University of Virginia Library

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]