Although it is true in most fields of knowledge that new discoveries
are often announced first in periodical articles and only later consolidated
into more comprehensive books, this situation is particularly characteristic
of bibliography. Given the nature of the subject, many contributions
inevitably consist of brief notes or articles on individual copies of a book,
providing facts which supplement a previously published bibliography or
which augment the accumulated evidence about a given printing or
publishing practice. As time passes and a sizable body of information
develops, a new book, drawing the scattered material together, may be
called for; but until that time, those periodical pieces represent the current
state of knowledge. Perhaps the classic instance in the field of bibliography
is McKerrow's Introduction to Bibliography (1927), which
has
been the standard guide for over forty years but which has naturally (and
increasingly) required supplementing by
reference to current research as reported in the journals.
Obviously a cumulated index to periodical articles is an essential
reference tool in any field, but the surprising thing about bibliography is
what little effort has been made, until recently, to provide this kind of
coverage.[1] When Studies in
Bibliography included in its third volume a "Selective Check List of
Bibliographical Scholarship" for 1949,
it was inaugurating what was to become one of its most important services
to bibliographers—a listing of the principal contributions of each
year,
including separately published monographs as well as articles in periodicals.
That service has now covered more than twenty years' work and has twice
been provided with cumulative indexes (in the separate issue of the lists for
1949-55 and for 1956-62), making it even more convenient to consult. One
has no complaint, therefore, about the indexing of bibliographical articles
from 1949 on—though the
SB lists cannot hope to be
complete and do not try to be (they are called "Selective Check Lists"). It
may therefore be necessary in certain kinds of bibliographical research to
consult other general indexes for items not included (such as a brief history
of a publishing firm in
Publishers' Weekly or a book review
on
a bibliographical subject),
[2] but these
lists do an outstanding job of
recording what can sensibly be called "scholarship" and have caused 1949
to be regarded as the great dividing line by anyone in the process of
searching out bibliographical articles.
[3]
For the period before 1949 a few guides to bibliographical work
exist, but they are not comparable to the SB lists in coverage
of periodical material on English and American books. The principal one
is probably the series of current lists[4] which have appeared in the
Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen since its inception in
1884; though the emphasis is on separate publications, especially those
relating to libraries, the lists do contain some English and American
articles. For the periods 1904-12 and 1922-26 annual (and indexed)
cumulations, issued under the title Bibliographie des Bibliotheks- und
Buchwesens (1905-27), make these lists easier to consult; and the
expanded cumulation which followed, the Internationale
Bibliographie
des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens [IBBB] (1928-41),
covering 1926-40, is particularly
useful, since it includes about two dozen prominent English-language
journals, such as the
Library, the
Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America [
PBSA],
Publishers'
Weekly,
Publishers'
Circular, and
Penrose Annual. Similarly,
Library Literature surveys a field which overlaps
bibliography,
and it indexes—besides a great many library periodicals, as would
be
expected—the
Library,
PBSA,
Publishers'
Weekly, and
Publishers' Circular.
[5] In addition, a selection of English
and
American items can be located in the "Bibliography" section of the Modern
Humanities Research Association's
Annual Bibliography of English
Language and Literature (1921- ), with coverage from 1920, and
in the sections on printing, publishing, periodicals, and book arts in
Writings on American History (covering 1902-03, 1906-40,
1948-57; published 1904-64),
Writings
on British History (covering 1901-45; published 1937-68),
Bibliography of British History (1928- ), and
Cambridge
Bibliography of English Literature (1940, 1957, 1969- ). Other
cumulative lists which may yield additional periodical material include E.
C. Bigmore and C. W. H. Wyman's great
Bibliography of
Printing (1880-86); Talbot B. Reed's "A List of Books and Papers
on
Printers and Printing, under the Countries and Towns to Which They
Refer,"
Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 3
(1895-96), 81-152; George T. Watkins's
Bibliography of Printing in
America (1906); Clark S. Northup's
A Register of
Bibliographies of the English Language and Literature (1925);
Nathan
Van Patten's
An Index to Bibliographies and Bibliographical
Contributions Relating to the Work of American and British Authors,
1923-1932 (1934); Alan R. Eager's
A Guide to Irish
Bibliographical Material (1964); T. H. Howard-Hill's
Index
to
British
Literary Bibliography (1969- ); and G. T. Tanselle's
Guide
to the Study of United States Imprints (1971).
