University of Virginia Library

Bibliographical History As a Field of Study
by
G. Thomas Tanselle

The history of scholarship has long been a recognized subject of inquiry in certain disciplines. One thinks immediately of J. E. Sandys's A History of Classical Scholarship (1903-8), Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's Geschichte der Philologie (1921), and Rudolf Pfeiffer's History of Classical Scholarship (1968-76) and of the considerable body of other work in this area.[1] Scholarship is of course a cultural activity, and the historical study of it forms a natural part of the intellectual history of any period or country. In practice, however, it is sometimes neglected in such histories, perhaps out of a feeling that it is derivative, not primary. But a distinction between creative work and scholarship cannot be maintained, for every effort to establish past events—however disciplined by what are taken to be responsible ways of handling evidence—is a creative act, involving judgments at each step. The same observation applies to the attempt at distinguishing criticism from creative work (and from scholarship). Literary critics (who are not necessarily concerned with history) have occasionally argued that their own writings are on a par with the literature they are ostensibly discussing. Surely, however, the worth of a piece depends on individual performance, not genre: some scholarly or critical essays are indeed more valuable and inspiring than some poems. All verbal works are instances of human creativity, and any of them can reveal how individuals in the past have viewed their own world and their inheritance. I need not belabor the point: the history of scholarship is a significant branch of historical study.

Some scholarly fields have had longer histories than others, and it is natural that the younger fields are less likely than the older ones to have been the subject of extensive historical investigation. American literature, for example, did not become an accepted field of academic study until well into the twentieth century, and the history of the field has not yet been vigorously pursued.[2] An encouraging sign, however, was the establishment in 1976 of the Jay B. Hubbell Center for American Literary Historiography at Duke University, which now holds the papers of

a number of prominent scholars of American literature as well as the archives of relevant organizations (such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association of America).[3] It is to be hoped that this development will serve as a stimulus to the creation of similar centers in other fields. Bibliography is a field deserving of more historical study than it has received, and a gathering of appropriate materials would no doubt encourage further work. Although the listing of books is an ancient activity, the examination of the physical evidence in books was rarely undertaken until relatively recent times. Bradshaw's work in the third quarter of the nineteenth century has rightly caused him to be regarded as the father of modern analytical bibliography, and the writings of Pollard, McKerrow, and Greg, beginning about the turn of the century, established the importance of bibliographical evidence for the editing of post-medieval literature. The emergence of analytical and descriptive bibliography as recognizable fields is therefore essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. What this kind of bibliography has achieved is even now frequently misunderstood; but it has such far-reaching consequences for all who read that its story ought to be considered an important chapter in intellectual history. I should like to offer here some reflections on bibliographical history as a field and some indication of what material is available to build on.

I

The various kinds of scholarly endeavor often referred to as "bibliography" are interrelated, and the history of any one of them necessarily impinges on the history of the others. But they represent such diverse activities that they have usually been taken up separately. The history of the listing of books, insofar as it is concerned with listings by subject, is primarily a part of the history of the study of each of those subjects. Trends in such listings, however, along with general considerations of the principles underlying the listing of books, do merit consolidated historical treatment, constituting the history of what is traditionally called "enumerative bibliography" (and has also been called, appropriately, "reference bibliography").[4] Significant historical work has in fact been accomplished in this area, the best-known examples perhaps being Georg Schneider's Theory and History of Bibliography (translated by Ralph R. Shaw in 1934 from the 1926 edition of the 1923 work), Theodore Besterman's The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography (1935; 3rd edition, in French, 1950), the books of Archer Taylor (Renaissance Guides to Books, 1945; A History of Bibliographies of Bibliographies, 1955; Book Catalogues: Their Varieties and Uses, 1957 [revised by William P. Barlow, Jr., 1986]; General Subject-Indexes since 1548, 1966),

Sears Jayne's Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (1956), and Rudolf Blum's "Bibliographia: Eine wort- und begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung" (Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 10 [1970], cols. 1010-1246).[5] D. W. Krummel's Bibliographies: Their Aims and Methods (1984) is not only a thoughtful statement in its own right, which will have an important place in any future history of book listing, but also a basic source for the literature of the subject;[6] and the Grolier Club's exhibition catalogue of the same year, Bibliography: Its History and Development by Bernard H. Breslauer and Roland Folter, records the landmark lists that would have to form the basis of any history of the field.

Some lists focus more on books as physical objects than on books as conveyors of information; and although the two approaches are not always distinguished in works on bibliographical enumeration, they represent fundamentally different impulses. Even so, a single list can obviously involve both, as when the scope of a list is determined by subject matter and the form of the entries by attention to the identification of editions and impressions. One class of lists concerned principally with books as printed items, not as transmitters of texts, consists of what are often called "imprint lists" or "imprint bibliographies"—that is, lists that attempt to record all printed matter (or all in certain categories) produced within a given geographical area during a particular period of time. Even when such lists contain entries with no physical details, what underlies them is as much an interest in printing and publishing history as in the history of ideas, and those lists are thus relevant to the story of the development of analytical and descriptive bibliography. The famous Short-Title Catalogue of pre-1641 English books, though it tries to keep physical details to a minimum, is a work of physical bibliography, aiming to differentiate editions; and its history is tied up with the history of the Bibliographical Society in London, a society interested in the history of books, not in the production of lists. Similarly, the list now usually called "Goff," recording copies of incunabula in American libraries, has played a major role in the history of the publications of the Bibliographical Society of America. Thus the history of those reference works that take books (rather than works) as their concern forms a branch of bibliographical history distinct from the history of subject lists.

But it is not a branch that has been much pursued. Some such works—like the STC itself—include accounts of their own history,[7] and a few essays exist that are useful in tracing the history of these works (principally pieces by those associated with the projects, such as W. A. Jackson and Katharine F. Pantzer on the STC, and Donald Wing and Robin Alston on the short-title catalogues for 1641-1700 and 1701-1800).[8]

Furthermore, library catalogues, however minimal their entries, are guides to—and consist of information drawn from—particular copies of books, and they constitute another category of reference work that is of direct concern to those interested in physical bibliography. But for this category, too, there is only a meager historical literature (aside from the books of Taylor and Jayne on early catalogues): the British Museum library catalogue has been best served, with work by Barbara McCrimmon and A. H. Chaplin, and David A. Smith has written well on the National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints; there has also been some examination, especially by Dorothy May Norris and Gertrude London, of the history of cataloguing practice.[9] Further historical studies of these kinds of reference works are to be encouraged; the results will be important not only for the history of libraries and of information control but also for the history of the development of bibliographical analysis and description.[10]

