University of Virginia Library

A History of Studies in Bibliography:
The First Fifty Volumes
by
G. THOMAS TANSELLE

The publication of the fiftieth volume of Studies in Bibliography offers an appropriate occasion for looking back over the history of the series, which is central to the history of bibliography in the second half of the twentieth century. When The Library, the journal of the Bibliographical Society in London, reached its fortieth volume in 1929, A. W. Pollard wrote an account of its history that serves to remind us how different were the origins of the two pre-eminent journals of bibliographical scholarship in the English language.[1] Whereas Studies in Bibliography was sponsored from the start by a bibliographical society, The Library began its life in January 1889 (three years before the founding of the Bibliographical Society) as the organ of the Library Association, and it did not become a bibliographical-society publication until 1920, more than three decades later. Nevertheless, there is one essential similarity in their histories: the crucial importance of a single individual. Pollard said that one of his goals in writing the history of The Library was to emphasize the debt owed by "all who are interested in bibliography" to J. Y. W. MacAlister--who (though his own primary interest was librarianship) managed to keep The Library alive as an outlet for bibliographical articles until the Bibliographical Society was (in Pollard's words) "strong enough to be able to take it over and carry it on with success." Similarly, Studies in Bibliography had a founder of vision and determination in Fredson Bowers, and its history is inextricably bound up with his life and personality.[2]

As Bowers's many bibliographical activities rapidly made him the leader of his field, so his journal quickly became, in the decade following World War II, the one that best conveyed to many in the bibliographical world the excitement of being at the heart of a developing area of study. During the first half of the twentieth century, The Library occupied that position; and although its standard of excellence did not diminish in the second half of the century, Studies in Bibliography became the place after 1948 where one witnessed most dramatically the exploration of new techniques and new areas.[3] That for most of its half-century it was the product of a single sensibility is one of its remarkable aspects, and one that differentiates it from The Library. MacAlister's role with The Library was to nurture it through hard times, until it could safely be released from his care; Bowers, in contrast, held on to Studies in Bibliography until his death, and its stature is a reflection of his qualities. Pollard ended his article by saying of MacAlister, "He was a great man"; and I begin this account by observing that one manifestation of Fredson Bowers's greatness is the success of Studies in Bibliography.

I

When Fredson Bowers in 1945 returned from his wartime naval service to resume his position in the English department at the University of Virginia, he was eager to continue the bibliographical work that he had only just entered into before the war. As matters turned out, by the end of the 1940s he was responsible for two of the landmark events of twentieth-century bibliographical history: the appearance in late December 1948 of the first volume of Studies in Bibliography and the publication a year later of his Principles of Bibliographical Description. These were epochal events because they can be seen, in retrospect, to have affected the course of bibliographical history in a profound way. Studies quickly became one of the major bibliographical journals in the English-speaking world and arguably has been the single most influential one in the second half of the twentieth century; the Principles brought order into the field of descriptive bibliography by offering the first detailed codification of its methodology, and the book--from the moment of its publication--has been the standard guide to the subject.

The two events are linked by their common origin in Bowers's own research, primarily his investigations into the printing history of Dekker's plays in preparation for a new scholarly edition of Dekker (a project

that formed in his mind in the late 1930s) and his examination of the practices of bibliographical description in anticipation of a detailed bibliography of Restoration English drama (a project that was certainly occupying his mind by 1946 and may well have originated soon after the appearance of the first volume of W. W. Greg's bibliography of pre-Restoration drama in 1939). But the pursuit of these projects did not, of course, require Bowers to found a journal or write an exhaustively comprehensive manual, and a more fundamental explanation of these events lies in his temperament. He had a strong drive to achieve mastery of, and indeed to be a controlling force in, any field that attracted his serious interest; and he had an enormous amount of energy to devote to these goals.

To him, it was not enough to embark on a major descriptive bibliography; he first had to systematize the whole field and offer instruction in it through a volume of Principles. Similarly, Studies results from his desire to be personally responsible for encouraging bibliographical work, especially the analysis of physical evidence as a tool for editors. The strength of his urge to be an authority on bibliographical analysis was no doubt formed, at least in part, by the criticisms that attended his first two bibliographical publications--his 1936 and 1937 articles on Dekker in The Library. In both cases his analysis was seriously in error, and in each instance a prominent scholar (Greg the first time, James G. McManaway the second) exposed his erroneous thinking in a later number of The Library. The importance of these rebukes for his bibliographical education cannot be overestimated. His determination to redeem himself produced, almost immediately, an article for The Library on running-title analysis, the very subject in which McManaway had found his knowledge wanting; but he had time for only one more such article before his wartime service, and after that enforced interruption he was undoubtedly all the more impatient to establish his authority in analytical bibliography. One could not argue that a new bibliographical journal was particularly needed at that time, with The Library and the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America receptive to all kinds of bibliographical research. But Bowers, having been forcefully convinced of the powerful results that could come from bibliographical analysis, began to take on the role of proselytizer for the field; and a journal would give him greater effectiveness in persuading scholars to produce more bibliographical articles.

That his own university should be known as a center of bibliographical and textual study was a natural element in his program, and he was involved in the formation, early in 1947, of a Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, the story of which has now been told by

David L. Vander Meulen. The idea that one of the principal activities of the Society could be the publication of an annual volume of articles was very probably in Bowers's mind from the beginning and was doubtless a topic of discussion during the early months of 1947; but definite plans for such a volume were not formulated until December 1947, just after the collector Linton R. Massey was elected the Society's second president (to succeed his fellow collector Chalmers L. Gemmill). During the next six months enough work on the inaugural volume had been done to permit the inclusion of an announcement in the seventh number (dated June 1948) of the Society's newsletter, the Secretary's News Sheet: In early September a prospectus was circulated by mail both to members and to nonmembers. This attractive flyer was a two-leaf fold of Strathmore Pastelle (so watermarked), each leaf measuring 9 11/16" by 6 3/8" and the final leaf bearing a deckle fore-edge. The first page reproduced the title page, displaying the title Papers of the Bibliographical Society University of Virginia, Bowers's name as editor, the designation "Volume I" for "1948-1949," and the imprint of the Society dated 1948. The second page listed the contents (not in the same typesetting as the actual volume), indicating the titles of the articles, the authors' names, and their institutions (or other identifications). On the third page was shown the opening page of the first article, as an example of the design of the text-pages (though it was not a reproduction of the actual opening page, which included footnotes and fewer lines of main text). And the fourth page provided an order blank in its lower half; the pre-publication price was $2.50 both to members (after their first free copies) and to nonmembers, and the price thereafter was to be $3.50, with the "usual trade discount" to dealers. The upper half of this page, under the heading "Informative Listings," noted that "Non display advertisements of the booktrade" would be accepted at $1.50 per line; they were to be "simply announcements of addresses and specialties of reliable dealers," arranged according to specialty. (See Figures 1-4 for a reproduction of this prospectus.)

The volume that appeared in the final days of 1948, printed in December at the William Byrd Press of Richmond, Virginia, in an edition of one thousand copies, contained 209 text-pages bound in heavy cream paper (with flaps folded over, and pasted to, the first and last leaves of the sewn gatherings). An unusually detailed colophon, even specifying the names of the compositors and pressmen, was suggestive of the care that had gone into planning the design; it was also appropriate for a volume whose contents were concerned with the processes of book production in the past:

There was an elegance, even a leisurely spatial extravagance, conveyed by the design--beginning with the cover title, in its flowery frame (see Figure 5), and the heft of the book-block, 3/4" thick, with many deckle fore-edges, and continuing with the well-leaded text-pages of Goudy's Monotype Garamont, surrounded by generous margins, and the coated-paper plates. Some readers of the prospectus may have wondered, when looking at the sample article-opening, why the two-inch display of the title of the first article did not include the author's name; with the volume in hand, they would have seen the reason--each article also had its own divisional title leaf, with the title and author's name on the recto in the same frame as that used on the front cover and with "The Bibliographical Society" at the top and "University of Virginia" at the foot. (See Figure 6.)

