University of Virginia Library

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."