sometimes show a gap that is in fact filled by information
in the collation line for insertions. This approach seems sensible, but a
fixed rule would probably be less satisfactory in some instances than reli-
ance on the bibliographer's judgment. What is finally most important is
that the bibliographer make absolutely clear, in an appended comment,
what the situation is.
The question whether there can ever be odd superscript numbers in
a collation
formula continues to come up, even though it is hard to see
how the answer can be
anything but an unequivocal "no" (see footnote 38
in my essay). If the function of
the formula is to show book structure (as
it unquestionably is), then an odd
superscript does not serve the purpose
because it does not show the placement of the
disjunct leaf. Yet even so
careful a bibliographer as J. D.
Fleeman sometimes uses odd superscripts
in his great
Samuel Johnson
(2000). The best case for odd
superscripts in
certain situations has been made by B. J.
McMullin in "The Description
of Volumes Gathered in Nines" (Script & Print, 37 [2013], 32–39).
The
situation arises mainly when an eighteenmo forme is imposed for gather-
ing
in nines rather than sixes—an arrangement that does occur in rare
instances,
especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
McMullin argues that an insertion planned as a regular part of a
volume
should be treated differently from leaves inserted occasionally to
rectify
a problem (which he calls "genuine" insertions); he also believes,
since
the inserted fifth leaf is often signed with a "5", that it would be
unwise
to treat the leaf following it as the regular fifth leaf in the gathering
sim-
ply because it is conjugate with the fourth leaf. His
recommendation,
therefore, leads to a formula on this model: "A-F9 ($5 inserted after $4)."
I do not, however, find this argument persuasive.
The fact that the fifth
leaf of every gathering is a singleton (and was planned to
be so) does not
make the structural situation any different from the one that exists
for all
insertions; and it would seem to be productive of confusion to say that
a
planned insertion after $4 should be called $5 (with the following leaf
$6),
whereas an unplanned one should be called $4+1 (with the following
leaf
$5). I believe the best approach for an eighteenmo in nines is to say "A-F8
($4+1)." (The actual signing would of course be recorded
separately.) In
this way the clarity and uniformity of the formulary does not have
to be
diluted, without any compensating advantages.
An interesting problem for the construction of a formula arises in con-
nection
with Renaissance music partbooks, all of which for a given title
were sold together
as a unit, though each had its own title page and may
thoroughly investigated this matter in "Bibliographical Aspects of Ital-
ian Printed Music of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" (Studies
in Bibliography, 56 [2003–04], 195–242). His sensible solution is to use
a bracketed letter and colon preceding the sequence of signatures for
each part, thus producing a single formula for the whole series of parts
but allowing the individual parts to be easily identified. A formula might
begin "[C:] A-D4; [T:] E- H4 …" (with "C" and "T" referring to "canto"
and "tenor"). When the parts are signed with separate alphabets, the
order of parts would remain the same (for it was a conventional order):
"[C:] A-D4; [T:] A-D4 …" (the bracketed letters allowing one to distin-
guish the identically signed gatherings without the use of prefixed index
figures, which would not be unambiguous since the order of the parts is
not self-evident). Boorman's article gives 92 examples of his system in use,
and he employed it in his bibliography of Ottaviano Petrucci (2006). His
work illustrates how the standard formulary can be imaginatively adapted
to different situations.
Another example is Anthony S. Drennan's suggestion for
handling
volvelles (woodcut diagrams with attached circular paper disks that
the
reader can rotate), in "The Bibliographical Description of
Astronomical
Volvelles and Other Moveable Diagrams" (The
Library, 7th ser., 13 [2012],
316–339). The movable parts of a
volvelle were printed on a separate
leaf from the base diagram and were meant to be
cut out and attached
to the page where the base diagram was located. Uncut leaves
printed
with volvelle parts rarely survive, and generally they have no obvious
lo-
cation in a collation formula; but Drennan feels that
the formula should
somehow note the fact that such leaves were once present (even
though
they were not intended to be part of the structure of the book after it
was
bound). One might see an analogy between an uncut volvelle leaf and
a
cancellans, since both were meant to be removed and relocated; the im-
portant
difference, of course, is that the cancellans replaced another leaf,
whereas the
cut-out volvelle parts were attached to another leaf. Dren-
nan understands that it would be unwise to try to account for the
added
pieces in the formula, and he properly recommends listing the
completed
volvelles separately. (For this purpose he has created an elaborate set
of
symbols for constructing a "collation formula" for each volvelle, showing
its
completed structure, and he appends additional commentary in words;
some
bibliographers may choose to avoid the formula and place the whole
account in
words.) The question is how to indicate in the letterpress col-
lation formula that
one or more uncut volvelle leaves originally accom-
panied the unbound sheets. Drennan chooses the Greek letter lambda,
which he places at
the end of the collation, along with an indication of the
zero. (The choice of lambda is unfortunate, since Allan Stevenson used
it to signify a letterpress leaf that was meant to be inserted to accompany
an engraved plate.) In cases where leaves with uncut volvelle parts were
printed as part of the main block of letterpress sheets, the use of lambda
(or some symbol) to explain certain cancellations may be helpful, as in "B4
(− B4 = λ1)." But simply attaching "λ1" or "λ0" to the end of a formula
may not serve much purpose, since the record of completed volvelles (and
their locations) makes clear that the book is one that incorporates cut-out
pieces. Still, it takes up little space and is worth considering.
A less successful way of dealing with volvelles is Mark
Bland's proposal
(in A Guide to Early Printed Books and
Manuscripts, 2010) to use the Greek
letter rho to indicate paper
that is attached to a printed page and thus
to create such an impossible expression
as "P4r + ρ1" (p. 64). He also
misuses chi to refer to inserted
engravings, even though the practice of
treating engraved and letterpress material
separately is by now well estab-
lished (see above). A similarly unwise suggestion
(again involving attach-
ments) is Patrick Spedding's idea
that a full-page paste-over cancel might
be recorded in the formula with reference
only to one side of the leaf, as
in "(A1v + χ1v)", as if a leaf can be split between its recto and verso sides.
But the
size of a paste-over cancel is irrelevant: any patches (regardless
of their size)
affixed to leaves (or meant to be) should not be included in
the collation formula
but rather noted in a separate explanation. (See
Spedding's "Cancelled Errata in
John
Buncle, Junior, Gentleman," Script
&
Print, 38 [2014] 115–121; and the responses to it by Carlo Dumontet, B. J.
McMullin,
John Lancaster, Richard Noble, and
me on pp. 249–252.)
An idiosyncratic collation system used by Robert Dawson in The French
Booktrade and the
"Permission Simple" of 1777
(1992) is effectively
dismissed
by B. J. McMullin in "Dawson Described" (Script & Print, 30 [2006],
174–180). Another
proposal that is unhelpful—in this case because what
it advocates is already
standard—is in R. B. Williams's "Victorian Book
Printing:
A Rare Supernumerary Signature" (Journal of the Printing
His-
torical Society, n.s., 18/19 [Summer/Winter 2012], 75–79).
Williams notes
that Charles
Williams's
Silver-Shell (1856) includes the signature "J"
and
then recommends interrupting the formula to indicate the presence of
"J"
("B-I8 J8 K-L8"),
since the normal practice in formulas is to assume the ab-
sence of "J","U" (or
"V"), and "W". This practice is obviously necessary
and already well accepted. A
brief discussion of some formulaic details
occurs in Anthony
James West's "A Model for Describing Shakespeare
First Folios, with Descriptions of Selected Copies" (The Library, 6th ser.,
21 [1999], 1–49), where he
reviews a few minor differences among the
usages of Greg,
Hinman, and Blayney (without saying what Bowers's
but his preference for a colon rather than a period to signify conjugacy
seems an unnecessary departure from standard practice.
Although the word "collation" is generally used by descriptive bib-
liographers to
refer to a report of the structure of the gatherings, there
are other kinds of
collation (in the general sense of a verification of the
order and completeness of a
series of items) that enter into a description.
For example, it is conventional,
following the formulaic record of the
gatherings, to state the number of leaves
represented by the formula and
then to provide a record (a collation) of pagination,
showing unambigu-
ously which pages have page numbers and what style of number is
used
(as in "pp. [i–iv] v [vi], [1] 2–4 [2] 5–11 [12]," where
the bracketed
italicized "2" indicates how many unnumbered pages whose
pagination
cannot be inferred are present at this point). For books that have
inserted
non-letterpress material, a separate collation of those insertions
comes
next (perhaps in its own "Collation" paragraph). The next paragraph
in
most descriptions is one headed "Contents," which indicates (preferably
in
quasi-facsimile quotation: see above) the intellectual content printed on
every page
(or group of pages), using signature notation and/or pagina-
tion for reference.
Because of the frequent irregularity of pagination in
pre-nineteenth-century books,
one should follow Bowers's advice to use
signature
notation instead of pagination for this period. An added benefit
(pointed out by
Bowers) is that studying the relationship between
produc-
tion and content is thereby facilitated. (A good recent example of
such
a study is John Barnard's "Dryden's
Virgil (1697): Gatherings and Poli-
tics," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 109 [2015], 131–139.)
As a result of this
advantage offered by signature references, I would
recommend using them for books of
all periods, perhaps accompanied
by page numbers. Thus the "Collation" and
"Contents" paragraphs are
complementary, the first collating physical makeup and the
second col-
lating intellectual content; when used together they help to indicate
how
manufacturing and meaning interact.
Because I commented briefly in my 1985 essay on the relation of
the
gathering-collation formula to format (since both relate to structure, and
a
format designation often precedes the formula), I should mention that
later (in
2000) I discussed the concept of format at length (see
"Format"
below). The most important post-1985 discussion of the
collation for-
mula itself is in the appendix to Paul Needham's
Hanes lecture, The Brad-
shaw Method
(1988), pp. 24–33. Although he does not propose alterations-
to the
presently accepted style of the collation formula, his account of
its history and
the principles behind it will enrich any bibliographer's
understanding.
FORMAT
"The Concept of Format" was published in Studies in
Bibliography, 53
(2000), 67–115. In it I offered a new definition
of format based on the
number of page-units selected to fill
each side of a piece of paper or
parchment of a given size; this formulation makes
the concept applicable
to manuscripts as well as printed matter of all kinds and
periods. A few
years after my essay appeared, B. J.
McMullin provided what he called
"an extended, if somewhat discursive,
footnote" to it: "Some Notes on
Paper and Format," Bibliographical
Society of Australia and New
Zealand
Bulletin, 28.4 (2004), 92–104. He summarizes my
arguments and gives
several illustrative examples, and I appreciate his careful
consideration
of the points I made. I especially like his observation that, in cases
where
the format is uncertain and requires explication, "we should not
agonise
over ascribing a particular notation to the volume." His discussion
does
not require any modification in my essay, but readers will benefit
from
following his line of thinking about specific books.
I do wish, however, to comment on his final paragraph. Since there
are cases where
the designation of format varies according to the bibliog-
rapher's way of
approaching it (as when double-size paper is cut before
printing), he asks, "If
format is an intrinsic characteristic should it ever
be subject to variant
designations, dependent on how it is defined?" He
raises here a basic philosophical
point, which relates to all description. If
we grant that objects do have intrinsic
qualities (as opposed to what we
project onto them), those qualities can only be
apprehended and reported
as filtered through our individual perceptions and
judgments. Every part
of a bibliographical description necessarily involves analysis
and interpre-
tation, and the format statement is no exception. Nor is there reason
to
believe that, by devising a comprehensive concept of format, we might
be
"trying to force discrepant items into a uniform mould." The fact that we
may
not be able (or at least so far have not been able) to determine with
certainty the
format of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century books
does not mean that the
concept has failed. Indeed, a single concept is
necessary to make clear how
situations differ.
The difficulty of determining the format of books printed on unwater-
marked wove
paper (which became increasingly common during the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth
century) has long been recognized, and recent
research on the transitional period
before and after 1800 provides the
major analytical techniques to be
added to those mentioned in my es-
say. McMullin, in
another article ("Watermarks and the Determination
of Format in British Paper,
1794 –circa
1830," Studies in Bibliography,
56
[2003–04], 295–315), shows that format can be established for
hand-
a watermark as a result of a legal requirement. A refund of part of the
paper tax for exported books was available if a date-watermark were eas-
ily visible; thus moulds were constructed with such marks along edges,
usually one or both of the longer edges, sometimes in opposite corners
and sometimes in all four corners, and often with the maker's name as
well. McMullin provides diagrams showing the positions of these marks
in various formats, and by reference to these diagrams (which form a use-
ful supplement to Gaskell's diagrams in A New Introduction to Bibliography
[1972, 1974]) one can determine the format of books printed on such
paper. (A further diagram, showing edgemarks along the shorter sides of
the mould, is given by Carlo Dumontet in "An Unrecorded Position of
Watermarks in Early Nineteenth-Century English Paper," Script & Print,
35 [2011], 111–113.) That the dates in these watermarks must be used with
caution was made clear in an earlier article by Hilton Kelliher ("Early
Dated Watermarks in English Paper: A Cautionary Note," in Essays in Pa-
per Analysis, ed. Stephen Spector [1987], pp. 61–68): some papermakers
did not change the "1794" watermark in later years, and it could happen
that a mark would be postdated.
McMullin also discusses another development of the same
period: the
growing use of machine-made paper. Although he indicates some
ways
of distinguishing machine-made from handmade paper, along with
the
possibility in some instances of identifying format by examining the
pat-
tern of original edges in uncut copies, he notes that the cutting of
paper
in edition-binding eliminates that possibility for most books beginning
in
the 1820s. One clue that remains, however, is the seam marks (that
is, the
imprint left in the paper by the seams joining the ends of the
wire-mesh
conveyor belt that replaced the hand-held mould); and Catherine M. Ro-
driguez has explained how the pattern of occurrences of
these seam marks
can sometimes enable one to learn the format (see "The Use of Web
Seam
Evidence to Determine Format," Bibliographical Society of
Australia and New
Zealand
Bulletin, 28.3 [2004], 122–124).
A few years later, McMullin pursued this point in an
impressive article
that should be read by every bibliographer dealing with
pre-1850 books
printed on machine-made paper ("Machine-Made Paper,
Seam Marks,
and Bibliographical Analysis," The Library, 7th
ser., 9 [2008], 62–88). He
gives a clear description of the process of
producing paper by machine
and the resulting characteristics of the paper (not only
seam marks and
evidence of wire-belt repairs but also a thinning along the original
edges
as a result of slippage of the pulp under the deckle straps). Seam
marks
may be either vertical or horizontal in the leaves of books, or
approxi-
mately so—but sometimes at angles that cause them not to run through
grams). The pattern of occurrences of seam marks in a book, when stud-
ied with the help of these diagrams and the standard imposition diagrams,
can occasionally enable the bibliographer to determine the format—but,
as McMullin cautions, additional evidence is usually needed to make a
conclusive determination (except when a seam mark spans two or three
gatherings). One must remember, in dealing with seam marks, that they
may be present in some, but not all, copies of a gathering and thus that
their pattern of occurrence will vary among the copies of an edition.
(McMullin also discusses a few other analytical uses of seam marks: see
below, under "Paper.")
Another difficulty related to format in books from the later eigh-
teenth and the
early nineteenth century is posed by the increasing use
of eighteenmo (see above,
under "Collation"), which raises the question
of how to tell whether a book gathered
in sixes is duodecimo or eigh-
teenmo. Pamela E. Pryde has
answered it by summarizing three imposi-
tion schemes for duodecimo in sixes and two
for eighteenmo in sixes,
established by drawing information from eight printers'
manuals (plus
Gaskell); and she adds two more for eighteenmo in sixes, with
diagrams
("Determining the Format of British Books of the
Second-Half of the
Eighteenth Century Gathered in Sixes," Bibliographical Society of
Australia
and New Zealand
Bulletin, 23 [1999], 67–77 [cited for a different purpose
in
note 42 of my essay]).
All the imposition diagrams mentioned above supplement those re-
ferred to in note
82 of my essay. The relevant lists in my Introduction
to
Bibliography (2002 revision) are sections 9D6, 9F3–4, 9G6, and
9H5
(pp. 267–268, 291–293, 309–310, and 315, respectively). My Bibliographi-
cal Analysis (2009) briefly summarizes the
primary means for determin-
ing format on pp. 38–39, 47, 53, 57–58, and 100–101
(note 12). Since
format is a basic fact about every book, bibliographers should
employ
all available techniques for trying to discover it; thus the progress that
is
being made in learning how to use the evidence in machine-made paper
is
particularly welcome.
PAPER
My essay on "The Bibliographical Description of Paper" was pub-
lished in Studies in Bibliography, 24 (1971), 27–67, and
reprinted in Readings
in Descriptive Bibliography, ed. John Bush Jones (1974), pp. 71–115, and in
my Selected Studies in Bibliography (1979), pp. 203–243.
I was pleased that
my approach was approved by the great scholar of paper, Allan Steven-
son, whom I had consulted shortly before the end
of his life, when we were
ars have made the most significant advances in the study of paper from a
bibliographical point of view: David L. Vander Meulen, Paul Needham,
B. J. McMullin, and John Bidwell.
Of their publications, the one with the widest applicability to biblio-
graphical
description, and a fundamental essay for the analysis of paper, is
Vander Meulen's "The Identification of Paper without Watermarks:
The
Example of Pope's Dunciad," in Studies
in Bibliography, 37 (1984), 58–81.
(Three years earlier he had
discussed and illustrated the various tech-
niques taken up here in his pioneering
1981 dissertation, a descriptive
bibliography of Pope's Dunciad; see pp. 47–58 for his general account
and pp. 72–77
for one outstanding example.) Most previous bibliographi-
cal work on paper
(including mine) had emphasized watermarks and the
chainline spaces close to them
and had either stated or implied that all
the other chain spaces were equal to each
other. But Vander Meulen
points out that the spaces
between chains in handmade paper vary within
a given mould (and from one mould to
another) and that the sequence
of the distances between chainlines can identify the
sheets produced in
a single mould. Although for various reasons a given space may
not be
consistent in all those sheets, the variation is slight and the overall
pattern
is not affected.
In describing books printed on handmade paper, therefore, it is not
sufficient
simply to say, for example, "chainlines 23 mm. apart." Instead,
the whole sequence
across a sheet ought to be recorded, and Vander
Meulen has
supplied a system that bibliographers should adopt. He uses
vertical lines to
separate chain-space measurements (extending the prac-
tice Stevenson follows near watermarks), with three further
conventions:
parentheses indicate an estimated or incomplete measurement (at a
gut-
ter or when a sheet was cut between chainlines); ellipsis dots signify
an
incomplete sequence (for a partial sheet); and the percentage sign stands
for
a deckle edge (in parentheses when the deckle is inferred). A record
(with
measurements to the nearest half-millimeter, taken at the middle of
the sheet) might
look like this:
(9) | 19 | 29.5 | 27.5 | 31 | (29) | 29.5 | 30 | 28.5 | 20 | (13)
(One desirable modification suggested by John A. Lane is to
use a verti-
cal wavy line instead of the percentage sign: see "Arthur Nicholls and
His Greek Type for the King's Printing House," The Library, 6th ser., 13
[1991], 297–322 [p.