If the physical appearance of the Papers was far removed from the utilitarian typography and layout of many scholarly journals, there was no question about the scholarly nature--indeed, distinction--of the contents, which in fact set the pattern for the succeeding volumes. The contributions were divided into two groups, the eleven articles first, followed by a section of six short "Bibliographical Notes." The pieces ranged widely in subject, from the medieval to the Victorian, and represented various kinds of bibliographical work, including manuscript investigation, publishing history, textual criticism, and the analysis of physical evidence in printed books. It was clear (even without an editorial statement) that Bowers conceived of the journal as one that encompassed all bibliographical study, with no restriction as to the geographical origins or periods or genres of the material examined. The roster of contributors also presaged future volumes in its mixture of well- established bibliographical scholars (for example, Curt F. Bühler of the Morgan Library and James G. McManaway of the Folger), little-known assistant professors (such as C. William Miller of Temple and Allan H. Stevenson of the Illinois Institute of Technology), and graduate students (such as Guy A. Battle of Duke). It was natural in the initial volume to draw on local talent, and the parochial nature of the resulting list of contributors is the only way in which the contents of this volume appear uncharacteristic in retrospect. Ten of the seventeen contributors had present or past connections with the University of Virginia--one full Professor (Joseph M. Carrière of the French department), one Associate Professor (Bowers himself), one Assistant Professor (George B. Pace), five of Bowers's graduate students (Mary Virginia Bowman, Jessie Ryon Lucke, James S. Steck, George Walton Williams, and Philip Williams), and two alumni (McManaway and Miller).

An important advantage to Bowers in calling on his graduate students was that he could thereby publicize the kind of bibliographical analysis he was encouraging and could send a signal to potential contributors that the journal was especially interested in such work. He published Philip Williams's analysis of compositorial spelling habits in the "Pied Bull" Lear, James Steck's explanation of the usefulness of center rules as bibliographical evidence, and his own note on the role of headline evidence in determining half-sheet imposition. He was also able to include four other forward-looking analytical pieces from outside his university: Battle's note on progressive changes in boxlines, Bühler's experiment in applying headline analysis to incunabula, Giles E. Dawson's identification of eighteenth- century piracies through an arsenal of techniques that included press figures, and--most important of all--the first of Stevenson's brilliant and pioneering expositions of the uses of paper

as bibliographical evidence. These seven contributions lent a distinct flavor to the volume and foreshadowed the journal's role in developing analytical bibliography.

Just after the first volume appeared, Linton Massey wrote his presidential report (dated 15 January 1949) on the Society's activities for 1948, and he devoted most of one paragraph to the volume:

The phrase "final publication" is a clue to the length and intensity of the discussion and planning that preceded the appearance of the volume. The reviews, though few in number,[4] were equally warm in their praise. Curt Bühler, writing in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (43 [1949], 227-229), set the tone by saying that the journal "has certainly made a most auspicious beginning." Perhaps the most notable comment in his review was his reference, at this early date, to a "Bowersian school" of bibliographical analysis. Greg, too, in his review, spoke of the University of Virginia as "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" (Modern Language Review, 45 [1950], 76). William B. Todd, soon to become a regular contributor, praised the "attractiveness of form" as well as the "excellence and diversity of content"; given his own concerns, he was glad to recognize the volume's emphasis on "the presentation and application of techniques of bibliographical analysis," which are of "essential interest" (Modern Philology, 46 [1948-49], 283-284). R. C. Bald (who had spoken on analytical bibliography at the 1941 English Institute, where Bowers gave a paper on headline analysis) offered the fullest assessment of the significance of the publication (in Modern Language Quarterly, 12 [1951], 370-371): He added--correctly as it turned out--that the volume "is almost certainly the forerunner of a distinguished series."

II

Thus launched, the journal proceeded steadily to make its annual appearance, presenting the same mix of bibliographical and textual scholarship. Although The Library had already shown its hospitality to textually oriented bibliographical analysis, Bowers was clearly staking out this area as a particular concern: what one could infer as a direction in the first volume was confirmed in the succeeding ones. (With the second volume, the title became the now familiar Studies in Bibliography-- often referred to in short form as Studies or SB, which I shall use interchangeably--and the old main title, which Bowers thought too parochial, became the subtitle, until it was dropped in 1972.)[5] The second volume (about the same length as the first, containing eleven articles and eight notes) opened indicatively with an article by William B. Todd that sorted out the early editions and issues of Matthew Lewis's The Monk. Bowers had been able to hear an earlier version of this article when it was delivered before the Society on 17 December 1948, and his request to be allowed to consider it for publication can stand as a prominent example of a scene that was repeated many times in later years--Bowers's

securing of articles at the time of their oral presentation at conferences. The episode also symbolizes Bowers's willingness--indeed, eagerness--to support the work of unknown scholars, as long as it was of high quality, for Todd was at that time a graduate student (though a mature one, whose graduate work had been delayed by European service during World War II), with no publications to his credit but with a pioneering University of Chicago dissertation in progress on the application of analytical bibliography to eighteenth-century English books.[6] With the publication of Todd's first article coming a year after the publication of Stevenson's first bibliographical article, Bowers's journal had the distinction of introducing two major bibliographical scholars in its first two volumes; and both were loyal to it, Stevenson publishing there four more times and Todd fifteen more (as of 1997). This nurturing of talent not only resulted in distinguished contributions but fostered the identity of the journal with a "school" of bibliographical work and as the place where the most advanced developments in analytical bibliography were likely to be found.

The second volume contained other analytical pieces, one of them by Bowers (on type-page width as a clue to compositor identification) and two others by two of Bowers's students who had received their doctorates a few months earlier: both Philip Williams, writing on Troilus and Cressida, and Lawrence G. Starkey, writing on the Cambridge Platform of 1649, dealt with half-sheet imposition, a subject treated by Bowers in the preceding volume. The Starkey piece was notable for being one of the rare instances in which techniques being developed in the study of Renaissance English books were applied to an early American imprint. The volume also treated a field not represented in the first volume, the history of bookbinding, with its inclusion of Eunice Wead's study of early binding stamps, accompanied by six pages of illustrations. The presence of Paul S. Dunkin's piece on the imprint of Dryden's Troilus and Cressida illustrated Bowers's willingness (displayed many times later) to print articles taking different points of view from his own: Dunkin found Bowers's 1949 Harvard Library Bulletin article on this subject unconvincing, and he presented two alternative explanations.[7]

Among the bibliographical scholars reappearing from the first volume were Giles Dawson and C. William Miller; among those contributing for the first time were Leslie Hotson and Edwin E. Willoughby. This volume, as W. W. Greg said in his review, "fully maintains . . . the high standard set by the first" (Modern Language Review, 45 [1950], 524). The Society already had reason to take pride in this accomplishment, and pride is evident in Massey's presidential report for 1949 (dated 11 January 1950): The "authority and prestige" of the Society were indeed publicized shortly thereafter (14 July 1950) by the review in the Times Literary Supplement, which said that with this volume the Society "firmly establishes its sponsorship of a journal which should be on the shelves of every great reference library."

Bowers's role in the immediate success of Studies went beyond his astute choice of contributors, for he also entered actively into the shaping of the contributions. Sometimes he offered detailed suggestions for revision, and at other times he made the revisions himself. George Walton Williams, Bowers's graduate student at the time of the second volume, has recently described how Bowers handled his article in that volume:

That graduate students were not the only contributors given such assistance is shown by Curt Bühler's experience in connection with the first volume. In his review, Bühler explained why he did not regard it a "breach of good taste" to comment on a publication to which he had contributed: "there may be advantages in these special conditions since I can testify, not only as a contributor but also as a very minor assistant in regard to another paper, to the great care exercised by the editorial board [i.e., Bowers]. It is not too much to say that Professor Bowers virtually rewrote a whole section of my own contribution." The fullest comment on this matter in a review appeared in Philip Gaskell's 1953 review of the first five volumes (Book Collector, 2: 159-160): Whether these remarks had their source in personal experience (since Gaskell was a contributor to the fifth volume) is not clear, but they do suggest the editorial care that was a constant in Bowers's handling of Studies over the next four decades. His willingness to invest time in the journal is suggested by a comment he made in a letter to Linton Massey (14 April 1949) when material for the second volume was being assembled: "These Papers have really got such a hold on my imagination that I take them more seriously than anything else I am doing."