If the history of bibliography deals not with the history of books but with the historiography of that history, with the story of how that history has been pursued, then the history of libraries might be considered not strictly part of it. For the purchasing and the collecting of books by institutions are—like the production of books by printers and the dissemination of them by publishers and booksellers—stages in the life cycle of books, from the origin of their texts in writers' minds to the reading of those texts by persons who encounter the books. This cycle, from beginning to end (the end often enough leading to a new beginning), is the subject matter of the history of books. Nevertheless, librarians, who naturally influence the course of the history of libraries and collecting, are also scholars of the book: they are part of book history themselves, and in addition they are students of that history. Indeed, the history of all scholarship that involves the use of books is ultimately tied to the history of books (and therefore of libraries). I. R. Willison, in his lecture On the History of Libraries and Scholarship (1980), makes a similar point, observing—and welcoming—a growing recognition of "the historical interdependence of libraries and scholarship" (p. 7). John P. Feather and David McKitterick have reinforced this position in their lectures printed as The History of Books and Libraries: Two Views (1986), the former pointing out that "the history of libraries is . . . part of the larger subject of book history" (p. 14) and the latter concluding, "Far from being divorced from other parts of bibliographical study, the history of libraries is essential to it" (p. 30). It is thus fruitless to try to enforce a sharp dividing line between the history of books and the history of bibliography. But the distinction may still be useful as a framework for thought: it may help one to see, for example, that the biographical

study of librarians may often contribute as much to the history of bibliography as to the history of the management of libraries (as much, that is, to the history of the study of books as to the history of the collecting of books). Cases in point are the biographical accounts of Henry Bradshaw, Francis Jenkinson, J. Y. W. MacAlister, A. W. Pollard, W. A. Jackson, and A. N. L. Munby.[11] However one assesses these shifting relationships, the history of libraries, unlike the history of bibliographical reference books, is a well-established field, with its own journals (Journal of Library History [1966- ] and Library History [1967- ]) and professional colloquia (such as the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association).[12] Its monographic literature includes many well-known broad surveys[13] and many distinguished histories of individual libraries;[14] and some guides to published research in the field have been assembled.[15] But despite the presence of a large literature of library history, the kind of integrated historical work that Willison, Feather, and McKitterick call for is still at its beginnings.

These points about the relation of library history to bibliographical history can be duplicated for the history of the antiquarian book trade and the history of collecting by individuals—in a way that they could not be for the history of printing or typefounding or papermaking or binding. Printers, typefounders, papermakers, and binders may also happen to be scholars, but their role in the cycle of book history is connected with the physical production of books, not with receiving or responding to finished books.[16] Dealers and collectors, however—though they, too, play a role in book history—deal with the completed object; and their manner of approaching it makes them bibliographical scholars, in one degree or another, in the very process of carrying out their function in the history of a book. Publishers fall in between, controlling production but also handling completed books.[17] Biographies and autobiographies of dealers and collectors (and often of publishers) are therefore contributions at once to book history and to bibliographical history. Broader historical studies of the book trade and of collecting may of course lean in one of these directions rather than the other, but in either case they remain, by the nature of their subject, a mixture of both. One does not normally think of the historical works on bookselling or on collectors and collecting[18] as studies of bibliographical history. But the greatest broad works in this area—such as John Carter's Taste & Technique in Book-Collecting (1948) and Graham Pollard and Albert Ehrman's The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to A.D. 1800 (1965)—can readily be regarded as making direct contributions to the history of bibliography, for the authors' own interest in the analysis of book structure and their understanding of the importance

of bibliographical evidence inform their discussions.[19] In 1977 I attempted to provide a guide to the literature of book collecting,[20] and one can see from a perusal of that essay the extent to which the relevant material can also be considered bibliographical history.

The work that bibliographical scholars do, after all, is one of the ways in which books can be used; and those scholars can therefore be seen, along with other readers (and dealers, librarians, and collectors), as an element in the world of books. Viewed in this way, the history of bibliographical scholarship is simply one part of the history of books. How one finally decides to relate bibliographical history to book history and to delimit the activities subsumed under the two terms is less important than having a clear idea of the considerations involved. Historical studies relating to books need not be conceived of as falling into only one of these categories, but writers of them ought to have given thought to the fact that their subjects do involve the intermingling of two separate strands. Scholarship, being historical, is by nature retrospective; but it moves forward through its use of the past and is part of the stream of history. To understand that booksellers and librarians and collectors participate in this double view can only enrich our studies of them, whether we call the results contributions to the history of the reception of books or to the history of bibliographical scholarship.

I raise these points not to encourage compartmentalization but to provide a context for thinking about the history of what may be considered the central core of bibliographical study, the part dealing with physical analysis. These other areas are unquestionably parts of bibliographical activity in the broadest sense, and the investigation of the course of their growth merits strong encouragement. But I wish to concentrate here on physical bibliography, which has received far less historical attention and which is central in that all uses of books as conveyors of information presuppose some attitude toward the physicality of books as artifacts. Those who make lists of books and those who sell and buy and read books do not always think through their position on this matter, but the way in which they pursue their work does nevertheless imply a position.

Physical bibliography directly confronts the physical evidence in books, working out methods of analysis to reveal information about how books were produced and then assessing the implications of that information for classifying books (in relation to other books purporting to represent the same works) and for establishing texts (understanding how the texts in books have been affected by the means of their production). The development of this kind of analytical bibliography, and of the descriptive bibliography and textual criticism that build on it, is one of the remarkable stories in the history of twentieth-century scholarship. A relatively

small number of people have been actively involved in this work, however; and, despite the efforts of some of them to explain its significance to a wide audience, most people who use books (including many of those who regard themselves as scholars) do not understand the field or its relevance to their own interests. One should perhaps not be surprised, therefore, that the history of the field has not been much investigated. But further attention to it would be valuable not only as a contribution to the history of scholarship but also as a way of clarifying the nature of the field for readers who are not specialists.

When one thinks about what work of this kind already exists, one is likely to name first the volume published by the Bibliographical Society (London) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary—The Bibliographical Society, 1892-1942: Studies in Retrospect (1945). This excellent collection of ten essays (edited by F. C. Francis) is a particularly fitting product of the Society's jubilee, for the Society was at the heart of the new developments in bibliography in England during the first half of the twentieth century, and the volume provides the best account yet written of the bibliographical history of that period.[21] Besides an essay by F. C. Francis on the history of the Society itself and an important statement by W. W. Greg setting forth a conception of the field that reflects its then-recent history ("Bibliography—A Retrospect"), there are assessments of the work on incunabula (by Victor Scholderer), STC books (F. S. Ferguson), Shakespeare (F. P. Wilson), the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Harold Williams and Michael Sadleir), foreign bibliography (Henry Thomas), and early bookbinding (E. P. Goldschmidt), and of bibliographical work in America (W. A. Jackson). The authors were prominent among those who had made the field what it was, and for this reason the volume is a primary document of importance to future historians; they were also scholars, and their essays display a mastery of the areas covered and a scrupulousness in forming generalizations. The work is not principally one of reminiscence but is an attempt to achieve a balanced view of the recent past, a perspective on activities in which the authors had been involved. Historians inevitably bring some predispositions to their reconstructions of the past, and first-generation historians may understandably bring more of them. Whether or not they in fact do varies from one individual to another, but personal involvement naturally plays a role. In his preface, F. C. Francis says of A. W. Pollard that "it was his genius to bring into the Society's life a personal element, a sense of common adventure, which has been one of its most valuable features and which I hope will never disappear from it" (p. vii). That "sense of common adventure" emerges repeatedly in the volume, as it does in many other writings by members of the circle—such as R. B. McKerrow's

An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), which conveys the excitement of research, the exhilarating feeling of being on the brink of significant discoveries. Any historian who deals with this coterie of pioneers should of course aim at capturing the sense they had of opening up new frontiers; but there is no substitute for the way this frame of mind manifests itself in their own writings.