318].) When there is a watermark, its position in
the sequence should be shown,
using Stevenson's system (explained in
my essay); and the
sequence should reflect the sheet as viewed from the
mould side with the watermark
right side up (the standard orientation for
bibliographical use: see below for Needham's use of it). Obviously one
to work with the side showing the obverse of the image. When a water-
mark is not present, the orientation is not significant, since the sequence
serves its purpose whether read forward or backward. The great value of
giving all the chain-space measurements is that all handmade papers can
thereby be identified, even when they have no watermarks or when only
an unwatermarked part-sheet is present (as in some half-sheet gather-
ings). In the first of the two sample descriptions near the end of my es-
say, the identification of the watermark and countermark should include
only the height and width measurements and should be followed (after a
semicolon) by the chain-space sequence, incorporating a notation of the
water mark position.
The most extensive use, thus far, of Vander Meulen's
observations
has been made by David L. Gants and R. Carter Hailey. Although their
methods of collecting data
differ (Gants's is high-tech and Hailey's low-
tech), they both make chain-space
sequences the center of their paper
descriptions—accompanied by indications of
wireline density (see below)
and measurements of watermarks, with digital
photographs (Gants) or
freehand drawings (Hailey) of the watermarks. Both follow
Vander Meu-
len's plan of using vertical lines to
separate chain-space measurements,
but each makes some modifications. Gants, when
explaining his approach
to building a database, says that he records the sequence
for every sheet
(not a representative one for any sheet from the same mould) and
that he
takes his measurements from either side of the watermark (not the
center
of the sheet), as a location accessible in a variety of formats. See
"Identi-
fying and Tracking Paper Stocks in Early Modern London," in Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of
America
, 94 (2000), 531–540. However, in
his
online "A Digital Catalogue of Watermarks and Type Ornaments Used
by William Stansby [1614–1618]" (2005), he
does not report the sequence
for each sheet individually, and he gives two
chain-space sequences per
mould, from the "top" and "bottom" of the sheet (that is,
near the two
longer edges, when the watermark is viewed in upright position). He
also
uses different symbols from Vander Meulen's:
parentheses for chainlines
that intersect watermarks, braces for deckle edges,
double slashes for gaps
in measurement, and square brackets for trimmed edges.
Hailey makes
fewer alterations to Vander Meulen's form of
report, the chief one being
to print in bold-face italics the figures for the
space(s) where a watermark
is located; and each of his chain-space measurements is
an average of the
measurements from several sheets, the result being a "composite
chain-
space model." (In using this approach, one must be careful not to
obscure
differences between paper stocks.) His method is set forth in detail
on
pp. 156–165 of "The Shakespearian Pavier Quartos Revisited" (Stud-
ies in Bibliography, 57 [for 2005–06; 2008],
151–195); he had previously
tique Laid Paper: A Method" (in Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism,
and Book History, ed. Ann R. Hawkins [2006], pp. 149–154) and in "The
Dating Game: New Evidence for the Dates of Q4 Romeo and Juliet and
Q4 Hamlet" ( Shakespeare Quarterly, 58 [2007], 367–387 [see pp. 372–373,
376–377]).
Vander Meulen's
1984 essay also discusses several
other ways to iden-
tify paper, none of which is covered in my essay. Their
inclusion in a
bibliographical description, however, is not necessarily required.
The one
most likely to qualify is a measurement of wireline density—expressed
(as
Vander Meulen suggests) in the number of wires per
three centimeters.
(A recent use of the three-centimeter measurement, reported to me
by
Vander Meulen, occurs in Agnieszka
Helman-Ważny's
The Archaeology of
Tibetan Books [2014], as on
pp. 35, 177, and 231–248.) Since paper can
be identified by the chainline sequences
alone, the addition of wireline
density may not be of further help, though it can
sometimes be useful
in making tentative discriminations among paper varieties and in
deter-
mining which varieties come from the same pair of moulds. In any case,
a
thorough description is of course not limited to details necessary
for
identification, and the inclusion of wireline density obviously adds to
the
completeness of the description. Another identifying characteristic is
the
precise location of any tranchefiles (a tranchefile is an extra chain
that
sometimes occurs, at one or both ends of the mould, between the
last
regular chain and the frame of the mould); but since these lines would
be
part of the records of chain-space sequences (and recognized by the
smaller
intervals they usually create), they do not normally need separate
attention.
Still another feature of laid paper is the "shadow" centered on many
chainlines,
caused by the supporting wooden ribs under the chains (ex-
cept for most
tranchefiles). Sometimes, apparently when chains are not
directly aligned over the
ribs (as they normally are), there is an effect of
double chainlines, one of which
in each pair is less distinct than the other.
Vander
Meulen does not include these secondary chainlines in his chain-
space
sequences, nor does he report the location of shadows in relation to
the secondary
chainlines. Although the presence of these features should
perhaps be mentioned in
general terms in a bibliographical description,
they do not usually call for
detailed reporting. A further article of Vander
Meulen's,
published four years after this major one, should be mentioned
here as a footnote to
it: "The Low-Tech Analysis of Early Paper" (Literary
Research, 13 [1988], 89–94), which conveniently sums up
the techniques
for analyzing paper and the literary and historical uses to which
such
analysis can be put.
Paul Needham has published an important series of essays on
the
history of paper and the analytical uses of paper evidence. Of these,
the
two that are perhaps most directly relevant to bibliographical descrip-
tion
are "The Paper Supply of the Gutenberg Bible" (Papers of the
Biblio-
graphical Society of America
, 79
[1985], 303–374) and "Allan H.
Stevenson
and the Bibliographical Uses of Paper" (Studies
in Bibliography, 47 [1994],
23—64). The former includes the
following example of a form for record-
ing a paper stock (p. 317), which is
repeated with further explanation and
commentary in the latter (pp. 32—33, and with
the addition of the "a"
and "b"):
Royal: Bull's Head
a. mR4 | 19 | 14 chains (ave. 42.1 mm) | 18 | (6+)
b. mL4 (3+) | 21 | 14 chains (ave. 42.3 mm) | 18 | (1+)
The heading shows the common name for the size of the sheet (Royal),
along with a
descriptive term for the type of watermark (Bull's Head),
without further
specification of the dimensions of either one. Needham
feels that precise leaf measurements of handmade paper are not
useful
even for an example with surviving deckle edges, given the variations
that
would exist between measurements taken at different points and the
dif-
ficulty of estimating how much is inaccessible in the fold. As long as
the
approximate nature of such measurements is clear, however, there is no
harm
in providing them as evidence for the extrapolation to the named
size. The "a" and
"b" lines in the description refer to the twin moulds of
the particular paper stock;
and "mR" and "mL" give the location of the
watermark as being in the right or left
half of each mould, with the at-
tached number indicating which chain-space it is in
(here, the fourth from
the nearest short edge). For "right" and "left" to be
meaningful, of course,
the paper must be consistently viewed from the same side and
with the
watermark image upright. Needham recommends
looking at the mould
side; and if in certain instances the felt side seems more
appropriate, the
designation "(f.s.)" can be added. When a watermark design has no
obvi-
ous top or bottom, the position of some arbitrary feature can sometimes
be
used and noted (though totally symmetrical abstract designs defeat the
system
altogether).
The remainder of each "a" and "b" line gives, at each end in paren-
theses, the
distance from the deckle edge to the tranchefile; then, moving
in from each end, the
number between the vertical rules is the measure-
ment from the tranchefile to the
nearest regular chain; and finally, in
the center, is the number of chainlines with
the average distance be-
tween them. (One possible ambiguity—whether or not the
stated num-ber of chains includes the two apparently represented by the second and
spaces" and not to "chains.") Needham acknowledges that this statement
of chainline numbers is "a very crude 'measurement,'" but he believes it
is usually sufficient for paper-stock identification when used in conjunc-
tion with the other details. He recognizes, however, that noting the size
of every chainline interval, as suggested by Vander Meulen (see above),
may sometimes be needed, especially in connection with unwatermarked
paper. The tabular form of Needham's presentation is obviously not es-
sential: his notation can be made to fit within the general scheme I sug-
gested at the end of my essay.
One notices that Needham's description does not include an
indi-
cation (using Stevenson's system or any other) of
the exact position of
a watermark in relation to the adjacent chainlines. The reason
is that
Needham feels the information conveyed by such
measurements is
"so inferior to that supplied by actual-size reproductions" that he
can-
not regard them as "a fundamental element of paperstock description"
(p.
34)—though he notes that they can indeed be helpful, as Vander
Meulen has shown. In any case, reproductions cannot always be
sup-
plied; and, even when they are, some bibliographers will feel that
they
should be supplemented by measurements. But it is true, of course,
that
reproductions will always provide details not covered by verbal
accounts.
Needham's essay on Stevenson includes other criticisms, but they are
subordinate to the
admiration expressed for Stevenson's overall
achieve-
ment. Reading Needham's assessment of Stevenson should be an impor-
tant part of any bibliographer's
preparation for thinking about paper.
Several other essays of his also make basic
contributions to this process:
"Res papirea: Sizes and Formats of the Late Medieval
Book," in Ration-
alisierung der Buchherstellung im Mittelalter
und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Pe-
ter Rück and
Martin Boghardt (1994), pp. 123–145; "Concepts
of Paper
Study," in Puzzles in Paper: Concepts in Historical
Watermarks, ed. Daniel
W. Mosser, Michael Saffle, and Ernest W. Sullivan
II (2000), pp. 1–36;
and his superb survey "The Paper of
English Incunabula," in Catalogue of
Books Printed in the XVth
Century Now in the British Library, ed. Lotte
Hel-
linga (2007), pp. 311–334.
B. J. McMullin's articles of 2003–04, 2004, and
2008 (cited above,
under "Format") are basic for the study of
handmade wove paper in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and
machine-made
paper in the first half of the nineteenth century. They provide
historical
background and explain some analytical techniques applicable to
those
papers. In addition to outlining clues regarding format (see
"Format"
above), he shows (in the 2008 paper) how seam marks in
machine-made
paper can be used for dating (paper with seam marks is probably
between
1810 and 1850) and for identifying cancels and
other irregularities in the
tern). An unanswered historical question that hampers some analysis is
whether the printer gathered and collated sheets before sending them to
the binder or whether, in the era of publishers' bindings, the binder took
on this job; if the latter, random combinations of part-sheets in finished
books might be more likely, thus rendering more doubtful the determina-
tion of the particular imposition used. The point most relevant to writing
a bibliographical description is his suggestion of two alternative plans for
recording seam marks (pp. 78–79):
seam marks horizontal: B1 2 7 8 F3 4 5 6 H3 4 5 6 M1 2 7 8
seam marks vertical: C5 8 G6 7 K6 7 N5 8 R1 4 U2 3 Z2 3
seam marks horizontal: $1 2 7 8 BM, $3 4 5 6 FH
seam marks vertical: $1 4 R, $2 3 UZ, $5 8 CN, $6 7 GK
As he points out, however, the pattern will not necessarily be the same in
every
copy of the edition; and if one therefore inserts library sigla (or copy
numbers) in
parentheses to identify individual copies, he feels that the first
system would
probably be clearer—though I believe that the preferable
one might vary in different
situations, since each has a different focus.
In any case, they are both usable;
and, though other schemes could be
devised (especially to give more information
about the exact positioning
of the seam marks), there would seem to be no reason in
most instances
to do so.
I do, however, think there is reason to question the point McMullin
makes next: that "one might well allow the record to stand
unqualified
[with copy sigla], to be understood as indicating that a seam mark of
a
particular orientation is to be found in the specified gathering in at
least
one copy from within the edition." One could, of course, adopt an
ab-
breviated form of paper description and omit the locations of seam
marks
entirely (saying simply "machine-made paper with seam marks"); but if
one
is going to specify a sample location, the copy (or copies) used to
obtain that
information should be specified. The situation is analogous to
the recording of
locations of other features that vary from copy to copy.
In the case of handmade
paper, for example, all the sheets of a book may
have the same watermark and
countermark, but those marks may not
appear on the same leaves in every copy,
depending on how the paper
was turned before printing and how the printing and
handling of half-
sheet gatherings were carried out; furthermore, the small
variations in the
papers coming from twin moulds (variation in watermark placement
and
in chainline and tranchefile spacing) may not be identically distributed
in
every copy. In all such cases, therefore, one ought to cite not only
signa-
ture locations but also the specific copies used—and normally to do so in
copies examined (see "Arrangement" below), since what is being recorded
is a feature of the edition as published, not a post-publication alteration.
A justifiable exception to this last recommendation, however, can be illus-
trated by Stanley Boorman's bibliography of Ottaviano Petrucci (2006),
where he (remarkably) records the locations of watermarks throughout
each copy examined (that is, not simply sample locations); this information
(along with his thorough notes on other variable features, such as in-house
corrections) is much more efficiently placed in the accounts of examined
copies, which thus form the largest element in his descriptions.
One other matter that McMullin has written about is the
paper-quality
mark—the symbol that may appear in the direction line on the first
page
of a gathering to identify the paper when two issues on different
papers
are produced. The presence of such marks should obviously be noted in
the
paragraph on paper in a description. An example of these marks is
illustrated by
McMullin in What Readers Should Ignore on
the Printed Page
(2014), p. 7; see also his "Paper-Quality Marks
and the Oxford Bible
Press, 1682–1717," The
Library, 6th ser., 6 (1984), 39–49, and "Cowper's
Complete Poetical Works, 1837
(Russell, 166)," Script & Print, 40
(2016),
45–54 (esp. pp. 51–53).
John Bidwell's contributions deal primarily with the history
of pa-
permaking and thus provide useful background for descriptive
bibliogra-
phers, even if they are not always relevant to the practice of
description.
(For an excellent overview, see especially his "The Study of Paper
as
Evidence, Artefact, and Commodity," in The Book
Encompassed, ed. Peter
Davison [1992],
pp. 69–82.) But descriptive bibliographers will be glad
to find in his extraordinary
American Paper Mills, 1690–1832: A Directory of
the
Paper Trade, with Notes on Products, Watermarks, Distribution Methods,
and
Manufacturing Techniques (2013) a list of watermark attributions, citing
each
watermark and naming the mill that used it (pp. lxx–lxxiii). They will
also
be happy to find in "The Size of the Sheet in America: Paper Moulds
Manufactured by N. & D. Sellers of Philadelphia"
(Proceedings of the Ameri-
can Antiquarian Society, 87
[1977], 299–342) a table headed "Some Names
for Anglo-American Paper
Sizes and Their Measurements." What makes
this table more useful than others of its
kind is that, for each of fifteen
named sizes, the dimensions reported at nine
specified times (from 1713
to 1952) are given.
Bidwell's principal exercise in actual description of paper
occurs in
his Fine Papers at the Oxford University Press
(1999), where (after an excel-
lent historical account of the
manufacture and sale of handmade paper)
he provides fascinating commentaries on the
forty specimens that are
included in the book. Besides identifying these papers, he
gives a concise
would have recorded in its ledgers (but recognizing that such descriptions
did not have to be self-sufficient because papermakers would have been
shown samples of what was desired). Each of his descriptions consists of
seven elements: weight (per ream of 480 sheets), texture (laid or wove),
dimensions, substance (grams per square meter), thickness (caliper mea-
surements in thousandths of an inch), color, and watermark. Here is an
example: "28–pound hand-made antique laid, 16¼ × 22½ ins: 106 gsm,
caliper .005 in., cream, watermarked near each of the four corners: W [flower]
M (felt side)" (p. 46). Clearly two of these features, weight and substance,
could not be reported from direct observation in descriptions of books
since they require loose sheets (though they might be provisionally noted
from external sources); but the other five are part of the standard I sug-
gested in 1971, though presented differently. Bidwell recognizes that the
thickness of a sheet of handmade paper is likely to vary from one part
of the sheet to another, and thus the significance of the thickness figures
he gives is not clear (a point made by David L. Vander Meulen in his
review of this book in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , 97
[2003], 589–595). In my 1971 essay I suggested that such figures should
be expressed either as a range or as an average; I would now add that,
in the latter case, the word "average" or the abbreviation "avg." should
be appended to emphasize the status of the figure. (An article that may
be regarded as a supplement to Bidwell, though published earlier, is John
Purcell's "The Availability of Hand-Made, Mould-Made and Fine Ma-
chine-Made Papers," Matrix, 3 [1983], 67–75, which includes a three-
page table giving specifications for twenty-nine papers that were available
at that time.)
One of Bidwell's services to descriptive bibliographers is to
have writ-
ten a thorough review of Peter F. Tschudin's
Grundzüge der Papiergeschichte
(2002) for Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
(98 [2004], 105–
109). Because Tschudin recommends describing paper and watermarks
in terms
of the International Standard for the Registration of Paper with
or
without Watermarks (first proposed by the International Association of
Pa-
per Historians [IPH] in 1992 and last revised in 2013
[text available on
the IPH website]), Bidwell had occasion
to assess that system—a task
that most bibliographers have not undertaken. The
system is designed to
produce machine-readable records, each of which has
potentially a hun-
dred fields, sometimes involving intricate coding. As an example,
Bidwell
notes that a watermark consisting of a crown
over CLK in script would
be reported as "R3/1—{b:(i:X"CLK")}"—and this is far from
being one
of the more complex possibilities. Although a large database
constructed
in this way could indeed be searched productively, the effort involved
in
comes to the sensible conclusion that descriptive bibliographers may justi-
fiably feel that their purposes are adequately served by readily understood
verbal watermark descriptions (including, as Stevenson suggested, quasi-
facsimile transcriptions).
A more detailed criticism of the IPH system (referred to by Bidwell)
has been provided on the website produced at Bates College by
Robert W.
Allison and James A.
Hart, "The WWW Watermark Archive Initiative,"
which is aimed at developing
guidelines for online databases: see the sec-
tion entitled "Commentary and
Interpretation of the IPH Standard." In
their comments on watermarks, they say, "Our
objective is to use straight-
forward standardized language and eliminate the
codes." This website
also contains links to several online databases of watermark
images, such
as the University of Delaware's "Thomas
Gravell Watermark Collection,"
containing some 8500 records as of early
2015; and the IPH website lists
more than a dozen such links. (See
below for some further references to
discussions of online databases.)
The next year after my essay, Philip Gaskell (whose important
earlier
studies of paper are mentioned there) published A New
Introduction to Bib-
liography (1972, 1974), which
discusses the history and analysis of paper in
two chapters. The one on paper in the
hand-press period (pp. 57–77) has
a page on description (pp. 76–77), and that on the
machine-press period
(pp. 214–230) has two pages (pp. 226–228). The former chapter
includes
the point, which cannot be stated too often, that handmade paper
varies
from sheet to sheet and that any edition may have been printed on two
or
more paper stocks, which may not be consistently represented in a given
copy
(emphasizing once again the necessity for examining a large number
of copies). But
the main contribution to paper description that Gaskell
makes in this book has to do with machine-made paper. He
enumerates
five simple tests for distinguishing the characteristics of different
stocks:
(1) assess the feel (surface texture) and color in a good light; (2)
identify,
with a raking light, the belt side and notice the wove pattern; (3)
measure
the pattern (in wires per centimeter) and, if it is oblong or
diamond-shaped
(rather than square), notice whether its longer dimension is parallel
to
the grain (which is also the machine direction); (4) measure the
thickness
with a micrometer; and (5) establish the relative densities of papers in
two
books by weighing them (though it should be added that there are often
too
many variables here to make this test of much use). He then lists seven
additional
tests that, because they involve damaging the paper (by fold-
ing or applying
chemicals), would not normally be of use to descriptive
bibliographers. Tables of
standard paper sizes are given for the hand-press
period (pp. 73–75; provided in my
essay as well) and the machine-press
Fleeman's bibliography of Samuel Johnson [2000], p. xxxvii.)
