University of Virginia Library

In a country which provides copyright protection by statute or which requires the deposit of works for the benefit of one or more of its libraries, the operation of the law will usually produce a body of documents relating to the literary and artistic output of that country. The exact nature of such material will vary according to the requirements of the statute, but one may expect it to contain information of bibliographical significance which would be difficult (and in some cases impossible) to locate elsewhere. For example, if the law defines the term of copyright for any work as dating from its publication, the records may include publication dates; if there is a manufacturing clause in the law, certain facts about the printing and binding of individual books may be given; if there is provision for the deposit of copies, the recorded deposit dates will furnish proof of the existence of particular books. Thus the bibliographer who knows what copyright records survive for the period and country with which he is concerned, and who possesses enough historical understanding of the copyright law to interpret them, has at his command a valuable tool for research.

In the case of England and the United States, not only are the extant copyright records extensive; in addition, because of the unusual situation in which two countries with important literatures speak the same language, the copyright laws of each country have had an effect on the original publication of the literature of the other, so that bibliographers of authors writing in English must be aware of the

copyright records of both countries. The English copyright law required registration of copyrighted works between 1710 and 1912, and there are also some records of registered books before and after this period. The United States, from the time of its first federal copyright law in 1790, has always included a provision for registration in its copyright legislation. For obvious reasons these records, even when they survive intact, do not constitute national bibliographies — some works may be copyrighted but never published, and many others may be published but never copyrighted. They do, however, provide a preliminary basis for a record of the two nations' literary output.

Whenever a bibliographer finds information of interest to him in copyright records, he is making a secondary use of those records; he is finding them helpful in ways other than those for which they were designed, just as he may profitably consult a publisher's files which are no longer useful to the publisher in carrying on his business. Quite understandably and properly, the officials in charge of such records have normally been more concerned with maintaining whatever records are required for current purposes than with servicing archives of older material. In the United States, such men as William Elliot and Thorvald Solberg did recognize some of the bibliographical uses of the copyright records, but their hopes for a national bibliography based on them were not realized until 1891, and then only in part — a story which has been admirably set forth by Joseph W. Rogers in U. S. National Bibliography and the Copyright Law (1960). Since that time such men as Verner W. Clapp, former Chief Assistant Librarian of Congress, Joseph W. Rogers of the Copyright Office, and Frederick R. Goff of the Library's Rare Book Division have been particularly concerned with the historical importance of the old records. But the general indifference to this material, on the part of officials and scholars alike, has not yet disappeared, and bibliographers have remained peculiarly unaware of its potentialities.

Although an enormous literature of copyright exists,[1] practically

nothing has been written about the secondary use of copyright material by literary scholars and bibliographers. Walter Pforzheimer, in his well-known essay on "Copyright and Scholarship" in the English Institute Annual 1940 (1941), outlined the essentials of English and American copyright history for the use of scholars (pp. 164-99) but said little about the ways in which the records could be employed. In connection with the American records, only two writers have gone very far in discussing the specifically bibliographical significance of such material. On 30 December 1937, Martin A. Roberts of the Library of Congress read a paper before a joint session of the American Historical Association and the Bibliographical Society of America describing the pre-1870 records and urging their publication as a "national heritage."[2] Seven years later Ruth Shaw Leonard intensively studied the Massachusetts records of the period 1800-09 for her Master's thesis at Columbia and summed up her findings in 1946 in an essay entitled "The Bibliographical Importance of Copyright Records."[3]

At that time the American copyright records had been used by only a few bibliographers. Charles Evans, in the 1910's, had taken advantage of some of the early district court records to add titles and deposit dates to his American Bibliography for the last decade of his coverage (1790-1800). And Miss Leonard, with Harry C. Bentley, had conscientiously read through the records in preparing the Bibliography of Works on Accounting by American Authors (2 vols., 1934-35) — which also contained an introductory chapter entitled "Copyright Laws and Administration — Their Significance to Bibliographers" (I, xi-xxi). In 1940 Louis C. Karpinski published his Bibliography of Mathematical Works Printed in America through 1850, which made effective use of the copyright records to establish the publication of many titles no longer extant, just as Lyle Wright's American Fiction, 1744-1850 (1939) included some otherwise unknown titles discovered in a search through the collection of deposited title pages, and Marcus McCorison's Vermont Imprints 1778-1820 (1963) contained some

unlocated titles taken from district court copyright records. Sidney Kramer, one of the pioneers in the use of copyright records for bibliographical purposes, included deposit dates in his A History of Stone & Kimball and Herbert S. Stone & Company (1939), and this practice of giving deposit dates in descriptive bibliographies has been used occasionally since then, notably in Jacob Blanck's Bibliography of American Literature (1955- ). For a more recent period, the published copyright catalogues were diligently searched by Wynot Irish for The Modern American Muse (1950), a list of American poetry between 1900 and 1925. Beyond these few works, American copyright records have rarely been drawn upon by bibliographers.

The English records have been used more extensively. The registers of the Stationers' Company between 1554 and 1708 have been regularly employed for decades by bibliographers of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and such literary and bibliographical scholars as A. W. Pollard, W. W. Greg, R. C. Bald, Giles Dawson, C. J. Sisson, and Leo Kirschbaum have turned their attention to the whole question of copyright in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pollard and Redgrave, of course, included references to the Stationers' Company registers in the Short Title Catalogue (1926) of pre-1640 books, and both Greg and W. A. Jackson edited parts of the Stationers' court records (1930, 1957). For the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the English copyright materials are perhaps lesser known; but the increasing recognition of the textual importance of overseas editions of both English and American authors is drawing more attention to the copyright records of both countries, especially to the way in which the copyright laws of each affected the literary properties of the residents of the other. I. R. Brussel, in his pioneer bibliographical work on trans-Atlantic literary publications, the two-volume Anglo-American First Editions (1935-36), understood the indispensability of copyright records, and Graham Pollard contributed to the first volume a thoughtful discussion of the bibliographical implications of the Anglo-American copyright situation. More recently Simon Nowell-Smith has gone into the question of nineteenth-century international copyright from a bibliographer's point of view.[4] And James J. Fuld's The Book of World-Famous Music (1966) illustrates some of the bibliographical uses of copyright data on a world-wide scale.

Copyright records have thus not been totally ignored by bibliographers, but they have not been drawn upon as frequently as one

might expect, considering the obviousness of the uses to which they can be put. They can help to establish publication dates; they are a source of information about anonymous and pseudonymous works; they can supply publication details for individual author-bibliographies and titles for comprehensive imprint lists. It is not too much to say that a check of the relevant copyright records should be a routine part of any bibliographer's investigations; and no bibliography can be considered definitive or thorough which does not utilize them.

Their precise bibliographical usefulness, however, depends on the provisions of the copyright laws at any particular time and place; in order to know how to interpret the records — or, indeed, what records to look for — the bibliographer must have some understanding of the copyright laws of the country and period with which he is concerned. It is with this in mind that I have drawn together a few suggestions for extracting from such records the bibliographical information they can yield. Since the American records are perhaps more complex and certainly less well-known than the English, the emphasis will be on them; and they can most conveniently be taken up in four groups: 1783-90, 1790-1870, 1870-1909, 1909-present. Following these four discussions are some briefer notes on the English records and some general considerations.