Distinguished as the first two volumes were, Studies fully came into its own with the third volume (dated 1950 and designated as for "1950-1951"), which brought together as impressive a group of contributors as any volume of bibliographical essays has ever had. It opened with four major essays on textual matters: R. C. Bald's "Editorial Problems--A Preliminary Survey," W. W. Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text," Bowers's "Some Relations of Bibliography to Editorial Problems," and Archibald A. Hill's "Some Postulates for Distributional Study of Texts." All four had been delivered at the English Institute on 9 September 1949, and Bowers's chairing of the bibliographical part of the program indicates

how these papers came to reside in Studies.[9] He was particularly pleased to secure Greg's essay, which (as he reported to Massey on 16 September 1949) he "had been sweating blood to get." This "magnificent paper," which Bowers had in fact helped Greg to formulate, was to become one of the most seminal papers in the history of English scholarship. Its argument for constructing authorially intended texts of Renaissance drama--by combining wording from revised editions with the punctuation and spelling of early editions--served as the point of departure and often of contention for textual critics throughout the next half-century.[10]

Following these articles came pieces by Curt F. Bühler, the bookbinding scholar Ernst Kyriss, Philip Williams, Charlton Hinman (who had written a doctoral dissertation under Bowers's direction in 1941 and who was to become the leading analytical bibliographer with the publication in 1963 of The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare), C. William Miller, William B. Todd (contributing a basic article on press figures), Rollo G. Silver (who was to become the most distinguished historian of American printing), and J. Albert Robbins. These twelve articles by themselves came to more pages than either of the first two volumes, and they were followed by fourteen bibliographical notes (ranging from Chaucer to Poe) and "A Selective Check List of Bibliographical Scholarship for 1949," which brought the total number of pages to 314, a hundred more than the earlier volumes. It is easy to see why John Carter, writing anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 March 1951, said that "for the interest and importance of its contributions this third volume of Professor Bowers's periodical must take its place in the first rank of such publications anywhere in the world."

When, a year later, the fourth volume appeared in hard covers--grayish blue paper-covered

boards with paper labels on the spine and front cover Studies had assumed most of the formal features that would characterize it in the ensuing decades. The first three volumes were bound in stiff paper wrappers--cream for the first volume, medium blue for the second, and reddish orange for the third. Labels on paper-covered boards continued to be the pattern through Volume 19 (1966), after which the casing was cloth, with stamped panels replacing the paper labels. (The only later change in the appearance of the volumes on the shelf was the reduction in leaf size as of Volume 31 [1978] and the consequent shortening of the spine height from 10" to 9 1/2".) With each year's casing in a different color (pair of colors, actually, since the panels differed from the basic cloth), the ever-growing presence of SB on the shelf has been a colorful one from the start (and now amounts to a six-foot display).

Inside the volumes, small changes in design took place in the early years: the separate title leaves for major articles were eliminated as of the second volume (a change praised by W. H. Bond, who had found those titles "rather heavy" when he reviewed this volume in the first number of Shakespeare Quarterly in January 1950);[11] and the layout of the major article openings was revised in the second and again in the third volume, at which point it achieved the form that has been followed ever since, with the title and author's name (joined on an intervening line with an italic "by") placed between a double rule (above) and a single rule (below). (See Figure 7.) The size of the text block on each page has remained virtually the same from the third volume (about 7" x 4 3/4"), though with the reduction of leaf size in 1978 the margins obviously became smaller (and, beginning in the same volume, the layout of footnotes changed from double- to single-column).[12] The Garamont type of the early volumes gave way for several years to Granjon and then, in Volume 9 (1957), to Linotype Baskerville, which has been used ever since; the last identifiable use of Strathmore Pastelle was in Volume 14 (1961), from which point the deckle edges also vanished.[13] As each of the first four volumes shows, halftone illustrations on coated paper were included when useful,

and later volumes continued this practice. Although the absence of a colophon in many volumes after the eleventh (1958) makes tracking the printers uncertain, it can be said that in the earlier years the printer was likely to be the William Byrd Press of Richmond, Virginia, and in more recent years Heritage Printers of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Most of the printed matter outside the body of articles and notes evolved to its standard form in the first few volumes as well. The major development was the inclusion in Volume 3 of a current checklist of bibliographical scholarship; such a listing became a prominent feature of Studies through Volume 27 (1974), often amounting to twenty double-column pages in small type and conveying a sense that Studies was not simply an annual but a yearbook, despite its policy of not including book reviews. (More on these lists below, in section III.) Another change involved a discontinuation rather than an addition: the elimination of advertising. In the first volume, as promised in the prospectus, there was a section called "Informative Listings"--that is, classified advertisements--following the "Notes on Contributors" (which have continued ever since to be the first element in the end matter). This department did not flourish, with five listings of book dealers in Volume 1 and fourteen in Volume 2. It did not appear thereafter, but in Volumes 4 and 5 display advertising was accepted and placed at the beginning of the volumes. Henry Stevens, Son & Stiles took a full-page advertisement in both volumes (in Volume 4 it faced the title page), and in each volume there were nine half-page advertisements (including some for major firms, such as Berès, Eberstadt, Rosenbach, and Seven Gables). No advertising appeared in any volume after the fifth. Information about the Society, divided between the preliminaries and the final pages in the first three volumes, was interspersed among the advertisements in Volume 4 and entirely moved in Volume 5 to the last pages, where it has remained. One other way--it may be noted in passing--in which the first five volumes were different from those that followed is that they were dated in terms of academic years, which incorporate parts of two calendar years (such as "1948-1949"), whereas beginning with Volume 6 (1954) each volume has been assigned a single calendar year (for more on this point, see footnote 26 below).

As for the financial situation of the journal during its first five years, some glimpse is afforded by the Society's balance sheets that were published in the Secretary's News Sheet. Because the Society was bringing out other monographs at the same time and because they were sent without further charge to dues-paying members, it is not realistic to look at the finances of Studies in isolation. But it is clear that the printing costs for Studies were by far the Society's largest expense (running about $2200

for Volumes 2 and 4, $3200 for Volume 5, and $3700 for Volume 3--in a budget where most items were in the low hundreds of dollars, if not below $100); and it is also evident that dues (which increased from $2.50 to $4.50 as of the second volume) and sales to nonmembers would not have covered these costs if there had not been contributions from the University's Research Committee (amounting, for example, to $1500 for Volume 2 and $1700 for Volume 3), the Richmond Area University Center, and--most important of all--a perennial anonymous donor (in fact, Linton Massey).[14] With those contributions, however, the Society did not show a deficit in any of these years, even though none of the thousand-copy editions sold out until later. One would not of course have expected these editions to be exhausted quickly, and the sales of Volume 1 were in fact encouraging; a year after its publication, about half the edition remained in stock, and thus about a hundred copies had been sold to nonmembers-- a figure that does not seem particularly low when one considers that the journal was new and that many institutions received their copies through memberships. The next year 120 more copies of Volume 1 were sold; and by January 1954, just after the publication of Volume 6, the total remaining stock of the first five volumes was 1200--the figures for individual volumes ranging from 163 for Volume 2 to 333 for Volume 4.

