University of Virginia Library

The Bibliographical Society of the
University of Virginia: The First Fifty Years
by
DAVID L. VANDER MEULEN

The special association of the University of Virginia with books is a connection that began with the founding of the school. The establishment of the University itself was one of the three accomplishments for which the institution's material and intellectual architect, Thomas Jefferson, sought to be remembered in the epitaph on his tombstone; the physical and symbolic center of the "academical village" that he fashioned was the Rotunda; and the most important space in that most significant building was its Dome Room, designed to house the library. Despite the local propensity to invoke Jefferson at every opportunity, no one has yet contended that he was instrumental in creating the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. It has been the Society, however, that more powerfully than any other instrument has linked books with Mr. Jefferson's University in the public mind.

That the opening two articles in the first volume of the Society's Papers--to be known from the second volume as Studies in Bibliography-- dealt with Jefferson reflects the Society's origins but is ultimately incidental to the larger connection. That the name of the University became a codeword for the analysis of books as physical objects, the study of the transmission of texts, and the preparation of scholarly editions, however, arose chiefly from the constellation of activities that the Society instigated. In his "warm welcome" to the Society and its journal in the January 1950 Modern Language Review, W. W. Greg noted this distinctiveness immediately: "Certainly the University of Virginia is the centre of a very live and extended school of Bibliography in all its aspects, not least in these highly technical ones that a small band of American scholars have made peculiarly their own." Ten years later a former University of Virginia professor then at the Claremont Graduate School, Sears Jayne, could attest in a letter to the Society's founders that "Since returning to California I have had many reminders of the fact that the name of the University of Virginia is known around the world primarily through the influence of its Bibliographical Society."

But while the international renown and influence of the Society are easy to verify, the reasons for its growth are not. How is it that a diverse group of people connected with a small university in the American South created an organization that would symbolize a scholarly approach and would produce a journal, Studies in Bibliography, that from the start the Times Literary Supplement declared (on 23 March 1951) "must take its place in the first rank of such publications anywhere in the world"?

I

An exploratory meeting for what was to become the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia was held at 4:30 Friday afternoon, 11 October 1946, in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of the University Library. According to Linton Massey, who was to serve as the group's president for twenty-six years, in the 1920s such a society had been a gleam in the collective eyes of Randolph Church, who later became the State Librarian of Virginia; of Jack Dalton, then a student but who would rise to the post of University Librarian; and of John Cook Wyllie, who began working in the library as a student assistant during the 1928 Christmas holidays and later became Curator of Rare Books, University Librarian, and Director of University Libraries. The fulfillment of a dream of adequate space in the form of the completion of Alderman Library in 1938 reinvigorated thinking about books, as did the magnificent gift announced at the dedication of that building, the collection of the Detroit philanthropist Tracy W. McGregor. The McGregor books themselves were crucial in forming the perception of the University Library as a site for serious research; but with the collection also came funds for a magnificent room, one begging to be used for scholarly functions.

The meeting in 1946 was at the instigation of Dr. Chalmers Gemmill, a University of Virginia (UVa) pharmacologist. Its venue, on the second floor of Alderman, identified it as in the demesne of Rare Book Curator Wyllie, who in preparation had sent in mid September an invitation and questionnaire to a couple hundred librarians, newspaper editors, printers, collectors, book dealers, and faculty, chiefly in Virginia. The intent was that responses to the questionnaire would help shape the organization, but the letter had to provide at least a tentative indication of its nature. Accordingly, Wyllie began: "At the suggestion of several local bibliophiles I am undertaking the organization of a small group of Charlottesville residents with an object of exhibiting in the Rare Book and Manuscript Division of the University of Virginia Library selections from their private libraries." He announced that at the planning meeting Gemmill would display and discuss examples of his own collection

of Baskerville editions, implying thereby how such a group might proceed.

The questionnaire asked whether respondents were interested in affiliating as active members with either a Bibliographical Society of Virginia or, more specifically, a Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. Subsequent questions inquired about dues, publications, exhibits, meetings, and officers, and they solicited names of people who might work on a constitution or be otherwise interested in joining. Wyllie's quietly shaping hand also appeared in notes that he attached to some letters. To a local bookstore proprietor, C. C. Wells, he wrote, for instance: "Would be particularly grateful if you could find time to write me off the names of some Charlottesville non- faculty collectors."

About 110 of the surveys were returned. One interesting characteristic is the number of respondents who were not interested in such a group but who instead of discarding the letter explained why they could not participate (they were usually "too old" or "too busy"). Such considerateness may arise from the manners of an earlier generation, but it might also point to an element that seems to account for the wide acceptance of the proposal--that these were people who were part of John Wyllie's great orb of personal acquaintances.

Whether the correspondents accepted or declined the invitation, their comments tended to reveal their sense of what Wyllie and the others were trying to create. A newspaper editor and stamp-collector from Lynchburg excused himself by saying, "If I were a collector of books, I am sure I would be glad to join an organization of men and women interested in the same hobby." A law professor carefully explained, "I love books for their contents, and old books for their association as well as their contents. That is, it is easy to feel about old books as if they were persons who reflect the mellowness of their years. I have no interest in books simply because of their rarity, such as first editions of current works. Accordingly, I do not believe that I would be a suitable member of the Bibliophile Society."

Those who were interested displayed different degrees of enthusiasm. The head of a Charlottesville dame school wrote, "I will be there on Oct. 11--to see what this is all about." (Her name subsequently appeared on the list of charter members.) A printing company official thought such a society "might be helpful in establishing a company library of carefully selected volumes." The response of a University alumnus in New York must have warmed the heart of Wyllie, who had established the rare book holdings by examining every volume in the general stacks. This prospective member wrote that many people would like to make or encourage gifts to the library. "If such is the function of the organization you propose," he said, "I will do every thing in my power to

be of help to you." Wyllie sometimes wrote back to overcome initial timidity. To UVa graduate Charlton Hinman, in Washington, D.C., he responded: "Your idea about the nature of an active member is clearly different from mine. It seems to me, for example, that a Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia without you and Billy Miller [that is, C. William Miller, another graduate] as members would be a pretty sorry society."

Other letters offered seasoned advice. From the Folger Library, James McManaway, himself a member of the Virginia class of 1919, wrote Wyllie, "If a group of bibliophiles can be organized, their interests will be stimulated by an attractive news letter to announce programs, memorialize gifts to U.Va. and otherwise minister to their self esteem. Its contents should be urbane, rather than learned." Louis B. Wright of the Huntington Library encouraged Wyllie "not to have too many meetings each year. . . . In the intervals between formal meetings you might find it desirable to put on special exhibitions sponsored by the bibliographical society and send out leaflets describing them"--a system that had successfully created interest at the Huntington. The most extensive comments came in an enthusiastic and wise letter from Williamsburg. "I was a member of the Bibliographical Society of America as early as 1901," it said, "when it was the Bibli. Socy. of Chicago, and when I was librarian of old Armour Institute. I attended the meetings, about eight or ten [people] present, and I must say they were insufferably dull." The correspondent pointed out other potential dangers: "The leaders [of the Bibliographical Society of America] have generally been busy men in their professions, and have not had the time to extend the Society's work. Moreover, in recent years, it has gotten into the hands of a small group, and remains in that group." A new society, however, could add to the forces creating bibliographical understanding: "It is a matter of regret that the term `bibliography' is so misunderstood, and especially among librarians, the view being that it is enumerative only, making . . . lists from Readers Guide, and such stuff."

The results of the questionnaire were presented at the October 1946 meeting, at which the group not only heard Gemmill's paper on "John Baskerville, Typefounder" but also designated a six-member committee to draft a constitution. Wyllie was appointed chair; the group also included Miss Lucy T. Clark, a rare-book cataloguer; Fredson Bowers, a forty-one-year-old Assistant Professor of English; Charles D. McCormick, a local resident who earlier had been part of a book-collecting group in Cleveland; Charles W. Smith from the Art Department; and Hugh M. Spencer, a chemistry professor.

On 20 February 1947, John Wyllie sent out a letter announcing that an organizational meeting would be held the following Wednesday

evening, February 26, in the McGregor Room. The thirty-three people who gathered there adopted a constitution that defined the object of their new society to be "to foster an interest in books (including books in manuscript), maps, printing, and bibliography." The group was to be called "The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia." This was the name widely preferred on the questionnaires, not only by Charlottesville respondents but also by a surprising number of others. Some had recommended the more localized term out of caution: if the Society succeeded on a small scale, its scope could be extended. Others recognized that the leadership would arise from within the University, and they therefore found the longer title more accurate. Linton Massey later reported the thinking that predominated: "From the beginning it was decided to identify the Society with the University of Virginia, no matter how dubiously the mother might regard her upstart offspring, because such an association would parallel the English precedent at Oxford, as it did the one at Cambridge later on; and because [paradoxically] such an affiliation would broaden the appeal and widen its scope far beyond that of a mere regional organization." The cumbersomeness of multiple prepositions in the name raised objections from some reviewers of the Society's Papers, but the designation--as well as the association with the University--has endured.

That first official meeting also codified practice in other, albeit less formal, ways. The McGregor Room was to be the standard venue for Society meetings, most of which, like this one, included a talk. At the inaugural session the address was given by Fredson Bowers, whose name would be linked more prominently than anyone else's with the Society. Speaking on "Some Problems and Practices in Bibliographical Descriptions of Modern Authors," he drew on information provided him by Jacob Blanck to prepare a "Description of the six impressions of Washington Irving's `Wolfert's Roost.'" This six-page mimeograph, whose contents would appear as a sample in Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description two years later, was distributed at the talk and also circulated with the first number of the Society's Secretary's News Sheet the next month. Though Bowers himself was to address the Society formally a number of times in succeeding decades, his contributions represented only one kind of presentation made at its meetings. On the other hand, although the summary of his talk in the first News Sheet indicates that the evening was less daunting than might first appear, his discussion gave notice that the concerns of the fledgling Society would extend beyond dilettantism.

The roster of original officers and Council members of the Society reveals the range of interests that found a welcome here. Chalmers Gemmill, who had illustrated his talk with his own books, was elected the

group's first president. His involvement appears to have arisen from his collecting interests; besides the Baskervilles, he owned a library of Nonesuch Press books, which were exhibited at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg in 1970. Gemmill, who was Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, was also a medical historian. His collecting and historical interests came together in an article he published as from a "Correspondent" in the London Times on 12 May 1965, "Coin-buying in the Middle East." He had long been in pursuit of the ancient wonder drug silphium produced from a plant pictured on old coins but now believed extinct. Of the first four Councilors, Hugh M. Spencer from the Chemistry Department also had a historical bent, and in 1983 he was to publish a history of that department, just as Gemmill had done for Pharmacology in 1966. According to Spencer's wife he was an eclectic collector, and his books were, she says, "a great source of pleasure to him." Miss Lucy T. Clark was the rare book cataloguer of the University, one whose tenure went back to the Rotunda days of the Library and who had trained herself in her vocation when she was unable to obtain suitable Library of Congress cards for old books. She eventually was the chief cataloguer of C. Waller Barrett's collection of American literature that he donated to the University Library, and she published a number of checklists based on portions of that hoard. The third Councilor, Charles W. Smith, was the first chairman of the University's Art Department and an artist known especially for his work in book design and wood-block printing and painting. Many of his cuts of local scenes even now grace University publications. In the 1960s he was a chief part of the Society sub-group called the "Typogs" that set up its own printing establishment, the Cockescraw Press, in the basement of Cocke Hall at the end of the University Lawn.

The remaining three original officers--Linton R. Massey, Councilor; Fredson T. Bowers, Vice-President; and John Cook Wyllie, Secretary-Treasurer--were to play the most fundamental and the longest- lasting roles in the Society. But before considering these founders in greater detail, it is helpful to identify the other Councilors of the first decade; they too helped to shape the Society at a crucial time, and their varied interests reflect the attraction the Society held. Atcheson Hench, who served as President in 1950, was a UVa professor of early English literature. A modest man whose motto was "If Hench can do it, anybody can do it," he was an omnivorous collector--of books, of manuscripts, but especially of words. By recording the language of his colleagues, his townsfolk, and his newspapers he ended up contributing to seven major dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English; his work accounts for the 195 quotations in the OED from the Charlottesville Daily Progress and another

fifteen from the local student paper The Cavalier Daily. Willis H. Shell, Jr., of Richmond privately operated "The Attic Press" (in his attic), but as a representative for the William Byrd Press he designed the early volumes of Studies in Bibliography and arranged their publication at virtual cost. Mrs. Vincent (Eleanor) Shea, who tended to many of the Society's local arrangements, was a collector of garden books, someone very interested in crafts such as printing, and a consultant in prints to the University Library. Joseph M. Carrière, Vice-President in 1951, taught French at the University, was twice president of the American Folklore Society, had been cited by H. L. Mencken (along with Hench) for his work on the sources of the American language, and had been named a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. Mrs. Randolph Catlin collected books of the Derrydale Press and editions of Somervile's poem "The Chace," both of which collections she eventually gave to the University Library. Arthur F. Stocker, Professor of Classics and sometime head of the Society's Publications Committee, was drawn to the Society because of the interest he shared in textual study with Fredson Bowers. Jack Dalton was University Librarian; he left in 1956 to become director of the American Library Association's new office for overseas library development and eventually became head of the library school at Columbia. Philip Williams was a former dissertation student of Fredson Bowers who returned to teach English at the University. William B. O'Neal was a professor of Architecture and a book and print collector. Finally, Sears Jayne was an English Department professor with a special interest in library catalogs of the English Renaissance.

On the tenth anniversary of the Society, Linton Massey characterized the Councils of the first decade this way: "So far from being a small group of intellectuals lost in a bookish world, they were then and are now, mere bibliophiles reasonably expert in some specialized field, qualified to hold office at least in the broad sense that they are able to read and write and are willing to meet twice yearly in an atmosphere of modest and genteel worldliness"--that is, convening at the Masseys' estate Kinloch, east of Charlottesville in Keswick, and after the Council session enjoying an elegant dinner and the notable fruits of Massey's cellar. Each Council member seems indeed to have made important contributions to the Society, but it was the efforts of Massey, Wyllie, and Bowers that were utterly essential and profoundly formative. All remained active in the Society until their deaths (Wyllie on 18 April 1968 at age 59, Massey on 9 November 1974 at 74 years, and Bowers on 11 April 1991 at 85), making their passings of particular importance in the Society's life.

Linton Massey served as President in the Society's second and third years, 1948 and 1949, and then from its fifth year, 1951, up to his death

twenty-three years later. His vocation was supervising a large farming operation on the 500-acre Kinloch estate and landscaping eleven beautiful gardens there. His avocation, or perhaps his other vocation, was book collecting. Interested in twentieth-century fiction, he early came to appreciate William Faulkner and began forming what Fredson Bowers described, in a breathless sentence for a breathtaking collection, as "the prototype of all single- author collections for depth and variety of original works, manuscripts, letters, clippings, memorabilia, and works of criticism and reference, so rich and varied that the Special Collections of the Alderman Library have had to invent a wholly new system of classification to do justice to this extraordinary collection." When Faulkner moved to Charlottesville he and Massey became fast friends, and Massey was instrumental in persuading Faulkner to bring his own manuscripts and working papers to the University Library, where they now reside with Massey's complementary collection. The friendship also led to the formation of the Faulkner Foundation, of which Massey was the first president (and Wyllie Vice-President). The Foundation supervised the Faulkner manuscripts, concerned itself with the education of black college students in Mississippi, awarded plaques to American writers of special achievement, and sponsored the translation and publication in English of Latin American novels. On his death Massey was honored by being one of the few non- academics to have a memorial resolution (prepared by Bowers) read before the University faculty.

The eloquence and urbanity of Massey's letters preserved in Society files come as little surprise when one realizes that already in the 1920s H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had accepted one of his short stories (published January 1924) for the Smart Set. What is striking about his correspondence is the impression it gives of his daily attention to the affairs of the Society and the application of his clear-headed business sense to its organization and publications program--all this while maintaining esteem for the value of bibliographical scholarship. His alertness to activities in all corners of the bibliographical world is pleasantly symbolized by the fact that he and Wyllie were the first American members of the Bibliographical Society of Glasgow when it was revived in 1960.

What is even more striking, however, is the passion with which he insisted that his gifts to the Society in support of its work be anonymous. Over the years those gifts amounted to tens of thousands of dollars, starting at a time when postage for announcements of the Society's meetings cost one twentieth of what it does now. It was Massey's quiet contributions that tipped the scales into solvency in the early years, that financed awards to student book-collectors, that helped republish copies of Studies that had gone out of print, and that sponsored receptions in

the Society's name when groups such as the Grolier Club visited Charlottesville.

The other members of the de facto triumvirate recognized Massey's contributions in all their forms, and they were grateful. After a Council meeting in 1955, Bowers wrote Massey (on 5 October) an appreciative note, praising

Wyllie shared those sentiments. When in 1952 he received the University's Raven Award, he wrote Massey (on 15 May 1952): Massey's response is interesting, both as an example of his own eloquence and for insight into how he viewed his position. He wrote:

The respect in which Linton Massey held John Cook Wyllie was widely shared. Even three decades after Wyllie's early death, his name spurs passionate assertions of affection from those who knew him. He, like Massey, held only a bachelor's degree (though he took all the graduate English courses the University had to offer), but he rose through the ranks locally and also became an important figure in the national and international book worlds. Like Massey, he sought heroically to serve other people and causes rather than to advance his own name, and as a

consequence that name is not as widely known as it deserves to be. Wyllie's career was devoted to libraries, editorial projects, and what one friend has called "academic entrepreneurship." His association with the University Library that began as a student assistant in the 1920s continued unbroken until his death--except for the hiatus in World War II when he served in the North Africa and China-Burma campaigns and received decorations from three governments. In 1948 the University president called on him to reorganize the University Press, an assignment made in recognition of his extensive orchestration of printed works bearing the imprint of the University and one that foreshadowed his central role in developing publications of the Bibliographical Society--in both situations, usually without a mark to identify his contribution. The citation for the University's Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award that he received in 1948 captured his character:

Some of his great energy found expression in historical and bibliographical scholarship. The rare book stacks he maintained were populated, according to a biographical account by Matthew Bruccoli, "with what lesser curators described as duplicate copies." He was familiar with all aspects of bookmaking and of bibliographical methodology and apparatus: during the summer of 1937 he did apprentice work under master bookbinders at the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library; in the 1960s he experimented with beta-radiographs of watermarks in the papers of Thomas Jefferson, assisted by local nuclear physicist Reed Johnson, who had earlier done the technical work for Allan Stevenson's experiments with watermarks in Chicago; he devised a system for relaying pages of books to other University libraries by television; and he was responsible for bringing to the library one of the first six--perhaps one of the first two--Hinman Collators ever made, a device that served to entertain visiting bibliophiles and that also facilitated the work of Fredson Bowers and his graduate students in comparing texts. Wyllie himself was long interested in the typography of the Bay Psalm Book, a subject of his Rosenbach lectures in March 1960. His early theory was that this volume known as the first book printed in the American colonies might actually have been printed in England. When the Princeton historian Julian Boyd caught wind of the suggestion (through a letter that Frederick Goff at the Library of Congress had mistakenly mailed to Boyd instead of to Wyllie), he had proposed that Wyllie spill the beans at the forthcoming meeting, in 1952, of the Bibliographical Society of America

in Charlottesville. Wrote Boyd, "What a reception for the New Englanders that would be!"

As Secretary-Treasurer of the Bibliographical Society for the first fifteen years and as Treasurer after that, Wyllie was the most common point of contact between the Society and the world. His work was crucial in the most visible activities of the Society: preparing its newsletter, the Secretary's News Sheet, from March 1947 on; coordinating its publications; and arranging speakers for its meetings, a task made easier by his active participation in the major bibliographical organizations of the country. Wyllie's popularity and his notable service made his early death in 1968 all the more stunning. In the preface to tributes collected in the 27 April 1968 issue of AB Bookman's Weekly, Sol Malkin wrote of the difficulty of reconciling himself to the fact that Wyllie was gone. Waller Barrett spoke of Wyllie's indispensable help in forming his collection of American literature, but above all for his revivifying assistance and encouragement. Howard Mott wrote Massey that the "loyal friendship, help and encouragement of John Wyllie" were crucial factors in his decision to stay in the book business. James J. Kilpatrick recalled that in the ten years John Wyllie was--amid his other duties--Book Editor of the Richmond News Leader, "We were then running the best damned book page in the entire country, the New York Times not excepted. God, how we miss him."