Besides Gaskell, another summation of basic information about
pa-
per (far more extensive than Gaskell's), incorporating
original research
and with fresh observations, is Neil
Harris's
Paper and Watermarks as Bib-
liographical Evidence
(2010, 2017, on the website of the Institut
d'Histoire
du Livre in Lyon; a pdf of the second edition
can be printed out as a
document of 155 very full pages). It is a learned treatise
on many aspects
of paper study, presented in a "snappy" and "punchy" way (his
words),
with frequent jocular asides. (This style is not to everyone's taste,
but
the work does contain some memorable sentences.) The most relevant
parts for
descriptive bibliographers are embedded in the fourth and fifth
chapters: "The Shape
of Paper" (pdf pp. 32–44), which deals with size
and format; and "Dillying and
Dallying with Watermarks" (pp. 45–59),
which includes comments on describing,
reproducing, and classifying
watermarks. Bibliographers who have occasion to consult
published col-
lections of watermark designs will benefit from the fascinating
chapter on
Briquet (pp. 60–75), which takes up his life, methods, and followers,
as
well as how to employ his great work. In using any of Harris's discussions,
one would be well advised to read, at the same time,
the corresponding
sections of his impressive seventy-page analytical record of the
interna-
tional literature, full of references not easily found elsewhere and
advice
not available anywhere else—see especially sections 7–23 (pp. 112–131,
on
size, format, and watermark description and reproduction), 30–31
(pp. 136–144, on
analytical bibliography and watermark collections), and
35 (pp. 150–152, on
websites).
What may be regarded as a supplement to Gaskell's and McMul-
lin's work on nineteenth-century paper is Chris Elmore's "Describing
Nineteenth-Century Papers" (Script & Print, 40 [2016], 5–28), though
its
emphasis is on writing papers rather than printing papers (it should
certainly be
consulted by those dealing with handwritten letters and
journals). Of the points
relevant to bibliographers of printed books, two
are worth repeating here, even
though they are obvious to anyone who
understands that paper made with the
Fourdrinier machine has a wove
pattern, imparted by the moving woven-wire belt on
which the pulp is
placed, and that any chainlines or watermarks result from the
action of a
dandy roll pressing into the other side of the pulp. Knowing this
process,
one can tell whether paper with a laid pattern is machine-made by
noting
whether it has a wove pattern as well as a laid pattern—the former
of
course indented into
one side of the paper, and the latter indented
into
the other. (The indentations from the wove belt were deeper and
closer
together than those resulting from hand-held moulds, but this point,
watermarked paper (even without laid lines) can naturally be detected
by the presence of the watermark indentations on the opposite side from
the wove-pattern indentations; but one can also note that the indenta-
tions of the lines of the watermark design (and lettering, if any) are inter-
sected by the indentations of the wove pattern from the belt—whereas
in handmade wove paper the watermark, being on top of the wire mesh,
covers the mesh pattern at the points of contact. (One must recognize
that these facts about paper made with the Fourdrinier machine do not
apply to so-called mechanical mould-made paper, in which a rotating
cylinder mould deposits each sheet on a moving woolen felt, and in which
all patterns and watermarks are therefore indented from the same side;
another difference between such paper and Fourdrinier paper is that its
fibers are distributed randomly in the sheet rather than solely in the belt
direction.) Employing contemporary paper-trade sources, Elmore says
that "laid" and "wove" were the standard nineteenth-century terms for
printing papers. As for dimensions, he gives tables of writing-paper sizes
(and size names), but he does not add anything to Gaskell's table of ma-
chine-made paper sizes. Although he suggests that bibliographers might
use some of the trade terms for other characteristics (such as finish, bulk,
and opacity), he also indicates that they were somewhat impressionistic,
reflecting the judgment of professionals who handled paper every day,
and that they should therefore be used with caution—or, I would add,
probably not be used at all (or only as ordinary adjectives, not as techni-
cal terms).
Among the many other post-1971 publications on the history
and
analysis of paper, several may be mentioned as particularly useful
for
descriptive bibliographers (and see the references in "Format"
above).
Published collections of watermark reproductions have improved
since
1971 as a result of the use of beta-radiography and several
photographic
and digital processes. (See David E.
Schoonover, "Techniques of Repro-
ducing Watermarks: A Practical
Introduction," in Essays in Paper Analysis,
ed. Stephen Spector [1987], pp. 154–167; A. de la Chapelle, C. Monbeig-
Goguelle, and A. Prat, "Les filigranes des dessins anciens et les
relèves
betaradiographiques," Annals of Radiology, 37
[1994], 249–258; David L.
Gants, "The
Application of Digital Image Processing to the Analysis of
Watermarked Paper and
Printers' Ornament Usage in Early Printed
Books," in New Ways of
Looking at Old Texts, II, ed. W. Speed Hill [1998],
pp. 133–147;
and Neil Harris, Paper and Watermarks as
Bibliographical Evi-
dence [2017], pp. 54–57, 128–131.) For
example, there are Thomas L.
Gravell and George Miller's two volumes (A Catalogue of
American Water-
marks, 1690–1835 [1979; rev. with
Elizabeth Walsh, 2002] and A Catalogue
of Foreign
Watermarks Found on Paper Used in America,
1700–1835
[1983]);
Thomas L. Gravell Watermark Archive on the Internet," in Puzzles in
Paper: Concepts in Historical Watermarks, ed. Mosser, Sullivan, and Michael
Saffle (2000), pp. 211–228. A notable publication by a great cartographic
scholar, David Woodward, is his Catalogue of Watermarks in Italian Printed
Maps ca. 1540–1600 (1996). A number of collections of watermarks are
now available online, and two websites that conveniently provide links to
many of them are those of the International Association of Paper Histo-
rians and of the "Bernstein: The Memory of Paper" consortium; see also
Harris (cited three sentences earlier), pp. 150–152.
The two anthologies just cited, Spector (1987) and Mosser
(2000), in-
clude a number of other pieces relevant to the
description and recording
of watermarks. The Spector contains Phillip Pulsiano's
extremely use-
ful list, "A Checklist of Books and Articles Containing
Reproductions
of Watermarks" (pp. 115–153). The Mosser presents three articles
on
watermark reproduction: Carol Ann Small's
"Phosphorescence Water-
mark Imaging" (pp. 169–181), Rolf
Dessauer's "DYLUX, Thomas L.
Gravell, and
Watermarks of Stamps and Papers" (pp. 183–185), and Dan-
iela
Moschini's "La Marca d'Acqua: A System for the Digital Recording
of
Watermarks" (trans. Conor Fahy; pp. 187–192). Also in the
Mosser
is Robert W. Allison's "An Automated World Wide Web
Search Tool
for Papers and Watermarks: The Archive of Papers and Watermarks
in
Greek Manuscripts" (pp. 201–210), which describes the Bates College
archive
mentioned above; and Ted-Larry Pebworth's "Towards a
Tax-
onomy of Watermarks" (pp. 239–242), which offers a computer-oriented
system
based on a "flexible grid pattern" for describing locations of parts
of
watermarks.
A third anthology, Looking at Paper: Evidence &
Interpretation, ed. John
Slavin et al.
(2001), emphasizes paper in prints, drawings, and manuscripts
and has
less of relevance for descriptive bibliography; but it does include
Ruby Reid Thompson's "Historical and Literary Papers and the
Applica-
tion of Watermark Descriptions" (pp. 142–153), which makes use of
the
Nottingham University Library Watermark Database, and Ian
Christie-
Miller's "Digital Imaging" (pp. 139–141), on the "Bookmark"
reflected-
light system. A later article on Christie-Miller's approach is his "New
Tools for Old Paper" (The Book Collector, 58 [2009], 383–389),
which
describes his Advanced Paper Imaging System, using both frontlighting
and
backlighting and showing conjugate leaves together. The equipment
that Christie-Miller has devised is illustrated on his website
(www.early-paper.com); the battery-powered one-millimeter-thick
electroluminescent
source for viewing paper structure and watermarks, which is a
part of
his system, has been marketed as "Pocket Viewlight" by Howard
Eaton
Lighting Ltd.
The series of articles reporting on the use of the Davis
(California)
cyclotron to analyze the makeup of paper and ink is most
conveniently
represented by Richard N. Schwab, Thomas A. Cahill,
Bruce H. Kusko,
and Daniel L. Wick's "Cyclotron
Analysis of the Ink [and paper] in
the 42–Line Bible," Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of America
,
77
(1983), 285–315. Two good general articles on the usefulness of
water-
mark evidence, both published in 1978, are Bruno Scarfe's "A Role for
Watermarks in Bibliographical Description, with
Special Reference to a
Collection of Spanish Dramatic Items," Bibliographical Society of Australia
and New Zealand Bulletin, 12: 85–101; and Stephen Spector's "Symmetry
in Watermark Sequences," Studies in Bibliography, 31: 162–178. Further
references can be found in my
Introduction to Bibliography (2002
revision),
part 5, pp. 181–193, and sections 9D5, 9F2, 9G5, and 9H4 (pp.
205–207,
290–291, 307–309, and 314).
To summarize: the main points to be added to my 1971 recommenda-
tions
are that one would be well advised to record the sequence of chain-
line intervals
in a stock of paper; that any indication of the location of a
watermark should
specify which half of the sheet it is in; that any citation
of a given leaf as a
source of evidence should indicate the particular copy
of the book used; and that
specifications of thickness of handmade paper
should note that the figure is an
average. These additions will make the
treatment of paper both more comprehensive
and more precise.
TYPOGRAPHY AND LAYOUT
I published "The Identification of Type Faces in Bibliographical
Description" in
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 60 (1966),
185–202, and reprinted it (with a
"Postscript") in Journal of Typographic
Research, 1
(1967), 427–447; it was reprinted in a French translation in
Arts et techniques graphiques, 86 (septembre-octobre
1972), 41–55. My sug-
gestions for classifying or naming a type
design (on various levels of speci-
ficity) and for measuring type faces (not type
bodies) were followed by
an example of how one might report features of layout such
as the size
of the type-page and the typography of running titles and headings.
The
idea of measuring faces rather than bodies has been advocated even in
a
professional printing journal: Eugene M. Ettenberg, writing in
Inland
Printer/American Lithographer for January
1969 (162.4) on the possibility of
switching to metric measurements,
said, "it is to be hoped that a newer
method for designating type size, should it
come, would not repeat the
mistake with which we have lived so long, that of making
the type size the
size of body. Type should truly be graded by its optical size
rather than
by its metal size" (p. 48).
In supplementing my essay half a century later, I wish to call attention
first to
Harry Carter's
A View of Early Typography up to about 1600
(1969;
reprinted in 2002 with an introduction by James Mosley)-not only be-
cause Carter is always worth
reading but also because he takes Bowers
as a starting
point. His aim is to show how, given present knowledge of
typographic history, one
can respond to Bowers's doubts about how far
a
bibliographer can go in identifying a type face. At the outset, he says that
a
face is "sufficiently identified" by the name of the punch-cutter (that
is, the
design), the body size, and the "style" as described by standard
adjectives. The
second chapter opens with this passage (which includes a
comment on measuring faces
that could be extended to later periods):
Why should it be so difficult to do what Professor Professor Bowers thought would be de-
sirable, if it were possible: to particularize
the type used in a book? If you measure
it, and find that 20 lines set in it take
up, say, 85 mm., you restrict it to a class of a
particular body—a property of a
type-founder's mould. It remains to describe the
face, which might be cast on a
variety of bodies. I had rather name typefaces for
size by the conventional body
that would best fit them, Pica, Long Primer, Minion,
and such, than by numbers,
qualifying these terms if necessary by adding "large"
or "small". Some time in the
early part or the middle of the sixteenth century these
names acquired fixed
meanings. Until it becomes appropriate to use them it is safest
to measure the face
of a fount, which you can do if you have a powerful magnifying-
glass and a fine
scale and measure from the top of b to the bottom of p or the extent
of an Italic
f. This, called the gauge of the face, cannot vary. (p. 23)
Carter proceeds to discuss the value of naming the designer-cutter (which
sums up
"all manner of information as to place and time, circumstances
and relationships"),
and he notes the inadequacy of the usual terms of
classification. "It is evident,"
he says (and bibliographers should take
note), "that in considering the face of a
fount of type we are in a world of
art, styles, difficulty of saying what styles,
inherited forms, human hands"
(p. 24). But although he concludes that this "humble
art" is not "suscep-
tible of scientific treatment," he clearly believes that
rigorous historical
description is possible.
The next book that should be mentioned, because of its prominence,
is Philip Gaskell's
A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972,
1974), though
unfortunately its section called "Type Sizes; and
Description" (pp. 12-
16) makes recommendations that raise some questions. To begin
with,
Gaskell says that a twenty-line measurement (from the top of an
ascender
in one line to the same point in the twenty-first line below) gives
one
(after division by twenty) the "apparent body-size," though he adds, "It
is
important to make sure that the lines measured are set solid." He says
that if the
vertical gap between the bottom of a descender in one line
and the top of an
ascender in the next line is half a millimeter or less,
"either leaded or printed from a fount cast on an oversize body." How,
then, has the body size been made "apparent"? This is precisely the dif-
ficulty that caused me to recommend not referring to the body size but
focusing instead on what is actually visible, and I continue to believe that
my suggestion is sound (giving the vertical size and the x-height of the
face combined with a multiple-line measurement). The specific number
of lines to be measured is a less important matter, and Gaskell's choice of
twenty is traditional; but he should at least have indicated that a twenty—
line measurement is not the only responsible possibility, since the greater
convenience of ten (which I pointed out) was recognized as long ago
as McKerrow's time (p. 306 of his 1927 Introduction), and later by Allan
Stevenson in his 1961 volume of the Hunt catalogue (p. clxxxii). Another
problem with Gaskell's discussion is the form of report he stipulates. Af-
ter the vertical dimension of the face is measured, he says, "the x-height
and the capital height are measured in millimetres and the result is pre—
sented in the form: '[face height X 20] X [x-height] : [capital height]'";
his example is "Body 82. Face 80 X 1.7 : 2.5." Although this system is
"adapted" from one "introduced" by H. D. L. Vervliet in The Type Speci-
men of the Vatican Press 1628 (1967), it is not in any sense an established
standard. He should have made clear that he is simply recommending this
form but that other plans are plausible; it is regrettable that his prescrip—
tive assertion ("the result is presented in the form …") will mislead the
very people that such an introduction is meant to instruct.
Gaskell's treatment does, however, make two points that usefully sup-
plement my
discussion. First, he notes how measurements are complicated
by paper shrinkage and
ink seepage. His guideline is that shrinkage (as the
dampened paper dried after
printing) reduced the type-face dimensions
"by about 1 per cent, and occasionally by
as much as 2½ percent." One
must certainly keep this point in mind; all one can do
is to take multiple
measurements in different copies and caution the reader about
the prob-
lem in an introduction. As for the ink spread that occurs when the
type
sinks into the paper, one must be sure to measure (using
magnification)
only the indented impression, not the total ink smear. This point was
ef-
fectively made in 1988 by Adrian Weiss in explaining why
photographic
reproductions are not useful for making type measurements
("Reproduc-
tions of Early Dramatic Texts as a Source of Bibliographical
Evidence,"
Text, 4: 237–268). (Cf. Joseph A. Dane's discussion of reproductions and
shrinkage in relation to
type measurement in The Myth of Print
Culture
[2003], pp. 75–82.) The other helpful point in Gaskell's
discussion is that
the height of a capital should be given as well as the total
height (ascender
to descender) and the x-height. David L. Vander
Meulen, in his Dunciad
ments for revealing the proportions of a design, and he suggests simply
giving the three figures (measured to the nearest third of a millimeter)
with virgules separating them (e.g., "face 4.0/2.7/1.7").
There are two other matters that I wish to add to what I wrote
in
1966. First, the indication of the number of lines on a typical page
is
meaningful only for books of prose or long narrative poems. For books
of
short poems, where few (if any) pages have text extending down to the point where the
last line would occur—and where even those pages may
have stanza breaks of more than
a single line space—the bibliographer
will have to depart from the formulaic
statement I suggested and explain
precisely what the situation is (indicating, for
example, the amount of
space between stanzas, altering the multi-line measurement to
something
smaller than ten lines if all the stanzas in the book are shorter than
that,
and noting whether each poem begins on a new page).
The second matter is that there may be times, especially in the hand-
press period,
when it would not be objectionable to give the type-body
size as well as the
type-face size. When the multi-line measurement comes
close to what it would be at a
specific time for a particular standard type
(pica, long primer, etc.) if set solid
(always allowing for paper shrinkage),
one may be justified in concluding that this
type was the one used. Gaskell
provides a table (p. 15) giving the names of the nine
most common body sizes in the hand-press period and the twenty-line measurements of
each
at varying times. (Carter gives a similar list of twelve sizes on p. 127;
and
J. D. Fleeman gives a list of thirteen sizes,
important for not being based
on multi-line measurements but rather on such
combinations as "ly", in
his Samuel Johnson bibliography
[2000], p. xxxvii.) A much more com-
prehensive table was published
by John Richardson, Jr., in "Correlated
Type Sizes and
Names for the Fifteenth through Twentieth Century"
(Studies in
Bibliography, 43 [1990], 251–272). This fourteen-page table
re-
cords twenty-line measurements in millimeters, inches, and points
(pica,
fournier, and didot), along with the type names in seven countries.
Al-
though he is careful to measure the type impressions under magnification
and
recognizes the problem of paper shrinkage, one may still feel that
some of his
measurements are unrealistically precise.
Indeed, this table has been severely criticized by James
Mosley (in
"Type Bodies Compared," Journal of the
Printing Historical Society, n.s., 23
[2015], 49–58) for
"indiscriminately" bringing together measurements
from "sources that are unevenly
reliable" (p. 56); he regards it as a "useful
reminder of the problems
involved"—problems that to some extent affect
the other published tables as well.
Mosley's main point is that size names
varied in the sizes they signified in
different geographical locations and
the various sizes (measured to hundredths of a millimeter) that certain
names could refer to in ten specimens from about 1585 to 1768. Although
one can use the earlier tables for giving a general sense of relative sizes,
Mosley has made it clear that one must be aware of local traditions at
different times. Furthermore, anyone concerned with measuring type and
naming the body sizes in pre-eighteenth-century books should read two
detailed reviews of W. Craig Ferguson's Pica Roman Type in Elizabethan
England (1989): one by Adrian Weiss in Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America , 83 (1989), 539–546; the other by John A. Lane in The Library,
6th ser., 14 (1992), 357–365. Ferguson's book, which is intended to help
date books and identify their printers, uses a brief checklist of features for
identifying types, but they are not adequate for determining the specific
type stock owned by a given printer (see the comments on font analysis
below).
In my account of levels of specificity for identifying type faces, the
highest one
involves recourse to specimen books, and there is one bibli-
ography that can be
singled out for its excellence in performing this task
for post-Renaissance books.
David Gilson's
Jane Austen
(1982)
includes
type descriptions supplied by Nicolas Barker in
the following form (this
one for Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion, 1818):
Printing: type: Vols.1 and 2 were printed by Roworth, Vols.3 and
4 by Davison. In
Vol.1 the 'Biographical notice' is set in Caslon Small Pica, the
'Small Pica No.2' from
the Caslon and Catherwood specimen in Stower's Printer's grammar
1808, with figures
from 'Small Pica No.1'; the 'Advertisement' is in a
Caslon Pica roman, identical with
the 'Pica No.1' in Caslon and Catherwood's
1819
Specimen, apart from some letters
which are of a different
cut, perhaps slightly earlier. The text of Vols.1 and 2 is set in
Caslon Pica roman,
the first in the Stower Caslon and Catherwood specimen. The
text of Vols.3 and 4 is
set in a Caslon Pica roman, between the second pica roman
shown in the Stower Caslon
and Catherwood specimen, and 'Pica No.4' in Caslon
and Catherwood's
1821
Specimen. … (p. 81)
Barker also contributed "A Note on the Typographical Identifications"
(pp. xi-xiv),
which is worth reading for its comments on the difficulties
of using typefounders'
specimens and the particular problems associated
with the 1780–1830
period. He notes that the work requires "an eye ac-
customed to the minute details
that distinguish the cut of one letter from
its equivalent in another fount." This
point illustrates why Gilson was
wise to turn to a specialist—and suggests that
other bibliographers might
do the same.