The scholarly contents of the fourth and fifth volumes reflected the now well-established pattern. The fourth one (for 1951-52) contained nine articles and fifteen notes (totaling 237 pages), with important contributions by several familiar names--McManaway, Todd, Stevenson, Dawson, Pace, Bühler, and Silver-- and major articles by two significant newcomers, G. I. Duthie (on the text of Romeo and Juliet) and Ralph Green (on early American power printing presses). The fifth volume (for 1952-53), with eleven articles and fourteen notes (totaling 230 pages),[15] opened imaginatively with an essay on "Problems of Literary

Executorship" by Norman Holmes Pearson, whose experience with this subject was legendary. It also contained, along with more work by Todd and Bühler, the first contributions from two important bibliographers, Philip Gaskell and Allen T. Hazen (the former with his influential study of eighteenth-century type sizes and the latter with one of his investigations of eighteenth-century paper). Among the comments made in reviews of these volumes was a lament (in the Times Literary Supplement review of the fourth volume on 7 March 1952) that so little work on books after 1800 had appeared in the pages of Studies. Bowers's reply (published in the number for 9 May 1952) gives further hint of his active pursuit of contributions: "we are particularly conscious of an imbalance in our material, and we do our best to beat the bushes for contributions treating more recent books. If we do not print more of such studies it is solely because we are not offered more and cannot secure them by personal solicitation." The spirit conveyed by these first five volumes was effectively caught by Philip Edwards in his review of the fifth one for Shakespeare Quarterly in 1953 (4: 185- 187): "Professor Fredson Bowers has created a new aristocracy in the world of bibliography, and the works he has here collected (so often revealing his own inspiration) have that kind of energy and sense of discovery which moved the Bibliographical Society [of London] in the days of Pollard, Greg, and McKerrow."

III

The volumes of Studies that appeared regularly, at the beginning of each year,[16] over the next four decades, continued to display the same broad range of interests, although a few variations in emphasis are discernible. Such shifts did not, however, result from decisions on Bowers's part but rather reflected changing patterns in scholarly research. For example, compositorial and presswork analyses of Elizabethan and Jacobean

play quartos were a prominent feature of the early volumes, but by the 1970s they no longer occupied the same dominant position. Studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century books, which Bowers had tried to stimulate early, did begin to increase in the early 1960s, as more scholarly attention was being directed to this period; indeed, a considerable number of the volumes after that time contained more pieces dealing with the past two centuries than with the Renaissance. Work on incunabula and early manuscripts has always held a smaller presence in Studies (though a steady one from the beginning as a result of Bühler's fifteen contributions through 1973); but in the 1980s there was a marked increase in the number of articles on early manuscripts. What may surprise some people is how prominently the eighteenth century has figured in SB's contents. Even in the early volumes the number of eighteenth-century contributions frequently equalled or surpassed the number devoted to Renaissance drama, and from 1959 on it was usually dominant by a significant margin. All told, the number of articles dealing with the period 1660-1800 is about the same as that concerned with the previous century and a half. One other category that has been a significant presence in Studies, and one that Bowers particularly welcomed,[17] consists of essays on textual theory and bibliographical methodology; though their numbers do not loom large, many of them have been extraordinarily influential. Greg's "Rationale" was the most notable of several such essays in the early volumes, and since 1965 at least one essay of this kind has appeared each year. The presence in Volume 15 (1962) of two articles (the opening two) on the role of computers in textual study shows how alert Bowers was to new developments in their early stages; and the result of this openness is that the full run of Studies includes important examples of all approaches--not only is analytical bibliography there, but the history of publishing and reading (or what is now called "book history" or the social history of books) is present as well.

A salient characteristic of the assembled run of Studies is its inclusion of several series of articles by individual scholars--although they were not usually presented as single studies divided into installments, since Bowers felt that in general an annual was not well-suited to serialization. In only eight instances was there explicit serialization, the longest (in seven parts) being Cyrus Hoy's "The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon" (8, 9, 11- 15),[18] which

derived from Hoy's graduate work under Bowers.[19] Far more often, what may be regarded as a series consists of independent articles in which a scholar repeatedly attacks a single topic from different angles. Two of the best-known (which began in the earliest volumes, as noted above) are Allan H. Stevenson's series on the analysis of paper (1, 4, 6, 20) and William B. Todd's on the development of analytical techniques for eighteenth-century books (2-4, 6-9, 11, 12, 15, 18).

Other significant groupings dealing with the eighteenth century are Friedman's on Goldsmith (5, 11, 13), Miller's on Franklin (11, 14), Bentley's on Blake (12, 19, 34, 41, 49), Eaves and Kimpel's (14, 15, 20) and Van Marter's (26, 28) on Richardson, Battestin's on Fielding (16, 33, 34, 36, 42), Kenny's on Farquhar (25, 28, 32), Woodson's on the 1785 Shakespeare (28, 31, 39), May's on Young (37 [twice], 38, 46), and Brack's on Johnson (40, 45, 47, 48). Not surprisingly, there are several similar groupings relating to compositor determination or presswork and proofreading analysis of Renaissance drama, the most extensive of which is by Robert K. Turner, Jr. (9, 12-15, 18-20, 27, 36); others include those by Hinman (3, 6, 9), Walker (6-9), George Walton Williams (8, 9, 11, the first two in collaboration with Paul L. Cantrell), McKenzie (12, 22, 25, 37), Ferguson (13, 15, 23, 42), Reid (27, 29, 35), Jackson (31, 32, 35, 49), Werstine (35, 41), and Weiss (43-45). One of the rare instances of compositor analysis applied to non-English books is Robert M. Flores's studies of Cervantes (37, 39, 43). Another important series dealing with the Renaissance is Cyprian Blagden's on the Stationers' Company and the seventeenth- century book trade (6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14). The number of such groupings of articles devoted to the medieval period and to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is smaller, but the articles are generally

of considerable interest-- such as those on medieval manuscripts by Pace (1, 4, 18, 21, 28), Greetham (37, 38), Hanna (37, 39, 40 [twice], 41-43, 48, 49), and Wright (39, 42); that on incunables by Rhodes (6-8, 11, 26, 34), as well as the long series by Bühler, mentioned earlier; and those by Altick (6, 11, 22, 39) and Scott Bennett (25, 29) on nineteenth-century publishing, West on twentieth-century publishing (26, 35, 36, 45), Shannon on Tennyson (13, 32, 34, 38, the second and fourth jointly with Ricks), Bruccoli on Fitzgerald (9, 13, 16, 17), Scholes on Joyce (15-17), and Brodsky on Faulkner (33, 34, 36-41, the first in collabortion with Robert W. Hamblin).

Of all the writers who have contributed more than once or twice to SB, there are two who supplied far more material than any others to the first fifty volumes: Fredson Bowers and I. Although Bowers could have published his own work in every volume (for he certainly had articles available), he chose to include himself in only half the volumes he edited (twenty-two out of forty-four).[20] And one can hardly complain about his including himself that often, since many of his articles are among the most significant that have appeared in Studies.[21] One could argue that his most influential contribution was one of the shortest, "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors" (17), which supplied the underpinning for the Center for Editions of American Authors and the whole movement to apply Greg's "Rationale" to the editing of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Other widely cited general articles are his "Some Relations of Bibliography to Editorial Problems" (3), which, coming in 1950, helped set the stage for the kinds of editions he soon began to produce and inspire; "Transcription of Manuscripts: The Record of Variants" (29), which described in detail a system for reporting manuscripts, worked out in connection with his William James edition; and "Greg's `Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited" (31), in which Bowers acknowledged some limitations in Greg's approach. Several of his articles, such as the one on Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (26), were by-products of his own editions; but the editing of Shakespeare (which he did not engage in himself, except for his Penguin edition of Merry Wives of Windsor) was the subject to which he turned most often in the SB pieces, with significant

studies of Hamlet (7, 8) and All's Well (32), along with some more general essays (6, 19, 33-35, 43).

As for my contributions, I first published a short note on Poe in 1963 (16), and beginning with the next volume I have published a full article every year (plus another short note in Volume 23). Most of my articles have dealt with one or the other of two subjects, descriptive bibliography (eleven items) or editorial theory (twelve items), but I have touched on some other general topics, such as the literature of American publishing history (18), press figures (19), copyright records (22), the relation of bibliography and science (27), the history of bibliography (41), and the limitations of reproductions (42). I leave it to others to comment on the significance of these essays, but I can say that they have given SB a greater concentration on theory and method than it would otherwise have had. And some of them have been among the more widely cited SB articles--"The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention" (29), "The Editing of Historical Documents" (31), "A Sample Bibliographical Description with Commentary" (40), and "Reproductions and Scholarship" (42), for example.

