University of Virginia Library

D. THE HAILEY'S COMET

R. Carter Hailey has built the simplest and most portable collator yet,
the Hailey's Comet (Vander Meulen, "Revision" 223) [plate 4]. His device is
available with bookstands in two sizes—14″ × 10″ for $750, 19″ × 10″ for
$825, and both for $975. He has replaced the frame of the McLeod with two
freestanding arms to hold the mirrors. The Comet weighs about fifteen
pounds and packs easily in a small gym bag. Like McLeod, Hailey has eliminated
one of the symmetrical optical trains—one eye looks directly at the
farther book while the other looks through two mirrors at the nearer book.
The absence of the frame accounts for the reduction in weight. As with the
Lindstrand and the McLeod, the Comet requires two good eyes on the part
of the viewer.

Another bibliographer, David Gants, has given new meaning to the
phrase "machine-aided collation" via the Comet. He has developed a method
of collating an actual copy of a book on the Comet with a computer-generated
image of another copy of the same book. Gants positions the physical book
in relation to a digitized version of another copy on a laptop screen so that
their images, after adjusting the freestanding mirrors, appear to superimpose
in the eyes of the viewer. Since the dignitized image serves as his control
copy, Gants does not need to carry a potentially valuable and bulky book
with him when he travels to a distant library. The ever-increasing number
of books available in this format greatly expands the number of texts now
available for collation. A single CD can hold hundreds of volumes—a virtual
portable library ready to collate at the press of a button. Since the size of the
digitized image on the laptop screen is adjustable, the problem of controlling
the standards under which the original book was scanned is not as acute as
it has been for scholars who have attempted to collate from microfilm-based
images in the past.[8] Gants further reports that since "the laptop display can
move along all three axes," it is very easy "to adjust yaw-pitch-roll image
alignment as well as relative size" (E-mail to the author). This method also
has the advantage of dispensing with the bookstands. The computer cannot
fit in a stand, obviously. The book is carefully propped open against a soft,
felt-covered support of the kind typically found in special collections libraries.
Not having to strap a book into a stand or cradle also tends to calm the nerves
of wary rare book custodians.

Hailey built the device for his study of the three editions of Piers Plowman
printed by Robert Crowley in 1550. He has used the Comet to collate
over sixty copies at libraries in the United States and Great Britain (Metzger).
I am grateful to him for generously providing the location information given
below.

CALIFORNIA

• D1. Los Angeles, Joseph Dane

KENTUCKY

• D2. Lexington, David Miller

NEW YORK

• D3. Pierpont Morgan Library

MISSOURI

• D4. Washington University, Olin Library, Department of Special Collections

• D5. St. Louis, Joseph Lowenstein

PENNSYLVANIA

• D6. State College, Patrick Cheyney

VIRGINIA

• D7. University of Virginia, English Department

• D8. Charlottesville, David Vander Meulen

• D9. Williamsburg, Brett Charboneau

• D10. Williamsburg, R. Carter Hailey

CANADA

• D11. New Brunswick, David Gants

  Purchased while Gants was on the faculty at the University of Georgia.
  It now resides with him at the University of New Brunswick, where he
  holds a joint appointment in the English Department and the Etext
  Centre.

NORWAY

• D12. Oslo, Jon Gunnar Jorgensen