For classifying type faces into broad categories, my suggestion of the
DIN system
(the initials standing for Deutsches Institut für Normung
since 1975),
as presented by James Mosley in 1960, remains
appropriate
in my view—especially the terms "Renaissance," "Baroque," and "Neo-
his New Introduction (p. 16). Robert Bringhurst, known for his thoughtful
discussion of typographic matters, has provided one of the best statements
of the reasons to use such historically allusive terms. In his often reprinted
The Elements of Typographic Style (1992), after mentioning research on "sci-
entific descriptions," he says:
But letterforms are not only objects of science. They also belong to the realm
of
art, and they participate in its history. They have changed over time just as
music,
painting and architecture have changed, and the same historical
terms—Renais-
sance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, and so on—are useful in each
of these
fields. … Typography never occurs in isolation. Good typography demands
not
only a knowledge of type itself, but an understanding of the relationship
between
letterforms and the other things that humans make and do. (p. 111)
He then presents a historical classification using these headings: Re-
naissance,
Mannerist, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Romantic, Real-
ist, Geometrical
modernism, Lyrical modernism, and Postmodern
(pp. 111–123).
There will never be an end, however, to the construction of clas-
sification
systems, and many other discussions of the subject have been
published since 1966.
Most of Alexander Lawson's
Printing Types: An Intro-
duction (1971,
1990), for example, is devoted to classification. After a
brief
summary of four systems (Vox, Association Typographique Internation-
ale,
British Standards Institution [BSI], and DIN), he offers "An Attempt
to Formulate a
Rational System" (pp. 45–119); although it is useful for
its numerous examples of
designs and its historical discussion of each, the
system itself uses the
traditional "old style," "transitional," and "modern,"
which are widely thought to
be inadequate. Bringhurst himself offered a
"scientific" approach in "On the
Classification of Letterforms" (Serif, 1
[Fall
1994], 30–39); it amounts to an extensive analogy with
biological
classification (using such terms as phylum, class,
order, family, genus, and
species) and seems unlikely
to become widely employed. (His discussions
of some individual period styles
followed in the next several issues of
Serif.) Lesser
examples are J. Ben Lieberman's
Types of Typefaces and How
to Recognize Them
[1967] and Gordon Atkins's
The Classification of Printing
Types [1975].
Among the helpful treatments of earlier systems are Walter
Tracy's "Type Design Classification," Visible
Language, 5 (1971), 59–66
(on Vox, BSI, and DIN); John Dreyfus's "The Typographical Importance
of Maximilien Vox," Matrix, 17
(1997), 1–11; and Craig Eliason's "A
His-
tory of the 'Humanist' Type Classification," Printing
History, n.s., 18 (July
2015), 3–26. A criticism of the DIN
system is Gerrit Noordzij's "Broken
Scripts and the
Classification of Typefaces," Journal of Typographic
Re-
search, 4 (1970), 213–240.
In connection with naming specific type designs, my 1966 essay
noted
several listings of specimen books and several anthologies of type
faces;
some of the most important works in both categories have been
published
since that time. As for lists of specimens, there are Maurice
Annenberg's
Type Foundries of America
and Their Catalogs (1975, 1994) and James Mos-
ley's
British Type Specimens before 1831: A Handlist
(1984). Mosley also edited
facsimiles of the 1766 Caslon
specimen (1983) and the 1796 Stephenson
specimen
(1990), and John A. Lane edited facsimiles of
the 1768 and 1773
Enschedé specimens (1993).
In the category of anthologies of faces, the
two outstanding ones are Rookledge's International Type-Finder by Christo-
pher Perfect and Gordon Rookledge
(1983) and A Manual of Comparative
Typography: The
PANOSE System by Benjamin Bauermeister (1988). Both
are very
helpful, with their cross-reference charts and "earmark" tables,
but the PANOSE
system is more complicated to use and the book displays
many fewer faces. Another
worthy work is Albert Kapr's
The Art of Lette-
ring (trans. 1983), which
shows a large number of "typefaces of the present"
(and includes a brief comparative
discussion of classification schemes). A
few other examples are James Sutton and Alan Bartram's
An Atlas of Type-
forms (1968,
1988) and Typefaces for Books (1990),
Mac McGrew's
American
Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century
(1986, 1993), Centennial's
Typeidenti-
fier (1986, with its "Typographical Sleuthing"
sections), Lawrence W. Wal-
lis's
Modern Encyclopedia of Typefaces, 1960–1990
(1990), Michael Mitchell
and Susan Wightman's
Book Typography: A Designer's Manual (2005),
and
Alan Bartram's
Typeforms: A History (2007).
Descriptive bibliographers need a vocabulary for talking about type
designs (in
addition to classifying and naming them), and my 1966 com-
ments (which
deal primarily with weight and width) should now be
supplemented with Philip Gaskell's excellent "A Nomenclature for
the
Letter-Forms of Roman Type" (The Library, 5th ser., 29
[1974], 42–51).
Other glossaries are Type Evidence:
A Thesaurus for Use in Rare Book and
Special Collections Cataloging
(Association of College and Research Librar-
ies, 1990); Robert Bringhurst's "Sorts & Characters" and "Glossary
of
Terms" in his The Elements of Typographic Style
(1992), pp. 214–240; and
Theodore
Rosendorf's
The Typographic Desk Reference (2009,
2016). (See
also S. J. M. Watson, "Three
Notes on Nomenclature," Printing Historical
Society Bulletin,
46 [Winter 1998–99], 9–10.) The nomenclature and clas-
sification of
printers' ornaments are taken up by Roger Burford Mason
in "A Note on Type Ornaments, Borders and Flowers" (Albion, 20
[Sum-
mer 1983], 5–9), and by Jim Mitchell in
"The Taxonomy of Printers'
Ornaments" (Bibliographical Society of
Australia and New Zealand
Bulletin, 9
[1985], 45–60).
Near the end of my essay, I mentioned the possibility of identifying the
individual
font owned by a particular printer—that is, the specific col-
idiosyncrasies, such as damaged and wrong-font types. Although Charl-
ton Hinman in 1963 did some work of this kind (in The Printing and Proof-
Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare), it was Adrian Weiss who showed
in detail how to pursue such analysis and use it to identify printers—
in several brilliant articles: "Font Analysis as a Bibliographical Method:
The Elizabethan Play-Quarto Printers and Compositors," Studies in Bib-
liography, 43 (1990), 95–164; "Bibliographical Methods for Identifying
Unknown Printers in Elizabethan/Jacobean Books," Studies in Bibliogra-
phy, 44 (1991), 183–228; and "Shared Printing, Printer's Copy, and the
Text(s) of Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres," Studies in Bibliography,
45 (1992), 71–104.
Another sophisticated approach to type analysis, not mentioned in
my
1966 essay (because it had not yet been undertaken), involves
computer
assistance. Nicolas Barker, in his chapter of The Book Encompassed ("Typo-
graphic Studies"), ed. Peter Davison (1992), quotes from two
1982 articles
by the digital-type designer Charles
A. Bigelow as a basis for suggesting
the adaptation of computer
type-designing techniques to the historical
analysis of type faces (pp. 96–98). In
2003, two projects employing digital
enlargements of type faces were
the subjects of published reports. Kay
Amert explained a
system for superimposing two images, one made up
of horizontal and the other of
vertical screened lines (or of two tints) in
order to reveal minute differences in
type-face shapes ("Digital Com-
parison of Letterforms," Printing
History, 46: 21–35). The other report,
by Blaise Agüera y Arcos, described
the work he and Paul Needham
had done with computer
enlargements of Gutenberg's type faces, reveal-
ing that variations were present
among the types for any given letter
and suggesting that Gutenberg's early types
were made in nonreusable
moulds ("Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in
Gutenberg's
DK Type," in Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing,
Selling and Using Books
in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Kristian Jensen [2003], pp. 1–12). There are
also digital
atlases of type faces in progress (see, for example, Heiner
Klocke, "The Software Architecture of the Hebrew Type Digital
Image
Atlas," in Hebrew Typography in German-Speaking Regions: An
Interim Report,
ed. Klocke and Itari Joseph Tamari [2001], pp. 63–70). But at present
most
collections of type designs on the internet are commercially oriented
and require
searching by the name of the design, though "Identifont" and
"Fonts.com" do allow
for identifying certain digital fonts by answering
several questions about their
appearance.
Although the analysis of ink, beyond naming its color, is not likely to
be
undertaken for most descriptive bibliographies, the composition of ink
can be
revealed by cyclotron analysis in the same operation that discloses
the makeup of
paper (as mentioned above under "Paper"). An extensive
my Introduction to Bibliography (2002 revision), part 6, pp. 195–224—which
includes, in sections A-E (pp. 195–204), additional publications related
to the identification and classification of type faces. See also the New
Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1969–74), in which the relevant
sections are by Nicolas Barker, Terry Belanger, Graham Pollard, James
Mosley, and Peter Davison. In preparing oneself to describe type designs
and layout, one must always keep in mind that these are art forms.
TYPESETTING AND PRESSWORK
In "The Treatment of Typesetting and Presswork in Bibliographical
Description," Studies in Bibliography, 52 (for 1999;
2000), 1–57, I discussed
how some of the results of bibliographical
analysis might be incorporated
into a descriptive bibliography. Analysis, of course,
underlies all aspects
of a description, but I was dealing here only with the kinds
of analysis
that would be reported in a paragraph on typesetting and presswork.
I
have nothing to add to my proposals there, but I do wish to emphasize
again
the importance of including this kind of information in a descrip-
tive
bibliography, as demonstrated long ago in David L. Vander
Meulen's
bibliography of Pope's Dunciad
(1981 dissertation). (A few examples of
analysis that might appear in
paragraphs other than the one on typeset-
ting and presswork: the analysis of format
is generally reported in the col-
lation line; the identification of printers in the
many instances of false or
incomplete imprints, based on the analysis of type-case
contents or print-
ers' ornaments, could well be mentioned in connection with
title-page
transcription; and the distinguishing of impressions, which may
require
a number of analytical techniques, obviously affects the whole
structure
of a description.)
The most comprehensive discussion of bibliographical analysis since
my
1999 essay is my Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical
Introduction (2009),
based on my Sandars Lectures (mentioned as
unpublished in note 3 of that
essay). The second chapter, "Analysis of Manufacturing
Clues" (pp. 31–
60, with notes on pp. 97–108), does not deal with the formal
presenta-
tion of bibliographical evidence but in other respects covers much
the
same ground as the 1999 essay, summarizing the uses of each
technique
of analysis (it also supplements the earlier piece with references to
later
work). (For the analysis of paper, discussed in the book but not in
the
1999 essay, see "Paper" above.) The book includes in its "Subject
Guide"
a listing of the main writings on each analytical technique, useful for
its
selectivity; many additional writings, but only through 2002, are
recorded
in my Introduction to Bibliography
(2002 revision), part 9, pp. 255–365.
I wish to call particular attention to three other post-1999
publica-
tions. They are outstanding examples of the application of analytical
tech-
niques to particular editions; and although they were not intended to
be
general introductions to the subject, they serve that purpose admirably
(at
least for the pre-1700 period): Randall McLeod,
"Chronicling Holin-
shed's Chronicles: Textual Commentary,"
in The Peaceable and Prosperous
Regiment of Blessed Queene
Elizabeth: A Facsimile from Holinshed's "Chronicles"
(1587), ed.
Cyndia Susan Clegg (2005), pp. 19–76; Adrian Weiss, "Casting
Compositors, Foul Cases, and Skeletons:
Printing in Middleton's Age," in
Thomas Middleton and Early Modern
Textual Culture: A Companion to the Col-
lected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (2007),
pp. 195–225
(cf. "Running-Title Movements and Printing Method," pp.
484–485);
and Paul Needham, Galileo
Makes a Book (2011). All three are notable for
their use of
running-title evidence for identification of skeleton-formes,
but their handling of
all techniques is exemplary. In connection with run-
ning titles, it is worth noting
that Needham's chapter "Parallel Printing
and Running Titles" (pp. 155–165), written
with David L. Vander Meu-
len, sets out the running-title
evidence in three tables with grid lines: the
first lists the different settings of
the running titles and shows (with vertical
columns for each sheet) where each one
appears; the second is organized
by forme and indicates which setting is on each
page of each forme; and
the third, arranged by sheet, shows (with vertical columns
for each setting)
all the settings that appear in each sheet. These tables
illustrate one way
in which the more compressed presentation I suggested can be
modified
to produce still greater clarity in some instances. A fourth work,
though
it does not as readily serve the function of an introduction, offers a
com-
prehensive (if flawed) example of how to investigate printing
practices:
Claire M. Bolton's
The Fifteenth-Century Printing Practices of Johann
Zainer,
Ulm, 1473–1478
(2016), which pays
attention to tolerances in measure-
ments (pp. 28–29, 54–56) and includes chapters
on printers' measures
(pp. 81–118), on point-holes (pp. 192–219), and on blind
impressions from
bearer type (pp. 119–158) and from the cloth used to dampen the
paper
(pp. 159–191); cautions about using this work are expressed by B. J. Mc-
Mullin in Script & Print,
41 (2017), 58–62.
Beyond these works, many analyses of more limited scope have ap-
peared since
1999, and I shall list some of them as useful examples of a
variety
of techniques (arranged here in the order followed in the
1999
essay):
IDENTIFIABLE TYPES AND ORNAMENTS. Adrian
Weiss, "A 'Fill-In' Job: The Tex-
tual Crux and Interrupted Printing in
Thomas Middleton's The Triumph of Honour
and Virtue
(1622)," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America, 93 (1999), 53–73.
Chiaki Hanabusa, "Shared Printing in
Robert Wilson's
The Cobbler's Prophecy (1594),"
of the Second Edition of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)," Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of America , 104 (2010), 277–297. Andrew Benjamin Bricker,
"Who Was 'A. Moore'? The Attribution of Eighteenth-Century Publications with
False and Misleading Imprints," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , 110
(2016): 181–214.
SPELLING AND LAYOUT VARIATIONS. MacD. P.
Jackson, "Finding the Pattern: Pe-
ter Short's Shakespeare Quartos
Revisited," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New
Zealand Bulletin, 25
(2001), 67–86. Paul Werstine, "Scribe or
Compositor: Ralph
Crane, Compositors D and F, and the
First Four Plays in the Shakespeare First Fo-
lio," Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America
, 95
(2001), 315–339. Vernon Guy
Dickson, "What
I Will: Mediating Subjects; Or, Ralph Crane and the Folio's Tem-
pest," Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America
, 97 (2003), 43–56.
T. H. Howard-
Hill, "Early Modern Printers and the
Standardization of English Spelling," Modern
Language Review,
101 (2006), 16–29. S. W. Reid, "Compositor B's
Speech-Prefixes in
the First Folio of Shakespeare and the Question of Copy for 2 Henry IV," Studies in
Bibliography, 58 (for
2007–8; 2010), 73–108.
HEADLINES. Eugene Giddens, "The
Final Stages in Printing Ben Jonson's
Works,
1640–1," Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America
, 97 (2003), 57–68.
Paul Need-
ham, "The Canterbury
Tales and the Rosary: A Mirror of Caxton's Devotions," in
The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki
Takamiya, ed.
Takami Matsuda, Richard Linenthal, and John Scahill
(2004), pp. 313–356 (see p.
323). Andrew
Zurcher, "Printing The Faerie Queene in
1590," Studies in Bibliography, 57
(for
2005–6; 2008), 115–50.
POINT-HOLES. Martin Boghardt,
"Pinhole Patterns in Large-Format Incunables"
(trans. John L.
Flood), The Library, 7th ser., 1 (2000),
263–289. Paul Needham, "Ul-
rich Zel's Early Quartos
Revisited," in Incunabula on the Move, ed. Ed Potten and
Satoko Tokunaga (2014;
Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 15.1,
for
2012), 9–57.
PRESS VARIANTS. Masi Agata,
"Stop-Press Variants in the Gutenberg Bible:
The First Report of the Collation,"
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 97 (2003),
139–165. Neil
Harris, "Nine Reset Sheets in the Aldine Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili,"
Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 2006, pp. 245–275. Paul Needham, "The 1462 Bible of Johann
Fust and Peter Schöffer (GW 4204): A
Survey of Its Variants," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch,
2006, pp. 19–49. Wallace
Kirsop, "An Avowal of Stop-Press Correction in 1817,"
Script & Print, 34.1 (2010), 8. Gabriel Egan, "The Editorial Problem of Press Variants:
Q2 Hamlet as a Test Case," Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America
, 106
(2012),
311–355; and "Press Variants in Q2 Hamlet: An Accident on N(outer)," Studies in
Bib-
liography, 59 (2015), 115–129. Huub van der Linden,
"Printing Music in Italy around
1700: Workshop Practices at the Silvani
Firm in Bologna," Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America
, 109 (2015), 491–532.
IMPRESSIONS FROM MATERIALS NOT MEANT TO PRINT. Randall McLeod, "Where
Angels Fear to Read," in Mar(k)ing the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the
Literary
Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry
(2000), pp. 144–192. Neil
Harris, "Rising
Quadrats in the Woodcuts of the Aldine Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili,"
Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 2002, pp. 158–167; and "The
Blind Impressions in the Aldine
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
(1499),"
Gutenberg-Jahrbuch,
2004, pp. 93–146.
PRESS FIGURES. Robert Dawson,
"Notes on Press-Figures in France and the Lo-
calization of Books during the Later
18th Century," Bibliographical Society of Australia
and New Zealand Bulletin, 28.3
(2004), 97–121. B. J. McMullin, "The Eighth
Edition
of Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 100
(2006), 447–461; and "Early 'Secular'
Press Figures," The Library, 7th ser., 10
(2009),
57–65.
The matter of "localization" (detecting features that are characteristic
of
printing practices in different geographical areas) was taken up briefly
in
note 16 of my essay; the references there can now be supplemented
with Carlo
Dumontet's "Compositorial Practices in Seventeenth-Century
Naples" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 98
[2004], 149–161)
and with Robert Dawson's
article listed just above.
It was only in connection with localization of compositorial practices
that I
mentioned the placement of printed signatures. But the role of
signature positions
in distinguishing editions, an old (and continuingly
useful) technique that has also
been a part of some "fingerprinting" sys-
tems for shorthand identification of
editions (see "Relation to Library
Cataloguing" above), is discussed in my Bibliographical Analysis, p. 103.
Also in that book I commented
(pp. 58–59) on the situation (not un-
common in nineteenth-century books printed
from plates, especially
American ones) where printed signatures do not correspond to
the actual
gatherings. Analysis of such signatures can sometimes reveal
structural
decisions made during the production of a book. For example,
Melville's
Clarel (as I pointed out in the
Northwestern-Newberry Edition [1991],
pp. 678–679) was published in two
volumes gathered in eights, but its
occasional printed signatures do not match that
structure. An analysis
of the occurrence of those signatures suggests that the
original plan was
for a one-volume publication gathered in twelves (and that
signatures for
the earlier plan were incompletely removed). B. J.