The most significant articles in Studies--it is important to add--have not come exclusively from writers who have published there repeatedly. The prime example is of course "The Rationale of Copy-Text," which was Greg's only contribution. Similarly, Bruce Harkness has so far published only one note and one article in SB, but the article was "Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy" (12), which has been often cited as a classic statement of the need for reliable texts of novels. Edwin Wolf 2nd made a single appearance in Studies, "Historical Grist for the Bibliographical Mill" (25), but it was an extremely important argument for paying more attention to bibliographical analysis in the examination of nonliterary Americana--an argument that has not yet been sufficiently heeded. Two of the best theoretical examinations of stemmatic analysis were by one-time contributors, Antonín Hrubý (18) and Michael Weitzman (38). Robert Halsband's one article, "Editing the Letters of Letter-Writers" (11), though now dated, was for years the most prominent discussion of this topic; Peter Davison's one article so far, "Science, Method, and the Textual Critic" (25), is an outstanding treatment of a difficult subject; Ross Atkinson's single article thus far, "An Application of Semiotics to the Definition of Bibliography" (33), is a stimulating approach to the perennial question of how to define the field; R. W. Franklin's one article so far is a landmark study of Emily Dickinson's fascicles (36); and one of David L. Vander Meulen's two contributions during Bowers's editorship, "The Identification of Paper without Watermarks:

The Example of Pope's Dunciad" (37), is a major advance in the bibliographical analysis of paper (and a natural extension of Stevenson's work, first published in the initial volume of Studies).[22]

Any list of the most important articles in Studies would always include D. F. McKenzie's "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices" (22). (It was the third of McKenzie's five contributions thus far, all on seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century printing.) This article pointed out questionable statements in a number of the articles of bibliographical analysis (including some of Bowers's own) that had been published (in SB and elsewhere) over the previous two decades and suggested that perhaps the time had come to spend more effort uncovering the data in printers' records than in attempting to deduce printing history from clues in printed matter. Inductive work, such as analytical bibliography, always involves uncertainties, but McKenzie had located instances where incautious or unwarranted conclusions had been drawn. It was salutary to have these instances publicized, but whether their existence called the whole field into question was of course a different matter. McKenzie, who had previously contributed a good example of bibliographical analysis to SB (a compositorial study of the second quarto of The Merchant of Venice in Volume 12), may not have intended to suggest that analytical bibliography should be abandoned; but the article lent itself easily to such an interpretation,[23] and there were many who wished to read it that way, having already felt that the postwar excitement over bibliographical analysis had gotten out of hand. McKenzie's article was not the sole reason for the decline in interest in analytical bibliography since then, but it did play a role. It fit the temper of the times, which in literary studies was beginning to turn away from a concern with authorial meanings and toward a view of texts as social products. Analytical bibliography is not, of course, tied to authorial intention; but since it had largely been developed by editors interested in such intentions, the two were associated by many people and thus lost favor together. At the time of "Printers of the Mind," McKenzie had not yet published any of his arguments for the "sociology of texts," but it is not surprising that his

writing moved in that direction. His SB article stands as a key document of a major turning-point in textual criticism.

It also reflects three other characteristics of SB, besides the journal's consistency in publishing seminal articles. One is that SB has always been hospitable to long essays, when their length is justified (Bowers did not hesitate to ask authors to make cuts). In addition to McKenzie's 75-page contribution, one thinks--for example--of Mason Tung's 72-page article on Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (29), or Bowers's fifty-three pages on the recording of manuscript alterations (29), or Adrian Weiss's seventy pages on font analysis (43), or my sixty-page surveys of textual scholarship (28, 44). A second characteristic symbolized by the McKenzie article is Bowers's willingness to publish articles with which he personally disagreed. He knew McKenzie's article was important, and he printed it, even though he could not endorse its tone or its conclusion, as he later stated in print.[24] In one early volume (13), he made a point of placing side by side two articles of opposed viewpoints (John Russell Brown's "The Rationale of Old Spelling Editions . . ." and Arthur Brown's ". . . A Rejoinder"), only the second of which he agreed with. But usually articles he demurred at were allowed to stand on their own--though occasionally he printed a rebuttal later and was even tempted to supply it himself. When I sent him a short piece critical of Paul Baender's note on copy-text (22), he not only printed it the next year but told me that, before my note arrived, he had planned to write such a reply himself. As for responding to McKenzie, both Peter Davison's and my articles on "science" (25, 27), at least in part, served this function.

A third characteristic of SB that one is reminded of by McKenzie's appearance is Bowers's efforts to enlist foreign scholars as contributors. Although few appeared in the first five volumes, the sixth volume contained work by five British scholars, and the number from the United Kingdom has remained strong ever since, along with good representation in later years from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. But the image of Studies as an international forum owes less to numbers than to the quality of the foreign contributions. Two of the most momentous of SB

articles, after all, were by foreigners, Greg and McKenzie. Besides those pieces, SB has published important work by--to name only a few--Alice Walker, Philip Gaskell, Cyprian Blagden, Harold Jenkins, Dennis E. Rhodes, Peter Davison, Keith I. D. Maslen, and B. J. McMullin. In the past two decades or so, European textual scholars have been particularly drawn to the study of authors' revisions and independent versions of works, and Studies has been the best place in the English-speaking world to learn about these developments. As early as 1975, Bowers published Hans Zeller's "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts," which has been repeatedly cited as the best introduction in English to the German approach. And Volume 41 (1988) included translated essays by one French textual critic (Louis Hay) and three German ones (Klaus Hurlebusch, Gerhard Neumann, and Siegfried Scheibe), although Bowers was not himself attracted to the study of versions (or to the theorizing) represented by their articles.[25] It is perhaps ironic that these papers had been offered at a conference celebrating Bowers's eightieth birthday, but it is entirely characteristic of him to have admitted them to Studies, recognizing that they reflect a significant movement. Bowers's openness to the best textual and bibliographical work being done anywhere in the world, even when it challenged his own firmly held beliefs, gave Studies an air of vitality and excitement year after year.

The only anomalous volume in the whole run of Studies is Volume 10, dated 1957, which consists entirely of checklists of bibliographical scholarship. It is labeled "Decennial Extra Volume" on the title page, and indeed subscribers did receive two volumes within the year, for Volume 9 is also dated 1957.[26] The tenth volume contains reprints of the

checklists for 1949 through 1954 that had appeared in Volumes 3-8 of Studies, along with the first publication of the list for 1955, which had not been included in Volume 9. (There was an explanation in Volume 9 that this list would appear in "the extra volume X of these Studies celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Society.") To these seven lists (totaling 130 pages) was added a sixty-page index of authors and (according to Anne Freudenberg's preface) "the specific or general subject of each item in the check lists as revealed in the title." Limited as it is, this index (with such entries as "Compositors," "Engravings," "Paper," "Press figures," and "Printing") is extremely useful in providing access to the lists, for they had not been individually indexed. The lists had thus not been easy to consult, despite a modest attempt at classification: each list had been simply divided into two parts, "Incunabula and Early Renaissance"[27] and "Later Renaissance to the Present," with the latter further subdivided into a section on enumerations and one on discursive articles and books (and these two sections had their own subheadings, "English and General" and "United States"). The "Incunabula" part was the work of Rudolf Hirsch; the part on "Later Renaissance to the Present" was in the first instance (for 1949) compiled by Lucy Clark and Fredson Bowers, but beginning with the second list the compiler was Howell J. Heaney. The 1957 preface, echoing the prefatory note to the first "Selective Check List," described the scope as "not intended to include catalogs of secondary publications, or other library aids, but to note selected primary investigations concerned with all phases of bibliographical scholarship."