The Studies in Retrospect volume is therefore unusual in being both primary documentation and scholarly history. As the former—and it is in fact a key document—it will obviously be of permanent use, regardless of how many other historical accounts are written. As the latter, it is worth citing here not because there is so little else to point to but because some of its essays are outstanding contributions to the history of scholarship and will remain so, no matter how excellent future treatments may prove to be. The volume offers us—as prospective historians of bibliography—a double model, encouraging us by example to write about our own immediate past in a scholarly way and demonstrating an approach to bibliographical history that is applicable to any period. The essays vary considerably in their achievement, but the most celebrated one—and rightly so—is F. P. Wilson's, entitled "Shakespeare and the 'New Bibliography.'" It is appropriate that his essay (by far the longest) should be the centerpiece of the volume, for his subject is central to the accomplishment of the Bibliographical Society in its first half-century: given the interests of Greg and McKerrow (and, through them, of Pollard), the application of physical evidence to textual problems was most extensively developed and demonstrated in connection with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, particularly Shakespeare. Wilson's essay has fortunately reached a new audience through its republication in 1970 as a separate volume with a preface by Helen Gardner, who revised the text according to notes left by Wilson and added (in bracketed footnotes) some supplementary commentary of her own. In Wilson's essay, she says in her preface, "The story of the development of Shakespearian textual studies was narrated with a range and ease of reference that sprang from massive learning so fully digested that it never clogged the coherent progress of the narrative and the argument." The essay, she went on, "had the unmistakable note of authority that profound historical scholarship gives" (p. vi). By referring both to "narrative" and to "argument," she is calling attention to what makes historical writing profound. Narratives must be shaped; and the knowledge and insight that cause one to see connections, and enable one to assess previous contributions critically, produce the argument that gives narratives their power to illuminate. Another way of making the same point is provided by her statement that Wilson's essay is both "a contribution to the history of scholarship"

and "a valuable introduction for anyone embarking on a study of the problems of establishing Shakespeare's text." Historical work at its best gives readers a view of the past that also instructs them in an approach to the subject under discussion.

Wilson's essay was in fact a history of a field—the "new" bibliography (that is, analytical bibliography applied to textual problems)—not just a history of bibliographical and textual work on Shakespeare. Since the time of his essay there has been no similar effort to cover any field, or subfield, of bibliographical study. The paucity of work forces me now to allude to two pieces of my own. I do so not to suggest that they are models of any sort (least of all in comparison with Wilson's essay) but to emphasize how little work has been done and to underscore an approach for further writing. Both are addresses delivered on retrospective occasions, one for the fiftieth anniversary of the Osler Library in 1979 and the other for the centennial of the Grolier Club in 1984.[22] In each case the subject is primarily the development of physical bibliography in the twentieth century, encompassing bibliographical analysis and its use in descriptive bibliographies and critical editions. That each of these pieces covers, at a length appropriate to an address, an area broader than Wilson's indicates the sketchiness of the treatment. Yet what I tried to show were the main lines of change and the principal issues, as they appeared to me. In dealing with author bibliography, for example, I took as central the shift from a reliance on checklists that enumerate points for identification to a greater understanding of the role of descriptive bibliography as publishing history and biography; and I made clear that in my view this shift was a welcome one, away from casualness and oversimplification and toward serious history.[23] Whether or not one agrees with my emphases or my judgments, one will find that I have offered not only a view of the past but also a way of looking at the field and evaluating its products. It is this double concern that I wish to stress, not whatever merits or flaws my own work may have. I hope that others will proceed in this fashion and that we will not have to wait long before my two addresses are supplanted by more detailed accounts.

The history of a field is to a large extent the biography of its leading figures, and biographical studies are thus an important genre within the history of scholarship. But here also there is little to point to for analytical bibliography, aside from reminiscences and memorial tributes. I do, however, wish to call attention to three essays, by Paul Needham, Fredson Bowers, and David L. Vander Meulen, that exemplify the qualities I am calling for. Needham's 1986 Hanes Lecture, The Bradshaw Method, examines Henry Bradshaw's contribution to the analysis and recording of the structure of books, reinforcing the often-expressed view that Bradshaw

is the founder of modern analytical and descriptive bibliography. Far from being simply a confirmation of what was already known or believed, however, the lecture furnishes new details about the development of Bradshaw's thought, drawn from his notebooks in Cambridge University Library, and redefines the relation of Bradshaw's ideas to those of his successors. One of the remarkable, and exemplary, features of Needham's lecture is that it conveys with great skill a sense of Bradshaw as a person, even while it emphasizes (as the title indicates) Bradshaw's approach to examining books; in Needham's treatment, the two are inseparable. Furthermore, Needham's own mastery of the bibliographical analysis of incunables enables him to evaluate with sensitivity both Bradshaw's practice and its role (or neglect) in later research. When, for instance, he shows[24] that Bradshaw conceived the collational formula to record structure, not signings, he is at once praising Bradshaw's insight, criticizing the frequent misunderstanding of the formula by those who followed, and taking a position on what the formula ought to do. As he concisely says, Bradshaw's work "is not merely astonishing for the age to which it belongs, and worthy of respect and interest on that account. It is a reliable guide to how to study books." Needham's lecture, like Wilson's essay, shows that historical understanding and an informed view of how to move forward are intricately linked.

Another essay that demonstrates the same point is Bowers's paper on "McKerrow's Editorial Principles for Shakespeare Reconsidered" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 [1955], 309-324). Although not primarily biographical, this essay analyzes McKerrow's motivations and the scholarly milieu in which his ideas were formed: "Any major work like Prolegomena," Bowers says, "has behind it a certain climate of thinking, a characteristic point of view which stems from the intellectual position held by its author" (p. 314). Bowers concludes that McKerrow's tendency to restrict the role of editorial judgment (in his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare [1939]) was a reaction against what he deemed the excessive liberties taken by nineteenth-century editors and what he saw as abuses of the New Bibliography by J. Dover Wilson. One gains from the essay both an understanding of the origins and evolution of McKerrow's ideas and a point of view regarding proper editorial procedure and its relation to analytical bibliography. The value of the piece as biography grows directly out of the extended thought Bowers had given to editorial matters.

A third exemplary piece also deals with a single important work but has a somewhat different focus: Vander Meulen's "The History and Future of Bowers's Principles" (PBSA, 79 [1985], 197-219) traces the reception of Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949)

and estimates its role in the future. The essay is the most thorough examination we have of the immediate and later reactions to a major bibliographical work; and Vander Meulen's own considerable experience with, and thoughtful consideration of, bibliographical description enables him not only to analyze tellingly the comments of reviewers and others but also to frame trenchant questions about the future course of descriptive bibliography. He places the Principles in history and suggests, in the process, the validity of the point of view it teaches.