McMullin has recently
analyzed a number of examples of conflicting
signatures, in "Gather-
ings and Signatures in Conflict" (Script
& Print, 39 [2015], 241–247). He
groups them into two
categories: those where the discrepancy between
signatures and gatherings was
unintended, resulting from an unforeseen
event or decision at a time when it would
have been inconvenient to make
alterations; and those where two or more sets of
signatures are present,
resulting from a plan to accommodate different impositions.
Both situa-
tions normally imply printing from plates, since the removal or
insertion
of signatures after plating would be especially time-consuming. (See
also
McMullin's "Cowper's Complete
Poetical Works, 1837 (Russell, 166)," Script
& Print, 40 [2016], 45–54.)
The line in which signatures are printed, just below the text of a page
(the
"direction line"), sometimes contains symbols or numbers that are
not regular
signatures, as may happen in the direction lines on other
I mentioned several other kinds of notation that may occur in direction
lines. In his Foxcroft Lecture for 2012, B. J. McMullin provided a much
expanded discussion of these matters (What Readers Should Ignore on the
Printed Page: Communication within the Book Trade, 2014). Besides giving a
basic introduction to press figures (pp. 7, 8–10), he comments on sev-
eral types of "communication between printer and binder": paper-quality
marks (pp. 7–8; see under "Paper" above), sheet numbers (p. 11), part
numbers in works published serially (pp. 11–12), and modified signatures
to handle "disturbances in the printing house" (such as added material,
errors in casting off, and cancels, pp. 12–17). He concludes with a very
different form of binders' instructions: actual statements printed vertically
along left edges or on leaves containing text for binding labels (pp. 17–19,
supplementing his 2010 article on binders' instructions: see "Ideal Copy"
above). All his discussions are accompanied by reproductions of examples,
and his lecture as a whole is a convenient summary of one class of biblio-
graphical evidence that should be analyzed and recorded by descriptive
bibliographers (as should discrepancies in catchwords, which are another
feature of direction lines).
A technique not mentioned in my 1999 essay is the use of variations
in
leading (the spacing between lines of type) to identify different printings
of
the same edition; for an explanation, see Gillian G. M.
Kyles, "Alteration
of Leading within Editions," in Studies in Bibliography, 52 (1999), 187–191.
My
1999 essay (followed by my 2009 book) does touch on the
means for
distinguishing whether type or plates were used to print particular
pages
or books, but it does not raise the question of distinguishing
Monotype
from Linotype. I wish to pass along here a detail communicated to me
by
David L. Vander Meulen: he was told by the printer of Studies in Bib-
liography (in the days when that journal was
printed from Linotype) that
occasionally an individual Linotype matrix might not be
seated properly
before the slug was poured. Thus a slug might contain a type-high
space
that would print (as happened in Studies in
Bibliography, 35 [1982], 275);
and what one might ordinarily
think would be a sign of printing from
separate types cannot be assumed to be so.
This situation is analogous to
that in which a shifting type is caught in one of its
misaligned positions
when a stereotype plate was made. Comparison of multiple copies
will
of course show no further shifting in either the stereotype or
Linotype
instances.
We are now surely beyond the point where the logical validity and
scholarly value
of analytical bibliography can be questioned. D. F.
Mc-
Kenzie's "Printers of the Mind" in the 1969
Studies in Bibliography was
the culmination of a tradition of
doing so. But I hope that my repeated
note 6, in my 2004 overview of McKenzie's work (Papers of the Biblio-
graphical Society of America , 98 [2004], 511–521; reprinted in my Portraits
and Reviews [2015], pp. 405–415), and in my 2009 book (pp. 26–29)—
have sufficiently summarized the reasons for continuing the attempt to
uncover, from the physical evidence in individual books, the printing-
shop activities that produced those books. Recently a new assessment of
McKenzie's essay was put forward by Joseph A. Dane in Blind Impres-
sions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History (2013), in a chapter called
"Bibliographers of the Mind" (pp. 58–72). Although he does not cite
my comments, he makes some of the same points, especially noting the
problems entailed by McKenzie's elevation of printers' records over the
books themselves as primary evidence—and as unfailingly accurate docu-
ments at that. Even if what Dane says is not new, the central five pages
of his chapter (pp. 63–68) are worth reading for his striking way of stat-
ing the defects of McKenzie's piece. For example, he rightly says that if
primary evidence is limited to external evidence (printers' records), then
McKenzie's "criticisms of analytical bibliography are little better than
tautologies" (p. 68).
Given this sound evaluation, it seems contradictory that Dane
calls
McKenzie's piece "the article that should have
sounded the death knell on
compositorial study" (p. 60). The attempt to define
individual composi-
tors' habits is only one kind of analysis, and Dane's focus wavers between
analytical bibliography in general
and compositor study in particular. He
seems to have an irrational dislike for the
latter, saying "I have never be-
lieved in the virtues of compositorial analysis"
(p. 59) and "The habits of
a compositor … are not interesting to me" (p. 70). He
adds, irrelevantly,
"I cannot think of a single case where a significant Shakespeare
word or
phrase is better documented because we have determined
compositorial
stints." This statement, even if true, is irrelevant because (1) there
is al-
ways the possibility that such analysis might be productive in the hands
of
future scholars, and (2) the value of an analytical technique does not
turn
on its usefulness for establishing texts. Whatever can be learned about
the
production of a book is a contribution to history, whether or not it
helps
editors.
A far more consequential criticism of compositor study (at least when
dependent on
variant spellings) has been offered by Pervez Rizvi in
"The
Use of Spellings for Compositor Attribution in the First Folio" (Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of America
, 110 [2016], 1–53). After an
amazingly
thorough and fascinating analysis (based on many more spellings
than
have conventionally been used), Rizvi concludes that
compositors' spell-
ings were so variable as to "support or rebut almost any
attribution" and
idea that individual compositors might have had no fixed spelling prefer-
ences (and might have been influenced in their choices by a great many
factors, or simply the whim of the moment) should not be surprising, for it
accords with human nature. But human beings have varying dispositions,
and some compositors may actually have had firm spelling habits; investi-
gating other editions in the way Rizvi has examined the First Folio would
not necessarily prove inconclusive in every case. After all, even within the
Folio, the division of Macbeth between two compositors, first proposed in
1920, "remains unchallenged and still appears very convincing," accord-
ing to Rizvi (p. 18). This degree of success may be rare, but it is possible.
Whether or not the tabulation of spellings (and abbreviations, punctua-
tion, and spacing) results in a convincing determination of compositorial
divisions, it gives one information, for the pervasive variation that defies
interpretation is itself a fact about the typesetting of a particular edition
(and about the historical development of written language). Rizvi has
provided bibliographers with a more comprehensive set of cautions for
pursuing this kind of work than they have had before. (The sensible re-
quirements suggested by Mark Bland in A Guide to Early Printed Books and
Manuscripts [2010], pp. 139–140, are commendable, but they should now
be supplemented by an awareness of Rizvi's observations.)
Compositor analysis of all kinds has long been recognized as some-
what more
speculative than presswork analysis (though the latter is not
without its problems);
but ruling out any potentially helpful approach is
unwise. A great deal of
historical research in all fields leads to results that
are less than certain, but
that is no reason to abandon it, when conducted
responsibly with awareness of the
pitfalls. Books are full of traces of their
own production, and (as I have said many
times) scholars must persist in
making every effort to tap this great body of
evidence. The point has been
especially well argued by David L.
Vander Meulen in "Thoughts on the
Future of Bibliographical Analysis" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
Canada, 46
[2008], 17–34); he concludes that it is "important to proceed
with an
understanding of the role of the physical in human activity and
the role of physical
evidence in revealing the past and understanding the
present." This is ultimately
the reason that we must follow the clues we
find in books, using all the tools at
our disposal.
NON-LETTERPRESS MATERIAL
The treatment of illustrative materials in books (such as pictures and
maps),
especially those—like engravings and lithographs—produced by
non-relief processes,
is taken up in my "The Description of Non-Letterpress
Material in Books," Studies in Bibliography, 35 (1982), 1–42. Since that
least from a practical point of view, is Bamber Gascoigne's How to Identify
Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to
Ink Jet (1986). After explaining the different kinds of prints (sections 1–46),
it provides "Keys to Identification" (47–79) and suggests how to proceed
("The Sherlock Holmes Approach," 82–106). It is full of enlarged photo-
graphs of details; there is no better source of help for bibliographers who
wish to identify the process used to produce a given print.
Another important book, which bibliographers should not overlook,
is Joseph Viscomi's
Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993). Although his
book
deals with only one process, relief etching, its first 150 pages describe
that
process with a well-illustrated account that is perhaps the most
thorough
exposition of a graphic process ever written. The broader significance
of
the book for bibliographers, however, is its thoughtful discussion of
vari-
ants among copies printed from the same plate. In the case of Blake's
il-
lustrated books, prints were produced in batches at discrete periods;
each
batch has certain stylistic features (especially in coloring) that
distinguish
it, and each subsumes various lesser variations. Although Viscomi
calls
these batches "editions" (since "impressions" in graphic-art
terminology
refers to each "copy"), they clearly are analogous to what
bibliographers
of printed books call "impressions" or "printings." The example of
Blake
is of course unique in some ways, but Viscomi's approach to it provides
a
model for thinking about variants in non-letterpress material in general.
As I
noted in my 1982 essay, bibliographers often need to relate a
given
illustration (and different states of it that may appear in different
copies
of an edition) to its history as an independent entity (offered for sale
on
its own); and reading Viscomi can help a bibliographer to approach
this
problem. (He also deals with the editorial implications of his
analysis:
see my review in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49
[1994–95], 534–537,
reprinted in Portraits and Reviews
[2015], pp. 334–337.)
One more basic and distinctive publication is Roger Gaskell's
"Print-
ing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration" (The Book
Collector, 53 [2004], 213–251). He begins by pointing
out, quite rightly,
that bibliography has been verbal-text-oriented and that "a
bibliography
of images" is needed, one that deals not only with inserted
illustrations
but also those (even when produced on different presses) that appear
on
the same pages as verbal text. His approach thus moves a step beyond
my
essay, which was largely concerned with inserted plates. After an account
of
the history and process of copperplate printing (drawing on the early
rolling-press
manuals), Gaskell makes a number of observations based on
an examination of some
seventeenth-century books with engravings. He
notes, for example, that plates were
usually printed on the mould side of
the paper, with chainlines parallel to the
shorter sides of the image. The
plates were normally printed by a different printer at a different location,
and often two or more images (sometimes intended for different books)
were printed on the same sheet; the plates for a given book appear on
mixed paper stocks somewhat more often than the letterpress text does.
Descriptive bibliographers will be particularly interested in knowing
(whether or
not the intended placement of plates was specified in print)
that printers
occasionally put the plates in their proper positions before
sending the folded and
gathered sheets to the binder (who, in first-class
work, may have removed them
before beating the sheets and then re-
placed them). Sometimes engravings were
printed on the same sheets as
letterpress text, and in those instances the
letterpress was printed first,
with spaces left for the engravings, before the
sheets were sent to the
rolling-press printer (with faulty register a not uncommon
result). It is
worth remembering, as Gaskell notes, that engravings would have
been
added to the letterpress in a single press run for the whole edition
and
are thus less likely to display variations than inserted plates, which
could
have been printed before or after the letterpress and possibly in
distinct
batches. Gaskell concludes with advice for descriptive bibliographers:
that
they should record "the spatial relationship of graphics and verbal
text,
the internal reference systems in use, [and] the placing and folding of
the
plates" (p. 233), all of which help to reveal author' and publishers'
inten
tions. Although Gaskell focuses on engravings, he includes a discussion
of
woodcuts (pp. 232–233) and believes that his approach is applicable
to lithography.
His article should be required reading for all descriptive
bibliographers who deal
with illustrated books.
A good analysis of an instance of adding an engraving to letterpress
is offered by
Randall McLeod ("Orlando F. Booke") in "IMAGIC: a long
discourse" (Studies in the Literary Imagination, 32.1
[Spring 1999], 190–215).
See also Karen Bowen, "Illustrating Books with
Engravings: Plantin's
Working Practices Revealed" (Print
Quarterly, 20 [2003], 3–34). The pres-
ence of engravings on
integral letterpress leaves poses no problem for the
letterpress collation formula,
since those leaves can simply be regarded
as letterpress leaves. But sometimes
inserted leaves contain both letter-
press and non-letterpress, and the question of
whether to report them in
the letterpress collation or the non-letterpress collation
was not taken up
in my 1982 essay. Therefore I will add here a
generally applicable rule
of thumb: when the letterpress part consists of words that
connect with
the verbal text on the adjacent pages, the insertion belongs in the
let-
terpress formula; but when the letterpress part is directly related to
the
non-letterpress image (as with a caption) rather than to the
surrounding
verbal text, the insertion belongs in the non-letterpress formula. It
should
same treatment as a non-letterpress one—when, for example, it contains
only a chart or a table, without verbal text connecting it to the adjacent
pages. (See also my comments, under "Collation" above, regarding the
role of textual content in structural formulas.)
More information on the rolling press can be found in Anthony
Dy-
son, "The Rolling-Press: Some Aspects of Its Development from
the
Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth Century" (Journal of the
Printing
Historical Society, 17 [1982–83], 1–30), and in his Pictures to Print: The
Nineteenth-Century Engraving Trade
(1984). Gascoigne can be supplemented
on photography by Richard Benson's
The Physical Print: A Brief Survey of
the Photographic
Process (2005). And for lithography there are the books
by the
great scholar of the subject, Michael Twyman, including Early
Lithographed Books: A Study of the Design and Production of
Improper Books in
the Age of the Handpress (1990), which deals
with verbal-text books printed
entirely by lithography, and A
History of Chromolithography (2013), which
includes color plates
of sequential color proofs with magnified images.
Also useful for bibliographers are
Geoffrey Wakeman, Graphic Methods
in
Book Illustration (1981); Gavin D. R.
Bridson and Donald E. Wendel, Print-
making in the Service of Botany (1986); Lois Olcott
Price, "The Development
of Photomechanical Book Illustration," in The American Illustrated Book in
the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gerald W. R. Ward (1987), pp. 233–256; Carol
Wax,
The Mezzotint: History and Technique (1990); and
Bamber Gascoigne,
Milestones in Colour Printing,
1457–1859
(1997).
The matter of terminology—that is, the relation of the classificatory
terms used by
letterpress bibliographers to those used by scholars treat-
ing non-letterpress
processes—is the main concern of Sarah
Tyacke's
"Describing Maps," in The Book Encompassed,
ed. Peter Davison (1992),
pp. 130–141. Her
survey of cartobibliographical approaches to early
maps shows that the emphasis has
often been on the production of indi-
vidual plates (and their states) rather than
on the published combinations
of images printed from the plates; but she recognizes
that cartobibliog-
raphy must combine these approaches, and she makes particularly
clear
the difficulties of accounting for atlas editions made up of widely
varying
combinations of states of plates. These difficulties have caused some
car-
tobibliographers to reject the term "edition"; but she believes that
"the
word 'edition', if sensibly applied, is still useful." She does not,
however,
formulate her own definition of this or other terms, though she
adds,
"The balance [in current usage] seems to be coming down in favour
of
defining the word 'plate' as the equivalent of a book 'edition'" (p.
138).
But such a definition applies only to plates as independent entities,
not
to the collections that form "books" (such as atlases). The random nature
causes her to say that "often only the title and text are the identifiers of
some new stage in their [the plates'] history"—but that in itself points
to a distinct publishing effort that can define an edition of a book as a
whole, regardless of how many variants exist within it. As I pointed out
in 1982, a basic complication of dealing with all non-letterpress contribu-
tions to books, not just maps, is that they often have separate histories
outside the books; but that complication does not prevent the application
of standard bibliographical classification both to the printed plates and
to the books. Bibliographers who wish to gain additional background for
thinking about these questions may find Tyacke's essay useful.
An excellent example of a descriptive bibliography concerned with
books consisting
entirely of engravings is David Hunter's
Opera and Song
Books Published in England, 1703–1726
(1997). His approach is
notable for
his recognition that "the standard techniques of bibliographical
descrip-
tion and the concepts of analytical bibliography … are applicable
to
non-letterpress material" (p. xxiv). They "have all been tested," he says
(in
his thorough discussion of "Bibliographical Description" in his
introduc-
tion, pp. xxiv-xxxvi), "and have been found to apply"—with only a
few
adjustments needed. One of them is that for these books an impression
(in
the bibliographer's sense of the copies printed at one time) is often
distinguished
by whether one or both sides of each leaf were printed, or
else by the use of
modified "passe-partout" title pages (in which the plate
has a blank space to be
filled in, usually with text from an extra small
plate). These books represent the
earliest extensive use of passe-partout
title pages, which are the most distinctive
feature that Hunter had to
deal with. To accommodate them, he created two new
symbols for use
in title-page transcriptions to mark the beginnings and ends of the
blank
spaces. Other small modifications arise from the fact that these books
are
made up primarily of disjunct leaves printed one at a time, and often
on
only one side. Bibliographers dealing with the same kind of books will
be
helped by examining Hunter's thoughtful practice, whether or not they
decide
to follow it in every respect.
An article expressing the same conclusion as Hunter's—that "the
standard methods of
descriptive bibliography" can be used in dealing
with engraved matter—is Ronald K. Smeltzer's "Typographic Books
from Intaglio Printing
Plates" (Caxtonian [Caxton Club], 24.5 [May
2016],
1–5). The difference here is that Smeltzer focuses on
verbal-text books
printed entirely from intaglio plates, with each plate being made
up of
multiple text-pages arranged for folding into gatherings (and even
bearing
signatures). Obviously the structure of such books can be represented
by
the usual style of formula that is regularly employed for letterpress
books.
Smeltzer's only innovation arises from the fact
that the book he chooses
proposes noting them within the formula in bold-face type, to distinguish
them from the intaglio-printed leaves. This suggestion seems appropri-
ate in such an instance, for nothing would be gained (and indeed some
clarity lost) by creating a second formula for the few letterpress leaves
of verbal text. Thus there can be occasions on which it is not objection-
able to report the products of two different printing processes in a single
formula, as long as the two are clearly distinguished. The nature of the
content of the inserted leaves is likely to play a role, as I suggested above
in connection with leaves that combine letterpress with intaglio. The book
Smeltzer describes also has nine engraved folding illustrations inserted,
but he sensibly does not include them in the formula for the gathered
sheets and letterpress inserts, even though they were printed by the same
method as the gathered sheets.
An example of an unusually detailed description of a plate book is
Lord Wardington's "Sir Robert Dudley and
the
Arcano del Mare.
1646–8
and 1661" (The Book
Collector, 52 [2003], 317–355). Other good, but less
elaborate,
descriptions of plates are in Paul W. Nash's "Pinxit, Sculpsit,
Excudit, Etcetera:
Some Notes on the Lettering Which Appears on Prints"
(The Private
Library, 5th ser., 4 [2001], 148–187); but the most useful
part
of his article, as the title suggests, is its glossary of terms and
abbreviations
used in prints, which serves as a supplement to Gascoigne's section
48
("Words below the Image"). One bibliography that focuses exclusively
on the
illustrations in the books it records is the second volume of
Nigel Tattersfield's
monumental
Thomas Bewick
(2011). A helpful discursive and
evaluative guide to the literature
is Gwyn Walters's "Developments in the
Study of Book
Illustration" (covering primarily post-1945 work, includ-
ing the
history of science), in The Book Encompassed, pp. 142–150.