These lists, despite their selectivity, did serve a significant function, particularly in calling to the attention of the bibliographically minded readers of Studies some of the work on analytical bibliography appearing elsewhere.[28] Although many of the items of course reappeared in the more comprehensive listings of current scholarship (especially on literature), their presence in a smaller specialized list made them easier to

locate, particularly after the index provided improved access by bibliographical topics. In the 1957 volume the lists were presented as an ongoing "annual department," and further such volumes, with cumulative indexes, were promised. Accordingly, the next checklist, the one for 1956, when published in Volume 11 (1958), was subtitled "Series B"; after seven checklists had been published (the same number that were brought together in Volume 10), Series B was considered complete, and in 1966 a volume bringing together the lists for 1956-62 was indeed published, with a cumulative index. But the idea of including volumes of reprinted checklists in the numbered sequence of volumes of Studies was now seen as mistaken, and the volume was published separately by the Society, with the compilers' names (Heaney and Hirsch) on the title page.[29] (Their preface, by the way, makes clear that it was their policy to list all articles, regardless of subject, appearing in the publications of six bibliographical societies-- London, Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, America, and Virginia.) A "Series C" (with Derek A. Clarke replacing Rudolf Hirsch as compiler of the "Incunabula" section) duly began with the list for 1963, in Volume 18 (1965), and continued for ten years--not seven, as with the previous two series. But no cumulated volume was ever published, and no further checklists appeared after the one for 1972 in Volume 27 (1974). The next year there was a brief announcement at the end of the last page of text: "In view of the duplication that would result with the proposals in the Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries to expand its coverage with the fourth volume, of 1973, the Society's Annual Selective Checklist has been discontinued as of this issue."

The Annual Bibliography referred to, which designated itself as "ABHB," was published at The Hague under the general editorship of Hendrik D. L. Vervliet for the Committee on Rare and Precious Books and Documents of the International Federation of Library Associations; and Vervliet was then in the process of building up a group of contributors to report on work published in their countries. It is true that the fourth volume of ABHB, covering 1973 (and published in 1975), did include

the United States for the first time, and the contributors of American entries were Heaney and Hirsch, who had produced most of the SB lists. Theoretically, therefore, ABHB did render the SB lists unnecessary. But the role of analytical bibliography in printing history was not as clear to all the contributors as it was to Heaney and Hirsch, and the field that had been so well represented in the SB lists had a rather marginal existence in ABHB. The situation is symbolized in the 1973 volume of ABHB by the placement of T. H. Howard-Hill's SB article on "The Compositors of Shakespeare's Folio Comedies" (26) in the section entitled "Relation to Secondary Subjects." Nevertheless, despite the different understanding of bibliography that underlay the two publications, Bowers's decision to end the SB lists has in the long run been vindicated: not only was some duplication of effort avoided on an annual basis, but also the creation of newer tools with more thorough coverage and superior indexing--such as the electronic form of the Modern Language Association's cumulated annual listings--has meant that the SB checklists would no longer be fulfilling the vital function they once served.[30]

If Volume 10 of Studies stands out from the series by consisting entirely of checklists, one other volume calls attention to itself by the presence in it of a foreword and a parody. Volume 20 (1967) took notice of the Society's twentieth anniversary in two ways. First, there was a "Foreword" made up of two messages, the first from Sir Frank Francis, director of the British Museum and immediate past president of the Bibliographical Society in London, and the second from Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., president of the University of Virginia. Both were friends of Bowers, and--although they acknowledged the important support of loyal Society members--they quite properly recognized that the driving force behind the success of Studies was Bowers himself. Francis, after noting that the Virginia organization had been formed by "a group of dedicated individuals banded together" (wording reminiscent of his phrase "a sense of common adventure," which he had used in the London society's 1945 jubilee volume to describe the early days of the older society), went on to say that "in this case" a journal "sprang into being full-grown and fully armed, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter,

whose thunderbolts she wielded from time to time." The identity of Jupiter was obvious: "the Society with the prestige it now enjoys and the great success it has had is substantially the image of its Editor, whose industry and monumental achievements in analytical bibliography are the admiration of bibliographers." As "spokesman" of the London society, Francis observed that Bowers had published "some of his earliest work in bibliography" in that society's journal, The Library; Francis concluded, "I like to think that the rigidly uncompromising standards which he has applied so successfully are in part at least the fruits of his association with our members." Shannon, in his comments, paid particular attention to the "supporting structure" of the society but only after declaring, "The renown of Studies in Bibliography, and of the senior editor who has fulfilled that responsibility from the initial volume, requires no elaboration or other encomium."

The other unusual aspect of Volume 20, besides this double "Foreword," was the nature of the opening article. Bowers clearly hoped to avoid making the celebratory occasion excessively solemn, and--instead of offering any comment of his own--he printed as the first piece (that is, immediately following the two congratulatory messages) a parody of textual and explicatory criticism written by the poet John Frederick Nims, a friend of the Bowerses. "The Greatest English Lyric?--A New Reading of Joe E. Skilmer's `Therese'" engages in "deep reading" to uncover the "substruct" of "riches" beneath the text of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees"--in the course of which a "brilliantly reasoned" analysis is attributed to Bowers, who is said to be working on a "monumental fifty-volume edition of Skilmer." The piece remains fresh and mischievously amusing. If Bowers wanted to show that he was not taking the twentieth anniversary too seriously, he never after that paused to take any notice whatever of an anniversary.

The twentieth volume of Studies did attract attention, however, most notably in the form of a full-page article in the Times Literary Supplement entitled "Bibliography and Dr. Bowers" (27 April 1967). It began by referring to the time when "the first volume of the society's Papers came forth to astonish all the bibliographers of Europe." "The new periodical," it continued, "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." The article first surveyed the physical changes in the early volumes ("the bibliography of the series itself"); the frequency of such changes prompted the writer to remark, "No doubt the editor uses successive volumes as examples for his classes in bibliographical description." Then the contents of the anniversary volume were judiciously assessed, sometimes admiringly (Allan

Stevenson's essay "offers another graceful demonstration of his persistence and art") and sometimes complainingly (Patricia Hernlund's piece is symptomatic of "a weakness in American bibliography as a whole: strong as the Americans are in textual theory and in analytical technique, few even of the most expert among them have a thorough theoretical and practical knowledge of the printing technology of their periods"). The criticisms (including the wish that Studies included book reviews) did not prevent the writer from concluding, "The whole number reflects credit upon the society, and in particular upon its chief editor." (Since Bowers's name is not attached to any article in the volume, the writer was led to wonder whether "it be he who galumphs through a parody of textual criticism under the name of J. F. Nims.") The latter part of the article examined Bowers's 1966 Clark Library address on "Bibliography and Restoration Drama" (published with a lecture of Lyle H. Wright's in a pamphlet entitled simply Bibliography), as a way of summarizing and reconsidering his ideas on the scope and techniques of descriptive bibliography. But the occasion for this reconsideration was clearly the SB anniversary.[31]

Many other volumes of SB were noticed in the Times Literary Supplement in the days of its bibliographical "back page," which regularly covered current numbers of bibliographical journals. Indeed, the TLS did not miss a single volume in the first eighteen and reviewed most of the succeeding ten volumes. These reviews often contained phrases like "The sustained excellence of Professor Bowers's journal" (16 April 1954) and statements to the effect that SB "contains, as we have come to expect, a very large proportion of the research now being undertaken in this subject" (11 May 1956). One of the most amusingly complimentary of the TLS reviews (on 5 May 1957) dealt with Volume 9; the opening and closing paragraphs give the flavor:

The importance of these reviews in publicizing the contents of SB was considerable, both because of the large and wide readership of the TLS and because the TLS was practically the only publication (other than a few annuals) that systematically examined the contents of bibliographical journals. Indeed, scholarly journals in any field are rarely reviewed, and no doubt it was SB's physical appearance--which made it look like a "book"--that caused a number of book-review editors to assign it for review. SB was thus more fortunate than most journals in the number of times its contents were analyzed in reviews in major journals--and by major scholars.