If I may refer again to my own work, I should like to comment on one further kind of essay that has not been much practiced. In 1986 I contributed to A Companion to Melville Studies (edited by John Bryant) an essay called "Melville and the World of Books" (pp. 781-835), which I conceived of differently from the usual survey of research. I wanted not only to pay some attention to the history of bibliographical work on Melville but, by including all kinds of research and writing that could be called bibliographical, to show the interrelatedness of all the work. The essay therefore takes up the researches on Melville's book-buying and reading and on the original and subsequent publication and reception of his writings, the efforts to record all the printings of his work and all the commentary on it, and the studies and editions aimed at establishing texts of his works. These various investigations, taken together, deal with Melville's relation to the world of handwritten and printed matter, to the segment of human experience involving the attempt to transmit verbal statements in physical form. Each of these studies contributes, in greater or lesser degree, to an understanding of the cycle that leads from the formation of Melville's ideas under the influence of other writers to the influence of his writings on later individuals who put their thoughts on paper. The never-ending process of returning to documents of the past for the stimulation that produces new insights, to be recorded in their turn in new documents, cannot be effectively studied without the point of view that analytical bibliography affords, for ideas are affected at every step of the way by the physical means of their transmission. As I said in the Melville essay, "It matters what editions, and what copies, of Shakespeare and Rabelais, of Thomas Beale and William Scoresby, Melville read, just as it matters what copies of what editions of his own writings were read by various commentators. The line connecting a copy of a book Melville read to the expropriation or adaptation of its text in one of his own works, and then from a copy of an edition of that work to the interpretation of its text by a critic who read that copy, is a direct one, if only it can be discerned" (pp. 782-783). The line can be extended further, for it obviously matters what copy of what edition of a critic's work is read by a later reader: we need to understand that "all printed

texts, those of commentators as well as those of the authors commented on, must be approached with the same alertness to the possibility of variation among copies and the same awareness of how physical processes of production affect texts" (p. 799). One of the advantages of considering together these different kinds of bibliographical work is that it will help readers to question the standard concepts by which material is divided into "primary" and "secondary" and the usual treatment accorded the resulting categories.

Surveys of the bibliographical scholarship in particular fields, like surveys of other kinds of scholarship, are a standard scholarly genre, and in a sense they are all examples of the study of bibliographical history. But those that are little more than lists in essay form may be regarded as bearing the same relation to historical writing that checklists bear to descriptive bibliographies. What turns a survey of previous work into a history of scholarship, however, is not so much the extent of the commentary (which is a function of the scale of the piece) but the point of view imbuing the whole. Whether one's subject is the bibliographical work of all kinds on a given topic or the bibliographical work of a single kind on all topics, one will have little insight into the subject without a background of thinking about the transmission of works made of words. Accounts of bibliographical history, like other historical writings, can be only as penetrating as the viewpoints that shape them.

II

The examples of writings on bibliographical history that I have mentioned were chosen to help delineate the contours of the field and to suggest directions for further work. Although the literature of the history of physical bibliography, as a field of scholarly inquiry, is not extensive, there are nevertheless many other writings that could be named. The bulk of them consists of retrospective pieces written by persons who were alive at the time of the events they are discussing—a situation not unexpected in a field that has had its principal development in the twentieth century. But some publications by scholars looking back to periods before their own time do exist. In any case, whatever published material there is serves to show how the field has been thought of and forms a body of literature that future historians will have to know. It may be useful at this stage to give some idea of what that literature consists of.

A natural category to begin with is the history of bibliographical societies, best represented, of course, by F. C. Francis's essay ("The Bibliographical Society: A Sketch of the First Fifty Years") in The Bibliographical Society, 1892-1942 (pp. 1-22). Two earlier accounts of the Bibliographical Society are also important (particularly the second, by

the man who was the Society's guiding spirit for over forty years): Falconer Madan, "The Bibliographical Society," Bibliographica, 2 (1896), 479-488; and A. W. Pollard, "Our Twenty-First Birthday," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 13 (1913-15), 9-27.[25] The Bibliographical Society of America has been treated in two essays, the first by Henry B. Van Hoesen ("The Bibliographical Society of America: Its Leaders and Activities, 1904-1939," PBSA, 35 [1941], 177-202), the second, on the Society's seventy-fifth anniversary, by J. M. Edelstein ("The Bibliographical Society of America, 1904-1979," PBSA, 73 [1979], 389-422); and there is a more specialized piece, on the early years, by Wayne A. Wiegand ("Library Politics and the Organization of the Bibliographical Society of America," Journal of Library History, 21 [1986], 131-157). F. P. Wilson covered "The Malone Society: The First Fifty Years, 1906-1956," in Malone Society Collections, 4 (1956), 1-16; and Edward Born provided an anniversary history of the Gutenberg-Gesellschaft, 1901-1976 (1976). A brief general treatment is Savina A. Roxas's article (headed "Bibliographical Societies, Development of") in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (2 [1969], 384-388)—an encyclopedia that includes historical accounts of individual societies, such as Roxas's on the Bibliographical Society (2: 401-405) and J. M. Edelstein's on the Bibliographical Society of America (2: 395-401).

A sketch of the growth of bibliographical societies all over the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was provided much earlier by G. F. Barwick ("Bibliographical Societies and Bibliography," Library, 4th ser., 11 [1930-31], 151-159),[26] and at the same time Ruth S. Granniss, the long-time librarian of the Grolier Club, wrote on "What Bibliography Owes to Private Book Clubs" (PBSA, 24 [1930], 14-33).[27] As her essay suggests, any examination of the influence of organizations on the study of books as artifacts must include bibliophilic and typophilic clubs as well as bibliographical societies. The basic works, still not superseded, are, for British clubs, Abraham Hume's The Learned Societies and Printing Clubs of the United Kingdom (1847, 1853) and Harold Williams's Book Clubs & Printing Societies of Great Britain and Ireland (1929); and, for American clubs, Adolf Growoll's American Book Clubs (1897)—supplemented by Florence M. Power's "American Private Book Clubs," Bulletin of Bibliography, 20 (1950-53), 216-220, 233-236—and Lois Rather's Books and Societies (1971).[28] Many individual clubs have published their own histories, such as Clive Bigham's The Roxburghe Club (1928), Nicolas Barker's The Publications of the Roxburghe Club (1964), John T. Winterich's The Grolier Club (1950, 1967), and the collaborative volume The Grolier Club, 1884-1984: Its Library, Exhibitions, & Publications (1984).[29] All these works are useful sources, but

there are gaps in the coverage, such as the post-World War II history of the Bibliographical Society and the history of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. And the scholarly history that would consolidate these individual histories into a comprehensive study of the development and achievement of learned societies and social clubs in the field of bibliography remains to be written.

A related area is the history of bibliographical journals, which are often produced by bibliographical societies, though there are illustrious exceptions. A. W. Pollard predictably handled the early history of the Bibliographical Society's journal in excellent fashion ("The Library: A History of Forty Volumes," Library, 4th ser., 10 [1929-30], 398-418), and I have discussed its early newsletter ("The Bibliographical Society's News Sheet, 1894-1920," Gutenberg Jahrbuch 1967, pp. 297-307). Pollard's important three-year experiment, Bibliographica, has received some well-deserved attention from Robin Myers ("Bibliographica," Private Library, 3rd ser., 2 [1979], 86-94). Desmond Flower wrote up the story of his and A. J. A. Symons's Book Collector's Quarterly ("The Book Collector's Quarterly," Private Library, 2nd ser., 1 [1968], 2-6; 3rd ser., 1 [1978], 39-48), and in that journal he had published an assessment of Oliver Simon and Stanley Morison's splendid Fleuron ("Tradition and Experiment: The Fleuron I—VII." Book Collector's Quarterly, 2 [March 1931], 93-100; see also James Moran, "The Fortieth Anniversary of The Fleuron," Black Art, 1 [1962], 106-113). The Fleuron and two other journals were given extended treatment by Grant Shipcott in Typographical Periodicals between the Wars: A Critique of "The Fleuron," "Signature" and "Typography" (1980), the published version of a thesis at Oxford Polytechnic; I know of no other book-length study of this kind, examining a group of related bibliographical or typographical journals, and it is to be hoped that the presence of this book will stimulate others to pursue similar topics. Several briefer overviews, however, are available: Ruari McLean, "Some Typographical Journals, 1900-1939," in Liber Amicorum Herman Liebaers (1984), pp. 307-315; Lawrence P. Murphy, "'Published for Book Lovers': A Short History of American Book Collecting Magazines," Book Collector's Market, 4, no. 5 (September-October 1979), 1, 4-10; Claude A. Prance, "Elliot Stock and Some Old Book-Collecting Magazines," Private Library, 3rd ser., 2 (1979), 42-48; and Joseph Blumenthal, "American Book Arts Magazines," Fine Print, 6, no. 1 (January 1980), 4-9.