Fuller
listings are Gavin D. R. Bridson and Geoffrey Wakeman's
Printmaking &
Picture Printing (1984); Bridson and James J. White's
Plant, Animal & Ana-
tomical Illustration in Art &
Science (1990); and my Introduction to
Bibliography
(2002 revision), part 7, pp. 225–236, which
includes references both to
art-historical works and to technical treatises and
cites additional check-
lists. The literature is large, but bibliographers cannot
avoid exploring
some of it if they are to treat the non-letterpress parts of books
as carefully
as they do the letterpress parts.
PUBLISHERS' BINDINGS, ENDPAPERS, AND JACKETS
When descriptive bibliographies are conceived as records of books as
published, and
thus as contributions to publishing history, the only bind-
ings that are relevant
to the basic descriptions are those commissioned by
publishers as the outward form
in which their books were to be offered
authors, printers, publishers, and subjects (as opposed to catalogues of
specific collections) provide binding descriptions only for books published
in edition-bindings, which became common in the 1820s. Before that
time, however, booksellers (or others fulfilling the publishing function)
did apparently often place portions of some editions on sale in a form of
temporary or unfinished binding; and when such bindings can be identi-
fied (as with the boards-and-label style of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries), they would properly be included in basic descrip-
tions. (See the comments on the recent work of Nicholas Pickwoad and
Aaron T. Pratt under "Ideal Copy" above.)
Some account of the craft or custom (that is, non-publishers') bind-
ings that are
found on most books from before the 1820s may be given
in descriptive
bibliographies in the paragraph on the copies examined,
where any post-publication
features of individual copies can be recorded
(see "Arrangement" below). Such
accounts, when they exist, are usually
very brief; the place where more detailed
descriptions of custom bindings
occur is in catalogues of collections, where the
focus is on the particular
copies that happen to have been brought together in those
collections.
The historical study of the structure and decorative styles of custom
book-
bindings is a distinct field, with its own terminology and an
extensive
and distinguished literature. The best sources to turn to for basic
guid-
ance are relatively recent ones: David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles
1450–1850: A Handbook
(2005, 2014); the chapter on "Armorials, Other
Binding
Stamps & External Features" in his Provenance Research in
Book
History (1994), pp. 97–131; Mirjam M.
Foot, "Bookbinding and the His-
tory of Books," in A
Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Nicolas
Barker
(1993), pp. 113–126; Nicholas
Pickwoad, "The Interpretation of Book-
binding Structure: An Examination of
Sixteenth-Century Bindings in the
Ramey Collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library,"
The Library, 6th ser.,
17 (1995), 209–249; and
Philipp. J. M. Marks, The British Library
Guide
to Bookbinding: History and Techniques (1998). A recent
example of a great
descriptive catalogue with detailed accounts of bindings is Giles Barber's
The James
A. De Rothschild Bequest (2013). Other outstanding work of
recent
years can be found in any book by A. R. A. Hobson,
H. M. Nixon, or
Mirjam M.
Foot. (A long list of the literature of custom binding appears
in my Introduction to Bibliography [2002 revision], section
8D, pp. 239–248;
for publishers' bindings, see section 8E, pp. 248–251.)
In the strictest sense, publishers' "bindings" are not bindings but rather
casings,
since the cloth-covered boards and spine constitute a case that
is manufactured
separately and into which the sheets are fastened. But
the term "publisher's
binding" (or "edition-binding") is widely used and
"case." The description of publishers' bindings requires a means for citing
colors and cloth grains; describing endpapers also entails noting colors
and sometimes (in the case of marbled papers) the various patterns that
marblers have traditionally used; and accounting for jackets obviously in-
cludes the identification of colors. I took these matters up in three essays,
on color (1967), patterns (1970), and jackets (1971, supplemented in 2011),
including in them some suggested wordings for the relevant paragraphs
in descriptive bibliographies.
Color
"A System of Color Identification for Bibliographical Description"
was published
in Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), 203–234,
and reprinted
in my Selected Studies in Bibliography
(1979), pp. 139–170. My recommen-
dation of the ISCC-NBS Centroid Color Charts, emerging from an extensive
survey of
possibilities, was clearly the correct one, and those charts have
gained fairly
wide acceptance among bibliographers since then. Their use
was endorsed in Philip Gaskell's
A New Introduction to Bibliography
[1972,
1974], pp. 238–239, and, for the
book-conservation community, in Abbey
Newsletter for
December 1980. A list of eighteen bibliographies using the
charts was
published in 1990 by Craig S. Abbott in
"Designating Color
in Descriptive Bibliography: The ISCC-NBS Method in Practice"
(Papers
of the Bibliographical Society of America, 84:
119–129).
Abbott also explained some of the mistakes made in those
bibliog-
raphies in the use of the charts, the most basic one being a failure
to
understand that each chip represents the center of the color-name
block
designated by the accompanying number and abbreviated name.
Thus
bibliographers who say their matches are inexact do not recognize
that
their choice of the closest match in each case does in fact provide
an
exact match to the area surrounding the centroid chip. I made this point
in
1967, but it cannot be stated too often, considering how
frequently
bibliographers have misunderstood it. (Although Abbott objects to the
phrase "centroid number"—and the citation of a
specific number in the
form "Centroid 191"—as indicative of this confusion, I
think the usage
can be condoned as a shorthand version of "the number associated
with
a chip in the ISCC-NBS Centroid Color Charts.") Abbott further notes that
bibliographers have sometimes
misinterpreted the abbreviations assigned
to the color-name blocks and expanded
them improperly—not realizing,
for instance, that lower-case letters indicate the
"-ish" form of a color
name (so that "yG," yellowish green, is a different color
from "YG," yel-
low green). As Abbott observes, many
bibliographers have seemingly used
the charts without consulting the related
ISCC-NBS dictionary, where
provides some useful cautions for bibliographers wishing to employ the
Centroid Charts.
One of the requirements I formulated for an appropriate color-
matching system
was that there should be "strong assurance of continued
availability in the
future." Because the Centroid Color Charts were
published
by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), I believed that they met
this
requirement. Unfortunately, however, in 1983 the NBS
discontinued their
sale, pending the results of a test of the stability of the
color chips by the
color consultant H. Hemmendinger; and
in February 1984 the NBS dis-
covered that twenty-seven of the chips
(out of 251) had shifted enough to
move from one color-name block to another.
Although the charts were
included in the NBS's 1984–85 catalogue of
Standard Reference Materials
and in the March
1984 price list, they did not appear in the
October
1984 price list and have not been available from the NBS
since then. On
6 April 1984 I wrote a long letter to Richard W. Seward of the Standard
Reference Materials
section, explaining why the charts were essential for
bibliographical work and
(recognizing that bibliographers formed a small
constituency) making the obvious
point that a color standard was needed
in many areas of endeavor. It seemed to me,
I said, that a "national
bureau of standards" could be expected to provide a
standard for color
designations. I received no reply, and three months later (on 9
July 1984)
I telephoned Stanley D.
Rasberry, chief of the Office of Standard Refer-
ence Materials, with whom
I had a cordial but unencouraging conversa-
tion. He confirmed that distribution
of the charts had stopped, and he
said that the only hope for any resumed
production (since the NBS did
not have its own color laboratory) was the receipt
of private funding.
There the matter has rested, except that over the years several
persons
associated with the development of the charts have privately sold
copies
from the small stock that remained (after the distribution of many
cop-
ies by the NBS), out of an original edition of 20,000. The most recent
of
those persons has been Nick Hale, who had been technical
director
of the Munsell Color Company at the time it oversaw the production
of
the charts (by the Tobey Color Card Company) and who had alerted the
NBS to
the problem of shifting in 1983. Hale's
possession of the stock was
publicized to the bibliographical world on 19 July
1996 by Sandra Alston
(of the Fisher
Library at the University of Toronto) through the email
list of the
Bibliographical Society of Canada. When Hale (then of Hale
Color Consultants, Inc., which is now in Naples, Florida) sent out
copies,
he included with each set a statement about the color shifts, along with
a
thorough report of the results of the 1984 measurements; and as of
June
2003, at which time about 150 sets were left, he also enclosed
a brief ac-
count of the history of the Centroid
Charts.
The significant color-chip shifts discovered in 1984—that is,
the
twenty-seven that shifted from one color-name block to another—are
as
follows: the chip for block 24 shifted to block 235; 56 to 59; 59 to 62;
75
to 78; 108 to 110; 118 to 125; 126 to 138; 129 to 131; 139 to 141; 147
to
166; 194 to 197; 195 to 199; 196 to 200; 197 to 201; 198 to 202; 200 to
204;
206 to 210; 208 to 212; 213 to 202; 215 to 229; 218 to 223; 220 to
225;
221 to 226; 225 to 243; 239 to 259; 247 to 250; and 257 to 260.
Persons
who consult descriptive bibliographies that cite centroid numbers
(and
the corresponding color names) should be aware that these
twenty-seven
numbers may not be accurate (depending on the date of the
bibliogra-
pher's work). But given the approximate nature of such citations in
the
first place, along with the fact that the only major chip shifts are to
closely
related color blocks, the shifting is not likely to render any
previously
written description seriously defective. The copies of the charts that
are
used in connection with reading these bibliographies may not of
course
precisely match those that were used by the bibliographers, but this
situ-
ation is not a serious problem. In 2003, Hale expressed the belief, based
on his long experience, that the chips
had probably changed very little
since 1984 and thus were still
usable.
Whether new descriptions, however, should be based on the Centroid
Charts is a question that one might at first think ought to be
answered in
the negative. After all, they are not readily available, and at least
twenty-
seven of the samples in them are not accurate. But it may be that there
is
no satisfactory alternative from a practical point of view. The two
main
contenders are the charts produced by the Munsell Color Company and
by
Pantone, Inc. Munsell has tradition behind it, since the Munsell system
is the
fundamental one of the twentieth century (see my discussion of it in
the
1967 essay) and is in fact the system on which the centroid sampling
of
the color solid is based. And the Munsell Book of Color
is published in two
editions, one with glossy and the other with matte samples
(over 1600 of
them). The fact that matte samples are available and
that the samples are
removable makes the Munsell Book
especially appropriate for bibliographi-
cal use (and it is indeed widely employed
for scientific as well as industrial
purposes). It is unwieldy, however, and at
present each edition costs about
$1000. It is not suitable for bibliographers to
carry easily with them,
and most will not wish to spend the money on a copy.
Libraries could
of course be encouraged to purchase copies for their
special-collections
reading rooms, but inevitably bibliographers will still find
many places
without a copy.
Pantone is more commercially oriented than Munsell, but bibliogra-
phers will be
interested in the fact that the Pantone system is frequently
used in the
graphic-design and printing industries. There is a wide variety
of Pantone
Matching System Color Guides for different purposes; most
or uncoated samples, identify each one with a Pantone number and name,
and cost in the $100–$500 range. A loose-leaf book is also available, as
well as apps for mobile devices. And there are several websites (such as
www.pantone-colours.com) that offer comprehensive showings of Pan-
tone colors, each labeled only with a Pantone number; but matching to
a computer screen is not recommended, since colors can vary from one
screen to another. (Pantone is a subsidiary of X-Rite, which offers spec-
trophotometers, but besides their costliness they go beyond the specificity
required for bibliography.) A compact and convenient book does exist,
called The Pantone Book of Color (1990), by Leatrice Eiseman and Lawrence Herbert, who provide an informative introduction. It displays 1024 col-
ors labeled with Pantone numbers and with names; the Pantone names,
however, are often fanciful—such as "dusty jade green" or "moonlite
mauve" or "apricot wash"—and are not appropriate for bibliographical
citation.
The matter of naming is vitally important, since a description must
enable one to
visualize a color without recourse to a chart (though a chip
number is there for
times when greater precision is needed). The merit
of the ISCC-NBS naming system
(used in the Centroid Charts) is that only
commonly
understood adjectives are used. The ISCC-NBS dictionary
(discussed in my essay)
enables one to convert Munsell notations as well
as centroid numbers to the
standard color names; but the use of Pantone
numbers (though it would allow easy
access to an approximation of the
colors on the internet) would not accommodate
the use of those names.
Taking all these considerations into account,
bibliographers would be
well advised to follow one of two courses. (1) Continue to
use the Centroid
Charts, since 89.2% of the chips are
probably still accurate (in that any
shifting has not moved them out of their
color-name blocks) and since the
other 10.8% can be assumed to have shifted to
such closely related color-
name blocks as not to invalidate a description (which
in any case refers to
a segment of the color solid, not a single point). (2) Use
the Munsell Book
of Color when convenient to do so,
supplementing it at other times with
the Centroid Charts;
combining the two in a single bibliography poses no
problem as long as all the
names are expressed in the ISCC-NBS standard
forms. Besides the ISCC-NBS
dictionary, another source for the equiva-
lences is a website provided by the
Texas Precancel Club, which lists the
centroid numbers and names along with the
equivalent Munsell nota-
tions and small color samples: search the internet for
"NBS/ISCC Color
System - Tx4.us", or use "tx4.us/nbs-iscc.htm". An example of a
bibliog-
raphy that uses the centroid system and also supplies the
corresponding
Munsell notation in each instance (as "perhaps more accessible") is
David Alan Richards's
Kipling (2010), which thus sets a valuable
precedent.
Patterns
The essay I wrote on "The Bibliographical Description of Patterns"
(covering
cloth grains and marbled papers, as well as the stamping applied
to the cloth for
particular editions) appeared in Studies in Bibliography,
23
(1970), 71–102, and was reprinted in my Selected Studies in Bibliography
(1979), pp. 171–202. Since
that time there has been a great deal of interest
in the description of
nineteenth-century publishers' bindings; but there
is one publication that stands
out as a promising guide for future use. It
is Andrea
Krupp's
Bookcloth in England and America, 1823–50
(2008), a
slightly revised version of an article in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America, 100
(2006), 25–87. This work emerged from an ongoing project
by two
conservators (Krupp and Jennifer Woods
Rosner) at the Library
Company of Philadelphia called "The Database of
Nineteenth-Century
Cloth Bindings (available online via the Library Company's
website, under
"Collections," then "Conservation Department Research on
Bindings").
Based on the Library Company's holdings, each entry in this
excellently
designed database includes more than sixty fields of data on binding
cloth
and design, binding structure, sewing patterns, and endpapers,
providing
a wealth of information that is beginning to make possible a more
detailed
understanding of the history of publishers' bindings and a more
exact
determination of the dates of undated books or successive
bindings-up.
The heart of the publication (in both 2006 and
2008) is a "Catalogue
of Nineteenth-Century Bookcloth Grains"
containing actual-size color
photographs of 125 grain patterns (plus six
variants)—far more than have
been published in previous sets of photographs for
bibliographical use.
Krupp thinks of her book as a
"'field guide' for identifying and dating
nineteenth-century bookcloth."
Each photograph is labeled with a reference code and a descriptive
name. The
basic names are the ones previously used by Carter, Sadleir,
Gaskell, Ball, and me, though some of the modifying adjectives are
new,
and "moiré" is taken as a family name, not a modifier. (Krupp claims that
I use "a different approach"—different from supplying
names—by as-
signing "letter and number codes"; but I emphasized in my essay, as I
do
again now, the importance of a standard terminology consisting of
com-
monly understood words.) The codes consist of three-letter
abbreviations
of the grain families, with attached numbers reflecting the
arbitrary order
of the photographs within each family. Thus "Ban8: Fine dotted
ribbon"
is the eighth photograph in the section devoted to the "Bands" family,
and
"Wav3: Diagonal wave" is the third in the "Waves" section. The
twelve
families are Bands; Beads; Diapers and Diamonds; Hexagonal;
Leather
Textures; Moiré; Nets and Meshes; Ribs; Ripples; Sand, Pebble,
Bubble;
Waves; and Weaves and Checkerboards—supplemented with a
"Miscel-
laneous" section and one called "Winterbottom," which shows sixteen
have appeared in reference works and thatrepresent versions of patterns
used in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. This "Catalogue"
is accompanied by a "Table of Nineteenth-Century Bookcloth Grains,"
which for each grain states thenumber of examples thus far entered in the
database and their date range (extremely useful information) and then, for
any grain illustrated in one of seven previously published sets of photo-
graphs (Carter, Sadleir, BAL, Tanselle, Gaskell, Ball, and Winterbottom),
gives the corresponding notations. There is also a separate set of color
photographs called "Catalogue of Nineteenth-Century Ribbon-Embossed
Bookcloth," consisting of 122 examples (plus six variants) of abstract, flo-
ral, and geometric patterns that are "larger than 6 mm. per repeat."
The result is a reference work that surpasses in various respects any-
thing
available before—though any of the earlier reference works can
still be used,
preferably with Krupp numbers also cited (and her
"Ta-
ble" makes it relatively easy to give such correspondences). But
inevi-
tably questions may be raised. Although Krupp has
not tried to create
a logically comprehensive system of classification (simply
listing families
of patterns in alphabetical order), one may still question the
inclusion
of a "Miscellaneous" section. And the "Winterbottom" section
results
from her belief that merging Winterbottom's late
nineteenth-and early
twentieth-century versions of patterns into the sections
displaying earlier
versions would be misleading. But its presence shows that the
"Catalogue
of Nineteenth-Century Bookcloth Grains"is not meant to
be limited
to the 1823–50 period (the dates in the title of the book), even though
the
bulk of the examples in the "Catalogue" (and "Database") are from be-
fore
1869, reflecting thework thus far done with the holdings of the
Li-
brary Company. The insertion of the Winterbottom examples in their
proper
places, however, would not mislead anyone since their dates (like
the dates of all
the other examples) are included in the "Table"—and
perhaps all the dates should
be given in the captions to the photographs
as well. Taking this step would make
clearer the way in which Krupp's
"Catalogue" can
gradually be expanded in the future.
The same thoughts are raised by Krupp's segregation of
ribbon-
embossed patterns into a separate catalogue, using a different style
of
codes for patterns (and for variants) and providing no names. She
rec-
ognizes that "another option would be to give each pattern a name (or
a
code) and integrate them fully into one large table…. There is
certainly
much more work to be done in that area than the amount of attention
I
have given them here" (p. 16). It is worth noting that when she
generalizes
about the number of patterns, she does include ribbon-embossed
exam-
ples in the totals. (One could argue, as I did in note 16 of my 1970 essay,
ally for each book; yet ribbon-embossed patterns, being a characteristic of
cloths prior to their use on individual books,can logically be distinguished
from the frames and lettering stamped into the cloth for those books. I will
add here that the basic cloth weave can be a distinguishing feature even
for embossed cloth and should not be overlooked when examining the
embossed pattern.) Incorporating the "Miscellaneous," "Winterbottom,"
and ribbon-embossed examples into the main body of the "Catalogue"
would be a first step toward making Krupp's system (however arbitrary) a
more welcoming and appropriate framework for future expansion.
The most important discussion of Krupp's work is B. J. McMullin's
"Patterned Book Cloth: A Review Essay," in
Script & Print, 32 (2008),
163–175. After a
historical sketch of the development of bibliographical
thinking on the subject
(containing some trenchant observations), McMul-
lin brings up the basic problem raised by the proliferation of
examples
shown by Krupp: should the set of photographs
be indefinitely expanded
as additional grains and variants are noted that do not
precisely match
any of those already illustrated? The fact that some patterns are
provided
with an additional photograph or two labeled "var1" or "var2"
implies
that such expansion is expected. It is not clear, however, why
additional
photographs would necessarily be preferable to added words for this
pur-
pose. As McMullin notes, the situation is
epitomized in the "diaper" cat-
egory, where the illustrations are for ultra-fine
diaper (defined as 20–22
units percentimeter), fine (10–15/cm.), medium (8–9/cm.),
coarse and
smooth (4/cm. each), and (anomalously)"5.5 diaper." The precedent
set
here would require more photographs for diapers that fall between 15
and
20 units per centimeter, or between 4 and 8 (except for 5.5). But a
series
of illustrations accomplishes nothing more than is achieved by simply
using
the word "diaper" followed by the measurement. A photograph of
diaper
would still be needed, but additional photographs serve no purpose
(and
indeed can be a complication, since the closest match at one time
might
no longer be the closest match after the insertion of
morephotographs).