The typical review inevitably consisted of brief comments on some of the articles, with an introductory and closing remark on "the high standard one has come to expect."[32] But the reviews were rarely perfunctory, and the reputation of the series attracted prominent scholars as reviewers. Some of them wrote repeatedly on SB for the same few journals. In the early years, for example, Greg wrote a succession of reviews for Modern Language Review (1-4), as did Arthur Brown (5, 6/7, 11) and A. N. L. Munby (8, 9, 13-15, 17-19); Herbert Davis for a time was a regular reviewer of SB for Review of English Studies (4, 7, 8, 11, 13), as was Arthur Brown (9, 14, 15); F. C. Francis reviewed more than one volume for The Library (2/3, 4/5), and so did J. C. T. Oates (9, 12) and Robert Donaldson (15, 18-23); and Philip Edwards reviewed several volumes for Shakespeare Quarterly (5, 6, 11), as did D. G. Neill for The Book Collector (9, 11-15). These were the journals that gave most attention to SB, and still other notable reviewers commented on

SB occasionally in their pages, as when James Kinsley reviewed Volume 5 in Review of English Studies, or when John Crow, in his inimitable fashion, discussed Volume 3 in Shakespeare Quarterly and Volume 18 in The Book Collector, or when Alice Walker reviewed Volume 11, D. F. McKenzie Volume 13, and Kenneth Povey Volume 14 in The Library. There was also considerable foreign publicity for Studies, not only in the form of occasional notices in such journals as Das Antiquariat, Anuario bibliografico cubano, Bokvånnen, Nordisk Tidskrift för Bok- och Biblioteksväsen, and Trimestre bibliografico but also through repeated comments by Sigfred Taubert in Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel (e.g., 11, 12, 14, 16-18) and Louis Bonnerot in Etudes anglaises (e.g., 6, 7/11, 13/15, 16/18).

Although the reviews always contained a great deal of praise, they not infrequently registered complaints as well. This being a journal concerned with bookmaking practices, even the unfortunate frequency of typographical errors became a topic for discussion. The quality of the writing was another target for several reviewers over the years. Arthur Brown, when reviewing Volumes 6 and 7, praised Harold Jenkins's article as a model of "the kind of civilized writing which is, it seems, all too frequently disdained by the twentieth- century scholar," and he then added, "I do wish that bibliographers in general . . . would make an effort to avoid the twin vices of smugness and formlessness" (Modern Language Review, 50 [1955], 523- 524). Herbert Davis can be taken as the spokesman for a number of reviewers when (in his review of Volume 11 in Review of English Studies, n.s., 10 [1959], 435-437) he objected to the extended "unwinding of these tortuous arguments . . . burdened by cautionary phrases" and suggested that Bowers "deal a little more rigorously with his contributors," many of whom "have not time to let their heady liquor settle and clarify itself."

A critical attitude toward analytical bibliography also surfaced in a number of reviews. An earlier review of Davis's (on Volume 7 in Review of English Studies, n.s., 8 [1957], 215-217) suggested that the "growing interest" in compositor study might be thought "a dangerous tendency rather like that attacked by A. E. Housman in his strictures upon those textual critics who gave up the attempt to understand the mind of their author, and devoted themselves entirely to a study of the habits of scribes." Davis did recognize the contributions that compositor study had made, and he found Alice Walker's work reassuring, but he used Bowers's article on the second quarto of Hamlet as "an illustration of possible dangers in building up arguments based on what must be partly conjectural accounts of what actually took place in the printing-house." Leo Kirschbaum, writing the same year but reviewing Volume 9 (Shakespeare

Quarterly, 8 [1957], 544-546), asked, "of what use has this servant [i.e., analytical bibliography], which tends to act like a tyrant, been to the scholar- critic?" He answered "not very much" and wondered "whether it will ever be very much, despite all its pretensions." This review was one of several salvos that Kirschbaum issued against the "Bowers school" at this time, but it serves here to show that the controversies surrounding analytical bibliography were not absent from the reviews, even a decade before McKenzie's "Printers of the Mind." Such reviews, indeed, helped to place SB at the center of its field, though they constituted only a part of the commentary: one must remember that a fuller guide to the influence of a journal (if a harder one to measure) is the use made of its articles in later scholarship. In more recent years Studies has not received as many reviews; but anyone who reads widely in the field knows that its presence has become even more prominent, as the volumes have mounted up and as more and more SB articles have been found indispensable by a wide variety of scholars.[33]

IV

A new era in the annals of Studies opened with Volume 46 (1993), for that volume marked the beginning of David L. Vander Meulen's editorship. That the years since then can be called a new era does not point to any difference of approach that Vander Meulen has brought to the position but only signals the fact that a change of editorship after forty-five years is obviously a major event in the life of any journal. Not that many journals have ever experienced such an event, for an editorial tenure of that length is as rare among scholarly journals as it is among general-circulation periodicals. And when the editor is also one of the great figures in a field, the situation is rarer still. If one tries to think of other major bibliographical scholars who have edited journals for long periods, one is bound to think first, in the English-speaking world, of R. B. McKerrow, who founded the Review of English Studies and edited it for fifteen years, and A. W. Pollard, who edited The Library for thirty-one years. But Bowers's forty-five-year editorship far surpassed both their terms--indeed, almost equaling the two combined.

Because Bowers at the same time published a large body of his own scholarship--some three million words, plus sixty-eight volumes of editions--and was a busy teacher and administrator, it is sometimes assumed that he spent little time on Studies. Nothing could be farther from the truth: Bowers was in fact an extremely active journal editor. No distinguished journal can exist without constant attention, and the SB editorship was a basic fact of Bowers's life, a continuous and demanding activity that existed alongside his other projects. His shaping hand is reflected throughout the published contents, as a result of his solicitation of articles and his treatment of them after he received them. Of course, the character of the journal derives, even more fundamentally, from his receptiveness to all kinds of work. He conducted SB with an open-mindedness that surprised some people, who thought that the assertiveness of his own writing indicated a lack of openness to other points of view. But just as the uncompromising quality of his public statements emerged from a principled and reasoned position, not from personal pique or stubbornness, so his standards for SB concerned cogency and scholarly responsibility, not a particular line of thinking.

But what was time-consuming about this approach was the way he worked with potential contributors. Solicitation of articles, which he engaged in continually,[34] was of course a compliment and an incentive

to the authors; but equally important was his recognition of bibliographical talent at an early stage and his supportive (if rigorous) criticisms that helped to give both reassurance and direction to those possessing it. He frequently invited his graduate students to contribute to Studies, when he saw that they had appropriate material, and thus helped to launch several of them on notable careers as publishing scholars. As for those who were not his students, Bowers's record of discovering talent extended from Allan Stevenson and William Todd, in the first two volumes, to Adrian Weiss, whose exciting and innovative investigations of Renaissance type fonts appeared in the final three volumes that Bowers oversaw. In the last of them, which was published nine months after Bowers's death, Weiss movingly recorded his indebtedness to Bowers: Weiss gave voice to sentiments that had been felt by many earlier contributors as well. I can testify myself to the friendly support that underlay his letters to me, from the time of our first correspondence about SB in 1962; his encouraging inquiries (and, sometimes, tentative hints) regarding my work in progress were as important to me as his sensitive and shrewd comments on the work actually submitted. I cannot imagine being read by a more responsive and understanding reader, or receiving more constructive and meaningful encouragement; and I know that my feelings are shared by many others. It seems apparent that a considerable portion of the contents of SB might never have existed without Bowers's perceptively chosen words at the right moments.

Once an article was received, Bowers gave it immediate and detailed scrutiny. The easy way in which prose flowed forth profusely from him enabled him to give copious advice, in the form of extremely long letters. It was not uncommon for potential contributors to receive letters of six, eight, ten, or more single-spaced--and sometimes unparagraphed--pages

(often with a postscript in his notoriously difficult handwriting). Frequently such letters were the by-products of the actual process of reading: he would go through articles at the typewriter and type out a running commentary as he read. This procedure sometimes resulted in his having to say, at some later place in a letter, that an earlier point he had made should now be disregarded; but even these adjustments of opinion were useful to the authors, who were thus alerted to spots in their articles that might at first be misleading or misunderstood. The authors always knew that their work was receiving Bowers's concentrated attention and that his suggestions grew out of an understanding of--and respect for--what they were trying to accomplish.[35] The appreciative comments of Curt Bühler and George Walton Williams, quoted above, are suggestive of the gratitude felt by many contributors.