Mention of Elliot Stock causes one to think of books in series, for he is perhaps best remembered as the publisher of "The Book Lover's Library," which in twenty-five volumes (1886-1902) is the most extensive series of books on books yet produced. Prance has also written on this

aspect of Stock's career ("The Book Lover's Library," Private Library, 3rd ser., 6 [1983], 132-139); Stock's role as publisher of other bibliographical work in the early days of the Bibliographical Society calls for further examination. (I should call attention here, parenthetically, to the frequency with which the Private Library has been mentioned in the last page or so: the editors deserve praise for the space they have devoted in recent years to the history of bibliophilic publications.) The general subject of such series of books was well surveyed in the mid-1930s by Ruth S. Granniss ("Series of Books about Books," Colophon, n.s., 1 [1935-36], 549-564). Another kind of series—that of lectures—has recently been given some welcome historical attention. The series of Sandars (Cambridge, 1894- ) and Lyell (Oxford, 1952- ) lectures have a significant place in the history of physical bibliography, and David McKitterick has taken the basic first step in studying them by producing The Sandars and Lyell Lectures: A Checklist (1983). In a preface he describes the foundation of the two series, and in the entries he provides references to the manuscripts or typescripts of the lectures when their locations are known (the Sandars have usually been deposited in Cambridge University Library and the British Library) and cites any published forms of them (including summaries in contemporary periodicals). The way is now prepared for someone to undertake a narrative history, and the Sandars series particularly demands this treatment: it was intimately bound up with the early history of the New Bibliography, having been established two years after the founding of the Bibliographical Society and in the same year when Greg and McKerrow entered Trinity College, Cambridge. (The remarkable roll of Cambridge bibliographers and editors—from Bennet and Bentley to Bradshaw, Housman, McKerrow, and Greg, and on to Carter and Munby—gives it a special place in the history of bibliography.)

The largest category of the literature of bibliographical history consists of biographical writings. Although there are few book-length biographies, and not many pieces of any length that are critical assessments by scholars who did not know their subjects personally, this literature is nevertheless a rich one because of the high quality of the memorial tributes to the major figures. There is no better way to gain a sense of how the field developed than to read these memoirs; even after a thorough scholarly history appears, they will remain of value for their immediacy in displaying the qualities of mind that shaped the field.

Of the five major figures before 1950—Bradshaw, Proctor, Pollard, McKerrow, and Greg—only Bradshaw (1831-86) has thus far been the subject of much scholarship, and he awaits a modern biography that would give appropriate attention to his bibliographical achievements.

Two years after Bradshaw's death George W. Prothero published A Memoir of Henry Bradshaw (1888), a long Victorian life-and-letters that emphasized Bradshaw's librarianship of Cambridge University Library. A volume of Collected Papers (edited by Francis Jenkinson) appeared the following year, and in 1904 A. W. Pollard edited "Letters of Henry Bradshaw to Officials of the British Museum" (Library, n.s., 5: 266-292, 431-442). The next serious work on Bradshaw did not occur until some sixty years later: Wytze and Lotte Hellinga's extensively annotated two-volume edition of Henry Bradshaw's Correspondence on Incunabula with J. W. Holtrop and M. F. A. G. Campbell (1966-78). Because Bradshaw's influence on other scholars resulted more from his correspondence with them than from the publication of essays, his letters are particularly important, and several further selections of them have seen print (e.g., those edited by David McKitterick in Hellinga Festschrift [1980], pp. 335-338, and in Quaerendo, 11 [1981], 128-164). At this time Robin Myers also contributed a basic account of Bradshaw's work on Caxton ("William Blades's Debt to Henry Bradshaw and G. I. F. Tupper in His Caxton Studies: A Further Look at Unpublished Documents," Library, 5th ser., 5 [1978], 265-283). In 1984 Roy Stokes performed a valuable service by editing a volume (Henry Bradshaw, 1831-1886) containing a selection of Bradshaw's work, along with an introductory essay and lists of Bradshaw's publications and of writings about him.[30] (This volume is the sixth in a series called "The Great Bibliographers," published by the Scarecrow Press, the first five being on McKerrow, Pollard, Dibdin, McMurtrie, and Sadleir.) Bradhaw had thus been far less neglected than most bibliographers by the time of the centennial of his death, which was marked by several events: an exhibition at Cambridge University Library; the publication of McKitterick's history of the Library, containing new information about Bradshaw; and Needham's delivery of his Hanes Lecture, the most penetrating discussion of Bradshaw yet written, and a model for historians of bibliography.

Robert Proctor (1868-1903), the next great figure in the history of the analysis of bibliographical evidence and a follower of Bradshaw's, was the subject of a memorable obituary essay by A. W. Pollard (Library, n.s., 5 [1904], 1-34; reprinted in his 1905 edition of a collection of Proctor's Bibliographical Essays); Pollard also put together a record of "Robert Proctor's Work" (in the same volume of the Library, pp. 192-205, 223-224). In 1951 Victor Scholderer commented on excerpts from Proctor's diary ("The Private Diary of Robert Proctor," Library, 5th ser., 5: 261-269; reprinted in Scholderer's Fifty Essays [1966], pp. 31-37); and recently Barry C. Johnson published a pamphlet, Lost in the Alps: A Portrait of Robert Proctor (1985), which records some new information

but seems more interested in the mystery of Proctor's death than in the details of his bibliographical scholarship.

Pollard (1859-1944), whose important work first on incunabula and then on Shakespeare made him a transition figure between the nineteenth-century analytical bibliography and that of the twentieth century and whose leadership caused the New Bibliography at first to be thought of as the "school of Pollard," did see into print some fragments of autobiography: "Reminiscences of an Amateur Book-Builder" (Colophon, part 4 [December 1930]) and "My First Fifty Years" (in A Select Bibliography of the Writings of Alfred W. Pollard [1938], pp. 1-15, and completed by Henry Thomas's "From Fifty to Seventy-Five," pp. 16-20), in addition to Two Brothers: Accounts Rendered (1916, 1917), on his two sons who were killed in the war. Following his death John Dover Wilson wrote a thorough and moving memoir (Proceedings of the British Academy, 31 [1945], 256-306) and, a quarter-century later, devoted a section of his autobiography, Milestones on the Dover Road (1969), to Pollard ("The Scholar as Saint: Alfred Pollard," pp. 237-249). F. C. Francis contributed an obituary to the Library (4th ser., 25 [1944-45], 82-86), and the Bibliographical Society's annual report in the same issue called Pollard "the creator of the Society as we know it to-day" (p. 101). The 1938 checklist of Pollard's voluminous writings is supplemented in the volume in the "Great Bibliographers" series, Alfred William Pollard: A Selection of His Essays (edited by Fred W. Roper, 1976), which also reprints Wilson's earlier memoir and includes an essay by Roger Leachman (based on his Master's thesis at the University of North Carolina) entitled "Alfred William Pollard: His Influence on Contemporary Bibliography" (pp. 58-77).