The "Beads," "Nets," and "Ribs" categories offer exactly the
same situ-
ation, but in all categories the adjectives of degree ("coarse,"
"fine," etc.)
do not cover all the possibilities.
Such omissions occur, of course, because the photographs represent
the books thus
far examined for the "Database"; but a comprehensive
"field guide" to a class of
artifacts cannot be constructed in that way
because, even at the price of
continued revisions, it will always be unsat-
isfying in certain situations. The
"Database" itself is a great accomplish-
ment; and as it grows—incorporating, one
hopes, records from many
collections other than the Library Company's—it will
become even more
bindings can be drawn. And it is appropriate that a field guide should be
a by-product of such a database. But the relation between the two needs
to be further thought through. In one respect the field guide is bound
to grow as the database does, because a field guide should illustrate all
distinct patterns, however rarely used some of them are. But in another
respect it should not grow, for if it attempts to register variations of dis-
tinctpatterns it will become more bewildering than helpful. Deciding
which patterns are "distinct" may to some extent be debatable, but it is
not nearly as intractable a problem as defining variations within them,
since the latter are nearly infinite in number. A classification scheme, by
definition, should deal with diversity not by reproducing it but by pro-
viding a path through it. Contrasting the classification of bookcloth with
that of color helps to illustrate the problem. As I pointed out in my 1970
essay, color is anatural phenomenon with definite limits and a continuum
within those limits; one can thus scientifically sample that continuum at
spatial intervals. Cloth patterns do not offer this opportunity, for it is
not possible to determine "centroids" within their variations. One can of
course subdivide patterns according to measurements of their repeated
units, as Krupp has done in a few instances (though her measurements are
not based on regular intervals); but, given the essential difference between
patterns and color, the result would not provide a necessary visual aid,
as centroid colors do.
Since the large number of photographs in Krupp's
"Catalogue" is not
entirely an advantage, bibliographers may well find it
preferable to limit
themselves primarily to her examples inwhich the name of the
grain
has no adjective or measurement attached and then to add
whatever
modifiers seem necessary on a given occasion—as in "coarse (8/cm.)
Rib
(cf. Krupp Rib3)." The fact that Krupp's photographs are actual size al-
lows one to know(through direct
measurement of unit-repeats in cases
where a measurement is not stated) the norm
fromwhich "coarse" and
"fine" variants depart. (The use of "cf." in my example
seems desirable,
though it differs slightly from my 1970 suggestion. Even when the
specific
variant is pictured in Krupp. it might be
better to cite only the Krupp
photograph of the basic
pattern, both for uniformity and to allow for
possible future revisions in Krupp's "Catalogue.") Bibliographers could
also do their
matching against the photographs I have published or those
provided by Gaskell (see below), since the smaller number of examples
in
those sets (36 and 29 respectively) do after all include the great
majority
of patterns found on nineteenth-century books and since the basic
names
given in them are the same as those used by Krupp.
This last point is not crucial, however, because Krupp's
"Table" al-
lows one, when consulting (or writing) a bibliography employing any of
grain in the "Catalogue"—and to find it online. Indeed, it is the presence
online of the "Catalogue" (along with the associated "Database") that
makes Krupp seem the most convenient reference for bibliographers to
cite, despite its limitations. One hopes that the "Table" will be added to
the online resources, since without it one still has to turn to the printed
book (or article) to make conversions between Krupp's code and earlier
ones and to learn the date range of each grain; and the measurement of
repeated units in every grain should be stated, since the pictures on the
website are no longer actual size.Presumably the online version will be
continuously revised to incorporate new grains (as the database grows)
and perhaps to rectify some of the flaws in the printed versions. Most
bibliographers and users of bibliographies are likely to have a portable
electronic device at hand as they examine books, or will not find it incon-
venient to make sure that they do.
Bibliographers should be aware of two other very large databases of
bindings that
allow for searching by a particular cloth grain; although
they give one access to
many images of bindings, neither is as appropriate
as the Library Company's for
bibliographers to use as a basic reference
in identifying the cloth on a book in
hand. One is "Publishers' Bindings
Online 1815–1930: The Art of
Books" (on the website of theUniversity
of Alabama Library and the University of
Wisconsin—Madison Library,
the partners in this project). It does provide (under
"Research Tools") a
"Gallery of Book-Cloth Grain Patterns" showing fifteen basic
grains la-
beled with standard names; each image can be enlarged and offers a
link
for searching the database for examples of books bound in that cloth.
The
notes on each book include the color and grain of the binding but do
not
come close to providing the amount of technical detail about binding
and
endpaper structure that the Library Company database does. Its emphasis
is
not primarily on bibliographical research (there are artistic, historical,
and
literary "galleries," each with essays and teaching tools), but it does
offer a
"gallery" of bindings by decade, accompanied by commentary.
The other database is
the British Library's "Database of Bookbindings"
(on the Library's website, under
"Catalogues," then "Bookbindings"),
which has excellent technical notes, including
the identification of cloth
grains bystandard names. But since it covers the whole
history of book-
binding as represented in the Library's collections, it contains
a relatively
small selection of publishers' cloth bindings, and it provides only a
verbal
(not a pictorial) guide to cloth-grain names for purposes of searching.
In addition to Krupp. there are three other significant
post-1970 treat-
ments of cloth grains. Two years after my essay, Philip Gaskell's
A New
Introduction to Bibliography
(1972, 1974) appeared, containing a section on
"Publisher's Cloth in Britain and
America" (pp. 238–247). Besides giving
the ISCC-NBS color system), Gaskell provides a classification of grains
and a set of photographs. He follows ingeneral my system of classifi-
cation and the naming of individual grains, though he leaves out one
("weave"), adds four ("beaded-line," "crocodile," "crackle," and "frond"),
and moves two to a different family ("bubble" becomes one of the "sand-
texture" grains, and "cord" becomes "ribbed-morocco" under "leather-
texture"). As for associated codes, Gaskell simply assigns each photograph
a number according to its place in the sequence of illustrations in his book
as a whole (beginning with "Fig. 84"). Thus his codes (unlike mine) do not
reflect a classification scheme; butthat fact is of little significance since
the order of the photographs (unlike Krupp's arbitrary order) does follow
his classification and brings related families together.
Sensibly he provides only a single photograph for each basic pattern—
that is,
only for grains whose names do not have adjectives of degree at-
tached to them.
He understands that grains "notably fine or coarse," for
example, can be specified in words, without the presence of
photographs
(even though, as in all systems, the norm represented by each
photograph
hasnot been precisely determined). My 1970 set of photographs
does
include a few fine, coarse, diagonal, and moiré examples for
illustrative
purposes but without suggesting that such photographs are necessary:
I
made clear that adjectives should be attached (as needed by the level
of
precision required) even when there is no matching photograph—and
that,
when still greater precision is desirable, a bibliographer may have
to supply one
or more additional photographs. The only thing I would
now add—whether one is
using my system or Gaskell's or Krupp's—is
that the greater precision sometimes needed to distinguish,
for example,
separate bindings-up (or secondary bindings) can often best be
achieved
by providing a measurement. On the subject of measurement, I
should
perhaps say that when a published photograph is intended only for
gen-
eral matching of a type of design (as opposed to serving as a record
of
the binding of a specific book), one does not need to know whether
the
photograph is actual size or not; but a measurement scale attached to
a
photograph (as in Krupp's basic catalogue but not her
catalogue of
ribbon-embossed patterns) is nevertheless helpful in determining when
a
match has been made.
Thirteen years after Gaskell's book, Douglas Ball published Victorian
Publishers' Bindings (1985), a thoughtful and well-documented
study that
includes a chapter entitled "The Decoration and Graining of Cloth
and
ItsBibliographical Importance" (pp. 24–31). In that chapter, Ball
points
out the potential (but not always conclusive) role of precise grain
identifi-
cations in the process of distinguishing and dating separate
bindings-up;
names of grains. But the most useful parts of his book for descriptive
bibliographers are two of the appendixes. The first, "Identification of
Cloth Grains" (pp. 123–129), besides pursuing in more detail the limita-
tions of some ofthe previously published photographs and the variations
in assigned names, offers descriptive comments on the basic families of
patterns. One of the emphases throughout—and properly so—is on the
importance of measuring the frequency of repeated elements in designs
in order to give precision to any modifying adjectives and the norms
they relate to. He suggests approximate norms for rib grain (11 repeats
per centimeter), ripple (25+/cm.), dot-and-line (perhaps 2.5–3.5/cm.),
checkerboard (perhaps 4/cm.), diaper (6/cm.), and bead (5.5/cm.). Then
he offers a particularly helpful discussion of the morocco family (pp. 126–
128), dividing those with "linearly directional" ribs into ribbed morocco
(with basically continuous ribs and converging channels, 8–9/cm.), cord
(with ribs separated by cross-creases, 8–9/cm.), and parallel cord (with
channels that generally do not converge). These measurements may be of
use to bibliographers in deciding when to add such adjectives as "fine";
but those adjectives can merely be suggestive, and precision can come
only with appended measurements. The second appendix, "Further Data
on Grains" (pp. 130–142), consists of two parts, the first being a table of
"Dates and Frequency of Use" (pp. 132–136), which assembles informa-
tion drawn from some 2600 entries in the first volume of Sadleir's XIX
Century Fiction. The data given here, when combined with those in Krupp's
"Table," form essential context for discussions of dating. The other part
of the appendix, "Some Additional Grains" (pp. 137–141), describes and
illustrates seven grains not dealt with in previous sources—but now incor-
porated into Krupp's guide. (Bibliographers will also wish to know of the
remarkable amount of detail in another appendix, "Nineteenth-Century
Edition Binders' Signatures," pp. 168–192).
The other of the significant post-1970 books is William
Tomlinson and
Richard Masters's
Bookcloth 1823–1980
(1996). Primarily a detailed
and
illustrated history of the bookcloth industry, it contains much
information
not otherwise available, drawing on the knowledge and materials
that
Tomlinson acquired in a sixty-year career in the
field, part of the time
with the Winterbottom Book Cloth Company of Manchester, a
promi-
nent supplier of bookcloth after 1853 and the dominant one
from 1891
to 1980. There are two chapters of particular interest for
bibliographers,
"Description of Bookcloth Qualities: (pp. 86–107) and
"Identification of
Designs (Grains)" (pp. 108–123), the first supplemented with
thirty-six
tipped-in cloth swatches and the second with thirty, dating from
after
1891. The first group is instructive in allowing one to feel
some of the
variety was available (some fifty qualities are described) cannot be put
to direct use by bibliographers, who deal with cloth attached to covers.
The second group, showing patterns ("designs"), turns out not to be more
useful for identification than good photographs. In any case, the late date
of all the samples means that this book cannot offer an appropriate gen-
eral standard for bibliographers—along with the fact that only arbitrary
letter codes are used (though they were employed, with some variation,
in the Bibliography of American Literature). What the book does accomplish
is to make clear to bibliographers how inexact all their descriptions are
when compared to what was necessary in the cloth trade: in 1948, for
example, Winterbottom's advertised "41 Qualities, 71 Designs and 688
Colours, equal to almost 50,000 different Effects." (Despite this profu-
sion, twentieth-century books in general use rather plain cloth and do
not display the variety of patterns found on nineteenth-century books.)
The authors recognize that bibliographical description does not normally
require the same precision as that employed by a cloth supplier,but they
add that using cloth as evidence for dating may well require something
closer to it.
In my 1998 review of this book (Printing History, 19.1: 39;
reprinted
in my Portraits and Reviews [2015], pp. 345–347),
I cited an example of
the kind of information it supplies that is especially
valuable for bibliog-
raphers: sometimes it was more economical to cut the cloth
in a "two-
way" fashion rather than "one-way," with the result that the cloth
pattern
might run vertically on some copies of an edition and horizontally
on
others (and thus the two directions may not signify separate bindings-
up).
A footnote to the Tomlinson-Masters bookappeared in 2002 in the
form of an article
by Willman Spawn and Thomas E.
Kinsella ("The
Description of Bookcloth: Making a Case for More
Precision," Papers
of the Bibliographical Society of
America, 96: 341–349), which describes the
William
Tomlinson Bookcloth Collection at Bryn Mawr College and lists
the
forty-three pattern books it contains (dating from the mid-1920s to
the 1980s),
plus Winterbottom's 1958 code book. The authors make the
point (previously
observed by Tomlinson and Masters)
that "established
bibliographical conventions do not account for the known
complexities
of bookcloth"; they grant that descriptive bibliographers may not
usually
need to go beyond those conventions, but they state (what is clearly
true)
that book history in general would benefit from research in such
archives
as exist, for the purpose of discovering the manufacturer, date, and
trade
specifications for the cloth found on particular books.
An additional work displaying cloth grains, but obviously not a can-
didate for a
bibliographical standard, is Geoffrey Wakeman's
Nineteenth
Century Trade Binding (1983). Its second volume
is a folder containing a
mens, plus four pages showing seventy-one rubbings of Winterbottom
designs. Support for Krupp's system comes from another publication:
Carlo Dumontet's "Nineteenth-Century Bookcloth Grain Classification
and the Special Collections Cataloguer" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America, 104 [2010], 105–112), which recommends the insertion of her
system of naming into the thesaurus of controlled vocabularies for cata-
loguers, especially the "Art & Architecture Thesaurus Online" (on the
Getty Research Institute's website) and the Rare Book and Manuscript
Section's "Binding Terms" (on its website). The latter is perhaps now
superseded by the online "Language of Bindings" thesaurus (established
through Nicholas Pickwoad's Ligatus project at the University of the Arts,
London). Some of the problems Dumontet outlines might be alleviated by
the adoption of my suggestion (above) of making the unmodified terms the
standard, with adjectives and measurements added in specific instances;
thus a full verbal description, with as much modifying detail as necessary
and with a Krupp reference (including "cf."), could appear in MARC
field 563, and the unmodified form (with the possible local addition of a
Krupp code) in field 655.
Besides describing cloth grains, the bibliographer must also record the
designs
(abstract and pictorial), frames, and lettering that are stamped
(in blind or
gold) into the cloth for individual editions. My suggestions in
1970 are probably
sufficient for most occasions; but a proposal for greater
detail has been offered
by Gene G. Freeman in "Descriptive Standards
for
Publisher's Bindings: Preliminary Notes" (Trade Bindings
Research Newslet-
ter, 5 [June 1992], 3–10). Freeman recommends dividing
each cover into
twenty-four "cells" (six rows of four) and each spine into twelve
(six rows
of two) and then estimating the percentage of the area in each cell
filled
withdecoration or lettering. An example is "1ABCD—Author's
name,
centered, 1A and 1D < 10%." But surely, if "centered" is not
enough,
it would be far more accurate simply to measure the distance
fromeach
end of the name to the edge of the cover. He also thinks that a
diagram
showing the "estimated fillfactor" of each cell "should be included in
a
descriptive bibliography" because the "distribution of decoration over
the
book's surface" can help to attribute unsigned bindings to particular
designers.
Few people, I imagine, will agree with this point, and I see no
reason for
bibliographers to adopt either of his recommendations. The
same issue of this
newsletter contains another short article with a promis-
ing title, David B. Ogle's "Uniform Notation for Describing
Decorative
Trade Bindings" (pp. 13–15); but the proposal (assigning a five-letter
code
to each book, the first two letters abbreviating the color and the last
three
the type of design) is only intended as a means for collectors to
locate
their books—though presumably such a code, if searchable in a library's
two issues of the newsletter ("Further Binding Description Comments," 6
[September 1992], 4; 7 [December 1992], 6) responds to Freeman's and
Ogle's articles by arguing for "a simple account, specifying cloth texture
and color, and describing the design [in words]."
Bibliographers who wish to place individual designs in a broader his-
torical
context have a number of well-illustrated sources to turn to. Al-
though the
leading American historian of publishers' bindings, Sue
Allen,
did not live to produce the comprehensive work she had planned,
her
publications are always worth seeking out (some are not easy to
locate).
Especially helpful are her Victorian Bookbindings: A
Pictorial Survey (1972,
1976), with its succinct history and 241
illustrations on microfiche,and
American Book Covers
1830–1900
(1998), an accordion-folded brochure that
includes
a time-line and twelve photographs of grains. (She also wrote an
essential
article, "Machine-Stamped Bookbindings, 1834–1860," which
includes a list of
American binders' signatures, for the March 1979 issue
of Antiques,pp. 564–572.) The equivalent of a time-line is provided by
the
"Keys to Identifying Covers" ofeach decade from the 1830s to the
1890s
in Calvin P. Otto's
Onlyin Cloth (1998).
Other books with many excellent illustrations are Eleanore
Jamieson,
English Embossed Bindings,
1825–1850
(1972); Ruari McLean, Victorian
Publishers' Book-Bindings in Cloth and Leather
(1973); Ellen K. Morris and
Edward S.
Levin, The Art of Publishers' Bookbindings, 1815–1915
(2000);
and Edmund M. B. King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings, 1830–1880:
A Descriptive
Bibliography (2003). One other work that should be men-
tioned, even though
it contains few illustrations, is Robert Lee
Wolff's
five-volume Nineteenth-Century Fiction: A
Bibliographical Catalogue (1981–86),
simply because it provides such a
large sampling of books with binding
descriptions (nearly eight thousand entries).
Wolff says he was "guided
by Sadleir's practices," and
he generally does use Sadleir's names for
grains.
Illustrated studies of individual designers also exist: on Margaret
Armstrong (by Charles Gullans and
John Espey, 1991), for example, or
on John Feely (by Sue Allen in a 1994
Clark Library pamphlet, Decorated
Cloth in America), on
Frank Hazenplug and Sarah
Whitman (by Gullans in
the same pamphlet), and
on Alice C. Morse (by Mindell
Dubansky, 2008).
Samples of the work of nineteen designers are listed
(but not illustrated)
in an exhibition catalogue from California State University at Fullerton,
Decorative
Approach to Trade Cloth Book Binding (1979).
When describing the ornamental designs stamped on grained cloth
for individual
editions, bibliographers should be aware of a small number
of bindings, used for
only about a decade after 1835, in which the cover
and spine designs were embossed
on the cloth before it was fastened
to the boards and spine strip rather than (as
was usual) being stamped on
surface, whereas stamped designs are pressed below the surface.) Because
the embossed designs were placed on the cloth in advance, the positioning
of the cover and spine elements obviously determined the size of book-
block that could be accommodated; sometimes when the match was not
exact, the designs are off-center on the finished book. These bindings are
discussed, and thirteen designs illustrated, by Andrea Krupp and Jennifer
Woods Rosner in "Pre-Ornamented Bookcloth on Nineteenth-Century
Cloth Case Bindings" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 94
[2000], 176–196). When one encounters a binding of this kind, one should
compare it with the Krupp-Rosner illustrations; and if it is different, one
should report it, in order to increase the inventory of the relatively small
number of such designs. (Occasionally an embossed designwas applied
to the cloth on an assembled binding case, but those instances can be
identified by the factthat the intaglio plate flattens the cloth grain and
thus leaves an edge mark.)