The intensive labor of Bowers's style of editorship was borne largely by Bowers himself. Before Vander Meulen's arrival in Charlottesville, only one assistant was recorded on SB title pages: L. A. Beaurline, a member of the Virginia English department, was named there in Volumes 17 through 27 (1964-74), first as Assistant Editor (1964-65) and then as Associate Editor (1966-74). And three other names made brief appearances as "Assistants to the Editor" in 1974-77, listed among the Society's officers at the back of the volumes.[36] When Bowers retired from the English department in 1975 at the age of seventy, he had made no arrangements for a successor as editor, and in any case he wished to continue editing the journal. But finding a successor was much on his mind in the years that followed. It happened that he met David Vander Meulen in the North Library of the British Museum in the spring of 1978 and, seeing the kind of work Vander Meulen was doing, invited him to submit the results of his research to SB. After a few years, Vander Meulen did send Bowers two pieces that derived from his work for a remarkable 1981 dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. The dissertation was a descriptive bibliography of Pope's Dunciad from 1728 to 1751, and it set new standards for bibliographical description, both in thoroughness and in the development and use of new techniques. Bowers published the two articles in Volumes 35 and 37 (1982 and 1984) and recognized

that the dissertation was a comparable landmark to William B. Todd's Chicago dissertation some three decades before, in the early days of SB. Vander Meulen thus joined the distinguished circle of young scholars who had benefited from Bowers's encouragement at significant moments in their lives.[37] Bowers suggested to the English department that Vander Meulen be interviewed for a position; an offer was made in December 1983, and Vander Meulen agreed to join the department in the autumn of 1984.

It was understood that part of Vander Meulen's time was to be spent assisting Bowers with Studies, and it did not take Bowers long to see that Vander Meulen, with his thorough knowledge of bibliographical and textual work and his judiciousness, would be an ideal successor. Bowers continued as editor until his death in the spring of 1991, and Vander Meulen thus had the opportunity of working with him for nearly seven years, gradually taking over many of the responsibilities for reading submitted articles and seeing the volumes through the press. Bowers's increasing reliance on Vander Meulen was reflected in the way Vander Meulen's name was reported in print. Although his name did not appear in Volume 38 (1985), the first one with which he was associated, it was given on the copyright pages of the next two volumes, first as "Assistant to the Editor" (39) and then as "Assistant Editor" (40). Beginning with the next volume (41), his name moved to the title page beneath Bowers's, first labeled "Assistant Editor" (41-43) and then "Associate Editor" (44-45). Volume 45, which appeared early in 1992 and was thus the first to come out after Bowers's death, contained the following announcement on the recto of the leaf preceding the opening of the first article:

Most of the editorial work for that volume was handled by Vander Meulen, but Bowers's name was allowed to remain as editor, and it was the next volume (46) in which Vander Meulen was first named as editor on the title page. At the top of the copyright page of Volume 46, the following appeared: Since that time Bowers's name has continued to be recorded as "Founding Editor" on the copyright page, and beginning with Volume 48 (1995) there is another listing below it: "Assistant to the Editor / Elizabeth Lynch."

The volume dedicated to Bowers (46) contains the "survey of his career" promised in the preceding volume, in the form of my 154-page monograph entitled "The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers," which not only discusses his professional life but presents a considerable amount of information about his personal life as well. In a journal known for its lengthy articles, it is perhaps fitting that the longest of all should have been devoted to Bowers himself. This biography was followed by a thirty-page checklist of Bowers's published work and a two-page chronology of his career, both prepared by Martin Battestin on the basis of Bowers's own versions that had appeared in his 1975 volume of collected essays. (The biography, checklist, and chronology, along with a preface by Vander Meulen and an index, were also published by the Society as a separate hard-cover volume.) The presence of all this material made Volume 46 distinctive, but in other respects it and the succeeding volumes under Vander Meulen's editorship have included the same kinds of articles that have characterized the journal from the beginning. Several of the same contributors, such as MacD. P. Jackson, G. E. Bentley, Jr., and Ralph Hanna III, have reappeared in these volumes, and the newcomers have included such a major figure as Paul Needham. Some of the particularly important articles have indeed been by first-time contributors, such as--to name only two--Ann R. Meyer's on the editing of King Lear (47) and Maura Ives's on the bibliographical description of periodicals (49).

Vander Meulen is clearly continuing the tradition of being hospitable to all kinds of bibliographical scholarship. A new interest that one may discern in the most recent five volumes is an effort to promote work on the history of bibliography, especially in the form of biographical studies of important bibliographers.[39] My biography of Bowers has been followed

by an illuminating discussion of Allan Stevenson by Paul Needham (47) and a graceful memoir of J. D. Fleeman by David Fairer (48). The latter piece is in fact part of a series of "Essays in Honor of J. D. Fleeman," as the table of contents for Volume 48 is headed. All but two of the articles in the volume are part of this grouping, which constitutes the first instance in which a volume of Studies has been designed as a Festschrift or has had an overall theme. Given SB's strong record in eighteenth-century studies and its new interest in biography, a Festschrift for a distinguished bibliographer of Samuel Johnson seems entirely in order. And not surprisingly the list of contributors to Volume 48 is one of the most stellar in the history of the journal, consisting of James McLaverty, O M Brack, Jr., Keith Maslen, Hugh Amory, James E. Tierney, Gwin J. Kolb, Robert DeMaria, Jr., Anne McDermott, Donald D. Eddy, Donald W. Nichol, Thomas F. Bonnell, Ann Bowden, William B. Todd, Pamela Dalziel, and B. J. McMullin. Vander Meulen's five volumes have thus shown some innovation, but strictly within the established tradition: the character of the series has been maintained.

I hope some idea of that character has been conveyed in the preceding pages, and perhaps a brief statistical retrospect is in order at this point. Over the past half-century, Studies has published the work of 509 writers, who have contributed 930 pieces filling 13,682 pages.[40] Twenty writers have contributed more than five times:

                         

G. Thomas Tanselle	36
Arthur Sherbo	28
Fredson Bowers	25
William B. Todd	16
Curt F. Bühler	15
G. E. Bentley, Jr.	10
Robert K. Turner, Jr.	10
Matthew J. Bruccoli	9
Ralph Hanna III	9
Rollo G. Silver	9
Louis Daniel Brodsky	8
Martin C. Battestin	7
Cyrus Hoy	7

             

George Walton Williams	7
Cyprian Blagden	6
John Russell Brown	6
Emily Lorraine de Montluzin	6
MacD. P. Jackson	6
C. William Miller	6
Dennis E. Rhodes	6

Since some of these scholars have tended to contribute short pieces, a perhaps more meaningful indication of which writers are most responsible for shaping the character of Studies is a ranking according to the number of pages their contributions cover. Those who have contributed more than 125 pages are as follows:[41]

                           

G. Thomas Tanselle	1468
Fredson Bowers	518
Arthur Sherbo	286
G. E. Bentley, Jr.	237
William B. Todd	236
Emily Lorraine de Montluzin	193
Martin C. Battestin	175
Rollo G. Silver	164
David L. Vander Meulen	163
Cyrus Hoy	161
Adrian Weiss	150
Edgar F. Shannon, Jr.	147
Robert K. Turner, Jr.	146
D. F. McKenzie	142

These lists dramatize the extent to which SB has fostered a group of loyal contributors, who repeatedly return to its pages. But these figures should be balanced against the fact that the total number of contributors is 509--hardly a closed circle.

For the past half-century Studies in Bibliography has been at the heart of bibliographical developments. Its fifty volumes, essential reading when they were published, will continue to be essential reading--not only because they are central to the bibliographical history of the times but also because they contain an extraordinary number of fundamental articles of permanent interest. This fact has been recognized by the decision to mark the anniversary by placing the entire run of Studies on the Internet. From now on, readers will have access to all the material

in Studies through the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia's site on the World Wide Web (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/), with the advantages for searching and downloading that are provided by electronic publication.[42] Studies will continue to appear in printed form (printed from Linotype), and the text of new volumes will be added to the electronic database as well.

Although SB is by no means the first scholarly journal to appear in electronic form, it is the first to have its entire--and sizable--back file made available on the Internet without charge. This action makes a clear statement: that the whole file is of permanent value and that any available technology for making it widely accessible will be used. One hopes that the Society's handling of SB will be followed by those responsible for other journals in the electronic future. Certainly the anniversary of Studies in Bibliography is being marked in a forward-looking spirit; and, with an experienced new editor fully in control, there is every reason to regard the journal's future with confidence.