R. B. McKerrow (1872-1940), who published several of the monuments of the New Bibliography (the edition of Nashe, the Introduction to Bibliography, the registers of publishers' devices and title-page borders, the Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare), was given a fine memorial tribute by W. W. Greg (Proceedings of the British Academy, 26 [1940], 488-515) and a checklist by F. C. Francis (Library, 4th ser., 21 [1940-41], 229-263). Besides the essay by Fredson Bowers mentioned earlier, the only other major publication about McKerrow is the volume in the "Great Bibliographers" series, Ronald Brunlees McKerrow: A Selection of His Essays (edited by John Philip Immroth, 1974), which includes Greg's memoir and a revision of Francis's checklist. Robin Myers has also written an account of the Introduction to Bibliography in her "Key Works in Bibliography" series (Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 5 [1978], 8-9, 11).

W.W. Greg (1875-1959) produced an even larger body of important

work than the others, and with good reason F. P. Wilson called him the "hero" of his account of the New Bibliography. Greg's Biographical Notes, 1877-1947, written in 1948, were privately printed at the Bodleian in 1960; a checklist of his writings was prepared by F. C. Francis in 1945 (Library, 4th ser., 26 [1945-46], 72-97, where Francis says that his work was marked "by a singleness of purpose rarely aspired to and practically never attained") and was supplemented by D. F. McKenzie fifteen years later (Library, 5th ser., 15 [1960], 42-46). F. P. Wilson wrote a substantial memoir of Greg (Proceedings of the British Academy, 45 [1959], 307-334), and a collection of tributes (by J. C. T. Oates, J. Dover Wilson, Alice Walker, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Fredson Bowers, and F. C. Francis) was gathered in the Library (5th ser., 14 [1959], 151-174). Greg's A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (1939-59) has been discussed by Robin Myers as one of the "Key Works in Bibliography" (Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 5 [1978], 98-100, 102). In 1966 J. C. Maxwell edited Greg's Collected Papers, incorporating some revisions from Greg's notes. Although there is not much directly biographical writing about Greg, his ideas have been the subject of extensive discussion. Because he made a number of important general statements about the field, as well as basic contributions to the development of thinking about descriptive bibliography and scholarly editing, there is an enormous literature that comments on his work. A large part of what has been written on textual criticism in English since 1950, for example, analyzes his essay "The Rationale of Copy-Text." Most of this writing is not specifically historical in aim; it is the kind of discussion that grows up around any figure whose work is influential—as it has done, indeed, around the other great bibliographers (though Greg seems to be the subject of more of it). But some of the commentary does try, however briefly, to account for the origins or timing of Greg's ideas,[31] and it is of course part of the material that the biographer of Greg must deal with.

One may read in some detail about the lives of a few of the other figures active in the Bibliographical Society in its early years, such as J. Y. W. MacAlister (1856-1925), a founder of the Society (Sir John Young Walker MacAlister: A Memorial for His Family and Friends, 1926—which includes Pollard's memoir originally printed in the Library, 4th ser., 6 [1926], 375-380), Talbot Baines Reed (1852-93), the first Secretary of the Society (Stanley Morison's Talbot Baines Reed, 1960), and Francis Jenkinson (1853-1923), President of the Society from 1900 to 1902 (H. F. Stewart's Francis Jenkinson, 1926). T. J. Wise (1859-1937), President of the Society from 1922 to 1924, has become—as a result of his bibliographical crimes rather than his bibliographical scholarship—the focus of a whole historical industry. The fullest account of the

forgeries, as well as the best guide to the writings on the subject, is Nicolas Barker and John Collins's A Sequel to "An Enquiry" . . . The Forgeries of H. Buxton Forman & T. J. Wise Re-examined (1983); John Carter and Graham Pollard also described the "Aftermath of 'An Enquiry'" in an essay published as the epilogue to the 1983 printing of An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets. David Foxon takes up another of Wise's crimes, the removal of leaves from books in the British Museum library, in Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama (1959). In the midst of all this, there is one essay on Wise's place in the growth of author bibliography (Simon Nowell-Smith, "T. J. Wise as Bibliographer," Library, 5th ser., 24 [1969], 129-141). A contemporary of Wise's, M. R. James (1862-1936), who was active in the Bibliographical Society somewhat later and was one of the inaugural recipients of its Gold Medal in 1929, has inspired a considerable literature (partly because of the interest in his ghost stories), from S. G. Lubbock's A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James (1939; with a checklist by A. F. Scholfield) to the recent books by Richard William Pfaff (Montague Rhodes James [1980], with a new checklist of his scholarly writings) and Michael Cox (M. R. James: An Informal Portrait [1983], with a list of writings about James). His reminiscences, Eton and King's (1926), help to paint the picture of Cambridge at an important time for bibliography. (Another contemporary, A. E. Housman [1859-1936], was not a member of the Bibliographical Society, but his textual work should be taken into account along with that of the early members of the Society, and a great deal has of course been written about him.)[32] A figure of the next generation who should be mentioned with this group is J. B. Oldham (1882-1962), whose work on bindings earned him the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society; he is now the subject of a book (J. B. Oldham, 1882-1962, 1986) by M. L. Charlesworth, who does not, however, say much about his bibliographical work. A still later member of the Bibliographical Society but a contributor (the only American contributor) to its anniversary volume, W. A. Jackson (1905-64), has been well served by William H. Bond, who in Records of a Bibliographer (1967) presented an admirable biographical sketch and a checklist, as well as a selection of Jackson's essays.

A few individuals earlier than Bradshaw can be seen, in one respect or another, as forerunners of modern physical bibliography. Thomas Bennet (1673-1728), whose An Essay on the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion (1715) employs printing evidence derived from collation in considering the authenticity of the opening of the twentieth article, has been discussed both by Strickland Gibson ("Thomas Bennet, a Forgotten Bibliographer," Library, 5th ser., 6 [1951], 43-47) and, in an excellent

piece of bibliographical history, by William L. Williamson ("Thomas Bennet and the Origins of Analytical Bibliography," Journal of Library History, 16 [1981], 177-186). The Prolusions (1760) and other writings of Edward Capell (1713-81) have been examined by David Foxon for their role in the development of quasi-facsimile transcription (Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description, 1970).[33] Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) and Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862) may be less easy to relate to modern methods, but their activities and reminiscences (e.g., Dibdin's Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 1836; Horne's Reminiscences Personal and Bibliographical, 1862) are part of what the historian of physical bibliography has to take into account for the early nineteenth century (see also William A. Jackson's An Annotated List of the Publications of the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin, 1965; and the 1978 volume, Thomas Frognall Dibdin: Selections, edited by Victor E. Neuburg for the "Great Bibliographers" series). An important contemporary of Bradshaw—indeed, one of Bradshaw's principal correspondents—was the printer William Blades (1824-90), championed as "the founder of modern scientific bibliography" by Stanley Morison (who was thinking of the study of typography, not the New Bibliography) in his introduction to Type Specimen Facsimiles (edited by John Dreyfus, 1963 [p. xix]; reprinted with another essay as Letter Forms, 1968). Talbot Baines Reed wrote a memoir of Blades (with a checklist) for the posthumous publication of The Pentateuch of Printing (1891). Blades's work on Caxton and his connections with Bradshaw have been repeatedly discussed, as in James Moran's "William Blades" (Library, 5th ser., 16 [1961], 251-266), Robin Myers's 1978 article (mentioned above) and her "The Caxton Celebration of 1877: A Landmark in Bibliophily" (in Bibliophily, edited by Myers and Michael Harris, 1986; pp. 138-163), and Lotte Hellinga's Caxton in Focus (1982; see "William Blades," pp. 36-40). Blades's (and Bradshaw's) relations with Tupper are explored in Robin Myers, "George Isaac Frederick Tupper, Facsimilist, 'whose ability in this description of work is beyond praise' (1820?-1911)," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7, part 2 (1978), 113-134.

