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.
