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.
