When in 1974 John Bush Jones put together an anthology of
Readings in Descriptive Bibliography, dealing with some of
the
developments since Fredson Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical
Description (1949), he pointed out in his preface that there was
nothing
for him to include regarding the quasi-facsimile transcription of title pages
and the formulaic recording of signature collation. It is true that less has
been written on these subjects in recent decades than on other aspects of
bibliographical description and classification. The reason, presumably, is
that
bibliographers have felt there was not much left to say.[1] These two features have been more
frequently
included in descriptions, and over a longer period of time, than the other
elements that we now expect to find in a thorough description: many
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century descriptions consisted of little else,
and even in more recent years abbreviated entries have
been likely to be limited largely to these two elements. There has thus been
ample opportunity for the techniques in the two areas to be refined through
practice and discussion, and most bibliographers probably regard the
conventions that have emerged as more firmly established than those
associated with any other part of a description. Nevertheless, a fresh look
periodically at accepted conventions can be salutary; and in fact some
further
discussion of these matters seems called for at present.
The nature of what needs to be said is rather different in the two
cases,
however. In regard to title-page transcription, the question is not so much
what methods or conventions should be used in transcribing as whether
transcription should be attempted at all. One reviewer in 1981 echoed a not
uncommon sentiment in discussing Sidney L. Gulick's Chesterfield
bibliography: "Is the transcription of the title-page in quasi-facsimile
any longer necessary or defensible? So much more information and relative
accuracy would be gained by photo-reproduction of title-pages, even greatly
reduced in size."
[2] This reviewer
chides
the Bibliographical Society of America, the publisher of the volume, for not
producing "something a little more advanced
bibliographically"—as
if a technological advance, allowing photographic reproductions to be
inexpensively produced ("the cost advantage of minimizing compositor's
work has steadily increased"), were necessarily a bibliographical advance.
Whether or not photographic facsimiles should supplant transcriptions
cannot be so simply settled as some have imagined: the question involves
the
essential nature of bibliographical description, and it must be thought about
in the context of the full range of techniques of quotation.
What requires further discussion concerning signature collation, on
the
other hand, is the technique for recording certain kinds of detail, not the
desirability of providing the collation in the first place. I am assuming that
the importance of signature collation for books of all periods no longer
needs to be argued. But perhaps I am wrong to assume so much, for
bibliographies of twentieth-century books do still sometimes appear without
collations, and one of our prominent bibliographers could say in 1970,
"Collation by signatures is unnecessary for most contemporary books except
in special cases."[3] It is perhaps in
order,
therefore, to say something further on this score; but the usefulness of
signature collation as a bibliographical practice, at least under some
circumstances, has not been called into question in the way that title-page
transcription has. A few suggestions, however, have been made in recent
years regarding the form of notation
that should be used in certain situations, and a few more are worth
considering. They do not add up to any major modification of the formulary
of collation codified by Bowers in the Principles; but they do
show
the results of continuing to think critically about the matter.