The third of the powerhouses that propelled the Bibliographical Society from the start was Fredson Bowers. A full account of his life and work has been furnished by G. Thomas Tanselle and published by the Society in 1993, a chronicle that Michael Dirda of the Washington Post Book World has called "a model `academic' biography." Bowers is indeed the best-known person associated with the Society, not because of immodesty on his part (he too applied himself behind the scenes to all aspects of the Society's activities) but because he published widely and because his name necessarily accompanied the journal he edited for the Society, Studies in Bibliography (popularly known as Studies or SB). Bowers had completed his doctoral work at Harvard in 1934, chiefly under the person he referred to as "my master Kittredge." He stayed there to teach until 1936, when he moved to Princeton for two years and then on to Virginia, where as a scholar and eventually as chairman of the English Department and Dean of the Faculty he would play crucial roles in the institution's rise to prominence. His reasons for leaving Princeton are not clear, though scuttlebutt holds that his colleagues were tired of him placing his offprints in their boxes. In 1937, for instance, he published ten notes and articles, ranging from pieces for more popular consumption in the Times Literary Supplement and the Sunday

New York Times to a lengthy essay in Studies in Philology and two more in JEGP. As Tanselle documents, in 1936 Bowers also published his first bibliographical piece.

Why Bowers came to Virginia is only slightly more apparent than why he left Princeton. The explanation of one of Bowers's early students, Irby Cauthen, is simple: "Because of Dean Wilson." It seems that Dean James Southall Wilson had in mind that Bowers would take over, as he did, the courses of John Calvin Metcalf, who was about to retire. Metcalf, according to Cauthen, had recognized Bowers's abilities at once, and Bowers also seems to have liked Wilson immediately. As signs of that friendship, Bowers edited a festschrift for him in 1951, dedicated his edition of Leaves of Grass to him in 1955, and prepared the official memorial resolution when Wilson died in 1963. At that time he wrote Wilson's widow, "I have always loved and revered him. He was the cause of my coming to the University, and he was an important reason why I stayed, perhaps the most important reason. I have always said that he was one of the three or four authentically great men whom I have known in my lifetime." Colleagues who were present at the 1969 dedication of Wilson Hall, a new building to house the English Department, say that it was the only time they ever saw Bowers weep.

Bowers joined the UVa English faculty in 1938 and within a couple years had established courses in the study of books as physical objects and in textual criticism. His work too was interrupted by wartime service, in this case in Washington, D.C., as supervisor of an intelligence unit deciphering enemy codes. His group was, in the words of William H. Bond, a "dismayingly bright bunch." Among its members were a number of people now well known to the bibliographical world: Bond himself, Giles Dawson, the classicist Richard Lattimore, and Bowers's former student Charlton Hinman, who in the course of his work conceived the idea of his collating machine. Bowers meanwhile had been designated one of bibliography's promising stars in F. C. Francis's account of the first fifty years of England's Bibliographical Society, published in 1945. Like Wyllie, he returned to the University ready for business--which included, as it turned out, the establishment of a society and journal that would occupy him for almost another half century.

The successful establishment of the Bibliographical Society, then, was first of all the result of the collocation of these specially gifted individuals in Charlottesville. But another sine qua non was the backing that local residents provided. Although the Society's publications, especially Studies in Bibliography, would quickly propel it to international attention, not all of the Society's organizers envisioned (and those who did could not safely assume) a world-wide constituency. What was crucial

to the undertaking was a core of supporters who could assist in whatever projects the Society might undertake and, through their annual dues, provide a regular source of income for those activities. The Society that came into being that winter evening early in 1947 listed 130 charter members--most of them from Charlottesville, and nearly all the rest from Virginia as well. Charlottesville and the surrounding Albemarle County then had a combined population of only 50,000, and the University was a quarter of its present size. The testimony of people who recall that era is that the dynamics of a small community prompted people to follow with attentiveness- -and with their presence--the ventures of their acquaintances. The early life of the Society quite naturally reflected the interests of those who had chosen to associate in this way, but it also established the patterns of activity that have been followed to some degree or other ever since.

II

The easiest way for the Society to establish a corporate identity and also to serve the core community most directly was to hold public meetings, and over the next twenty years the group sponsored about 120 of them. The University and city newspapers invited local residents, while Society members received notice on one-cent postcards labeled by Addressograph plates. Most meetings featured a distinguished guest who gave an evening talk in front of the McGregor Room fireplace. Gemmill's discussion of Baskerville in October 1946 foreshadowed the pattern that developed once the Society was formally constituted in February 1947. Besides Bowers's presentation at that meeting, two other speakers appeared before the Society that spring: charter members Charles D. Hurt from the Stone Printing Co., Roanoke, speaking about "The Monotype" (18 April), and Charlton Hinman from Johns Hopkins on "Why 79 First Folios?" (6 June). When the Society reassembled for the next academic year, its roster of programs had attained the shape it was to hold for about two decades. A list of the talks given the first two full seasons shows something of the nature and range of the presentations. Providing these speakers was a significant contribution to the life of the University and town; the guests meanwhile gained an opportunity to encounter a pleasant part of the physical and intellectual world, and the Society benefited from the increased sense of its existence on the part of its visitors.

     

1947-48
Oct. 8	Kenneth S. Giniger (Prentice Hall, New York City), "The Effect of Modern Publishing Production Practices on Book Collecting"
Oct. 17	Walter L. Pforzheimer (Washington, D.C.), "On Copyright"

                         

Oct. 24	H. W. Tribolet (Chicago), "Processes of Hand Bookbinding and Restoration"
Nov. 17	Earl K. Fischer (Institute of Textile Technology, Charlottesville), "On Printing Inks"
Feb. 13	C. William Miller (Temple Univ.), "Henry Herringman"
Mar. 12	Coolie Verner (UVa), "First Maps of Virginia"
May 14	Giles E. Dawson (Folger Shakespeare Library), "The Career of R. Walker, Printer- Publisher, 1729-1750"
1948-49
Oct. 8	Charles H. Lindsley (Institute of Textile Technology, Charlottesville), "Scientific Incunabula: Scientific Works Printed before 1501"
Nov. 12	James G. McManaway (Folger Shakespeare Library), "Two Prompt Books of Hamlet"
Dec. 17	William B. Todd (Univ. of Chicago), "The Strange Case of the Monk: A Bibliographical Investigation"
Jan. 14	Edwin Wolf 2nd (Rosenbach Company, Philadelphia), "The Textual Importance of Manuscript Commonplace Books of 1620-1660"
Feb. 25	William B. O'Neal (UVa), "William Blake as Illustrator of Books"
May 12	Robert K. Black (Antiquarian Bookseller, Montclair, N.J.), "The Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Novels"
May 20	John Alden (Curator of Rare Books, Univ. of Pennsylvania), "Problems in Eighteenth- Century American Bibliography"

Even in the early years, then, the Society's speakers were drawn from the ranks of publishers, printers and binders, scientists, academics (including historians, literary critics, bibliographers, and textual scholars), collectors and curators, dealers, and art historians. The Society's breadth of contacts and its increasing recognition enabled it to lure speakers without duplication, though a number of them could be found close to home. As a talented crop of Fredson Bowers's graduate students came to maturity they joined the procession: Philip Williams and Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., in 1952, George Williams in 1955 and 1958, Oliver Steele in 1957, and Matthew Bruccoli in 1958. UVa alumni who were flourishing in the book world were obvious candidates--people such as Hinman, Miller, or John D. Gordan, Curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library (who spoke in 1954). C. Waller Barrett, whose collection of American literature would make the UVa library the preeminent repository of such materials, was likewise a natural choice (in 1951 and 1962).

The arrangements for Gordon Ray's talk on 20 April 1966 show how the Society might go about planning a visit by someone with less direct ties to the University. Ray was already well known to many in the Charlottesville academic and bibliographic community, especially through his work as a Victorian scholar and his presidency of the Guggenheim

Foundation and the Grolier Club. On 24 January of that year, Bowers, who had to be ever alert for articles for Studies, sent a brief note to Massey: Massey accordingly wrote Ray, extending these terms: Ray accepted (14 March), the date was agreed on, and the subject of the talk chosen from the possibilities Ray had suggested: Ray flew into Charlottesville the morning of the 20th in time for lunch at the Masseys, where guests included many of the people he had declared (on 18 March) he hoped to see while in town: "the Blotners and the Ehrenpreises . . . the Barretts, the Bowers, the Shannons." His McGregor Room talk that evening on "Victorian Society and the Victorian Novel" was well received, and he returned to New York the next day. Bowers never did snare an article from Ray for Studies, although three years later in Ray's Foreword to The American Writer in England: An Exhibition (from Barrett's collection at UVa) he sided with Bowers in the debate that had arisen in the New York Review of Books over the editing of American writers, and he provided what proved to be the most cogent assessment of the controversy.

Still other visitors were pleased to book a Charlottesville engagement as part of a wider speaking tour. The recently published memoirs of Barbara Kaye (Second Impression, 1995) offer insight into such a stop from the visitor's point of view. In 1951 she accompanied her husband Percy Muir to speak to the Society on 24 October. The night before, he had given his talk "Rogues and Vagabonds in the Book Trade" at the Folger Library in Washington; they rode the C&O down to Charlottesville, visited the University and Monticello, dined at the Bowers home, went to the Society meeting, and then caught the 10:30 train for New York. The exhaustion created by such a pace may explain the slippery grasp of details in her account of their visit to "the university building" at the "University of North Virginia," where an "unusual and attractive feature" of the campus was a wall, which "stands there no longer." The

repast on the Bowers terrace was the "typical southern meal" that Mrs. Bowers, Nancy Hale, had promised: "southern fried chicken followed by strawberry shortcake." Barbara Kaye seemed taken aback to discover that Nancy Hale had written more novels than she had, but she found the Bowerses "good company" and as "human and friendly as everyone else we met." She enjoyed Charlottesville, but "Bill Jackson's schedule [for the Muir tour] allowed for no loitering, and after Percy had delivered his `Rogues and Vagabonds' talk at the university, the Bowerses saw us off on the night train" (208).

Although the evenings with formal papers were the most frequent Society gatherings, the group also met under other circumstances. The annual business meeting of the Society, chiefly to elect officers, eventually was combined with an evening lecture, but initially it served as the occasion for a "members only" introduction to special items in the University library or a viewing of films on printing or illustration. Beginning in the fall of 1949 and continuing at least to 1952, the Society sponsored a number of "Student Round Tables," informal discussion of bookbinding, type faces, imposition, and printing (including a demonstration of a hand press by Charles E. ("Chic") Moran, Jr., of the University Printing Office). These in turn led to the library's sponsorship of "Browsing Room Talks," "in part successor to the Society's Seminar talks" according to the Society's Secretary's News Sheet (SNS) 15. (Massey himself gave a Browsing Room Talk on Joyce on 18 March 1958.) In the winter of 1952-53 the Society and library together sponsored an experimental series of hour-long "Tea Meetings" in which, according to SNS 25,

Four of these were given: by Walter Harding of the English Department, on collecting Thoreau; by Mrs. Eleanor Shea, Society Councilor, on the T. Catesby Jones Print Collection of the University; by Harvey Deal, University reference librarian, on the use of the Union Catalog in research; and by John Cook Wyllie on "The Forms of Twentieth- Century Cancels." When Wyllie's paper under that title was published in PBSA in 1953, he noted that it "had its origin as one of a series of talks on twentieth-century bibliographical problems prepared at the request of the student seminar of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia." Tea and all it entailed was also a customary way for the Society to honor special guests, from at least the time in May 1951 when "The Secretary and Mrs. Wyllie" served "refreshments in the Library Staff Room immediately following the talk in order to give members an opportunity to meet the Barretts," and in 1953 to honor F. C. Francis of the British Museum, through 1967, when the visitor of distinction was Keith I. D. Maslen from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

The various interests to which the Society's constitution committed it all found expression in its formal meetings, but some members wished to follow particular interests more intensively. Accordingly, the budget for 1959 introduced a line for "`Typogs' and Student bibliographical awards." The linking of those two endeavors suggests that the "Typogs," later to be called the "Typographical Section" of the Society and to receive a separate budget allocation, were considered an additional way of serving University students. The student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, described the organization this way:

The size of the group fluctuated; the core members were Runge, Chic Moran, Charles Smith, and Joan Scholes--all non-students. An article in the June 1963 issue of the University's Alumni News said that participants "number from 15 to 20 (the total varies)," while thirty members attended the luncheon on 30 May 1963 honoring Smith on his retirement.

Luncheons in the cafeteria of Newcomb Hall, the student union, were one of the two main occasions on which the group manifested its corporate existence. Beginning in the fall of 1959, members met at 12:30 on Wednesdays, often accompanying their lunches with informal talks (such as those by Warren Chappell, book designer and artist, who spoke about type design on 24 May 1962, and A. Samuels, President of Charlottesville's Allen Company, speaking on processes for color separation on 7 November 1962).

The soul of the group, however, lay in its small printing establishment. In 1962 members adopted for it the name "Cockescraw Press," with a crowing rooster designed by Smith as its device. According to the Richmond Times- Dispatch,

(Before assuming that name, the fledgling establishment was briefly known as the "Ruptured Rooster Press.") At its peak of activity, in 1963, the Press had "two foot- powered printing presses, a few fonts of handset type, two proof presses (hand operated) and various other pieces of equipment," according to the Times-Dispatch. Most of the apparatus had been donated; the Society, however, purchased the workhorse of the operation, a 12" x 18" Chandler and Price press, recognizing not only the delight but also the instruction that would result.

The printers typically would meet on Monday nights, generally breaking off by 11:00 or 11:15 in order, according to Runge, to get a beer before midnight at the Gaslight Coffee House on West Main Street. Other deadlines were more problematic for the group; as Runge told the Alumni News, in order to have something printed one needed to "Just ask us and then wait a couple of years for us to do it." Under pressure of time, the Press would sometimes have its compositions printed by the University Printing Office--which at other times would set copy in linotype for the Cockescravians when their supply of type was too limited. (When those situations coalesced, the Cockescraw contribution was limited to design work.)

The largest printing jobs of the Press tended to be programs--for the Society itself, as on the occasion of its joint meeting with the Baltimore Bibliophiles on 11-12 May 1963, and, from February 1962 through April 1964, for the twenty-fourth through thirtieth Peters Rushton Seminars in Contemporary Prose and Poetry, the successors to McGregor Room Seminars that had in fact served earlier as models for Society meetings in that room. An undergraduate member of the Press, Gene Blumenreich, was editor-in-chief of the student literary magazine Plume and Sword, and with his staff printed its covers there. The two largest projects were booklets: Atcheson Laughlin Hench: A Check List, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-one, Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-two, a 1962 production to commemorate the work of the Society's third president and sometime Press member, and William B. O'Neal's Charles Smith: His Work in Book Design: A Checklist (one form of which was issued as SNS 50), in conjunction with a McGregor Room exhibition of Smith's typographical work opening on 16 May 1963, to honor him on the occasion of his retirement from the University.

The surprise reception and luncheon the Cockescraw Press held for Smith on 30 May, with Warren Chappell as toastmaster and illustrator of a menu- keepsake, marked the apogee of the group. When Smith left the

Art Department that he had joined permanently in 1947, serving as its first chairman for most of that time, so did the Press's claim on space in the departmental quarters. Though as late as the following spring the Press was still printing Rushton Seminar programs, minutes of the Society's Council meeting on 23 October 1965 record its quick demise: Interest in printing itself did not die as readily, however, and the minutes of 18 September 1971 offer a brighter note: By 14 June of the next year Kendon Stubbs was able to write Massey, then in London: The "little broadside" contained a passage from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and the press was the Chandler and Price, which formed the nucleus of what over the next twenty years was known as the Alderman Press, on the first floor of Alderman Library. There the press itself was subsequently used to print the menu-keepsake for Fredson Bowers's retirement dinner on 26 October 1974 ("by C.S. & K.S. for I.C."--that is, Clinton Sisson and Kendon Stubbs for Irby Cauthen); type for the Society's limited edition of Faulkner's Marionettes (1975.3 in the accompanying list) was also set there. In the mid 1970s the establishment added a replica of an eighteenth-century common press, built chiefly by Lester Beaurline of the English Department and Clinton Sisson of the library, in order to provide better facilities for teaching bibliography.

One way for the Society to serve its wider communities was to host meetings with or for other organizations. Some of these groups were local--the University Library (whose distinction from the Society was often unclear), the Medical School Library, the student History and

English clubs, the University Press, and the local branch of the English Speaking Union. But soon they were also national, beginning with a joint meeting with the Bibliographical Society of America on 9-10 May 1952. The BSA met the first day, with talks by A. H. Greenly, Henry R. Wagner, and William A. Jackson. The following day Philip Williams, Irby Cauthen, Joseph Graves, and Fredson Bowers spoke at the BSUVa sessions, Bowers serving for the first time as the heavy artillery that the Society would roll out to salute visiting scholarly organizations. He gave the only talk when the Grolier Club came to Charlottesville on 24-25 October 1958 (at which time the local newspaper noted John Carter's delight in examining the library's Michael Sadleir- Robert Black collection of gothic novels), he gave the talk at the banquet when the Baltimore Bibliophiles held a joint meeting with the Society on 11-12 May 1963, and he spoke at the Saturday evening dinner when the Pittsburgh Bibliophiles visited on 24-25 September 1966. (Besides at the inaugural meeting in 1947, Bowers addressed the Society as well on 9 April 1957, 10 April 1958, and 20 March 1961--more often than any other speaker.) Despite its power, this ordnance seems not to have been overwhelming; one Baltimore visitor wrote that "Fredson Bowers capped the evening in a fascinating way," and another praised the "delightful dinner with Dr. Bowers making wisdom painless, even in the abstruse reaches of mechanized bibliographical description."

The Society also worked with a variety of other groups, in a number of ways. In its early days, for instance, it held a coffee for a regional meeting of the Virginia State Printers' Association (5 December 1953), and it hosted the Walpole Society (7 May 1954) and the Manuscript Society of America (27 May 1955); years later it co- sponsored, with the University's Center for Advanced Studies and the English Department, an Eightieth-Birthday Conference for Fredson Bowers (20-23 April 1985). One reason for multiple sponsorship of events was that the line separating the activities of people who served both as Society officers and as representatives of other organizations was not always clear; consequently, when an exhibition seemed in order for delegates to the International Congress of Archives (14 May 1966), for example, it was jointly arranged by the Society and the University Library. (The next day in the lobby of the library's Barrett Room the Society hosted a tea honoring two of the visitors, Sir David Evans, former Keeper of the Public Records, and Mr. Peter Walne, County Archivist of Hertfordshire.) The overlap of commitments and sponsorships is particularly evident in the case of Wyllie. Typical is the announcement in the final issue of another organization's News Sheet, that of the Bibliographical Society of America, at a time (1951) when the youthful Virginia society

needed all the attention from Wyllie that it could garner: "Publication of the Index to the Society's Papers [that is, of the BSA] . . . has been delayed by the death of Mr. David M. Matteson. Mr. Matteson's work will be carried on by Mr. John Cook Wyllie of the University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia." Recognition of the importance of serving the wider bibliographical world was indeed a persistent characteristic of the Society. When in 1958 Donald Hyde as Vice-President of the BSA organized regional advisory councils, Dorothy Miner, who as chairman of the Southern Area Board solicited Wyllie's participation, cautiously tested whether his work for the Virginia society had made his interests more parochial. He happily accepted the post, pointing out that he had been a member of the BSA longer than he had been of the Virginia society (and that he had no inclination to loosen that tie). Paradoxically, service that Society leaders could divert from the Society to the larger world worked to strengthen the Society--and in that way too served the larger cause of bibliography. Wyllie was not formally acting in his Society capacity when, as Secretary of the Rare Book Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, he arranged for its first major conference to be held at the University (18-20 June 1959). One accomplishment of that visit, however, was to establish even more indelibly the connection between the University and the care and study of books. Fifteen years later, on 30 June-2 July 1974, when the ACRL's Rare Book and Manuscripts Section Pre-Conference again met in Charlottesville, the effect was the same-- except that this time the Society formally participated by sponsoring a cocktail party, quietly funded by Massey, before the final banquet.

Though the activities of the Bibliographical Society and the University Library sometimes could not be differentiated, one special function the Society served from the start was as a Friends group for the library. (Indeed, about six months after Wyllie died, C. Waller Barrett began to organize the group called the Associates of the University of Virginia Library and asked Massey to serve on the Sponsors' Committee.) An advantage of having supporters under the immediate direction of the people they purported to help lay in the efficiency of the operation. Besides sponsoring book-related talks in the McGregor Room, as the Associates would do later (sometimes in conjunction with the Society, as for the lecture on 23 November 1970 by Edwin Wolf 2nd), the Society solicited donations for the library and arranged exhibitions. In Massey's presidential report for 1948 (circulated with SNS 9) he called attention to "the valuable books acquired through the Society, many of which have been described in the Secretary's News Letters" (e.g. in SNS 2 and 3, and later 10 and 13). After the visit by Mrs. Roy Arthur (Rachel McMasters

Miller) Hunt and the exhibition of her botanical books in 1952, Wyllie wrote Linton and Mary Massey, But whereas building the library's collections may have been an implicit goal of the Society, providing displays of books was explicitly announced as early as Wyllie's 1946 letter accompanying his questionnaire (even if a motivation behind such exhibits might ultimately have also been to develop University collections). In his 1948 report Massey reported on the development of this goal, linking it with the Society's attempt to spur interest in collecting at the student level:

He had further presentations to report the following year (in his 1949 report distributed with SNS 13): Over the years (to the present) the books of the student winners have continued to provide interesting displays in the library, even after the practice of showing members' collections faded.

Numerous other opportunities also arose for exhibitions. Sometimes speakers would bring their own materials--a pattern established with Chalmers Gemmill's Baskerville talk in 1946. (That collection then went on public display at the library.) One of the earliest attempts to provide such visual aids miscarried when Nathan Van Patten's train from Stanford

was snowbound in Utah and he was unable to speak on 10 February 1949 and show his books published in Greenland. But others did successfully tell and show, among them Eric Kessler, from the Swiss Legation, on "The Contributions of Switzerland to Book Making" (9 March 1950); Irvin Kerlan, Acting Director of the Food and Drug Administration, on children's books (15 May 1953); John D. Gordan, from New York, on "The Collecting of the First Works of English and American Authors" (8 October 1954); W. Hugh Peal, also from New York, on letters of Charles Lamb (4 November 1955); and Charles Feinberg, businessman from Detroit, on "Walt Whitman's Difficulties with Publishers and Book Sellers" (15 February 1957). Sometimes the library arranged relevant displays from its own collections, as it did for Calhoun's talk "John Bartlett and His `Familiar Quotations'" (30 September 1957), for Feinberg's return on 21 March 1958 (where his own examples were supplemented with holdings of the Barrett Collection); and Richard Harwell from Emory University (12 February 1953), whose exhibition consisted of sound recordings of Confederate songs, complemented with a display of Confederate sheet music arranged by Miss Ruth Byrd of the Alderman staff.

The Society furthermore cooperated in publicizing travelling exhibitions in which its own involvement is unclear--a display of British Books arranged by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, for instance (November 1950); a model paper- making machine from the Hammermill Paper Company (December 1951); a show on Modern Swedish Bookbinding (December 1952-January 1953); and books from private presses, organized by The Society of Printers of Boston and including the work of Society members Hunter Middleton, Joe Graves, P. J. Conkwright, Ben Grauer, and Willis Shell (October 1953). Another exhibition of private presswork opened with a Society- sponsored talk by James Babb, Librarian of Yale, on 16 October 1953. The Society's involvement with exhibitions reached full expression with two major ones it supported directly: those of botanical books of Mrs. Roy Arthur Hunt (accompanied by her talk on 25 April 1952) and of the typographical work of Charles W. Smith (opening on 16 May 1963).

An exhibition of quite a different kind consisted of what might now be known as performance art: a presentation of Charlton Hinman's mechanical collating machine in action. Wyllie had whetted public curiosity about the invention as early as December 1947 in his Secretary's News Sheet 5:

Wyllie's inveterate interest in technology prompted him to purchase one of the first of the new machines for the library, and the interest of Hinman's former dissertation director Bowers in textual study prompted Bowers to spur his students to use it. A burst of publicity accompanied the arrival of the device in early 1956; with the enthusiasm that characterized the early Society in general and Studies in Bibliography in particular, Bowers told the Charlottesville Daily Progress that "A whole new field of investigation is opening before us" (11 February 1956). Given the research then going on at the University, he was particularly excited that "This equipment will reveal previously unsuspected printings from [nineteenth-century printing] plates, and will put these in their proper order." With his recollection of problems he had earlier tackled himself but also his characteristic practicality, he went on:

At the annual business meeting of the Society a couple weeks later (on 27 February 1956), Matthew Bruccoli, one of Bowers's students who was to make great use of the machine, demonstrated it for members and for guests from the student English Club. Meanwhile news of the arrival had spread to Richmond. The book editor of the Times-Dispatch, Lewis F. Ball, devoted one of his Sunday columns to it, in the process providing probably the most vivid description the machine has ever received:

Other guests invoked similar imagery. During the Society's preparation of a bibliography of his writings, James Branch Cabell wrote Wyllie after a visit to the library that "I liked too finding out something about that mystic Hinman machine" (28 January 1958). After the 1963 meeting of the Baltimore Bibliophiles in the McGregor Room, one member noted in her letter of thanks to Massey that "I was ever so glad to see the Hinman machine--a creature about which I had heard so much and only now understand." Hinman's collator, whose presence at UVa was the product of the interests of early members of the Bibliographical Society, remains in use today. Because the machines were expensive and generally required some understanding of the bibliographical purposes they might serve, only a few dozen libraries ever acquired them; because many libraries that did so have since removed them from service, the University of Virginia library has assumed renewed significance as one of the best places in the world to conduct bibliographical research.

Behind the public face of the Society lay not only weekly attention by its officers and committees but also formal meetings of the Council twice a year. From at least 1949 these were held at Kinloch; the business session would be followed by a dinner proverbial in local circles for its excellence. The 4 June 1977 occasion was a landmark, prompting this tribute from the Council:

This tradition had continued even after the death of Linton Massey on 9 November 1974. In the memorial resolution Bowers read before the University faculty, he observed that "The menus of these dinners, preserved over the course of twenty-five years, themselves deserve publication as a bibliography of dining. The minutes of the meetings we may leave in decent obscurity." Massey's wife Mary, who had always been close to the Society, continued to host the Council until her poor health forced cessation after the 17 November 1989 dinner, though the Council visited Kinloch for a business meeting one last time on 30 April 1993. The minutes that Bowers spoke of recorded official business, of course, but those of 13 December 1958 show the potential inclusiveness of the Secretary's observations:

Meanwhile the Society's annual business meetings, which had begun as "members only" occasions for electing officers, modifying the constitution, and engaging in some special activity such as examining treasures

of the University Library, viewing movies on book production, or watching the Hinman Collator in action, had already in early years lost their distinctiveness as special occasions and had been blended into one of the evening lecture meetings (from the mid 1950s to the mid '60s) or held as short late- afternoon sessions attended only by Council members. From 1969 through 1992 the latter were held in the office of the University Librarian, with the meetings successively establishing records for their brevity.

The fortunes of the annual meetings mirrored the fate of the public lecture series, whose last talks were sponsored in 1967. The subsequent abandonment coincides with the 1968 death of Wyllie, whose loss deprived the Society of crucial energy in a program that had already been confronted by decreased interest. Attracting an audience had, in fact, been a challenge from the start. As early as 18 April 1949 Massey had written Bowers proposing an informal series of talks that might lure more people (that suggestion soon led to the Student Round Tables). Some guide to actual attendance can be gleaned from Wyllie's advice to Howard Mott before his talk on 8 November 1951; he told Mott to expect twenty to thirty people. The day after Gerald Stevenson addressed the Society on private presses in Iowa (on 4 January 1962), Chalmers Gemmill wrote Massey, "I thought that Mr. Stevenson did a good job last night. It was too bad that more people did not come out to hear his talk."

In the same letter of 18 April 1949 Massey had pondered the appropriateness of the setting for the lectures:

Bowers responded the next day saying that he agreed thoroughly; a few years later he had occasion to express his thoughts more fully to Massey about a number of the issues at stake.

Even after the Society had gotten on its feet, then, it continued to wrestle about its appropriate emphasis. Whether the selections of speakers happened to fit with prevailing Society goals or not, they had immediate practical effects: in an overview of Society activities, the Cavalier Daily reported that "Attendance at meetings varies from 20 to 150 or more" (11 May 1962).

With only two exceptions, assistance with the talk by Edwin Wolf 2nd on 23 November 1970 and, notably, with the Charlottesville conference honoring Fredson Bowers on his eightieth birthday (20-23 April 1985), the Society sponsored no public lectures for twenty-seven years. That hiatus ended in 1994. Under the leadership of its new president, G. Thomas Tanselle, the Society's annual business meeting on 22 April was combined with a program--in the McGregor Room--conducted by local graduate students. Moderated by Monique Dull, the session included Carter Hailey ("George Steevens and the Revision[s] of Johnson's Dictionary"), Kelly Tetterton ("Paperbacks as an Area of Bibliographical Study: The Case of Virginia Woolf's Orlando"), David Gants ("Pictures for the Page: Techniques in Watermark Reproduction, Enhancement and Analysis"), and Peter Byrnes ("Byron and the Pirate: The Case of Poems upon His Domestic Circumstances"). Besides reestablishing the Society as a visible presence at the University, the aim was to recognize and encourage student bibliographical activity by providing a public venue for discussion of that work. Students were able to benefit further by drawing on the advice of Council members as they prepared their talks. The program was remarkably successful, though by skimming the cream of current work it reduced the array of papers available the next year. For the following meeting the Society consequently pursued another idea it had considered, that of hearing from University faculty members doing bibliographical or textual work other than in the English Department, where traditionally the Society's chief academic constituency lay. The speaker that year, on 21 April 1995, was Gary Anderson from Religious Studies, who addressed the group on "The Life of Adam and Eve in Text and Iconography." By the next year another crop of excellent student papers had matured; with David Gants as moderator at the 29 March 1996 meeting, Frank E. Grizzard, Jr., spoke on "A Collector's Progress; or, Why I Have 500 Copies of the Same Book [Pilgrim's

Progress]," Elizabeth A. Jordan talked about "Imposing a Canon: The Curious Printing of Bell's Poets of Great Britain," and Andrew M. Stauffer examined the textual implications of "Byron's Monumental Epitaph for His Dog." The revived public meetings convincingly showed that bibliographical study at the University had a promising future.

III

To stimulate interest and encourage excellence in two kinds of activities that interested the Society, it soon established two contests, one in book collecting, for all students of the University, and another in printing, for printers throughout the State. The collecting competition, begun in the Society's first year and held in 1996 for the forty-first time, has proven the chief way for the Society to serve the element of the University otherwise little affected by its activities--its undergraduates. When Wyllie was presented with the Raven Award by University students in 1952, the outstanding reason noted by the undergraduate presenters was in fact the inauguration and continuation of the contest.

Wyllie and Massey were the chief promoters of the competition (Bowers served as a judge the first year and a couple times thereafter), with Wyllie coordinating activities on the University Grounds (including collecting entries at the Rare Book Room) and Massey anonymously funding the prizes (for over two decades). The University's rare book curators have always been members of the Society's Council and hence logical members of the Awards Committee; besides their ability to assess the quality of collections, they have a professional interest on behalf of the library in knowing what kind of books are being brought together around them. Other judges have been drawn from the Society's Council, from the English Department faculty, and from the wider Charlottesville membership. (The report of the 1964 committee also pointed out that "We were happy to be joined by Mr. Jacob Blanck in our deliberations.") Irby Cauthen, who had won first prize as a graduate student in 1949 with his collection on the architecture of Charleston, South Carolina, joined the panel as a "former winner" in 1951; a few years later he returned to the University as a member of the English Department faculty and from 1960 through 1989 he served on the committee, most of the time as its chair, with the rare book curators William Runge and, later, Julius Barclay. During those years the drop-off point for entries was either the English Department or the Rare Book Room, reflecting not only the people involved but also the interests strongly represented. Though others replaced Cauthen and Barclay after 1989 following their retirements from the University, the contest instructions have continued to specify that entries be submitted to people in the English Department or what is now Special Collections.

The regulations for the contest changed over the years, but one ground rule remained: as Wyllie told the student paper, the Cavalier Daily, on 22 February 1949, entries are judged "not on the basis of expense but on the coherence" of the books submitted. After the first contest (in the spring of 1948), in which all entries were considered together, the Council invited a student member of the committee, George Williams, to systemize the rules. Beginning the next year entries were invited in two categories: "Class A: Collections which have been assembled with primarily a bibliographical interest in mind. (Such a collection might include all the editions of any one work or any one author, first editions of modern poets, association copies, or items of this type.) Class B: Collections which have been assembled with primarily an interest in study, reading, or scholarship in mind. (Such a collection might include various works relating to any field or fields.)" With an implicit acknowledgement that not all meritorious entries fit one of those groupings, the Committee intermittently added awards for "Best" or "Unusual" student libraries in the 1960s and '70s. The challenge of attracting an equal number of entries in the divisions and the difficulty of maintaining a clear distinction between these overlapping sections prompted a return to an all-encompassing single category in 1990.

The biggest shift during those four decades occurred in the contests for 1956 through 1961, when the "bibliographical" award was presented not specifically for book collecting but for bibliographical achievement in general. As the announcement of the 1960 contest described the honor, the prize "goes to a student who is interested in some phase of bibliography, either the exploration of a particular text or a collection of a series of editions by one particular writer." Under such guidelines, the award went in 1956, for instance, to George Walton Williams "in recognition of his bibliographical skills, and notably for his researches in the fields of Elizabethan and Charlestonian bibliography" and in 1959 to Donald E. Glover for "his study of the manuscript of Bret Harte's `Rose of Tuolomne,'" a manuscript in the Barrett collection of American literature in the University library. Other "bibliographical" winners in those years were Robert K. Turner (1957), Matthew Bruccoli (1957 and 1958), and Oliver Steele (1958 and 1961). The judges' verdicts were subsequently vindicated, for each of these winners went on to publish significant bibliographical scholarship (four of the five in Studies in Bibliography).

Another temporary change in those years was that the names of potential candidates were solicited from the University faculty. Turner's award in 1957 ultimately stemmed from the nomination Bowers sent to Massey: "It would be appropriate enough to give the award for bibliography to Robert K. Turner, who is doing a bibliographical dissertation,

and working on Nicholas Okes the Elizabethan printer and the text of Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy." The response of the 1956 collecting winner, Charles N. Biondi, reveals that contestants in that category too were sought out; in his letter of thanks he not only expressed amazement at being chosen but recalled his surprise at hearing of the contest itself ("In fact I was not even aware of the practice of the Society to give this sort of recognition to student collectors"). Biondi's award showed that the collecting portion of the competition had also changed, for he was broadly honored "in recognition of his talents as a bibliophile, and notably for his collecting interests in the fields of early prints and fore edge paintings of American scenes."

Attracting the attention of potential contestants was always a challenge. In early years Wyllie prepared announcements that teachers were asked to read in class; the weight of the request increased in the 1960s, when Irby Cauthen, chair of the Awards Committee, issued these to his faculty as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The University News Service circulated word of impending contests and of their outcomes, resulting in stories in both the student paper and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Word also extended far beyond the local community. In his column "Books Alive" in the Chicago Sunday Tribune of 29 June 1952, Vincent Starrett noted that "Top awards in the University of Virginia's annual student book collectors' contest for 1952 went to young men [Robert Campbell, Jr., and Norris Randolph] who collected first editions of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde." This attention was not unambiguous, however; it appeared in the "No Comment Department" along with a list of terms for different forms of button collecting and with announcement of a new edition of Shakespeare in which "`all the famous and most quotable passages' will be printed in red."

In 1967 the Society began to advertise the contest through posters on University bulletin boards. The original design, used at least four times, reflected its era: a brightly colored maze (changing its hue from one year to the next), with the pattern overwhelming the text located in the bottom quarter of the sheet. Posters in the mid and late '70s were almost entirely typographical; among them were a couple with orange and red type on off-white paper, and one printed in black and burgundy with the simple outlines of book covers (this one designed by a 1979 winner, Peter Brehm--whose collection was entitled "The Art and History of the Book"). The form introduced in 1980 continued through 1994--an oblong design with the competition title on the left and details of the contest on the open pages of a book to its right. The first of this series was the most unusual: the left-hand page had a running title, and the text below began in mid sentence. The right-hand page contained the

Society's name and a colophon--including the number of the copy in an edition of 100.

One of the surest ways of attracting participation was by offering prizes--cash every time, along with a year's membership in the Bibliographical Society, and sometimes a volume on book collecting (from 1984 through 1987), membership in the friends or "Associates" group of the University Library (from 1989), and gift certificates from local booksellers. (In 1952 the editor of the Amateur Book Collector also contributed a year's subscription.) In a letter on 9 March 1949 to student committee member George Williams, who apparently had suggested lower amounts, Massey explained the thinking behind his contributions: "Since I have already undertaken to provide privately whatever cash is needed for the prizes you will suffer no pain when I suggest two first prizes of $15 each, and two second prizes of $10 each. . . . My thought is simply to provide the impetus these larger sums would give to the hesitant or lazy student book collectors." For the first two years the first-place winner in each category received $15 (with descending amounts for other places); that amount rose to $20 in 1950 and then $25 in 1952, where it remained until it jumped to $100 in 1989.

In 1948 C. C. Wells of the New Dominion Book Shop in Charlottesville awarded a $2.00 credit for all entrants who did not win one of the first three places; he again offered credits the following year, as did W. H. Lowdermilk and Co. of Washington, D.C. That year three other local bookstores-- Anderson Brothers, University Book Store, and Jameson Book Store--worked together and through their representative Roscoe S. Adams arranged further credits totalling $20.00 to winners of the first three places in each category. The four Charlottesville dealers together donated $32.00 in credits for the 1950 contest, but such contributions then faded away until they were resurrected in 1989. The booksellers' response to the invitation for each to provide a $25 gift certificates was enthusiastic ("Great idea!"; "I will be most happy to donate"; "I have long been a proponent of such an idea"), and nine dealers contributed that year (growing to twelve in 1996). In 1994 the Booksellers at 310 Market Street also held a reception for that year's winners. The renewed involvement of booksellers in the life of the Society not only marked a re-establishment of the relationship with one of the group's original constituencies but also helped the Society heighten the level of collecting awareness among students who were living in what long had been an active book town.

With the award has also come a small bit of public recognition. In the early years the winners were announced with appropriate suspense at one of the Society's evening lectures. Winners who are graduating

have their honor listed in the University's commencement program. For at least the first five years, and regularly since 1979, the winning entries have been displayed in the University's Alderman Library--the early ones for a week in the McGregor and Public Documents rooms, and more recently for a month in that building's entrance hall. Over the years of the contest 163 students have received awards, 11 of them twice and 7 of them three times. (The contest has also attracted entrants who were unsuccessful several times.) In part because books tended to loom large in the consciousness of English students and because organizers of the contest often were from that department, many of the collections contained books by or about English or American literary figures. The chronological span represented in the most recent contest-- from Ben Jonson to Generation X writers--has been characteristic. The alphabetical range of literary subjects and authors has also been broad: Arthurian literature, Robert Browning, John Bunyan, Edgar Rice Burroughs (especially Tarzan), Erskine Caldwell (in lurid paperback), Charles Dickens, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, "almost all editions of the complete works of George Farquhar," William Faulkner, Robert Frost, George Garrett, Ernest Hemingway, William Dean Howells, Jack Kerouac, D. H. Lawrence, George Meredith, the Sitwell family, Jesse Stuart, E. B. White, and Virginia Woolf. Related collections have focused on a genre or theme: manuscript diaries, eighteenth- century editions of fables, Greek and Latin classics, homosexuality and the homosexual in literature, French drama, and science fiction. (The 1964 commendations noted that Edward M. Turner, "the only undergraduate cited by the committee, has collected some 1,500 pieces of science fiction, a collection that, because of the collector's youth, indeed rivals the Clarkson collection at Harvard University which has 6,000 items.")

English Department students have not collected only literary writers, however, nor have entrants been limited to English majors. Most schools of the University have been represented over the half century, with frequent participation especially from students in Government and Foreign Affairs, History, Law, and Physics. A number of times travel accounts have appeared, along with several collections of maritime history. Several students have offered books on Central and South America, including a 1000- item collection by William R. Woods in 1959. Asian civilization has incited several entries, as have the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The Civil War and the Confederacy have proven popular, while other historical interests have found expression in books on old trials and on fifteenth-century France. The philosophy of science was the contribution of a graduate student in physics, and the arts have been represented by a variety of collections: Leonardo da Vinci, Hogarth prints, landscape gardening, architecture of Charleston, S.C., log houses, and a couple of

impressive groupings on music. In 1953 Roy E. Clark, a second-year College student, presented books "Concerning all phases of music from the physical aspect of sound to musical work, and including technological aspects, information on sound reproducing systems, music theory, important personages--composers and artists, program notes, history, symphonic and chamber music scores." Eighteen years later Law student Teri Noel Towe won with a collection that "centers around music, musical biography, musical scores, books on keyboard instruments and keyboard music, books on recordings, and finally an extensive library of recordings numbering over 3,000 pieces." Collections on bridge and on wrestling showed equal devotion, as did one that perhaps serves to symbolize many of those in the Society's first half century, a 1964 entry by William S. Kable on "the history of the book."

Though the contests have invariably attracted high quality entries, the number of contestants has fluctuated, thereby spurring periodic reflections about continuation of the undertaking. In June 1965 President Massey sent a memorandum to Council members in which he pondered the fate of what over more than a decade and a half had become a University institution:

The letters that he attached from recent winners were typical in their themes. George B. Goode, for example, made the most obvious but also the most important observation: "This has spurred my interests in book collecting"--adding that the award "raised my spirits at the most opportune time, in the midst of final exams." The encouragement the winners received was often as important as other considerations. In accepting the 1961 prize, for instance, Matthew Bruccoli wrote Massey that "As you know, I have received the research award [in 1957 and 1958], but I am even more pleased to be recognized as a collector." By the same token, the gifts of cash fueled the fire. Nathaniel P. Neblett observed in 1960 that "I shall be able to fill several gaps in my collection with this award," and James A. Means wrote the Society in 1970, "I am presently engaged in the rather difficult task of assembling a collection of Pope's works in early editions, and the Committee might be interested to know that their cash award will be spent in making an addition to this collection."

Despite notable successes and emulation elsewhere (SNS 18 reported that Dartmouth College had started a similar competition), questions about the contest's ongoing existence surfaced repeatedly starting in the late 1960s. The establishment in 1962 of the Amy Loveman National Award for student book collectors (for which the Society nominated local students) signalled a general interest in the activity early in that decade, but in 1968 Irby Cauthen reported to Massey that for the current local contest "Only these three entries have been received." His 1971 report pointed to further decline as well as rebound: "There were four entries this year, some improvement of the paucity of entries last year, and two of them describe truly outstanding collections." The next year was even better: "this year there were six entries of outstanding interest." But in 1974 the number was back down to three; Cauthen suggested that "The Executive Council may wish to consider whether to continue it with such a small response; contests such as this one seem to be losing their appeal among university students more rapidly than they should." A number of times the Council did vote to hold the contest biannually, although a consistent pattern did not readily develop (no contests were held in 1976, 1978, 1983, 1986, and 1988, and no entries were received in 1984). The Council determined most recently in 1990 that a two-year interval was needed for a suitable number of collections of sufficient quality to develop, and since then the competition has been held in the fall (instead of the spring, as previously) of even-numbered years.

Many of the effects of the contest are visible only against the backdrop of a breadth of years. In 1984 Robert W. Kitchell, wrote Rare Book Curator and Society Councilor Julius Barclay,

Many of the student collections led not only to greater ones but also to scholarly achievements based on them. The Pope collection to which James Means devoted his 1970 winnings came to include a unique volume of Pope's New Dunciad (reported in Notes and Queries in June 1973). Matthew Bruccoli's 1961 collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works presaged his role as the leading biographical scholar of that writer and also as the preeminent Fitzgerald collector. Maura Ives (1989) based her dissertation and a subsequent edition of George Meredith's short stories in large part on the copies she collected. Bradley Gunter (1967) had written his M.A. thesis on the subject of his collecting (T. S. Eliot), followed through with a dissertation on that author, and then produced three lists on Eliot for the Charles E. Merrill program in American Literature. Richard H. W. Dillard, whose collection of the writings of George Garrett (in 1964, the year the judges were advised by Jacob Blanck) "illustrated a high standard of the collection of the works of an author presently living and accessible," eventually wrote a book on Garrett. Two 1994 winners, Frank Grizzard (with his 500 copies of Pilgrim's Progress) and Kelly Tetterton (with editions of Woolf's Orlando) subsequently addressed an annual meeting of the Society about research stemming from their collections. (A 1996 winner, David L. Gants, who collected seventeenth-century editions of Ben Jonson for work on his bibliographical dissertation, had spoken earlier to the Society about his studies.)

While these examples suggest something of the role of collecting and of the contest in the lives of these students, a glimpse of what the Society hoped the competition could be is best exemplified by the winner of the first contest in 1948, Arthur Parsons Bean, Jr. In the 1978 exhibition keepsake for the display of his Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell collection at the University of Virginia Library (The Sitwells: A Tapestry of Talent), Bean traced his progress as a collector:

This collecting spurred by the Society had direct scholarly fruit. On 29 September 1969 Bean, who was then teaching at American University in Washington, wrote Massey: The 1978 library exhibition, whose keepsake also included contributions by Francis T. S. Sitwell, Kenneth Clark, and Mildred K. Abraham, was a dramatic reprise of the 1948 display there of Bean's core collection; the 10 books had grown to more than 500, along with hundreds of other documents and artifacts, and the fruits of three decades of loving labor were now brought in their full glory to the public. This episode of the Bibliographical Society's service to the University, first to its students and then to its wider community, drew to fitting completion when Bean subsequently donated the collection ("which," he said, "was really born here") to the University Library.

Although in naming the Society its founders chose to align it more closely with the University than with the state as a whole, they remained alert to the community beyond Charlottesville. One way of manifesting that attention was to establish a contest for all printers of Virginia. In conjunction with the newly formed Virginia State Printers' Association, the Society sponsored three such competitions: in 1951 (for work produced from January 1950 through June 1951), 1952 (covering July 1951 through July 1952), and 1954 (for July 1952 through December 1953). The contest was created and conducted by President Massey and Secretary Wyllie, who duly signed the certificates that were awarded as prizes at the annual meeting of the Association. The appreciation was immediate: on 31 October 1951 August Dietz, Jr., a Richmond printer and a founder of the Association, wrote Massey, "You and John have started something for the printers in Virginia that will be a lasting memorial to both of you."

Entries were invited in fifteen categories (sixteen the third year), though the Society reserved the right to subdivide any section. The official categories ranged from books, pamphlets, and programs to prints, calendars, direct mail materials, and business forms. (Newspapers were excluded, for they were judged separately by the Virginia Press Association.) Entries poured in: 200 the first year, over 300 the second. Although the number of submissions the third year is not clear, it implicitly was high, for the number of "Certificates of Special Merit" for "special contributions to Virginia printing" was larger than ever before. The Society seems to have developed these awards as a form of "Honorable

Mention" in order to expand the number of printers it could recognize. The same impulse operated from the start as the Society exercised its option to subdivide categories. Already in the first year separate awards had been given for books produced for Virginia publishers and for out-of-state publishers, and for exhibition programs as well as dance programs and commencement programs.

The judges were drawn from the ranks of Bibliographical Society members in Charlottesville who were not directly connected with the Virginia printing trade and who were not to consider publications produced for the Society. The estimable quality of those judges further points to the fertile ground from which the Society arose. For the first competition they included John Canaday, formerly an art professor at the University and later the art critic of the New York Times; Harry Clemons, the University's librarian emeritus; Dan Healey, Charlottesville public librarian; and Charlotte Kohler, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Miss Kohler stayed on the panel a second year, to be joined by William B. O'Neal, curator of the University's Museum of Fine Arts, and Charlottesville architect W. E. Stainback. Another architect, Dale Hamilton, judged in the final year, along with two people who, like O'Neal, at one point served on the Society's Council: Eleanor Shea, Consultant in Prints to Alderman Library, and Charles W. Smith, Chairman of the school's Department of Fine Arts.

Press releases announcing the winners proudly noted their geographical distribution throughout Virginia, though the bulk of them clustered in the printing capital of the state, Richmond. Twenty-two firms won prizes in the three years the Society sponsored the contest, with Whittet & Shepperson of Richmond garnering the most-- nine. The William Byrd Press, also of Richmond, brought in eight (including for the Rosenbach catalog West of the Alleghenies); that this press published most of the early volumes of Studies in Bibliography pointed not to favoritism on the part of the judges but to the quality to which the Society had devoted itself. (Willis Shell of the Byrd press, who oversaw the production of Studies there, also won twice for productions of his private Attic Press.) Five-time winners included the Journalism Laboratory Press at Washington and Lee University; Stone Printing and Manufacturing Co. of Roanoke, from whose proprietor had earlier come to the University of Virginia an impressive collection of books illustrating the history of printing; and the Everett Waddey Company of Richmond. The University of Virginia Press, with whom the Society also issued many publications, won four times.

The winning entries were variously displayed at the Printers' Association convention and at the State Library, and they were also made available to schools and libraries requesting them. Though the connection

between the Society and the Association was by all indications cordial (the relationship included the Society's hosting of a coffee in Alderman Library for a regional meeting of the Society on 5 December 1953), the Society's sponsorship may have become a victim of the unmanageable deluge of interest it had provoked. In the fourth year of the Association's existence it took over the award itself, appropriately renamed for past- president Dietz, who had just died. For that competition it received 465 entries.

IV

The most visible manifestation of the new Society's existence, and the one that ultimately would not only characterize the organization most widely but also serve as its greatest contribution, was its publications program. The following articles in this volume--the full list of those productions, the history of Studies in Bibliography in particular, and the author index to the first fifty volumes of Studies--reflect the relative importance of this aspect of Society life. In its first half century the Society was to produce not only 50 volumes of SB (and reprints of 20 of them) but also about 175 other publications, in addition to 53 issues of its Secretary's News Sheet. Though this publishing program was not fully envisioned at the Society's foundation, this activity and the concerns it represented quickly developed, as was noted by a description of the Society in a 1966 Bibliography catalog from the University Press of Virginia:

As striking as the publications program was to become, it was nonetheless the natural outgrowth of the original circumstances of the Society.

The earliest publications rose from the same need to establish a corporate identity that had prompted the Society to hold public meetings. Some method of ongoing communication was called for among those whose interests had caused them to associate, particularly for members outside of Charlottesville, and within a month of the February 1947 start Wyllie issued the first number of the Secretary's News Sheet. Even this came not ex nihilo, for Wyllie had as models the News Sheets issued by the secretaries of the Bibliographical Society in London (1894-1920)

and of the Bibliographical Society of America (1926-1951). Wyllie's initiative in fact closely paralleled that of the early secretary of the London society, A. W. Pollard, who (according to F. C. Francis in his account of that group on its own fiftieth anniversary) undertook as one of his "first actions" the "establishment of the Bibliographical Society's News Sheet, designed in the first place as a substitute for the postcards on which Notices of Meetings had hitherto been sent out." The Virginia society, furthermore, had itself used postcards to announce meetings, though it continued to do so for another forty years. (Among other similarities not readily apparent between the two groups are that each has been tightly entwined with a single library and that the archives of both are sadly deficient.)

The Secretary's News Sheet ran for 53 issues, from March 1947 to December 1967, with the Council confirming reality by voting to discontinue the series on 21 March 1969. All except the final half dozen were by Wyllie, whose role as Secretary passed to William Runge in 1962. Their frequency varied, but they tended to come out about quarterly (though dated by month of issue). The first twenty-nine were on 82" x 11" paper--the first twenty-five numbers mimeographed on one side of one to ten leaves, then the next four photo-offset double-sided with a heading set in Warren Chappell's ubiquitous Lydian display type. The contents themselves of all News Sheets except numbers 43 and 50 were typewritten. A further variation occurred in one of the first twenty-five: no heading had been included for SNS 15, and all copies had to be hand-stamped with the name, issue number, and date. From issue 30 (February 1954) the shape became squarish, about 6 3/4" high by 4 3/4" wide, but within that framework experiments in form continued. The typeset headings for 31-33 were printed in red; 31-33 and 35 were on coated paper; and with number 36 Lydian returned (except, again, for 50). Three cents of postage carried the copies to members--through 1952 in printed envelopes from Alderman Library, but after that bearing the stamped return address of the Society.

The News Sheets first of all communicated Society business: announcements of meetings, exhibitions, publications, reviews (that of SB 4 in the Stockholm journal Bokvännen clearly pleased the Secretary), contests and winners, gifts, and amendments to the constitution; annual financial statements; and, too soon, a necrology. News from members was welcome (including word that one was running for Governor of Virginia, or another's recommendation of a researcher in London, "six shillings an hour, funds to be deposited with her in advance"), and often copies of their publications were offered for distribution through the Society. Reflecting the embeddedness of the Society in Alderman Library, the News Sheet listed talks of other organizations that were to be

given in the McGregor Room. The most scholarly purpose the early newsletters served was to print bibliographical notes and queries. They presented and solicited corrections for a draft of Rollo Silver's list of the first presses in each of the United States, for instance; they entertained modifications and additional locations for Coolie Verner's Society publication A Further Checklist of the Separate Editions of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, with contributions by such people as Lawrence Wroth, Frederick Goff, and Thomas W. Streeter; and they provided additions and corrections to standard reference works, especially the Pollard and Redgrave STC, Wing's STC, and Evans's American Bibliography.

Because not every issue of the News Sheet needed to include reports of official Society affairs, entire numbers eventually were devoted to bibliographical checklists, ones ineligible for publication either as monographs because of their brevity or as SB articles because the journal generally eschewed enumerative listings. SNS 34 foreshadowed that development: this October 1955 number included a record of recent work on Joyce, but for the first time it had a separate cover (a drawing of Joyce by John Canaday). From 1958 through the final number in 1967 (SNS 39-53) most of the News Sheets could stand as independent publications (and were sold as such). These included checklists of works by or about Roger Duvoisin (39), John Davidson (40), Joyce (42, with additions in 48), Jefferson as architect (43), Eudora Welty (45), Andrew Lytle (46), and Charles Smith (50). The series concluded with two further supplements to Evans's American Bibliography.

The Secretary's News Sheets also formed a natural bridge between the Society's meetings and its wider publications program. With the first number was enclosed the handout Fredson Bowers had distributed the previous month at the inaugural gathering (item 1947.1 in the following checklist; his talk itself, on bibliographical description, was summarized in that first SNS). The logical next step was to publish the full text of talks, as the Society began doing with Charlton Hinman's presentation that spring (1947.2) and with those of Earl K. Fischer and C. William Miller (1948.1, 2) the following academic session (and as Wyllie was doing simultaneously with papers delivered at the McGregor Room Seminars in Contemporary Prose and Poetry). But if these mimeographed publications had more than ephemeral significance, they deserved more permanent form than as stapled sheets. Accordingly, starting in 1949, new publications were enclosed in stiff-paper covers (usually tan, except, in the case of a checklist of writings about R. E. Lee [1951.3], appropriately gray, and blue for a straggler in the series [1958.2]). But then there seemed no reason to limit these productions to Society talks;

already in 1947 Wyllie and Barbara Harris had produced a transcription of nineteenth-century copyright entries in Norfolk, and more scholarship that had not been first presented orally followed in 1949. The initial contributions came from the local circle: listings by Bowers (A Supplement to the Woodward & McManaway Check List of English Plays 1641- 1700), Miller (Henry Herringman Imprints: A Preliminary Checklist), and Wyllie (Preliminary Finding List of Writings on the Kentucky Book Trade, which he prepared for the Bibliographical Society of America as "Chairman for Southeastern States" of its Committee on Nineteenth-Century Publishers). But the range of authors immediately expanded: among the 1950 offerings was the first of the Society's important indexes to national bibliographies, the Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue by Paul Morrison, Curator of Rare Books at the University of Chicago. (Bowers arranged for the Index when he began summer teaching at Chicago in 1949.) The Society likewise began to publish talks that had been given in places other than Charlottesville: by Madeleine Stern at the Oneida, N.Y., Historical Society (1951.4), and by Helene Maxwell Hooker and Herman E. Spivey at the 1951 English Institute (1952.3, 9). Except for Morrison's Index, which had been lithographed, these publications were all mimeographed, on 82" x 11" paper. Except for one item announced in 1953 but not published until 1958 (1958.2), mimeographing ended in 1953, the same year the Society produced its first hardcover books.

Those books in boards grew out of what the young Society was already accomplishing. Richard Harwell's Cornerstones of Confederate Collecting (1953.2) was a revised edition of the mimeographed version issued the previous year (1952.2). Roger Bristol's Maryland Imprints 1801- 1810 (1953.1) complemented mimeographed checklists of early Tennessee and Lexington, Kentucky, publishing. Both books were manufactured by the University of Virginia Press, and they bore some of the first public acknowledgements (except for SB 4 and for the 1952 exhibition catalogue of Mrs. Roy Arthur Hunt's botanical books, the Society's first typeset publication other than Studies) of what would become a crucial link between the Press and the Society. Walter Harding's list of Walden editions (1954.3) and Mary E. Knapp's checklist of verse by David Garrick (1955.2) followed as hardcover editions in succeeding years, but the book whose presentation particularly suggested the Society was taking its publications seriously was another by Morrison, his Index of Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers in Donald Wing's Short- Title Catalogue . . . (1955.3). Advertising fliers reproduced the two-color title page of this large-format book, and the colophon recorded the name even of the person who laid and locked up the forms. The reception

was appropriately welcoming. Writing in College and Research Libraries in October 1955, Allen Hazen captured as well the way in which major scholarly advances quickly become assumed as part of the normal intellectual landscape: As the Society began to produce books in print runs larger than the needs of its own membership, it encountered the need to advertise. Accordingly, announcement of Society publications appeared in places such as Amateur Book Collector, American Book Prices Current, Antiquarian Bookman, College and Research Libraries, and the Wilson Library BulletinCusually in conjunction with other books from the library or the University Press.

The following year saw another major project, the more than two thousand pages in five volumes of Robert Turnbull's Bibliography of South Carolina 1563-1950. (An index volume followed in 1960.) Not only was the preparation of this work a large task; it was also especially convoluted. The book was produced "as an uncorrected typist's copy posthumously made from an author's uncompleted handwritten manuscript"; the typing, "not originally intended for photographic use," had been from dictation by the late author's wife, who had shipped the resulting cards to the Society only four weeks before her own death. Despite the Society's acknowledgement that the work was only provisional, it too was greeted with wide applause (a writer in the October 1956 Yale Alumni Magazine called it "monumental" and "remarkable"), and as a whole it has not yet been superseded. Amid continuing publication of paperbound books over the next few years, more items in hardcover also appeared. Notable among these were a two- volume bibliography of James Branch Cabell (1957.4; a volume each by Frances Joan Brewer and Matthew Bruccoli) and Frances Sharf Fink's Heads Across the Sea: An Album of Eighteenth-Century English Literary Portraits in America (1959.1). By far the most lavish, however, was the first in what would be a series completed in 1996 of eight Shakespearean prompt books from the seventeenth century, all edited by G. Blakemore Evans. The book consisted of two fascicles in stiff paper wrappers, the first consisting of editorial text, printed by letterpress, and the second a facsimile of the annotated seventeenth-century

edition, which the Meriden Gravure Company reproduced by collotype. These were gathered in a portfolio, which itself was stored within a 13"-high slipcase. The Antiquarian Bookman of 8 August 1960 called the volume "a magnificent example of bookmaking and the book arts," and James McManaway, writing in the Autumn 1964 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, identified the series as "one of the very important contributions of new material in Shakespearian studies and English theatrical history."

As the physical and scholarly quality of its publications rose, the Society was faced with the question of whether to continue offering work which proclaimed itself "preliminary." A related but separate question was how to keep its publications affordable. The earliest forms, the mimeographed items, accomplished both goals. Not that these were without scholarly value; as Johan Gerritsen pointed out in English Studies in August 1956, "Among the many bibliographical benefits which the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia has in recent years bestowed upon the world of scholarship must also be numbered a series of mimeographed publications on special subjects." But as the range of items issued by the Society expanded, their appellation changed from what they were ("the mimeographed series") to that from which they were differentiated ("near-print publications," a description used as early as 1952). The need for a less formal method of publication survived the demise of the Society's use of mimeography in 1953, and in 1954 several new forms were introduced.

The first was that of small- format books, slightly less than 7" x 5", unbound except for staples through the face of the book block near the spine. Four of these appeared (1954.1, 1954.5, 1955.1, 1957.1); the last was simultaneously available in a permanent casing which, except for its paper spine label, was the form in which five more publications of this size were issued (1958.1, 1958.3, 1959.2, 1960.4, 1960.6). (The same binding was used in those years for Barrett Library checklists of American literature.) Another change in 1954 was the issuance in two forms of the books that were slightly larger (about 9" x 6"). To ameliorate the cost of the Society's increasingly ambitious publications, members were sent unbound copies without charge, usually in advance of publication of the hardcover version (which they could then buy, at the price announced to the public). Five of these appeared, covering editions of Walden (1954.3), Garrick's verse (1955.2), Jefferson's books on the fine arts (1956.1), Thoreau's library (1957.2), and James Branch Cabell's writings (vol. 2 of 1957.4). All the unbound titles except the Jefferson one were stapled through the front; all except the Walden bibliography were on paper of the same quality as the hardbound issue.

Whereas those sets of paperbound items originating in 1954 seemed

to beg for permanent bindings, the books in a third group that began to appear then (but adumbrated by the Hunt exhibition catalog in 1952) gave the impression that they had reached their intended appearance. Though also paperbound and stapled (but on the spine), the outside of these small-format publications was a two-leaf fold wrapped around the other leaves, with the front as the title page. (Paper copies in the other groups had a half-title or a blank on the front.) That first year only a sole example appeared, Joseph Graves's account of Victor Hammer (1954.2), but the pattern would find expression in the 1955 number of the Secretary's News Sheet (34) that was issued with a cover and in the nine issues of SNS from 1958 through 1967 that were devoted to a single subject. This design began appearing repeatedly in the regular publications program in 1962, though with a slight variation: the three items issued that year (1962.3, 4, 5; each had wrappers larger than the text leaves) and in the two subsequent (1966.4, 1967.6) all were unfastened inside their covering. (Harkening back to earlier terminology, the catalog of James Monroe's library [1967.6] characterized itself as "The issuing in near-print of a manuscript designed ultimately for book form. . . .") They shared that feature with most of the special Secretary's News Sheets, though the two News Sheets at the end of the run in 1966 and 1967 were stapled on the spine, as was one of the non-SNS items (1967.13). Frontal stapling showed up in this series (as 1966.2 and 1967.5), but unlike earlier examples these items with multiple gatherings now had their first leaf as title page instead of a half-title or blank.

In their appearance, the "Technical Reports" that the Society introduced in 1967 were an obvious continuation of earlier publications: photo- offset, small format, wrappers with title on front, and stapling on the spine. They tended to be longer than their predecessors (the thickest, the catalog of Ellen Glasgow's library [1969.5], came to 309 pages), but what they particularly added was a new explicitness about the affordability and special nature of the items. One of the first, a bibliography of the Colombian poet José Eusebio Caro (1967.1), pointed out that these reports were available to members "at nominal prices, ranging from $.50 to $5.00, depending on the cost of production. [&] They are considered as being either preliminary and advance forms of manuscript preparation, or of such specialized interest as not yet to support letterpress publication." As such they filled the same function that some people find met today by the Internet. From 1967 through 1970 eleven of the Reports were published--seven being indexes to the figurative imagery of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists by Louis Charles Stagg.

With the termination of the Technical Reports, the Society by and large refrained from issuing material in subordinate forms for about two decades. One situation that did call for special attention, however,

was the intermittent need to reproduce articles from Studies in Bibliography. This happened only a few times and was initiated by the University Press of Virginia, which in 1965 republished G. Thomas Tanselle's The Historiography of American Literary Publishing for its own promotional purposes. In 1967 the Society itself reprinted Franklin B. Williams's Photo-Facsimiles of STC Books and in subsequent years three more essays by Tanselle: one for a customer's erroneous order (1968.5), one for the U.S. Copyright Office (1969.4), and one, on the editing of historical documents, for general circulation (1978.4). Special occasion to offer SB articles in separate form arose in 1993 for Tanselle's biography of Fredson Bowers and the accompanying list of Bowers's writings by Martin Battestin. Accordingly, the Society established a series of "Occasional Publications," intended for the reprinting of articles that deserved wider distribution and for works of less than monograph size. The Bowers book (1993.3) was the first, followed immediately by another article from the same volume of Studies about books for which Samuel Johnson subscribed (1993.2), and then by an edition of Johnson's translation of Sallust (1993.4).

Although all these publications divided into various subsets according to their form, in their subject matter they fit coherently into the Society's larger publishing program. Not surprisingly, checklists of primary or secondary materials or full-fledged descriptive bibliographies appeared more often than any other kind of book, and editions, especially of literary works, were also relatively frequent. The other major category of Society publications fit naturally with these: writings about bibliography and editing, and about the book trade more widely.

Individual publications are not always neatly assignable according to genre, but overall the Society produced about thirty author bibliographies and a further eighteen or so listings of other primary sources. Lists of secondary materials about authors and subjects were slightly fewer, about three dozen in all. Bibliographical description as a concern of the Society and the standards that could be achieved were manifest from the very start in the form of Bowers's handout on Wolfert's Roost (1947.1). But despite the publication (elsewhere) of Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description in 1949, his model was slow to take effect; the author of the checklist of Walden editions in 1954 specifically noted that "I have tried to keep bibliographical details to a minimum" (1954.3). Occasionally bibliographies included collation formulas (as in Bowyer's Junius, 1957.1) and samplings of variants (as in Bruccoli's Cabell, 1957.4b), but it was not until B. C. Bloomfield's bibliography of Auden in 1964 that the Society published full-fledged descriptions.

A good number of useful checklists both for authors and subjects nonetheless emerged in those years, most of them appearing in the inexpensive

series already noted. The authors here tended to be English and American literary ones, from Garrick to Maugham, Maxwell Anderson, and Welty, but they also included the political controversialist Junius, the French writer J. K. Huysmans, the architectural historian Fiske Kimball, and the Colombian poet Caro. The incarnation of later works of this kind in hardcover gave them additional dignity even as the range of coverage expanded: four such volumes, published after the Society issued its books through the University Press of Virginia, included bibliographies of Glasgow (1964.4; this one fit the earlier literary pattern); of George Abbot, a seventeenth-century archbishop of Canterbury (1966.1), and John Henry Newman (1978.1), these broadening the scope to religious writers; and of Arnold's letters (1968.1), which highlighted coverage of manuscript materials. Meanwhile the Society was also publishing checklists on other than single authors. Several of these covered genres: seventeenth-century English drama (1949.2, Bowers again proving an early model) and fiction (1952.4-6, reprinted as 1967.7), English prose fiction of the 1740s (1972.1), the Chilean novel (1961.2), and Virginia almanacs (1962.1). Still other lists fell into no convenient category: performance dates of D'Urfey's plays (1950.1), for instance; poetry occasioned by the death of Charles II (1958.1); and editions of the important eighteenth-century cartographical record of American waters, The English Pilot (1960.6).

A further category of checklist- related items includes some of the most important books published by the Society. Already in the early years had come forth a broad variety of imprint lists--of Henry Herringman in the seventeenth century (1949.3), of the Derrydale Press in the twentieth (1951.2), and of Maryland (1953.1), Tennessee (1953.3), and Lexington, Kentucky (1953.4) from the time printing began there. But what proved of exceptional value were the collateral materials the Society provided for three existing national bibliographies-- Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue for English books up to 1640, Donald Wing's continuation for books to 1700, and Charles Evans's American Bibliography for American books through the eighteenth century. The first contributions have already been noted: Paul Morrison's 1950 Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in the STC and his similar index to Wing in 1955. The Society published two supplements to Wing by John Alden based on holdings in Ireland (1955.1) and the British Museum (1958.2), and, by agreement with the Wing Revision, also recorded addenda and corrigenda in Studies in Bibliography for several years (in volumes 29-31, 1976-78). In 1961 Roger Bristol, a University of Virginia librarian, produced the first of his auxiliary works for the Evans bibliography, his Index of Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers for

names occurring there. His 1970 Supplement to Charles Evans' American Bibliography, published by the Society and the Bibliographical Society of America, and his Index to that Supplement the next year capped at least twenty years of his labors. Whatever limitations the original sources possessed affected all these progeny, but each of the new books enhanced its source by providing access not otherwise possible.

It was with a memorial gift from the Massey family after the death of Linton Massey in 1974 that the Society began in earnest to publish descriptive bibliographies. Up to then it had brought forth only the ones for Auden (1964.1, with a second edition as 1972.2) and Ernst Toller (1968.4). Except for Donald Gallup's bibliography of Ezra Pound, which was published in 1983 with St. Paul's Bibliographies, subsequent books of this kind were to be known as "Linton R. Massey Descriptive Bibliographies" and financed from the Massey fund. Seven of them have appeared: by Joe Maynard and Barry Miles (with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg) on William S. Burroughs (1978.2), Candace W. MacMahon on Elizabeth Bishop (1980.4), James A. Grimshaw, Jr., on Robert Penn Warren (1981.1), Stuart Wright and James L. W. West III on Reynolds Price (1986.3), Wright on Randall Jarrell (1986.2) and Peter Taylor (1988.1), and Michael Boughn on H.D. (1993.1). By this time serious work in bibliographical description anywhere looked to the guiding influence of Bowers (as the Wright and Boughn books acknowledge), but the MacMahon and Grimshaw volumes also had the advantage of his personal attention. The bibliographies in this series were a fitting tribute to Massey in part because of their similarity to his own book published by the Society, "Man Working," his catalogue of the Faulkner collections at the University of Virginia (1968.3). It was not a descriptive bibliography, but because even now none exists for the works of Faulkner, the thoroughness of his account has insured its continuing value for many of the reasons that full bibliographies are consulted.

One unexpected contribution of these bibliographies of modern authors is that many of them provide prefaces in which their subjects reflect on what it is that such works accomplish (and by which they also guarantee that the following account of their works is incomplete). Though not all of these writers seem to have read Bowers on the purposes of descriptive bibliography, they do offer reminders of the social context of the bibliographies themselves and of what is at stake in human terms. Elizabeth Bishop states concisely the theme common to all the commentators:

The image Robert Penn Warren chooses seems intended to portray his own perturbation rather than to comment on the book he is prefacing, but either way it is sobering: W. H. Auden invokes similar imagery: In his introduction to the bibliography of his friend William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg begins with more overt deprecation but ends, as the others do, with a recognition of potential good in this form of scholarship: And though Reynolds Price implies that bibliographers are among the stereotypical enemies of artistic creativity, he singles them out for commendation:

Linton Massey's death also prompted another publication, a facsimile of the Virginia copy of Faulkner's play The Marionettes. Designating the book as "A Linton R. Massey Memorial Publication," the Society published it in two editions: a sumptuous version of unopened and unbound sheets in a portfolio and slipcase, limited to 126 numbered or lettered copies (1975.3), and a trade edition, which included an introduction and textual apparatus by Noel Polk (1977.1). These were two

of the fourteen facsimile editions the Society has produced, eight of them in the series of Shakespearean prompt books from 1960 to 1996. Two of the others, Poe mementoes for the Society's twenty-fifth anniversary (1971.2) and a poem by Pound (1984.2), were in the nature of keepsakes, but the final two, like the Faulkner and the Shakespeare, were serious scholarly works--a facsimile of a copy of Pope's Dunciad into which a friend of Pope had copied readings from the manuscript (1991.1), and an edition of Johnson's previously unpublished translation of Sallust (1993.4). The first of those was marked by an extensive bibliographical apparatus; the second, by a new method of recording manuscript alterations.

Earlier the Society had commemorated the death of John Wyllie in a similar way. From the proceeds of a solicitation led by Matthew Bruccoli it produced two "John Cook Wyllie Memorial Publications": an edition of The Notebook of Stephen Crane, edited by Donald J. and Ellen B. Greiner (1969.2), and Edgar Allan Poe: A Bibliography of Criticism 1827-1972, by J. Lasley Dameron and Irby B. Cauthen, Jr. (1974.1). The Crane notebook was part of a larger grouping of scholarly editions that over the history of the Society had included Goldsmith's "Prospect of Society," edited by William B. Todd (1956.2); Hawthorne's poems, by Richard E. Peck (1967.3); the notesheets (1972.3) and early drafts (1977.2) of Joyce's Ulysses, by Phillip F. Herring; George Eliot's notebook, by Joseph Weisenfarth (1981.2); Frost's stories for his daughter Lesley, by Roger D. Sell (1984.1); Longfellow's John Endicott, by Edward L. Tucker (1985.2); and Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by Linck C. Johnson (1986.1). It is interesting that although the ideas of Fredson Bowers had formed the basis for the seals granted to editions by committees of the Modern Language Association of America, the nature of these Society books entailed that only one, the Thoreau, was eligible for their mark of approval (it received the award from the Center for Scholarly Editions).

While Dameron and Cauthen's bibliography of Poe criticism was special in paying tribute to Wyllie, it was also part of the Society's ongoing attempt to trace the responses of readers by listing their printed reactions. Although enumerations of criticism never became a chief form of Society publication, a fair number of these did appear, usually on literary subjects. Some were in the paperbound publications-- lists of Master's theses on Spenser (1950.4) and Wordsworth (1962.4), and an earlier version of Dameron's Poe list (1966.2). Sometimes they arose as adjuncts to descriptive bibliographies, as in the accounts for Auden, Toller, and (in the Massey series) Bishop, Warren, and H.D. But a number of full books were devoted to these as well: on Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburh (1969.3), Valéry (1970.1), Austen (1973.2, 1985.1),

Carlyle (1976.2), and Carroll (1980.2, in conjunction with the Lewis Carroll Society of North America). The same patterns obtained for writings on other than specific literary authors, beginning already in the mimeograph days (with checklists of appearances of the "American hero" [1950.2] and of books about Robert E. Lee [1951.3]). Beginning in 1954 the Society also co-published four books (in the series Bonner Beiträge zur Bibliotheks- und Bücherkunde) that listed German contributions to the study of non-German writing: doctoral dissertations on English and American (1954.4), romance (1958.4), and Scandinavian language and literature (1959.3), and German translations of American belles lettres (1961.5). In addition, the Society published John M. Spalek's massive guide to archives of Germans who emigrated to the United States after the rise of National Socialism (1978.3).

Though books such as the Austen checklists quickly brought needed revenue and performed a useful scholarly service, the chief concerns of this bibliographical society were not in principle literary, and publications on the order of its two cumulated checklists of bibliographical scholarship (1957.3 and 1966.5; these had first appeared in Studies) or its list of published facsimiles of early music printing (1962.5) were more in accord with its original purposes. The study of collecting and collections also came closer to those interests--and indeed honored the concerns both of those who established the Society for bibliophilic reasons and of those who had more specific scholarly purposes in mind. Several of the early mimeographed papers were on collecting: on the Sadleir-Black assemblage of gothic novels (1949.1), on confederate imprints (1952.2), and on southern fiction (1952.7). A surprising number of publications itemized the contents of important libraries--those of literary figures Thoreau (1957.2), Faulkner (1964.2), Emerson (1967.2), Glasgow (1967.13), and, most dramatically, Fielding (1996.2); of American presidents Jefferson (1956.1, covering his fine arts library; the keepsake 1952.10 also provided Jefferson's recommendations for a basic gentleman's library) and Monroe (1967.6); and of the early nineteenth-century president of the Bank of the United States (1950.6; the paper was first presented as a talk to the Society by the Virginia professor, David McCord Wright, who had re-collected these items). Books by Linton Massey (1968.3) and by Robert W. Hamblin and Louis Daniel Brodsky (1979.1) were accounts of collections, as were in their own ways the exhibition checklists for the Hunt botanical books (1952.1) and the Grolier Club's W. S. Gilbert display (1963.1). The uses made of collections was also a concern: Paul Kaufman's Borrowings from the Bristol Library 1773-1784 (1960.4) presaged the more recent fascination with the study of such records.

Also in harmony with the constitutional goals of the Society were the

publications it sponsored about bibliography, textual study, and book trade history. Actual bibliographies and editions themselves constituted a form of commentary (and often contained explicit discussions as well), but separate reflections on these subjects were also present--from the first official meeting, in fact, when Bowers talked about the description of modern books. In the title of the other Society talk of early 1947, Charlton Hinman asked one of the most incisive questions in either bibliography or textual criticism as he pondered the scholarly significance of having seventy-nine first-folio editions of Shakespeare's works available in a single library, the Folger (1947.2). Discussions specifically of textual matters were also present from early on: Edwin Wolf 2nd talked about the textual importance of manuscript commonplace books from the seventeenth century (1949.4), and two papers published by the Society on behalf of the English Institute addressed the need for organized records of literary manuscripts (with the goal of preparing standard editions of American authors) and the value of non- literary (here, "historical") papers for literary students (1952.9, 1952.3). Hardcover books devoted to textual questions dealt with the composition history of novels by Faulkner (1975.2), D. H. Lawrence (1979.3), and, pictorially, Dreiser (1985.3) as well as transmission of motifs in Aesop (1979.2) and the grammar of substantives in Shakespeare (1976.1). But by far the most important discussion of bibliographical and textual matters in separate publications of the Society occurred in books by Bowers and Tanselle. A collection of Bowers's essays (Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing) appeared shortly after his retirement from the University (1975.1); summaries of his ideas also pervade Tanselle's biography of him (1993.3). Tanselle's essay on the editing of historical documents was reprinted from SB (as 1978.4) and had wide influence in that editing community. The activity of the Society's monograph publications program and of its journal overlapped in three volumes of Tanselle's articles that it has published: Selected Studies in Bibliography (1979.4), Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle (1987.1; both of those works collect essays that first appeared in SB), and Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (1990.1; this one contains material from SB as well as from other sources).

The Society also published a variety of books dealing with printing history and the book trade; these, too, emerged in the earliest days of the Society. One of its very first productions was a documentary record, the list of nineteenth- century copyright entries for the Eastern District of Virginia (1947.3). That item, chiefly the responsibility of Wyllie, was soon followed by a list of writings on the Kentucky book trade (1949.5) that he had compiled as regional chairman of the Bibliographical Society of America's "Committee on 19th Century Publishers." In line with the checklists of imprints and the personnel indexes to national bibliographies

considered earlier, the Society published A Directory of the Book Trade in Greenfield, Massachusetts, 1792-1899 (1954.1); other works explored the role of printing in fifteenth-century England (1967.4) and, as a festschrift, books ". . . in America's Past" (1966.6). A number of publications dealt with important individuals: Valentine Simmes (1968.2), Ralph Crane (1972.4), and Henry Herringman (1948.2) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; William Williams in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Utica, New York (1951.4); Samuel Snowden in nineteenth-century Virginia (1952.8, 1954.5); and Victor Hammer in nineteenth-century Vienna and subsequently much of the rest of the world (1954.2). In addition, the Society issued an expanded form of D. F. McKenzie's SB listing of Stationers' Company apprentices as the first volume in his important series of such accounts (1961.3). Finally, the Society published a group of works on the processes and materials of printing. A couple of these were paperbound: an account of printing inks (1948.1), and a Technical Report reprinting advertising cuts from the eighteenth-century Virginia Gazette (1969.1). The others were more substantial: Richard E. Huss's The Development of Printers' Mechanical Typesetting Methods, 1822-1925 (1973.1), and Rollo Silver's classics, Typefounding in America, 1787- 1825 (1965.2) and The American Printer, 1787-1825 (1967.8).

Overall, then, the Society's publications became characterized by their range and by their affordability. Many carried prefatory notes of thanks to Society officers not only for help in the course of production but also for suggestions that had generated the items in the first place. Frequently the books reflected the particular interests of the same officers. The ones on American imprints, for instance, fit well with Wyllie's former role as an editor of the Virginia Imprint Series, just as the items on South American literature accorded with his facility in Spanish (he had grown up in Santo Domingo). One of the especially interesting features of many of the books is what would now be called their "interactive" quality; they were often explicitly recognized as stages of an ongoing discovery. That activity was possible most readily when the Society conducted its Secretary's News Sheet, for here it could solicit and report updates on its own publications--Bristol's Maryland Imprints, for instance, or Verner's record of Jefferson's Notes on Virginia. The most vivid example of such building is undoubtedly the work that led to Bristol's Supplement to Evans. New "Evans Addenda" in seven issues of the News Sheet contributed to a large "checking edition" issued in twenty-three 32-page fascicles from 1962 through 1964 and then collected in 1965; responses to these appeared in the final two numbers of the News Sheet in 1966 and 1967, and then all the new materials were gathered in 1970. The Society's publications also interacted with themselves

in other ways. The second part of Mish's English Prose Fiction cited its indebtedness to an article in SB 2; the republication of Morrison's index to the STC was made from Wyllie's annotated copy of the original (with a new note emphasizing that modifications were "Still welcome"); and the second edition of the Auden bibliography announced that the University Press would act as the ongoing agent for corrections and additions. Such ongoing interest for their offspring is not inevitable among publishers or authors, and it represented another way in which the Society attempted to be of special service to its field.

The ongoing adjustments in the physical form of the Society's publications entered a significant new phase in 1996 when the Society established a site on the World Wide Web. With that home page came two electronic publications: a searchable index of authors and titles from the first forty- nine volumes of Studies in Bibliography (1996.3), and the complete and searchable contents of volume 7 of Studies (1996.4). The latter was the prototype for what will be made available early in 1997: the complete backfile of forty-nine volumes of SB, all encoded to be searchable electronically (1997.3). As such, Studies will be the first scholarly journal to make its full retrospective file available electronically without charge. The publications of 1996 also show the Society's flexibility in choosing the method of textual reproduction most appropriate to the circumstances. In that year it produced not only these electronic publications distributed on the World Wide Web but also a book set by computer and printed by xerography as well as one set by linotype and printed by letterpress.

Although the SB volumes from nearly a half century were newly keyboarded for the electronic project by a commercial firm, the tagging with computer codes was performed by the staff of the University Library's Electronic Text Center, which also mounted the files on the Internet. This Center, which has become an international leader in the presentation of electronic materials, maintains a particular advantage in that its director David Seaman and many on his staff are experienced in bibliography and textual criticism and thus have special insight into the texts they are dealing with. That expertise has also come into play for two other electronic publications to be made at the same time as the full SB: searchable page facsimiles of G. Blakemore Evans's complete series of seventeenth-century Shakespearean prompt books (1997.2), and a combined and searchable edition of the six installments of Emily Lorraine de Montluzin's attributions of authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine (1997.1) that had earlier appeared in Studies.

The cooperation involved in these electronic projects is a new form of the oldest collaboration in which the Society has engaged--with the University Library. Though that connection was strongest at the beginning,

when the Society almost appeared to be an agency of the Library, in some form or other it has always been maintained. Harry Clemons, who was Librarian at the Society's inception, instantly recognized the benefits the Society brought the library. On 12 October 1949 he wrote Massey that he "deemed it fortunate for this Library that it could serve as headquarters," and he noted that the Society had "brought to the Library interesting speakers and interested audiences." Even today, four members of the Society's Council are from the library staff.

But particularly for the Society's publications, as for the various joint meetings noted earlier, the group has also entered into partnerships with a number of other organizations, among them the English Institute (1952.3, 9), H. Bouvier u. Co. in Bonn (1954.4, 1958.4, 1959.3, 1961.5), the Thoreau Society (1957.2), the American Association of Architectural Bibliographers and the Society of Architectural Historians (1959.2), Ediciones de Andrea of Mexico City (1961.2), the James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library (1967.6), Southeast Missouri State University (1979.1), the Lewis Carroll Society of North America (1980.2), St. Paul's Bibliographies (1983.1), the New York Public Library (1991.1), and the Johnsonians (1993.4).

By far the most important relationship for publications, however, has been with the official printing and publishing arms of the University itself. The blurry distinctions between University Library and Bibliographical Society extended to these other relationships as well; the positive result was that, with the Society and its leaders operating at the center of this activity, the name of the University early in the Society's life assumed the connotation it would long hold as a place associated with the serious study and production of books. Already on 30 May 1953 the Antiquarian Bookman wrote that "It is a dull month when the University of Virginia, in all its branches, does not contribute something useful for bookmen." The "three particularly pleasant items" it noted for the current month were two Society publications, Bristol's Maryland Imprints and Mitchell's Preliminary Checklist of Tennessee Imprints, and a book from one of the other "branches," a pamphlet of Increase Mather published for the McGregor Library--that is, one in a series of editions from the McGregor collection published by Wyllie. All three were ostensibly published by still another division, the "University of Virginia Press." That unit, which Wyllie had reorganized at the behest of the University president in 1948, was at this time largely a printing service, though stimulated by Wyllie's interest in issuing books it had also developed into the rudiments of a publishing press. According to Chic Moran, who was the establishment's director for twenty years starting in 1954, the University allowed this Press considerable autonomy, thereby adding to its accessibility for the Society. It was at the Press

that many of the Society's early publications (as well as SB volumes 4 and 9-30) were printed, and it was from the Press that its first hardcover books were issued.

For some time people both inside the University and out (the latter included Julian Boyd, who had written a forceful proposal to that effect) had thought that a formal scholarly press was a necessary concomitant to UVa's aspirations as a research institution and to its perception as such. According to Edgar Shannon, who was then University President, "Fredson Bowers and some other distinguished faculty were having to go to be published at other places and to some extent what could be our own reputation was being bled off that way" (Shannon's remarks came in an interview reported in the Winter/Spring 1996 newsletter of the Press). Under the leadership of Shannon the University Press of Virginia was founded in October 1962. Its name was chosen to reflect its design to serve organizations throughout the state; the former University of Virginia Press, meanwhile, became known as the University of Virginia Printing Office. For a five-member committee to propose organizational guidelines for the new Press, Shannon drew on two stalwarts of the Bibliographical Society, Bowers and Wyllie. For the seven-member governing board that was subsequently established, the Society provided two others: William B. O'Neal and Arthur Stocker.

The first director of the new Press, Victor Reynolds, arrived in April 1963. Working from an office in the Rotunda that contained "a table and two chairs and a telephone and some scratchpads and pencils" (according to Francis L. Berkeley, Jr., in the same 1996 interview for the Press's newsletter), Reynolds quickly had to establish a list of books. One approach to doing so found expression in a letter he wrote the Society on 11 April: "The Board of Directors of the University Press of Virginia has authorized me to tell you that the Press will consider it a privilege to take over the stock of books previously published by the Bibliographical Society of Virginia on the following terms." Indeed, of the seventy- five titles listed in the Press's first catalog that fall, thirty-two (six of them volumes of SB) were Society publications. (Together, books from the Society and McGregor Library constituted 60% of the Press's first list.) Society publications also provided range, appearing in four categories (Art, Bibliography, History, and Literature) out of the seven in a related checklist of items being taken over from the former University of Virginia Press. Reynolds also discovered another advantage of collaborating with the Society. As the Society's Publications Committee chairman Arthur Stocker noted to fellow Councilor Anne Ehrenpreis on 5 October 1966, a certain bibliographical book "is in the hands of the Press, but Victor Reynolds habitually refers bibliographical matter to us, as a source of publication funds." As the Press became established

and gradually obtained better quarters, it was better able to take physical control of the books it was offering for sale. Acquiring a warehouse meant consolidating the books that had been scattered around the University Grounds, though it turned out that the symbolism of the books' physical location could prove ambiguous. As a result, Wyllie wrote to the University auditor on 1 August 1967 to clarify ownership as well as to summarize the Society's arrangements with the Press:

The Society, too, clearly benefited from the new arrangements. Physical consolidation of the volumes the Press was offering first of all meant that the Society could reduce the stock it was storing in the Rare Book Room. But the chief benefits lay elsewhere. As Massey explained in a letter of 14 August 1969 to Frederick Goff, President of the Bibliographical Society of America (about Bristol's forthcoming supplement to Evans's American Bibliography), "Once the publication of a book has been authorized they [the Press] relieve us of all further concern." Though the Society still went through the vexatious process of having manuscripts evaluated and of superintending whatever revisions were necessary, the Press increasingly took care of production and, of particular importance, advertising and distribution. Shortly after the launching of the Press the Society published on its own a few remaining works that had been in the pipeline as well as some more Technical Reports, but in the late 1960s it also initiated a few last items for which it would have sole responsibility: Hawthorne's Poems (1967.3), the new edition of Mish's fiction checklist (1967.7), the book on Valentine Simmes (1968.2), and Stephen Crane's Notebook (1969.2). The latter, a memorial to Wyllie, unwittingly signaled that the Society would no longer be able to sustain an independent publishing program, for one of its workhorses was now gone. In a memorandum to the Council on 28 February 1969, Linton Massey explained the Society's situation:

Particularly on the minds--and hands--of the Council was the Wyllie memorial volume; as Massey wrote Matthew Bruccoli on 8 August 1969, "This book was produced through the University Printing Office, not the University Press; we are thus obliged to merchandise the volume ourselves. Wish us luck and a larger sale this autumn!" In volumes 23 through 25 (1970-72) of SB two publications lists appeared: for items available through the Press, and through the Society. The Society offerings were mostly the Technical Reports, but they included the four books; by the end of 1970, those hardcover publications had been transferred to the Press and the remaining Reports discarded.

The identity and recognition that the Society books gave the Press from the start was strengthened as the Press began to handle publications for a number of other institutions of the book world. In a letter on 1 June 1972 to the Masseys abroad, Walker Cowen announced with glee that "I have concluded an agreement to distribute . . . the past publications of the Grolier Club." From its earliest days the Press had made available the productions of the Virginia Historical Society, the Virginia State Library, and the Tracy W. McGregor Library. The number of affiliated institutions grew, and the bookish ones among them came to include not only such major establishments as the American Antiquarian Society, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Folger Library, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and St. Paul's Bibliographies, but also such organizations as the American Association of Architectural Bibliographers, the New York Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Columbia Historical Society, the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Colonial Williamsburg, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Bryn Mawr College Library, and Prospect Books. (In an instance of multivalent cooperation, SB 32 in 1979 included a list of titles from the Bibliographical Society of America that were available from the Press.) Although the Press did not deal solely with bibliography, it quickly became the first source to check for new publications in that field. That status was reinforced by special "Bibliography" catalogs the Press issued in 1966 and 1974, two of only a dozen or so subject catalogs the Press has issued during its existence (and most of those later, in the 1990s), and by the covers of its biannual catalogs that were based on new Society publications such as Massey's Faulkner volume, the Society's Poe keepsakes from 1971, the Marionettes, or Frost's Stories for Lesley. Cowen himself had joined the Press under Victor Reynolds and succeeded him as director in 1969; in 1971 he also became a member of the Society's Council. To the Press's other strengths were added two excellent designers who often worked on projects of the Society: Edward Foss for the first decade and a half, and, from 1980, Janet Anderson.

The death of Walker Cowen in 1987 kindled changes in the relationship of the Society and the Press. Early signs of a shift appeared as the

Press ended its association with the organizations whose presence in its list had contributed to its reputation as a preeminent American press for publications dealing with the book world. A more direct complication arose when the Press accepted only grudgingly a book that the Society considered one of its more important contributions, a collection of G. Thomas Tanselle's essays entitled Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing. Reluctant to accept the judgment of the Society, the new Press director requested that "future projects be accompanied by an outside expert evaluation." Believing that "such collections do not make a new contribution to scholarship" and would lose money, the Press also required that the Society receive a smaller share than usual of the proceeds from the Tanselle book. (Sales later required that the book go into a second printing.) It was about this time that other complications also arose and that the Society began to think anew about resuming full responsibility for its publications program.

An occasion to do so arose in the early 1990s. As a parting token to his friends, Fredson Bowers had on his death in 1991 left some money to the University's English Department in order that it could prepare for them an updated checklist of his writings. Martin Battestin's work on that list developed in conjunction with Tanselle's preparation of a biography of Bowers, and it seemed appropriate to apply the Bowers bequest to reprint together these accounts that first appeared in SB 46 (1993). The mechanics of doing so were quite straightforward (though the reissuing provided opportunities that had to be seized for slight revision and for the addition of an index), and with the new volume the Society not only began its series of "Occasional Publications" but also resumed publishing on its own. The second item in that series, a checklist of books to which Samuel Johnson subscribed, was reproduced from the same volume of Studies and held minimal challenges, but the third, an edition of Johnson's translation of Sallust, required more decisions about production. The Society's two 1996 productions in hardcover, the final volume of the Shakespearean prompt books and the account of Fielding's library, were likewise produced independently. It remains to be seen whether the Society will wish to proceed without the set of services the Press would otherwise provide, but in at least one regard the Press has become irrelevant, for the publishing the Society has begun on the Internet enables it to produce new kinds of works and to bring them to audiences more efficiently than with print. The Society's connection with the Press has not been severed, however; as a symbol of that continuing relationship, the Press continues to store and distribute the copies of Studies that remain after the Society has sent out the volumes to members.

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia (renamed Studies in Bibliography for volume 2), the journal that the Times Literary Supplement said "came forth to astonish all the bibliographers of Europe" (27 April 1966), was the Society's most hazardous publishing venture: publication in the form of a book was expensive, and there was no assurance of adequate sales to recover the cost of production. Such a project had been latent as far back as Wyllie's 1946 questionnaire that gauged interest in a society. About half the respondents--including Bowers--said they would like to see "an annual volume of studies." (Slightly more hoped for "Printed announcements of exhibits.") In a letter to Massey after the appearance of volume 1, Bowers pondered the future of Studies and summarized the attendant problems:

As the local Daily Progress noted (on 15 January 1949), issuance of volume 1 did indeed mark formally "the growth into a national organization of what was originally a small group of people meeting occasionally in the McGregor Room of the Alderman Library to hear talks on books." From that point, Studies served symbolically as "monumental evidence" of the "work and worth" of the Society itself (according to Richard Shoemaker in Library Trends, January 1967). F. C. Francis likewise affirmed that representativeness in his Foreword to volume 20: "the Society with the prestige it now enjoys and the great success it has had is substantially the image of its Editor." The development of the journal's reputation can be charted by the responses it evoked from the TLS: recognition was instant ("the Papers [as the first volume was called] . . ., under Dr. Bowers's aegis, are rapidly earning their place on the same reference shelf as the transactions of the senior societies of London, New York, Edinburgh and Oxford" [24 August 1951]), and its

leadership soon came to be taken for granted ("Professor Bowers's annual has become so firmly established a pillar of the bibliographical establishment that the reviewer could perhaps confine himself to a list of this year's contents" [1 July 1965]) and its place with respect to the earlier journals uncontested ("The new periodical rapidly established an authority rivalling that of The Library, and it has maintained its distinguished position ever since; by now every bibliographer is in its debt" [27 April 1966]). In 1962 the French journal Études Anglaises observed, "Cette publication annuelle est peut-être la plus remarquable que nous offrent les grandes presses des Etats-Unis: l'érudition est à l'honneur quand elle est aussi magnifiquement servie par la typographie et réciproquement, car celle-ci reçoit alors un hommage que trop souvent elle dédaigne. [This annual publication is perhaps the most remarkable offered by any of the great publishing houses of the United States. Its erudition is well served by the typography which, in turn, does honor to the erudition, usually disdainful of such mundane matters.]"

Despite the instant success of Studies, three early anxieties persisted and became permanent concomitants of the journal: where would the articles, money, and editorial assistance come from to produce the next volume? Bowers's assiduity in pursuing papers is a theme in the broader history of SB that G. Thomas Tanselle treats elsewhere in the current volume, but it is worth identifying here as well, for it typifies the way that Studies preoccupied Bowers for forty-five years. Tanselle notes how Bowers served on William Todd's Chicago dissertation committee in the summer of 1949 and how (by arrangements already underway) Todd's series of important contributions to Studies began that year; that same summer Bowers not only compiled his Supplement to . . . Woodward & McManaway (1949.2) and garnered Paul Morrison's personnel index to the STC (1950.3) for publication by the Society, but he also consummated an agreement with the English Institute to print papers from its bibliographical section. One of those was "a magnificent paper by Greg which I had been sweating blood to get" (letter to Massey, 16 September 1949). Extant letters also show some other ways that articles came about. He once wrote Massey (3 Sept. 1963) that at a professional meeting he had seen a scholar whose "tongue was hanging out to give a paper here before the Society . . . and then hand it over to Studies" (the topic, moreover, promised to appeal to "our British friends"). Just as Bowers solicited on behalf of other activities of the Society, other Society members looked out for Studies. Hence when Wyllie noted an item of special interest in Waller Barrett's collection, he told Bowers, who "is writing direct to Waller to ask him to write the thing up for a note in the next volume" (Wyllie letter to Massey, 5 November 1954). Sometimes the

crucial step was simply to ask, as is implicit in a 12 May 1955 letter to Bowers from Faulkner scholar Carvel Collins ("I do know your Studies in Bibliography and am flattered that you should ask me to submit a piece for it") or explicit in my own case, in which, after my work came to Bowers's attention while we were in the British Library in 1978, he invited me to let him see it when I had something written up. To the end of his life he was anxious about where copy for the next volume was going to come from.

The concern over finding material to print was compounded by the need for the volumes to appeal to appropriate constituencies. The desired range was broad, but the scholarship available did not always match. Though a large number of pieces in the first volume were by local writers and three of them were of special local interest (each touching in some way on Jefferson), and though he recognized the importance of local supporters to the continuing existence of Studies, Bowers also realized that "by their nature our Papers will probably grow less rather than more Virginian." "John is rightly very concerned that we print in the Papers a reasonable number of American bibliographical articles," he wrote Massey on 19 April 1949;

His suggestion was to expand the purview of mimeographed publications to include writings related to Virginian and American history-- "if they could be brought in any broad sense under the term `bibliographical' as being concerned with documents of whatever nature." While appreciating other activities of the Society for their own sake, he also recognized the complex interdependency of the group's undertakings: "I agree thoroughly with your ideas about more meetings and talks drawing on local talents and on such subjects as you suggest. . . . the Society exists as more than simply a publishing organization, and if we wither here, we shall wither nationally. . . . There is, possibly, a delicate balance between our local membership, the size of our dues, and the financial requirements of the Papers, to say nothing of possible monographs in the future if we can get the proper backing."

The instant praise that Studies elicited brought an equally speedy

offer from the University of North Carolina Press to publish subsequent numbers as well as any separate monographs the Society might produce. Massey noted that proposal in an April 1949 letter to University President Colgate Darden, who had just written to thank Massey for a major gift that guaranteed that the second volume of the journal would appear. Massey pointed out what he believed (and what proved to be right) but what was also calculated to encourage Darden's favor: his gift to the Society had been "actuated solely from my interest in it and my conviction that through it the University has a unique opportunity to enhance its reputation for scholarship throughout the world in a field offering little academic competition." These remarks and the reference to North Carolina were particularly shrewd because the University was still smarting from an article a decade earlier (June 1935) by Edwin R. Embree in the Atlantic Monthly. Appraising American universities, Embree had found that no university in the South ranked as "eminent" or even "leading," and that out of 206 university departments in the country rated as distinguished, only one was in that region--at North Carolina.

In Massey's 1956 history of the Society he described the precarious financing of the first volume of Studies:

Meanwhile the Society also needed to divert cash for other projects, including any separate publications it was to produce (and which might produce financial profits). The $800 deficit that remained from the first SB was funded from the next year's dues and then bumped along from year to year. Several times the Society appealed to the University for a grant that "would thus place us beyond any strict need for deficit financing of the sort that we have been committed to for a decade" (letter of Wyllie to Provost Joseph Vaughan, 13 December 1957); on 22 October 1959 President Edgar Shannon wrote that in order to get the Society "completely out of the red" he was approving $1013 from the Alumni Fund for the Society, noting that "I don't have to tell you how interested I am in the Bibliographical Society, and how proud I am of its accomplishments since its inception."

The money was also gratifying in that it marked formal University support of the Society. Massey had called attention to the lack of such recognition in his letter of request (on 24 October 1959):

The earlier funds had indeed been useful, but they had to be applied for annually, they were fairly small to begin with, and they kept declining (down to $200 for volume 15, with a spurt in the final year, for volume 17, to $480). Grants from the Richmond Area University Center shared those features, except that they were even smaller, usually to cover the cost of publishing articles of individual faculty.

The shaky financial standing of the journal quite naturally concerned no one more than Bowers. The gratitude in his response (on 14 April 1949) to Massey's gift toward volume 2 was therefore profound:

Bowers in fact felt so buoyed by the surety of adequate pages in volume 2 that he stayed up into the early hours of the next day to expand a note he had written into an article. With his heavy personal investment in the journal, it is not surprising that he responded to Massey much the same way a few years later: Bowers was known for his long, single-spaced letters, but his series to Massey in April 1949, when the future of SB and the direction of the Society lay in question, reiterate in their appearance how seriously he took these questions: his calculation of possibilities on the 19th, for instance, contains about 3000 words typed on four dense pages, with a 500-word postscript by hand on a fifth sheet. Meanwhile Bowers was looking for ways in which he could help directly. When it was unclear whether money was sufficient to add a few pages of short but important notes to the next volume, he told Massey, "Although I don't have the folding money to indulge myself in this sort of thing, I am prepared to put up, strictly anonymously, a hundred dollars to help get this other material in print so far as it can be done for this sum" (30 April 1949). A few years later he noted the local Research Committee's friendly hope that "we should be self-supporting in the future" but observed that "I do not anticipate trouble next year. Both Gemmill and I are now in the inner sanctum group which actually makes the awards" (18 November 1953).

The financial security that the Society sought for Studies based on a permanent subsidy never materialized. Bowers had hopes for lasting support particularly after he returned in 1949 from his first summer of teaching in Chicago--with "a flattering offer to come out there" for good, as he wrote Massey on 16 September. "A similar journal bulked very large in the Chairman's mind at Chicago, and he stated it would be subsidized there without question. I had a very interesting summer seeing how the other half lives. Everyone at Chicago knew of the Papers and admired them." On the other hand, he also understood the realities of local politics:

Gradually, as separate publications began generating their own profits and the annual dues of members covered production costs of the journal, this centerpiece of the Society's activity did achieve relative financial stability. But throughout his life Bowers remained mindful of the Society and journal's contingent existence (on 23 April 1981 he wrote Kendon Stubbs that "Since I have got in the habit of thinking of the Society as poor, I have too often substituted my time for money that perhaps should have been spent on professional readers" for Society publications). Partly by nature he looked constantly for little ways to improve the financial situation of Studies. When the Richmond Area University Center was providing publishing grants to faculty, he planned to have Coolie Verner apply: "The saving to us will not be great, since it is unlikely that Verner's article in type will run to more than five or six pages, but every little bit helps and is worth a distinct effort, which we shall give it" (letter to Massey, 30 April 1949). The switch from 16-page

gatherings to 32-page ones in 1985 was to save a slight bit of money, as was the transfer of footnotes from the bottom of the page to the end of the article in 1988 through 1990. His frequent advice to trim the size of articles came from his good editorial sense, but Bowers was also mindful that what was not worth publishing was not worth paying for.

The third worry that dogged Bowers as Studies editor was the need for a suitable assistant- -and eventually for a successor. At first various minor but incessant chores were taken care of in the library, though Bowers recognized (in a letter to Massey, 19 April 1949) that "how long we can expect the library staff to do our clerical work for us is an open question." At the start, when all officers devoted themselves equally to all activities, the other leaders helped with the Society's journal. In those early days he wrote Massey, "I am 100 per cent behind your ideas for expanding the activities of the Society and creating a more general interest. To my mind this is as important as the Papers; and I am against anything which would tend to make the Papers seem my own private project. No one knows better than I do that they are not, and without John's hard work and your encouragement there would be no Papers" (20 September 1949). Proof for the articles went not only to Bowers but also to Wyllie, whose secretary Miss Jean McCauley would prepare a table of contents and other preliminary matter. Permission to proceed with printing required the authorization of the Council, especially in the early days when the availability of money to do so was never assured, and until at least the late 1970s the Council received reports on the cost per page of the current volume. On the other hand, Bowers was also in control of various non-editorial details from the start. An early letter (13 July 1949) from Wyllie to Willis Shell at the William Byrd Press reveals that Bowers was the one who decided to use different binding colors from year to year:

In later years, through preparation for the 1989 volume, the color selection became the subject of an annual ritualistic visit by Bowers to Janet Anderson at the University Press.

As time went by, the duties connected with producing Studies only increased, as did the proportion of them that fell to Bowers, especially about the time Wyllie was promoted to University Librarian. Several younger colleagues whom he hoped would be able to help fell victim to English Department politics or left the University for other reasons. His frustration boiled over several times in 1957. In one letter to Massey (6 February) he reported that he had told the English Department chairman-- Atcheson Hench, former president of the Society--that "I seemed

to be expected to take over all the business details with the Press down to seeing the last reprint gets out on time; and I was disinclined to do some of the work expected of me and wanted some help." He added that "we need people on the Council who will do some work and contribute more to the Society than a sociable evening," also pointing out that he had "just fired the proofreader Wyllie hired, as incompetent, and will do the work myself again." He was still distressed that fall, writing Massey, "I suspect we should consider printing in England, pretty soon. I am determined from now on not to substitute my time for the normal printer's proofreading. In fact, I haven't got the time, nor do other members of the Society. This last year or two has been a nightmare for me about proofs . . ." (20 September).

Significant help arrived in the fall of 1960 in the form of Lester Beaurline, who joined the English Department after receiving his Ph.D. earlier that year at Chicago, where Bowers had gotten to know him. Part of his attractiveness to the Department, Bowers later wrote, "was the solution of the SB problem" (letter to Beaurline, 2 March 1973). In volume 17 (for 1964), Beaurline first appeared on the title page, as Assistant Editor. He held that designation the following year as well, and then from volumes 19 through 27 (1966 through 1974) worked as Associate Editor. (In 1967 he and Bowers also published a two-volume edition of Dryden's plays.) The measure of his ever- increasing responsibilities during that period can be gauged by a gentle admonishment he received from Massey about the volume for 1969: "As I am sure you have been reminded many times Studies 22 was a bit long, and we did exceed our budget figure" (29 March 1969). The difficulty had arisen when a commissioned but tardy article arrived after others had been accepted to fill the apparent void; the counsel from Massey suggests the large role Beaurline had come to play. In his years at the journal his responsibilities grew, just as they had earlier for Bowers, and for his final half-dozen years there he had the assistance of graduate students for clerical and proof-reading jobs. In those years his interests had changed as well; to the extent they remained bibliographical, they found expression especially in building the replica of a common press for the Alderman Press and in printing books of poetry there.

About 1970 Bowers asked Beaurline whether he would like to take over as editor if Bowers himself resigned; Beaurline decided he would not, and he participated in the recruitment of a candidate for the English Department who would fill that role. That person declined, just as he had turned down a position in the Department in the mid 1960s. On 28 February 1973 Beaurline submitted to Bowers his resignation. "I really have too many other duties and interests to carry on with Studies any longer," he wrote; "As of June 1, I'll have to turn to my own research &

writing--none of which I have touched for two years." Bowers was concerned that the Department, having thought the "SB problem" was settled, might be less amenable than earlier to hiring someone to serve as a replacement for Beaurline and then successor to himself. But the following year, Bowers's penultimate before retirement from teaching, the Department did extend another offer; that prospect too declined. Meanwhile various Assistants to the Editor were hired to perform some of the work for Studies: Gillian Kyles for volume 27 (for 1974, the final one Beaurline worked on) through volume 29; Clint Sisson for volumes 28 and 29; and Susan Hitchcock for volume 30.

But Bowers's decades-old problem remained. On 18 November 1984 he wrote his oldest son that "There is a young man just hired at the University who seems promising and maybe I shall see if he is interested and start breaking him in within a year or so, and then see if he can take over." That fall the English Department had invited me to join the faculty, with the special duties of teaching eighteenth-century English literature courses as well as classes in bibliography and in textual criticism, and with the responsibility of helping Bowers on Studies. What was in effect my probation began that autumn as Bowers asked my thoughts about some articles that had been submitted. In the familiar pattern for those who have worked with SB, activity quickly picked up, and at the end of the following year I was listed in the forthcoming volume (39, for 1986) as "Assistant to the Editor." "Assistant Editor" followed for four years, and after that "Associate Editor." Bowers's death on 11 April 1991 forced the question of his successor once and for all, and the Council of the Society appointed me to the editorship of Studies, adding Elizabeth Lynch as a part-time Assistant to the Editor in 1994.

The continually changing nature of the Society's publication program required steady adjustments in the organizational structure of the Society as well. Duties in the early days were shared, though if the number of acknowledgements in prefaces is an accurate gauge, authors of works published in the first decade perceived Wyllie as most involved and Bowers as also providing significant help. As the Society finally shed the financial debt that had clung from the start and as its ventures into hardcover publishing provided a sense of what it might accomplish, Massey in 1959 formally established an "Editorial Advisory Committee for Monographic Publications." Wyllie described this group in a letter of 8 April 1964 to a prospective contributor:

This system continued until the death of Wyllie in 1968. But even within it different poles of attraction operated, with Massey and Wyllie less committed than Bowers to devoting the publishing program exclusively to serious scholarship (Wyllie differed from Massey, however, in being more willing to publish work in progress). Not that those two were unscholarly, by any means. In a characteristic reaction, Wyllie expressed disappointment after his first Rosenbach Lecture in 1960 over the audience's lack of seriousness; in the same vein, Massey reminded a member of the Faulkner concordance project in 1971 that "such concordances based on faulty texts will have little value; definitive texts are a necessity, I should imagine, before any considerable work could be done on concordances." But they also kept themselves from becoming overwhelmed by the gravity of what the Society was up to. In Secretary's News Sheet 8 (September 1948), Wyllie spoke as one whose feelings were not engaged in what obviously mattered to others: "Two of our members, Mr. Fredson Bowers and Mr. Paul Dunkin, are having a running fight over definitions of state and issue in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America." When an angry correspondent wrote Wyllie in 1958 that a graduate student's article had made him look like an "ignoramus," Wyllie replied, "Bibliographers are a funny breed anyway, and all I try to do is coexist with them." Massey's distance surfaced intermittently in his reminders to people that he was not an academic insider (and, indeed, that he wouldn't necessarily wish to be); as he wrote a friend on 25 December 1970, "I have always kept myself well in the background, and I should be reluctant to find my successor [as Society President] using the office to promote himself, as can so easily happen in the Groves of Academe."

These attitudes came to bear on the publications program at the Council meeting of 30 April 1966, when Massey asked, "Should the Society enlarge its aims?" According to the minutes, "The President expressed his fear that, having identified itself largely with analytical bibliography, the Society is losing ground quantitatively, and that consequently it should broaden its appeal to include book collectors and others for whom analytical bibliography is of limited interest." The debate, then, was over the same questions the Society had faced at its inception twenty years earlier. The minutes continue: "In reply, Mr. Stocker argued that the particular strength and distinguishing mark of the Society has been its emphasis on analytical bibliography; and it was pointed out by others that both the monograph publications and Studies itself have by no means been devoted exclusively to analytical bibliography." The outcome of the discussion was the establishment of a new

series to be edited by Walker Cowen and "intended to merit the interest of members in areas of literature beyond analytical bibliography." One such volume was ultimately produced, the edition of Hawthorne's Poems in 1967.

In the necessary discussion about reorganizing publications after Wyllie's death, Stocker wrote Massey that customary procedure "when our Committee had completed consideration of an item" had been to "turn it over to John Wyllie, who carried on all the negotiations with the Press" (31 May 1968). (Wyllie's major role had prompted at least one author to call him "Editor of the Monograph Series" [1960.4].) Massey now proposed a three-member Finance Committee, with himself as chairman, that would create an overall plan for publishing ventures, that would receive proposals from what was now called the Publications Committee, and that upon review of the Society's finances would give authorization to print. By subjecting decisions about publishing to wider scrutiny, he hoped the new system would lead to "fewer titles, better books, and far fewer Technical Reports" (letter to Stocker, 25 October 1968). One of the victims of the housecleaning was the "serial analyticals," library catalog cards for individual articles in Studies that the Society provided (at 324 to 64 each over the years) for all volumes through 1969 but for which requests were now diminishing. (An example of this series, in effect another Society publication, can be seen at the top of the third column of volume 217, page 303, of the National Union Catalog.)

The two-committee system proved cumbersome, and after consulting the Council Massey replaced the groups early the next year with a single Executive Committee consisting of Bowers, Cowen, Ray Frantz, and himself. Its duties combined those of the separate committees: to supervise the disposition of tendered manuscripts and to administer the Society's publication funds in an orderly way. Each new manuscript was to be forwarded by the Society's Secretary to Cowen, who would either reject it out of hand or submit it to an expert reader. Calling for "fewer and much better titles and texts," Massey said in a memorandum of 28 February 1969 that only after "the book has met our rigid scholarly standards" would the committee itself formally consider the project and its attendant scheduling and financing. One of his special hopes was that the system would thwart the possibility of publications becoming the custody of a single person. In a report on the status of Society activities after the death of Massey in late 1974, Kendon Stubbs described this plan as it had by then evolved, including in its name:

In 1977 Bowers was elected chairman of the committee; all three major founders of the Society had now served the equivalent of that role. One of his first actions was to meet with Cowen "to discuss various ways of lowering publication expenses," according to the Council minutes of 4 June 1977, and he fretted over the number and quality of incoming manuscripts as much as his predecessors had (this accounts in part for his editorial work noted earlier on several descriptive bibliographies). Minutes of 17 November the next year reveal that the committee's general procedures were straightforward: "As in the past, all new manuscripts are to be sent to Mr. Bowers, who will in turn present them to the committee"-- which at that time consisted also of Cowen, Mrs. Massey, and Stubbs. Bowers acted in that capacity for over a decade, followed by Stubbs and then, in 1991, by another member drawn from the existing committee, Ruthe Battestin.

V

The ratio of the number of people that the Society has served, both within the organization and beyond, to the number of those working at its core may be one of the highest for any scholarly institution. The size of the official membership has, quite naturally, fluctuated over the years, but a number of trends are evident. The Society grew with unusual quickness from the 130 charter members (itself a surprisingly high number) listed in the attachment to the first Secretary's News Sheet in 1947. By 1952 membership had grown to nearly 500, and a 1958 news story on the occasion of the Grolier visit reported (probably with an exaggeration in the count by 10%) that the Society "has 1000 members scattered all over the earth" (Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 October 1958). The definition of "members" is complicated and an exact count therefore difficult because many institutions have chosen to order their copies of Studies directly from the University Press, but the highest enrollment appears to have come in the early 1970s; around the time of the Society's twenty-fifth anniversary, about 950 members were on Society rolls and another 200 or 300 institutions held standing orders with the Press (these in addition to customers who purchased volumes of SB ad hoc). Since then the number has gradually declined to about 550 formal memberships and 150 standing orders. (Individual sales also continue; the 1000 copies for 1995 sold out.) The greater part of that reduction has been the result of institutional cancellations as library budgets have been trimmed; recently personal memberships have actually increased slightly.

The latter had predominated in the early decades, with the institutional ones finally matching and then surpassing them in the 1970s (though a decade earlier if standing orders through the Press are taken into account). Currently institutions account for 55% of formal memberships.

The geographical distribution of members also changed over time. This data is hard to reconstruct with precision, but the years for which reasonably thorough evidence is available (the earliest, the fifth, and the latest) show early strength in Charlottesville followed by a rapid expansion beyond and an increasing acceptance by institutions. Because some early addresses cannot be determined, the annual totals in the following chart (which do not include the Press's standing orders) do not quite add up to the figures cited above. For reference, one might note that the high water mark occurred in 1972, when the Society held 468 individual memberships, 496 institutional ones, and about 200 standing orders through the Press.

           

	1947	1952		1996
	Personal	Personal	Institutional	Personal	Institutional
Charlottesville	68	80	0	34	2
Other Virginia	45	69	5	10	10
Other U.S.	11	173	109	129	160
Foreign	1	21	15	68	150

The lone foreign subscription in 1947 belonged to a member at the American Embassy in Iceland; by 1952 twenty-six countries were represented. Today memberships come from thirty-one countries--mostly from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom (76), Germany (30, all but 3 institutional), Canada (24), Japan (15, all but 2 personal), and Australia (14). To ease problems of currency exchange and to establish bibliographical ambassadors, the Society early on appointed Honorary Secretary-Treasurers in foreign countries. These began in 1952 with the British Isles (Mrs. Douglas Wyllie), Chile (Ricardo Donoso), Finland (Lauri O. Th. Tudeer; later Jorma Vallinkoski), France (Henry A. Talon), and India (S. R. Ranganathan), followed a couple years later by Germany (Richard Mummendey), the Netherlands (Johan Gerritsen), and Venezuela (Pedro Grases) and then in 1964 by Sweden (Rolf du Rietz). Most of these people served continuously until 1969, when the Society abolished all posts in this increasingly complex system except for the British Isles. When in 1991 the Council finally acceded to Mrs. Wyllie's wish to retire, it found her successor in R. J. Goulden. At about that time it also added Honorary Secretary- Treasurers for Australia and New Zealand (Ross Harvey; later Brian N. Gerrard) and Japan (Hiroshi Yamashita). Establishing these positions was a recognition of actual and potential interest in those countries; by the same token, it is a tribute

to the representatives that memberships there are now among the largest outside the U.S.

The categories of membership available at any one time have reflected the changing circumstances of the Society. It quickly became apparent that the original $2.00 membership fee was inadequate to provide for an annual volume of papers, and in preparation for the second volume (1949-50) the basic dues were raised to $4.50. Not all members were necessarily interested in that scholarly direction, however, and accordingly at the 28 September 1949 annual meeting a range of membership categories was established. Regular or "Subscribing Members" received the new annual as well as "all other bibliographical material" issued by the Society; "Resident or Associate Members," at $2.50, had the privilege of attending Society meetings and received the News Sheet and selected pamphlet publications but not Studies--benefits apparently shared by "Student Members" (at $1.50), except for the pamphlets; and "Contributing Members," like "Subscribing Members," received all publications but by their benefactions of $15 or more assisted specially "in furthering the work of the Society." The "Associate" class was dropped in 1952, though the informality of the organization meant that policies could be improvised. To a man in the Air Force who objected to having to pay dues while abroad, Wyllie wrote: "Gosh man, we will make a rule. Members on active service in enlisted grades will be carried as in full standing without payment of dues during the period of their active service. At least we will do this now in your case, and if we get into a general war, we will reconsider the whole problem." The constitutionally mandated student category--for UVa students only--was never widely publicized and in 1970 was deleted both as a required division and as a current possibility. The category itself was formally reinstituted in 1990; students anywhere were now eligible, and they received all the benefits of Subscribing Members, but at half the price. By choosing in effect to offer students a copy of Studies at less than the cost of production, the Council sought both to serve an audience not commonly known for its financial resources and to entice members at a formative stage in their intellectual development.

The number of Contributing Members, whose names have appeared as a roll call of honor in each volume of Studies, serves as a rough index of the size and activity of the Society. Similar to the fortunes of regular memberships, these rose quickly, reaching a plateau after the first decade but then inching upward to a peak of 66 (19 institutional, 47 personal) in 1968. With a dues rate of $25 for this class of members, who received the results of the stepped-up publications program, the arrangement was less and less to the benefit of the Society; a subsequent doubling of the rate resulted in the loss of 2 institutional and 15 personal members.

The new plateau led gently to a valley in the mid 1980s, but since then the number of Contributing Members has risen slightly: in 1996 there were 34. Overall 148 individuals and 80 institutions have signed up in this classification. From 1964 through 1969 the Society advertised a sub-category of Contributors, that of "Life Members," for a one-time payment of $150. Massey, Wyllie, and Thomas O. Mabbott enrolled at once, followed shortly by B. C. Bloomfield, Lester J. Cappon, Francis O. Mattson, and Victor G. F. Reynolds. With visions of how it could serve its communities better if it had greater resources, the Council at its September 1996 meeting established upper categories of "Patron" ($250+) and "Benefactor" ($500+), hoping to attract the contributions of those who might be content with no other reward than the public thanks of the Society in Studies and the knowledge of having done good.

This appeal for additional funds arose at a time when the Society's cash reserves had nearly vanished. A graph of such monies across the life of the Society shows the accumulation of a few thousand dollars in the first decade but then their dwindling; a gentle rise to about $10,000 in the mid 1960s; and then a skyrocketing as the Society began marketing through the University Press while also producing more substantial books--to nearly $50,000 in 1980 and almost twice that by 1995. Yet when measured against similar societies, the Virginia one has been relatively poor. The sudden fall-off in 1996 is actually a sign of the Society's good health, however, for the money went into a revitalized publications program (too recent for any proceeds to have returned) and into making the back issues of SB available in electronic form. (In his Executive Committee Budget for 1971, Massey had noted that the cash balance had been increasing partly because the Society had not published anything recently but was resting on the laurels and profits of books in the warehouse.) Although the Society acknowledged that it would never recoup directly the money spent on the electronic project, it undertook the expense cheerfully, believing that the increased availability would be of service to scholarship and that the project might serve as a model and encouragement for others.

Traditionally the Society's funds have come from three sources: dues, which approximately pay for Studies; publications, which on the whole have generated a profit; and gifts, which have financed sundry other undertakings but which have also enabled the primary ones to stay afloat at crucial times. For three years, from 1966 through 1968, the Society administered an anonymous grant (Paul Mellon has now given permission to be identified as the donor) to Allan Stevenson "for the development of new techniques in the dating of undated English books, with special reference to the early period." Before this Stevenson had published four revolutionary articles on paper study in Studies; a

product of his new research, "Tudor Roses from John Tate," appeared in SB 20. In 1966 the Society applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its monograph program. (That agency's parent organization was also the subject of perhaps the only public lobbying by the Society. On 20 January 1970 Massey wrote Senator Harry Byrd and others in support of President Nixon's proposal to fund it anew, reminding them that "While this internationally known Society with over twelve hundred members will not itself benefit from the funds administered under the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities, we do in this materialistic and mechanistic world view with concern any threat to the already limited recognition given by the Federal Government to the humanities.")

Though the Society's application to the NEH was unsuccessful, Bowers's own editing projects for authors from five centuries sometimes did receive such funds. These undertakings were not formally connected with the Bibliographical Society, but they are a reminder of how the Society represented an ongoing corporate presence for bibliography at the University and how it created a climate for such work to thrive. The same could be said for other local accomplishments--the library's publication of Joan Crane's bibliographical catalogue of the Robert Frost collection, for instance, or her and Anne Freudenberg's catalog of a Faulkner exhibition in honor of Massey. Nor does the Society have a formal relationship with Terry Belanger's Book Arts Press, despite the many connections that exist. It was, however, the bibliographical tradition created by the Society at the University that made Charlottesville appealing when the Columbia Library School closed in the early 1990s, and it was that same tradition that made University administrators eager to welcome this additional linking of books and the University.

The Society's most consistent financial hope was for permanent funding by the University. Aspirations were highest in the early years as the Society sought a way of guaranteeing the existence of Studies, but they also rose, unrequitedly, when at the death of Wyllie the Society sought ongoing support for a secretary. That need, however, pointed to what the University had already provided. Apart from the small grants the Society had received from the University's Research Committee, it had from the start utilized the services of the secretaries of Wyllie and of his successor as Rare Books Curator, Bill Runge. Beginning in 1950 some of this assistance was reflected in the Society's budget as a $100 subsidy from the library in the form of mimeograph supplies, postage and stationery, and Addressograph plates. On Wyllie's death the library provided the Society with a business office, which it still maintains. In various intangible ways the departments whose members serve on the Council have supported that work; most significantly, the English Department now considers

Studies in Bibliography one of the official duties of its editor, and when that department moved into a new building in 1995 it provided an office for the first editorial quarters the journal has had. The Society also has the privilege of bearing the name of the University, a responsibility it has attempted to honor by in turn adding respect to that source--often by taking under its banner the accomplishments of people with no other connection to the school.

The broader membership of the Bibliographical Society has found its representatives in the thirty-three members who have served on the Council, some of them as officers. (The fluctuating combinations of these overseers can be traced in the annual lists in Studies.) Those of the first decade have already been noted: Joseph M. Carrière, Mrs. Randolph Catlin, Miss Lucy T. Clark, Jack Dalton, Chalmers L. Gemmill, Atcheson L. Hench, Sears R. Jayne, William B. O'Neal, Mrs. Vincent Shea, Willis A. Shell, Jr., Charles W. Smith, Hugh M. Spencer, Arthur F. Stocker, and Philip Williams--in addition to Bowers, Massey, and Wyllie. Because of the impact that the latter three had on the organization, it is reasonable to view their departures as demarcating major phases in the Society's history, with Wyllie's death in 1968 marking the end of the first stage. Many of the early Councilors remained through the two decades of Wyllie's presence, and a number of additional ones joined during that time (the years of their doing so are given in parentheses): William Runge (1962), a former graduate student in History who had become Curator of Rare Books Irby Cauthen (1960), a faculty member in the English Department who had previously been a graduate student there; and Anne Ehrenpreis (1966), a literary scholar in her own right and wife of Swift biographer Irvin Ehrenpreis in the English Department.

The second period of the Society extended from 1968 to approximately the time of Bowers's death in 1991. Massey himself died in 1974, relatively soon after Wyllie, but the changes instituted in those half dozen years characterized the Society for its second pair of decades. (At the Council meeting where Kendon Stubbs was elected President a month after Massey's death, "Mr. Cowen suggested that Mr. Stubbs continue managing the Society as it has been going in the past until it is decided how the work should be distributed.") New Council members reflected new circumstances in the Society's life, but most of these people had already been connected with the Society and represented interests that the Council had traditionally encompassed. Fresh Councilors in this era included: Kendon Stubbs (1966), a graduate student in the English Department in the early 1960s who subsequently was appointed to various posts in the University library, including that of Associate Librarian; Ray Frantz (1968), University Librarian; Walker Cowen (1971), Director of the University Press; Julius Barclay (1974), Rare Book Curator;

Mrs. Linton Massey (1975), a notable collector of botanical books who formally joined the Council upon the death of her husband; and Ruthe Battestin (1979), a researcher with wide experience in the book world and later collaborator on the standard biography of Henry Fielding with her husband Martin in the University's English Department.

The demise of Bowers coincided with an unusual number of changes in the Council's make-up--as well as the last meeting at Kinloch. A number of the added members were recent arrivals at the University: Nancy Essig (1990), the new University Press Director; Kathryn Morgan (1991), the new Rare Book Curator; Terry Belanger (1993), the Director of the Book Arts Press; and Karin Wittenborg (1994), the new University Librarian. On the other hand, Penelope F. Weiss (1993) had been the Society's Executive Secretary since 1986. Furthermore, two of the most symbolic changes, in the editorship of Studies and the presidency, involved other people who already had a significant connection with the Society. I had begun working with Bowers on the journal soon after joining the English Department in 1984 (I was elected to the Council in 1986), and the new role as editor was an extension of earlier ones. G. Thomas Tanselle, elected a Council member and President in 1993, had published in Studies annually since 1963 and had become a friend of Bowers; the world of bibliography and textual criticism had in fact sometimes linked their names, often with that of Greg, as a hyphenated adjective. Tanselle succeeded Irby Cauthen, who not only had provided stability as President since 1978 but also was a charter member. What was striking about Tanselle's appointment was that it marked the first time (except in the case of Willis Shell, of Richmond) that a Council member came from outside Charlottesville. His selection was nonetheless very much in keeping with the national and international character that the Society had assumed very early, an expansion presaged by Massey's own involvement from beyond the University Grounds.

Over the years the Council has nominally supervised the work of the Society, reflecting on the Society's initiatives and direction at its semi-annual meetings and providing assistance and organization for activities ranging from teas and book collecting contests to the publishing program. What that means in practice is that the Society has run chiefly under the guidance of its officers. In the report Stubbs prepared for the Society in 1974, he observed that "In the somewhat false terms of business management the Society can be described as having two productive functions [the production of Studies and of monographs], carried out essentially by about six personnel." It is also the case that the organizational structures of the Society became largely those that were dictated by the publishing program (as described above). During the long stint of Massey's executorship, coordination of all functions was chiefly his.

(He was President for all of the Society's first twenty-eight years except the first and fourth; Chalmers Gemmill served in 1947, and Atcheson Hench in 1950.) Of the Society's presidents, he was able to exercise the greatest involvement in its day- to-day affairs. In Stubbs's report, he remarked that "Linton's great gift was to be a gadfly to all of us, making sure that Pat Shutts' accounts were up-to-date or that I wrote to prospective authors, helping Walker determine the retail price of a publication, worrying with Fred about the costs of composition for Studies." He added that "it is hard to conceive that the Society would have survived without his kind of constant and courteous attention to every detail." In those years Wyllie and Bowers were also incessantly active, gradually developing their own bailiwicks but having the overall welfare of the Society at heart and helping in whatever ways they might.

The others Stubbs may have had in mind can be gleaned largely from a record of Society officers. Arthur Stocker was the first with a significantly long tenure; he was Vice-President from 1951 to 1957, and then in 1959 answered the call to be in charge of the important board that supervised publications. When Wyllie's role of Secretary-Treasurer was split into two offices in 1962, Bill Runge took on communication with the wider world as Secretary, meanwhile also serving as a chief organizer of the Typogs. Three others assumed official positions in the reorganization that followed Wyllie's death. Walker Cowen took the new post of Second Vice-President; his occupation as Press Director made him vitally involved with all Society publications for the next twenty years. The roles of Secretary and Treasurer were recombined and assigned to Ray Frantz, who distinguished himself by tending with notable success for twenty-five years to the finances and legalities of the Society in its days of greatest prosperity. During the final years of Linton Massey's presidency Kendon Stubbs had been Assistant Secretary; his effectiveness there and his keen insight into Society operations made him a natural choice to succeed Massey as President. When Irby Cauthen began as President in 1978, Stubbs took over the vice-presidency, the role in which he continues to serve the Society in which he has been an official for nearly thirty years.

Gradually another role also came into prominence in the Society, that of Executive Secretary. Historically, much of the clerical work of the Society, including the processing of memberships, had been carried out by secretaries in the Rare Book Room--among them, Miss Evelyn Dollens (who in 1949 became Mrs. John Cook Wyllie), who kept the first membership list on cards; Miss Jean McCauley, also in the early days; and Susan Gunter in the mid 1960s. In the summer of 1968, following Wyllie's death, the Society moved its files and stock from the Rare Book Room and hired its own Secretary, Maxine Greenberg, to work twenty

hours a week out of the General Office of the library. Ruth Pennock followed her that autumn, at which time the library granted the Society a room of its own. Elizabeth Wyatt helped to sort and organize Society files the following summer, and in 1971 Patricia B. Shutts took the place of Mrs. Pennock. By the end of the decade the Council recognized that the duties of this position were far more than clerical and that its holder was largely responsible for the day-to-day operations of the organization; accordingly, it designated Mrs. Shutts "Executive Secretary." That title has continued for her successors, Florence Fleishman (who served for part of 1986 but then resigned for health reasons) and Penelope Weiss. In 1974 Stubbs estimated that "some two-thirds of her [Mrs. Shutts's] time is devoted to work concerned with Studies and membership and the other third to monographs." Today the SB and membership duties are as exacting as before, but the Society's escalating publications program demand another two-thirds of the Executive Secretary's work. She and the Assistant to the Editor are the only paid employees of the Society, both of them part-time.

In his comments in SB 20 celebrating two decades of the Society's development, F. C. Francis noted that although "Persistence is not an unfamiliar characteristic of officials of bibliographical societies," yet "the University of Virginia has in the record of service excelled all its brethren." Amazingly, what Francis saw was only part of what was yet to be. The story of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia in its first half century has been that of three great leaders and the people who devotedly worked with them. The Society has passed through stages of development, as any healthy body must: early exuberance and attempts to be all things to all members while it sought its special identity; then solvency, and its orientation as a successful publishing society; and next a fresh vigor under a new president as it has sought to build on its past with an active publishing program (including in electronic forms), public meetings, student participation, and even a reincarnation of the Secretary's News Sheet in the form of an annual presidential letter.

A common theme throughout that progress and accomplishment has been the selflessness that has distinguished both the Society and its leaders. Although the achievements of Linton R. Massey and John Cook Wyllie are immediately recognized and appreciated in the book world when they are raised, the men and their work are not as widely known as they might be, for they intentionally minimized their own visibility and placed wider interests above their own. In that regard their spirits were commensurate with the particularly sweet temper of the University Library and the University of Virginia Press at mid century-- a perception of those institutions so widespread and uniform that it seems

to be other than the product of mere nostalgia. Fredson Bowers was no less oriented to service; that he published extensively, however, meant by definition that his name went widely to the public, and he did become renowned. His role in the Society, like those of the other long-term participants, changed according to circumstances, but his unwavering commitment, particularly to its monographs and journal, is symbolized by the 45-year duration of his active involvement. In that tradition the leaders of the Society today are likewise distinguished by their willingness to contribute extraordinary amounts of time to its well-being without promise of private gain.

Not surprisingly, these attitudes have also characterized the Society itself. Although it is true that the Society would not have prospered without the astute management and attentiveness of Massey, the energy and academic entrepreneurship of Wyllie, and the wisdom and intellect of Bowers, it simply could not have survived without the loyalty of its members-- "scattered all over the earth"--and with their faithful contribution of dues and gifts that have transcended hopes of personal advantage. Institutionally, the Society has been willing to combine for meetings, exhibitions, and publications with whatever groups seemed appropriate in order to achieve the widest good. From its inception to the present the Society has also been willing to place itself in financial jeopardy for the sake of bringing important scholarship to wider audiences--as the initiation of Studies in Bibliography in the first place and now its presentation on the World Wide Web both show.

Massey ended his tenth-year account of the Society's journey "from early insolvency to a present impecuniousness" with what, in its double negatives, is a typically modest remark from him:

Four decades later the Society need not abandon humility to recognize from a wider vantage point that its work has indeed aided the development of scholarship in a significant way. Moreover, it is not only lasting accomplishments that have continuing value; the ones that have provoked their own overthrow likewise have enduring significance, for without them greater understanding would not have ensued. It is these functions in the development of scholarship that make it important for the Society to prosper in its second half century; it is awareness of these roles in its history that will inspire it to do so.

Note on Sources

The location of extant records of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia reflects basic elements in the Society's structure over its first half century. The most extensive documentation for the early decades occurs in the files of President Linton Massey and Secretary- Treasurer John Cook Wyllie. Massey's relevant papers were transferred to the Society's office upon his death; Wyllie's went as part of the immense accumulation of the University Librarian to the University Archives, now part of the Special Collections Department of the library, where they are classified under the general heading RG-12/1. Because all Society business was brought to the attention of Massey, his files of copied and original correspondence are often the most complete that exist for the early years. Disparate papers from Fredson Bowers are collected in Special Collections under Archives grouping RG-21/30 and Manuscripts classification 5691. The Archives in Special Collections also include a segregated group of Society materials under the designation RG-24/2. Of most significance here are financial records from 1953 through 1958 and materials relating to the preparation of Studies in Bibliography from 1965 through 1972, or approximately the years L. A. Beaurline helped Bowers with the journal. Also of interest in these files are correspondence about the first two student book collecting contests and the entries from the first printers' contest. Shelved with rare books in Special Collections is a lengthy run of Society publications under the call number Z1008.V54. The Society's own archives achieved greater coherence once the organization obtained separate space in Alderman Library and as the role of Executive Secretary developed. Existing records of the past twenty-five years, as well as some materials such as ledger books from before then, are now stored in the Society office.

On the tenth anniversary of the Society, Linton Massey wittily summarized its history in "Bibliographia Virginiana or Ledgerdemania," Virginia Librarian, 2.4 (January 1956), 41-42. William H. Runge provided a convenient one- page description in volume 2 of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Allen Kent and Harold Lancour (1969), p. 406. The activities and personages of the Society have often received attention in the University's student newspaper Cavalier Daily, in the Charlottesville Daily Progress, in the University's Alumni News magazine, and in Chapter and Verse, the publication of the Associates of the University of Virginia Library. The Alumni News of June 1963, for instance, discusses the Cockescraw Press (pp. 10-11, 25), and in Chapter and Verse 4 (February 1976) Clinton Sisson traces its reincarnation as the Alderman Press (pp. 7- 9). One of the most important environments from which the Society emerged is described by Harry Clemons in The University of Virginia Library 1825-1900: Story of a Jefferson Foundation (1954), an account that includes Wyllie's early connections with the library.

The resolution that Fredson Bowers prepared and read before the University faculty in memory of Linton Massey appeared in Chapter and Verse 3 (February 1975), 4-8. A photograph of Massey appeared as the frontispiece in Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975), and a biographical account of him by Edmund Berkeley, Jr., is forthcoming in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The DLB also contains Matthew J. Bruccoli's article (with photographs) on John Cook Wyllie (vol. 140, American Book-Collectors and Bibliographers, First Series, ed. Joseph Rosenblum, 1994, pp. 327-341). G. Thomas Tanselle's The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers, including a chronology and a checklist of Bowers's writings by Martin C. Battestin, was published by the Society in 1993. It reprints, with corrections and an added index, material that first appeared in volume 46 (1993) of SB, and includes a portrait of Bowers. Chalmers Gemmill's history of his department, Pharmacology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine (1966), contains a brief sketch and a picture of this first president of the Society. The career of its third president is summarized by Anne Freudenberg in "Atcheson Laughlin Hench," Chapter and Verse 2 (1974), 27, and by Edward A. Stephenson in "Atcheson Laughlin Hench," American Speech 50.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1975), 291-292. On the occasion of his retirement from the University the Cockescraw Press produced a list of his writings: Atcheson Laughlin Hench: A Check List, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-one--Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-two (1962).

I am indebted to the following individuals, each of whom has provided essential help in the course of my work: Julius P. Barclay, Martin C. and Ruthe R. Battestin, Mary Beaurline, Edmund Berkeley, Jr., Fredson T. Bowers, Jr., Matthew J. Bruccoli, Betty Cauthen, L. Gayle Cooper, Roger Deane, Susan Foard, Anne Freudenberg, Susanne R. Glass, Vesta Gordon, Gillian Kyles, Nancy Mills, Pauline Page, Michael F. Plunkett, Frederick Ribble, George Riser, William H. Runge, David Seaman, Alexander and Charlene M. Sedgwick, Clinton Sisson, Barbara Smith, Mrs. Hugh Spencer, Bill Sublette, G. Thomas Tanselle, Karin Wittenborg, and the staff of the Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia Library. A number of others must be singled out with gratitude for special contributions: Arthur Stocker, Kendon Stubbs, and especially Mrs. John Cook Wyllie, for their reminiscences and their insights into Society history; Edgar Shannon, C. E. Moran, Jr., and Janet Anderson, for information about the University of Virginia Press and the University Press of Virginia; Paul Collinge, who as proprietor of Heartwood Books was crucial to preparation of the list documenting the central activity of the Society, its publishing; Elizabeth Lynch, for her creativity and energy in ferreting out new sources of information; Doris Vander Meulen, who provided early direction with her help in extracting meaning from Society records; and Penelope F. Weiss, for her knowledge of Charlottesville life and assistance with Society files. The history of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia is the story of many people, both in its living and in its telling.