[6]
Even after checking these lists, a bibliographer still cannot be sure
that he is drawing from a reservoir containing all the articles in all the
principal bibliographical journals of the period. What he must do, to come
closer to this goal, is to consult several further kinds of index. One is the
guide to articles in a specified group of bibliographical journals. The
best-known of these is George Watson Cole's excellent Index to
Bibliographical Papers Published by the Bibliographical Society and the
Library Association (1933), covering the period
1877-1932—essentially an index to the Bibliographical Society's
Transactions (1893-1920), the Library
(1889-1932),
Bibliographica (1895-97), and the Library Association
Record (1899-1929). A successor to this index is Michael Turner's
forthcoming "Bodleian Index to Certain Bibliographical Journals," which
will cover, from 1933 through 1965, the Library,
PBSA, Studies in
Bibliography, Book Handbook, Book
Collector, and Bibliotheck, as well as the publications
of
the bibliographical societies of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and
Glasgow. Another kind of index, which can be used to supplement both of
these works, is the cumulative index to a single periodical—such as
that
for PBSA (as of 1931 and 1951) and for the Bulletin
of the
New York Public Library (as of 1936, 1946, and 1962).[7] Cumulative indexes before 1942
can be
located through Daniel C. Haskell's A Check List of Cumulative
Indexes to Individual Periodicals in the New York Public Library(1942).[8]
Finally, one can turn to the general periodical indexes, most of which
cover at least a few journals of bibliographical interest. Poole's
Index, for example, covers the early years of the
Library
and Library Journal, along with the Bibliographer,
Bibliographica, and such other late nineteenth-century journals as
Book-Lore, Bookworm, and the
American
Bibliopolist. For the twentieth century, the Readers'
Guide indexes Publishers'
Weekly and
several of the library periodicals, while the Social Sciences and
Humanities Index (formerly International Index)
includes,
during part of its run, PBSA and the Library,
as
well as Colophon, Library Quarterly,
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, and a few
other periodicals with occasional bibliographical material. The
Annual
Magazine Subject Index
[9] also
takes up
PBSA and the Library, plus certain library
journals
and a number of typographical publications, such as Printing
Art, Print, and Graphic Arts. The
central
group of library journals is again surveyed in the Internationale
Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur [IBZ], along
with
Publishers' Weekly, Publishers'
Circular, the Library, and, for a few years,
American Printer, British Printer, and
Printing
Art; in recent years the coverage of IBZ has been so
enormous (now roughly 13,000 periodicals) that one might expect more
bibliographical journals to be included—indeed, there are
considerably
more of them in recent years—but for the pre-1949 period the
IBZ is not markedly richer in bibliographical material than
the
other periodical indexes. Similarly, the British Humanities
Index
(formerly Subject Index to Periodicals), aside from a dozen
or
so library journals, records only a few bibliographical journals—the
Library and PBSA, the publications of the
bibliographical societies of Oxford and Glasgow, and—only after the
beginning of the SB lists—Signature,
Typographica, Penrose Annual, and
Book
Collector. Although there is much overlapping of coverage among
these periodical indexes,[10] and
although many bibliographical journals are not covered in them at all, they
are worth checking, since stray articles of a bibliographical nature can
always turn up in some of the general magazines indexed in them.
One could go on making further suggestions for tracking down
articles, but the point is clear: for pre-1949 material, no one index to
bibliographical literature provides a counterpart to the SB
lists,
and,
if one wishes to approximate the
SB coverage, one must make
a time-consuming check of a number of lists. Periodical indexes can of
course be constructed in either of two ways—as an attempted record
of
all material, wherever published, that is relevant to a given subject, or as
a survey of a specified list of journals. Of the indexes mentioned here,
Library Literature and the guides to historical writings are
good
examples of the subject approach, while the standard general periodical
indexes are examples of indexes based on fixed groups of journals. Since
the subject areas covered—such as librarianship and
printing—are less
broad than the whole field of bibliography and since the bibliographical
journals covered in the general indexes naturally represent only a selection
from the full range of bibliographical periodicals, neither group of presently
existing indexes provides a really satisfactory control of serial
bibliographical material before 1949. Of course,
persons interested primarily in a particular author will find bibliographical
articles gathered together with other material about that author in each
year's issue of the MLA
International Bibliography and the
MHRA
Annual Bibliography and in other guides to literary
scholarship. But the fact that bibliographical articles do get listed in this
way does not mean that a listing devoted exclusively to bibliographical
articles is superfluous—an article on a particular writer, for example,
may employ an unfamiliar bibliographical technique, and the bibliographical
importance of the article may not be as readily recognized if it is not
recorded in a bibliographical context. There is simply no substitute for a
serial listing which takes bibliography as its field of knowledge. The
SB lists are important because they do more than cover a
limited list of periodicals; instead, they try to include all the significant
scholarship in physical bibliography, wherever it
happens to appear, and, in doing so, they provide a means for measuring
the growth of bibliographical knowledge at the same time that they furnish
a tool which facilitates the further accumulation of that knowledge.
[11]
Since there is no real counterpart for the period before 1949, it
becomes particularly important to be aware of the main bibliographical
journals of the period and of the places (if any) where each is indexed.
Surveying the journals which might reasonably be expected to publish
bibliographical material is complicated, however, by the variety of fields
and publications that are related to the study of the book in its broadest
sense—ranging from the scholarly papers of bibliographical societies
to
the trade journals of the printing industry. While a journal of librarianship
may not very often have an article relevant to physical bibliography and
while a book-trade magazine may not usually publish anything that could
be called scholarship, both are undeniably sources of information which
may be helpful to bibliographers. The most extensive convenient listing of
these journals is Carolyn F. Ulrich and Karl Küp's Books and
Printing: A Selected List of Periodicals,
1800-1942 (1943); its thousands of entries show the great
extent
of this literature and provide a place where one can turn for the names of
lesser-known journals relevant to all aspects of book production.[12] Because I had occasion, in
preparing my
Guide to the Study of United States Imprints, to examine the
indexing of these varieties of journals somewhat more systematically than
I had done before, and perhaps more systematically than bibliographers
generally have time to do, I thought it might prove useful to draw this
information together in concise form. Accordingly, I shall make some
comments in the following pages on the indexing of five classes of
periodicals:[13] journals of
bibliographical societies (and related scholarly bibliographical journals of
a general nature); book-collecting journals; magazines dealing with printing
and typography; trade journals of the publishing industry (or other
industries—aside from printing—related
to the production or distribution of printed books); and library journals
(both general periodicals and those associated with particular libraries).
Following these discussions is a table surveying more precisely the
coverage of the principal journals in the nine most prominent relevant
indexes.
[14]