My 1970 essay also covered the patterns of marbled papers, used both
for covering
binding boards and for endpapers. Because every piece of
hand-marbled paper is
unique, any matching that a bibliographer does
can only be approximate (no matter
how large the sample), and the twelve
illustrations I provided, divided into two
classes and given their tradi-
tional names, are perhaps sufficient (along with my
suggestions for addi-
tional verbal modifiers). But if one wishes to make
comparisons against a
larger selection, one should turn to Richard J. Wolfe's great book, Marbled
Paper: Its
History, Techniques, and Patterns (1990), which contains (following
p. 186)
one hundred ninety-two excellent color illustrations, each assigned
a number and
(in a supplementary list) a name (the same traditional name
I had used, with many
alternatives and with useful historical notes). In-
stead of attempting a
classification of patterns, Wolfe arranges the
samples
according to "their development and manufacture in various
geographi-
cal locations," and thus types of patterns are not kept together. But
the
advantage is that the bibliographer who uses these samples in
conjunc-
tion with Wolfe's discussion of them (in "The
Evolution of Marbled Pat-
terns," pp. 179–192) has a basis in some instances for
the approximate
dating of papers. Although that possibility is obviously most
useful in
connection with pre-1820 books (before the period of publishers'
bind-
ings), nineteenth-century publishers did often make editions available
si-
multaneously in cloth and in "half-calf" with marbled covers, which can
be
difficult to identify. In any case, the wide availability of the Wolfe book
(along
with its unquestionable authority) makes it an appropriate refer-
ence for
bibliographers to cite when describing marbled paper.
Other sets of color illustrations of marbled patterns have been pub-
lished
(usually in conjunction with marbling instructions), but none
of marbled specimens in Anne Chambers, The Principal Antique Patterns
of Marbled Papers (1984); fourteen good color photographs of "very basic
patterns" in Iris Nevins, Traditional Marbling (1985, 1988), photographs
that are also included in her catalogues of papers available for sale;
ninety-three pages of illustrations in Barry McKay, Patterns and Pigments
in English Marbled Paper (1988); and sixty-seven large color illustrations
in Einen Miura, The Art of Marbled Paper (1988; trans. 1991). Attempts
at classification are less common. Phoebe Jane Easton has a chapter on
"Nomenclature of Marbled Patterns" in Marbling: A History and a Bibli-
ography (1983)—reprinted in Ink & Gall, 7.2 (Winter 1993), 7–9—which
summarizes my system. The same issue of Ink & Gall also includes Carina
Greven's "The Development of a Standard Nomenclature for Marbled
Paper" (pp. 10–13), which includes a classification based on the "evolv-
ing nomenclature" developed by the Belgian-Dutch Bookbinding Society.
This system, however, simply enumerates seven types of patterns, in over-
lapping categories: (1) pebble or stone; (2) drawn (using a tool), subdivided
into ten patterns, such as curl, feather, and peacock; (3) combed (actually
a type of "drawn"); (4) shadow (or "Spanish"), usually made on pebble
(and when not, they fall into the sixth group); (5) fantasy (either abstract or
pictorial); (6) combination (of two or more patterns); and (7) overmarble
(marbled more than once). The object here is not primarily to provide
a classification scheme (and this is not a satisfactory one) but rather to
establish an international terminology (with equivalents in several lan-
guages listed). This project is now fully reported in Elly Cockx-Indestege,
Sierpapier & Marmering: Ein Terminologie voor het beschrijven van Sierpapir en
Marmering als boekbandversiering (1994).
In addition to marbled paper, nineteenth-century publishers often
used
floral-patternedpapers for endpapers, and the basic article on this
subject is
Sue Allen's "Floral-Patterned Endpapers in
Nineteenth-Century
American Books" (Winterthur Portfolio,
12 [1979], 183–224). Allen divides
the patterns into eighteen categories (which go
beyond the strictly floral):
(1) seaweeds; (2) maidenhair fern and related
designs; (3) sprigs and tiny
bouquets; (4) small flowers and leaves connected by
stems; (5) tightly fitted
flowers and leaves; (6) large, realistically drawn
flowers; (7) large, real-
istically drawn flowers showing depth and volume; (8)
"Eastlake" style
(rigidly stylized) flowers; (9) small geometrics; (10) mechanical
and imita-
tive; (11)designs on two axes; (12) Renaissance style (scrolled or
curling
leaves, sometimes with flowerheads or coiling tendrils); (13)
publishers'
initials and trademarks and similarly organized units; (14) oriental
mo-
tifs and arrangements; (15) fairy-tale patterns; (16) butterflies and
birds;
(17) typefounders' combination borders; and (18) "modern" explosive
de-
signs. (The two most commonly used styles werenumbers 4 and 8.) She
teen categories) and a "Catalog of Selected Nineteenth-Century Ameri-
can Endpapers," which contains comments on each of the illustrations
(plus a list of the binders represented). Bibliographers would do well to key
their endpaper descriptions to her illustrations, as a way of indicating the
general style of pattern and placing it in a larger context. But they may
also wish to supply their own illustrations. An example of a bibliography
that provides illustrations of decorated papers—in this case twenty-two
of those used by Knopf on covers—is Richard J. Schrader's bibliogra-
phy of Mencken (1998). Books that display decorated papers—such as
Annette Hollander's Decorative Papers and Fabrics (1971), Henry Morris's
Roller-Printed Paste Papers for Bookbinding (1975), and Decorated Paper Designs
… from the Koops-Marcus Collection (which includes some wonderful full-
page illustrations of marbled patterns; 1997, in the Pepin Press's delightful
"Design Series")—are not of particular use to descriptive bibliographers
unless they show close relatives of the papers being described.
The whole range of decorated paper (however produced) is concisely
classified by
Henk J. Porck in "Characterization of Western
Handmade
Decorated Papers: Development of a Standard Terminology" (in Looking
at Paper: Evidence & Interpretation, ed. John Slavin et al. [2001], pp. 196–
201), where six
categories are outlined: monochrome (dyed in the pulp or
painted), metal (gold or
silver), marbled, paste, block-printed, and relief-
printed (embossed).
Because my 1970 essay, besides dealing with patterns, includes (near
the end of
the first section) asample of a complete binding description, I
wish to call
attention to a feature of the binding process not mentioned
there: the pencil
marks that frequently appear near the beginning and/
or end of the printed
gatherings. Collectors and bibliographers have of-
ten noticed them, but they have
rarely been commented on—though
Roger E. Stoddard
included an illustration of one in Marks in Books, Il-
lustrated
and Explained (1995). His item 10 (p. 9) shows what he calls a
"binder's
mark"—in this case a "4" penciled in the gutter at the foot of
the last page of
the penultimate gathering. The first person to investigate
such pencil marks in
detail is Robert J. Milevski, who reported on them
(with
illustrations) in "Marks in Nineteenth-Century Trade Bindings"
(The Book Collector, 60 [2011], 41–56). He identified two categories:
"sew-
er's marks," which usually appear in the bottom margin of the last
page
of the last gathering (or the last page of an inserted publisher's
catalogue);
and "production marks," which usually appear in the lower margin
(or
sometimes one of the side margins) of the first page of the second,
third,
and/or fourth gatherings. In both cases, they take the form of a
letter,
a number, or a squiggle. Their exactfunction is not clear, but
Milevski
offers some possibilities: those at the end could identify the person who
those at the beginning could identify the collator and/or signify that all
gatherings were in order and any insertions were in place. More will be
learned about them as more are reported and examined; and bibliogra-
phers should note them in their binding descriptions, just as they would
naturally mention that better known kind of evidence of the binding op-
eration, the binder's ticket (with specific copies indicated as sources in
both cases). Milevski observes that the pencil marks are "direct evidence
of the human hand in the mass production of books in this era" (p. 47);
as such, they deserve to be recorded for further study.
Jackets
My comments on the rationale and procedure for including dust-
jacket
descriptions in a descriptive bibliography were first published as
the third
section (pp. 109–115) of "Book-Jackets, Blurbs, and Bibliogra-
phers" in The Library, 5th ser., 26 (1971), 91–134; they were
supplemented
on pp. 58–60 of "Dust-Jackets, Dealers, and Documentation" in Studies
in Bibliography, 56 (for 2003–04 [2006]), 45–140.
These discussions were
reprinted, with slight revisions, in my Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms,
andUse (2011), pp. 24–30 and 43–46.
Two recent descriptive bibliogra-
phies that can be singled out for their careful
descriptions (and photo-
graphs) of jackets are David
Supino's
Henry James
(2006, 2014) and
David
Alan Richards's
Kipling (2010). For others, see "Introduction to the
Field"
above, showing that jackets are now receiving much more attention
than
they once did. Another indication is Paola
Puglisi's
Sopraccoperta (2003);
and in 2016 Mark
R. Godburn published Nineteenth-Century
Dust-Jackets,
a narrative history that contains many more illustrations of
nineteenth-
century jackets than I provided and deals more fully than I did with
con-
tinental Europe and with unprinted jackets. Among the kinds of boxes
in
which books have been published are those that take shapes related to
the
subject matter of the books. Eugene Umberger has recently studied
this
phenomenon by writing about books on tobacco housed in such forms
as
cigar or cigarette boxes (see "Detachable Book Coverings (That
Aren't
Dust-Jackets)," The Book Collector, 65 [2016],
91–98).
My 2011 book includes a list of almost 2000 examples of pre-1901 Brit-
ish and
American publishers' book-jackets, boxes (slip-cases, boxes with
lids, etc.), and
other detachable coverings for books (such as envelopes or
overall wrappings). It
is limited to items that have printed text or deco-
ration on them, and the bulk
of the entries give some indication of the
extent and nature ofthe printed matter.
My list was not intended to be
a census but simply to report the examples I had
learned about during the
previous four decades. It is extensive enough, however,
to give an idea
of the growth in the use of book-jackets during the nineteenth
century.
consult it as an initial indication of which publishers were using jackets at
a given time, and for what kind of books, as a way of gauging whether the
particular books they are describing were likely to have been published
in jackets or boxes. If any of those books themselves happen to be pres-
ent in my list, the bibliographer will thenknow where to find a copy in a
jacket or box (when my source was an institutional library) or at least can
be sure that a jacket or box once existed (when my source was a dealer's
catalogue or private collection).
Since the publication of my book, a large number of additional ex-
amples have
been reported tome (and some further ones are listed in the
appendixes to
Godburn's book); I hope that they will eventually form a
supplementary list posted
on the website of the Bibliographical Society
of the University of Virginia, thus
increasing the body of evidence on
which bibliographers can draw. The University
of Virginia Library itself
now holds by far the largest collection of pre-1901
jackets: in 2014 it pur-
chased the collection of the dealer Tom Congalton (the
largest collection
reported in my book), and two years later it bought the second
collection
that Congalton formed, bringing the total of its holdings to well
overa
thousand volumes. Every bibliographer who is describing a book from
the
1830s onward (or indeed one ofthe annuals or children's books from
the
preceding decades) should make an effort to find out whether it
originally
appeared in a jacket or box and, if so, to locate such a copy.
ARRANGEMENT
I discussed the considerations underlying the overall arrangement
of a descriptive
bibliography and the numbering of its entries in "The
Arrangement of Descriptive
Bibliographies" in Studies in Bibliography, 37
(1984), 1–38.
The approach outlined there is displayed in practice in
my "A Sample Bibliographical
Description with Commentary," Studies
in Bibliography, 40
(1987), 1–30. I wish to call particular attention here to
my discussion of subedition in part I of the 1984 essay, for that concept is
one
of Bowers's most important contributions to descriptive
bibliography
and has not received the recognition it deserves. (I should
add,however,
that my ensuing comments on the role of geography in the organization
of
printing-publishing history does not conform with Bowers's view, a point
I discussed in my 1975 essay on issue and state [see above].)
The most significant post-1984 articles relevant to the subject of ar-
rangement
are two careful and thorough ones by Maura Ives. The first
is
"Descriptive Bibliography and the Victorian Periodical" (Studies in Bibli-
ography, 49 [1996], 61–94). My 1984 essay points out the
illogic of giving
full descriptions of an author's books and then simply listing
that author's
important (or even more important) part of the author's career and since,
in any case, periodicals are printed matter exhibiting the same character-
istics and problems common to books. Ives discusses these points in detail
and then goes over the few differences she sees between the description of
a periodical and that of a book (such as the periodical's "dual existence":
a self-contained individual number that is part of a larger unit). At the
end she provides a sample description (of a single number of a periodical),
which occupies slightly more than four pages of small type and includes
a historical introduction, a title-page transcription, listings of contents,
illustrations, and plates (with quasi-facsimile transcriptions), descriptions
of paper, typography, and publisher's binding, and a record of copies
examined. All this is handled in exemplary fashion, but it raises a serious
practical question: is it realistic to expect such treatment of every number
of a periodical in which an author appeared, unless the author contrib-
uted to periodicals only a few times? However desirable such treatment
would ideally be, it would normally increase bibliographers' work beyond
what most bibliographers would regard as feasible, and it would lengthen
the resultingbibliographies beyond what most publishers would be willing
to consider. From a realistic point of view, an abbreviated form needs to
be found—one that recognizes the importance of describing periodicals
but does not require a full description of every relevant issue.
One bibliography that takes a step in this direction is George
Miller
and Hugoe Matthews's
Richard Jefferies (1993), in which periodical con-
tributions
are placed first, as the "A" section. The authors "believe this
to be a more logical
arrangement in a work of this kind, and one that is
particularly appropriate in
Jefferies' case," since Jefferies
was "a literary
journalist," half of whose lifetime book publications "were
serialized in
or collected from periodicals" (p. xviii). For a great many other
writers,
as Miller and Matthews
suggest, periodical contributions precede book
publications, and one could argue
that placing them first in a bibliogra-
phy would frequently be appropriate. In any
case, Miller and Matthews
have
clearly taken periodicals seriously, and they describe their plan for
recording
periodical contributions as follows:
The entries are listed chronologically under the periodical titles which are in
al-
phabetical order. Information about the journal itself, the type of publication,
fre-
quency of issue, subject matter and editorial policy, proprietor, publisher and
printer,
editor(s) while Jefferies contributed to it,
format, price, etc. is given first. In the entries
that follow as full a reference
aspossible is given, including issue number and month
or day of issue—points often
obscured by rebinding. The text of all items is compared
with that of their
subsequent printing in book form, and any changes incontent or
the extent of any
revisions are noted. The contents of all items not subsequently printed
in book form
are summarized. Any information from documentary or other sources
notes on the background to Jefferies' association with the journal and on any possible
untraced or unconfirmed contributions toit. (p. xix)
One might object that the only element of physical description here is
"format,"
which turns out to be simply the leaf dimensions. Neverthe-
less, these
bibliographers have shown admirable independence of mind
and have demonstrated one
reasonable scheme for handling periodicals:
providing a general account ofa
periodical first, followed by abbreviated
entries for the subject's contributions to
it. The number of details in the
general account and in the entries could be
increased or lessened depend-
ing on the situation and the bibliographer's
inclination. Thus the opening
account could include notes on typography and paper
and a collation for-
mula in cases where most numbers of a journal follow the same
pattern,
and variations in the cited issues could be briefly noted.
Ives does not mention the Jefferies bibliography, but perhaps she had
it in mind
when she said that describing a single number of a periodical
is not sufficient. The
Miller-Matthews plan, however, does offer a
respon-
sible, and easily adjustable, approach. In my 1984 essay, I expressed
the
hope that full-length descriptive bibliographies of individual
periodicals
might eventually be published, with the result that bibliographers of
au-
thors would only need to cite thosedescriptions. But such bibliographies
are
not likely to be produced soon, or in quantity, and author bibliogra-
phers will
have to find realistic solutions. The important thing is for bibli-
ographers of
authors to recognize in the first place that a problem indeed
exists and that they
must think creatively about the best way to deal with
it in each particular
situation. (The so-called degressive principle, which
is what is involved here, is
discussed in the last part of section II of my
essay and more recently—but only in
connection with enumerative bib-
liographies—in D.W.
Krummel's
Bibliographies: Their Aims and Methods
[1984] pp. 46–47,
63–64.)
Ives's second article is "The Place of Musical Settings in Author Bib-
liographies,
with Examples from Christina Rossetti" (Papers of the Biblio-
graphicalSociety of America, 108 [2014], 5–39). Its
most helpful parts are
its commentary on constructingentries for musical settings
(pp. 27–31)
and its listing of relevant scholarship (pp. 33–39). The former calls
at-
tention to features that could be recorded in addition to the
standard
factsof printing and publishing history—features such as vocal
range,
instrumentation, initial key signatures and tempo notations, and
plate
numbers. (She also mentions reviews of performances, but these would
be
within scope only if secondary critical writings, such as reviews of the
author's
books, were included elsewhere in the bibliography.) The record
of scholarship
includes bibliographies that report musical settings, indexes
two admirable works, D. W. Krummel and Stanley Sadie's Music Printing
and Publishing [1990] and Krummel's The Literature of Music Bibliography
[1992]), and significant library collections. The rest of the article, for the
most part, states the obvious. Ives feels that unless an author bibliography
gives an explanation for the presence of music entries, it will usually be
"impossible for users of these bibliographies to understand why musicis
included" (p. 20). But appearances of poems in sheet music, hymnals, mu-
sic collections, and so on are simply instances of the printing or reprinting
of particular poems, and entries for them would be expected in an author
bibliography as part of an author's publication history. Such entries help
to document a work's textual history and its reputation and influence, as
Ives notes, but they do not differ in that respect from all other entries.
Whether musical settings should be recorded in a separate section is dis-
cussed in some detail; and although Ives believes that such segregation is
"almost always preferable" (sometimes with subdivisions), she recognizes
that situations must be evaluated individually. If many bibliographers will
not need a large part of the instructions offered here, Ives's discussions
are nevertheless sensible, and some of them provide suggestive reading
for anyone engaged in defining the content and placement of entries for
music in an author bibliography.
The last paragraph of a description, the record of copies examined,
is discussed
briefly in my essay (in the fifth paragraph from the end), in
order to emphasize the
distinction between the numbering of specific
copies for reference within a
description and the numbering of the entries
themselves, which of course does not
refer to individual copies. The post-
publication features of books that can be
reported under"Copies Exam-
ined" include inscriptions, annotations, bookplates, and
custom bindings.
For help in pursuing clues regarding provenance, the best guide is
David
Pearson's
Provenance Research in Book History (1994); for the
identification
and description of custom bindings, see the references mentioned
under
"Publishers' Bindings" above. Extensive provenance notes are
illustrated
in Anthony James West's "A Model for
Describing Shakespeare First
Folios, with Descriptions of
Selected Copies" (The Library, 6th ser., 21
[1999], 1–49);
and a large collection of such notes (from the same proj-
ect) can be found in Eric Rasmussen et al., The Shakespeare First
Folios: A
Descriptive Catalogue (2012).
One post-publication feature that is not often thought about is dis-
cussed by
Jeffrey Todd Knight in "Invisible Ink: A Note on Ghost
Im-
ages in Early Printed Books"(Textual Cultures, 5.2
[2010], 53–62). Knight
is speaking of offsets from adjacent items bound together
(not from
the printing process, which would be reported elsewhere in the
description);
ing (as do many other post-publication additions to books). The impor-
tance of the "Copies Examined" paragraph cannotbe exaggerated, not
only because it records the sources for the description (enough reason in
itself) but also because it fittingly completes the account by reflecting the
post-publication life of those artifacts.
| Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography | |