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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"?
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