The next generation after Greg's produced a remarkable group of bibliographers from the ranks of publishers and booksellers. The mentor of many of them was the publisher Michael Sadleir (1888-1957), whose Trollope bibliography appeared as early as 1928; he wrote some "Passages from the Autobiography of a Bibliomaniac" for the great catalogue of his collection, XIX Century Fiction (1951) and was the subject of an amusing piece by Simon Nowell-Smith ("Sadleir Sadleirized," New Colophon, 2 [1949], 135-142). At his death both John Carter (Book

Collector, 7 [1958], 58-61) and Graham Pollard (Library, 5th ser., 13 [1958], 129-131) wrote tributes, and Simon Nowell-Smith prepared a checklist (Library, pp. 132-138). Robin Myers made XIX Century Fiction the first work discussed in her "Key Works in Bibliography" series (Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 4 [1977], 394-398), and Roy Stokes edited (with introductory essay and revised checklist) a volume on Sadleir for the "Great Bibliographers" series (Michael Sadleir, 1888-1957, 1980). No doubt the most celebrated members of this group were John Carter (1905-75) and Graham Pollard (1903-76)—both from the antiquarian book trade—because of their exposure in 1934 of Wise's fabrications through a pioneer use of physical analysis applied to nineteenth-century materials. This aspect of their lives is of course well covered by Barker and Collins in A Sequel to "An Enquiry." Carter wrote some reminiscences of other parts of his life, such as "Sotheby's of London, New York: The Early Days; Some Egotistical Reminiscences" (Art at Auction 1970-71, pp. 34-47), and he supplied a biography of Pollard for Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard, edited by R. W. Hunt, I. G. Philip, and R. J. Roberts (1975), a volume that also includes a checklist of Pollard's published work. Nicolas Barker wrote substantial memoirs of both Carter and Pollard (Book Collector, 24 [1975], 202-216 passim; 26 [1977], 7-28 passim), and P. H. Muir also recorded some recollections of Carter for the Book Collector (24: 271-276 passim). Muir (1894-1979), another bookseller-bibliographer closely associated with this group, published an informative autobiography, Minding My Own Business (1956) and was honored on his eightieth birthday with a booklet edited by Laurie Deval (P.H.M. 80, 1974); in 1980 Barker wrote an obituary tribute for the Book Collector (29: 85-88), and three years later Muir's widow was responsible for the appearance of P. H. Muir: A Check List of His Published Work (a supplement was added in 1985, and in 1986, under the name Barbara Kaye, she published The Company We Kept, her sequel to his autobiography). John Hayward (1904-65), dominant force behind the Book Collector for seventeen years, was the subject of a particularly evocative group of tributes edited by John Carter ("John Hayward, 1904-1965: Some Memories," Book Collector, 14 [1965], 443-486; also published as a pamphlet). And A. N. L. Munby (1913-74), librarian of King's College, Cambridge, for twenty-seven years and himself a bibliographical historian of distinction in his five-volume work on the collection of Thomas Phillipps (Phillipps Studies, 1951-60), has been taken up in several memoirs besides those by Barker in the Book Collector (24 [1975], 191-201 passim) and (with checklist appended) in Munby's Essays and Papers (1978): Patrick Wilkinson, Alan Noel Latimer Munby (1975); Harold Forster, "'Munby Ltd,'" Book Collector, 31 (1982), 331-338; John R. Gretton, "A. N. L. Munby: A Tribute," in Essays in Book-Collecting (1985), pp. 76-80.

As these names and citations show, book collecting and antiquarian bookselling intersect bibliography so extensively that most biographies of individuals associated with any of these areas are relevant to a study of the others. For a picture of the bibliographical world of the first half of the twentieth century, one should not neglect, for example, such biographical accounts of dealers as Rosenbach (1960), a detailed biography of the great Philadelphia dealer by Edwin Wolf 2nd with John Fleming, and Dukedom Large Enough (1969), the reminiscences of David A. Randall, who was in charge of rare books at Scribner's in New York while John Carter was Scribner's rare-book representative in London. Similarly, the famous physician-collectors William Osler (1849-1919) and Geoffrey Keynes (1887-1982) have a place in bibliographical history, the former for Bibliotheca Osleriana and Incunabula Medica and the latter for his long series of bibliographies of writers he collected (both were presidents of the Bibliographical Society). For both, we have their own statements about their collecting ("The Collecting of a Library" in Bibliotheca Osleriana [1929]; "Religio Bibliographici" in Keynes's Bibliotheca Bibliographici [1964], earlier published in the Library, 5th ser., 8 [1953], 63-76) and full-length biographical accounts (Harvey Cushing's massive The Life of Sir William Osler [1926] and Keynes's autobiography, The Gates of Memory [1981]), along with some later assessments (particularly Charles G. Roland's of Osler and Nicolas Barker's of Keynes).[34]

Dealers and collectors seem to have engaged in more autobiographical writing than have bibliographers, some of it not perhaps immediately related to the concerns of analytical bibliographers but all of it contributing to a picture of that part of the book world in which analytical bibliography exists.[35] And this picture has been extended by a number of scholarly studies of dealers and collectors, some notable examples (besides Rosenbach and Phillipps Studies) being Wilmarth Lewis's Horace Walpole's Library (1958), Wyman W. Parker's Henry Stevens of Vermont (1963), B. L. Reid's The Man from New York [John Quinn] (1968), Cyril E. Wright's Fontes Harleiani (1971; following his and Ruth C. Wright's edition of The Diary of Humphrey Wanley, 1966), Anthony Hobson's Apollo and Pegasus [Grimaldi] (1975), and Nicolas Barker's Bibliotheca Lindesiana (1977), along with such catalogues as Allen T. Hazen's A Catalogue of Horace Walpole's Library (1969), Gabriel Austin's The Library of Jean Grolier (1971), and Edwin Wolf's The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia (1974). Scholars of typographic history are another class of students of the physical book: the

most thoroughly discussed is Stanley Morison (1889-1967), the subject of a biography by Nicolas Barker (1972) and of many shorter memoirs;[36] but volumes of collected essays and Festschriften, usually containing checklists and introductory appreciations, provide a starting point for biographical work on a number of others.[37]

In the second half of the twentieth century the dominant bibliographical scholar is Fredson Bowers. He, like Greg, has been the focus of a great deal of commentary; but the most clearly historical pieces that have thus far appeared about him are probably two essays included in "Fredson Bowers at Eighty" (PBSA, 79 [1985], 173-226; also printed as a separate)—David Vander Meulen's (mentioned above) on the Principles and mine on "The Achievement of Fredson Bowers." A pictorial booklet, A Keepsake to Honor Fredson Bowers, marked the occasion of his retirement in 1974; a checklist of his writings is included in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (1975), pp. 531-548, and is supplemented in PBSA, 79 (1985), 221-226. His own tribute to Charlton Hinman (Book Collector, 26 [1977], 389-391) is worth examining for his comments on the other primary developer of analytical bibliography in this period. Robin Myers has discussed both Bowers's Principles and Hinman's The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) in her "Key Works" series (Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 6 [1979], 362-367 passim; 8 [1981], 219-223).[38]

All these biographical accounts, and the studies of bibliographical societies and journals, provide glimpses—sometimes scholarly, sometimes journalistic and anecdotal—into particular segments of bibliographical history. Such writings form part of the basis, along with the bibliographical work itself, on which more comprehensive histories can be constructed. But very few efforts of broader scope have been attempted. Greg's "Notes on Dramatic Bibliographers" (Malone Society Collections, 1, parts 4-5 [1911], 324-340; 2, part 3 [1931], 235-238) limits itself to lists (from 1656 to 1812) of English plays—making the point that "a familiarity with the history of dramatic bibliography is often necessary for the criticism of current and received opinions" (p. 324). A true precursor of F. P. Wilson's essay is Percy Simpson's "The Bibliographical Study of Shakespeare" (Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, 1, part 1 [1923], 19-53), an excellent piece of work that "attempts to show historically how recent scholarship has worked with effect on the problems of the text of Shakespeare" (p. 49) and sees Pollard as the leading figure.[39] There has been nothing, however, like Wilson's piece since. George Watson Cole, in 1929, published "A Survey of the Bibliography of English Literature, 1475-1640, with Especial Reference to the Work of the Bibliographical Society of London" (PBSA, 23, part 2: 1-95),

which—though it is not a continuous narrative—is a useful (and neglected) work: it consists of a chronological sequence of historical sketches (some several pages in length) of individuals and institutions that have produced important bibliographies, with appended sections listing the bibliographies and reproducing sample entries from them.[40] Some sense of historical development is often conveyed in the introductory comments to scholarly books and articles, but they rarely become full-fledged historical studies. One exception is Morison's long essay "On the Classification of Typographical Variations," prefixed to Type Specimen Facsimiles (mentioned above for its discussion of Blades), a large part of which (pp. xvii-xxviii) deals with the history of typographical scholarship. Foxon's Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (cited earlier for its recognition of Capell) is another rare instance of historical attention to an aspect of physical bibliography, in this case the conventions of title-page transcription. My two essays on twentieth-century bibliographical history are much broader in scope than Wilson or Morison or Foxon but are much less detailed. Obviously this survey of the literature of bibliographical history must be anticlimactic: there are many reminiscences and some detailed studies but very little that tries to pull the disparate parts of the story together.

III

The works that I have alluded to here are only a sampling of what exists—but, I hope, a sampling that suggests the range of the published material and one that includes most of the basic items. Many more books and essays that are retrospective in one way or another could be mentioned, particularly those that are anniversary or obituary tributes to particular individuals. There is a large roster of people, active during the Bibliographical Society's first half-century, who deserve attention, in addition to those already mentioned as subjects of historical writing—among them, G. F. Barwick, R. W. Chapman, W. A. Copinger, Cyril Davenport, E. Gordon Duff, F. S. Ferguson, F. C. Francis, Stephen Gaselee, Strickland Gibson, E. P. Goldschmidt, Konrad Haebler, G. D. Hobson, Falconer Madan, Henry R. Plomer, Charles Sayle, Percy Simpson, Henry Thomas, Edward Maunde Thompson, W. H. J. Weale, H. B. Wheatley, Harold Williams, Iolo A. Williams, F. P. Wilson, and J. Dover Wilson. One can locate obituaries, DNB articles, and the like for these figures and others, just as one can find—through indexes, guides, and patient searches—further bibliographical writings with some historical perspective. Voluminous as this literature is, it is largely the natural by-product of the development of the field, not the result of disinterested scholarly investigation. Of the works that I have named, the majority

are personal reminiscences. The field may not be old, but it is old enough that independent judgments concerning the accomplishments of its earlier years are possible.

The writings mentioned here, and others like them, should be familiar to all bibliographers, for they show what traditions have grown up in the field and how previous bibliographers have looked at their colleagues and predecessors. But the historian of bibliography, in addition to knowing this retrospective work, must of course return to the bibliographical scholarship itself and to any unpublished material relating to it. The scholarship is not as conveniently indexed as one might wish, and some of it remains hidden in monographs and essays indexed only under the authors of the books analyzed, not under the bibliographical approaches employed. But much of the material is in fact accessible through a series of indexes and guides,[41] though their presence should never cause one to neglect the systematic searching of shelves and of periodicals, a process by which one's sense of the growth of a field will more fully emerge. The whereabouts of the relevant collections of unpublished letters and papers are, as in all fields, less easy to determine. Scholars' papers, when they are preserved at all, are likely to be in the institutions with which they were associated, for such papers are regarded more often as part of institutional archives than as manuscripts of independent interest. As long as the papers are properly cared for, one should perhaps not complain; many scholars do, after all, play prominent roles in their institutions and deserve a place in the collections that support institutional memory. But many scholars (and not always different ones) have taken important parts on the broader stage of international scholarship; and the fact that their papers are often regarded as being primarily of local interest suggests the position that the history of scholarship occupies in the hierarchy adopted by many collectors of manuscripts in institutional libraries.

Writing history—the attempt to reconstruct some segment of the past —is always a creative activity. The shapes that historians give to the past are the products of particular points of view and particular selections of details. As we move forward, our sense of how we got to our present location changes, and new versions of the past continually emerge. When the subject of our history is humanistic scholarship, we are looking at individuals who were historians themselves, individuals who chose the study of the past as their way of coming to terms with the world. Historians of science and of belles lettres, painting, music, and the other arts deal with the same kind of individuals, who happen to have taken different routes to satisfy the same creative urge, the urge to place the stamp of human control on what seems to be the chaos outside the mind.

Some novelists and scientists may decide that chaos is the ultimate reality, but even then they have imposed a human conception on the exterior world and can thereby feel that in some way they have mastered it. F. C. Francis's reference to the "sense of common adventure" that characterized the Bibliographical Society in its early years can be applied more generally: for all who think about their relation to their surroundings, and endeavor to explain the past or present or future, share a common adventure. Biographies give us the story of that adventure, life by life, showing how creative pursuits relate to the exigencies of living. And the story of a field is a shaped collection of such biographies. The number of lives that have been devoted to bibliography is not large, because the significance of the field, and thus of bibliographical lives, is often underestimated. But the concerns of the field are of fundamental importance to all literate beings: everyone who reads is affected by bibliographical discoveries and concepts, for every text is likely to be altered in the process of its transmission; and a knowledge of how the physical objects that bear verbal messages were produced will influence how one approaches any text.[42] When we write bibliographical history we are adding to the record of human creativity and in the process showing what bibliography contributes to the life of the mind.

Notes