University of Virginia Library

"The Library: A History of Forty Volumes," Library, 4th ser., 10 (1929-30), 398-417.

Some of the relevant details are sketched in below, but many more can be found in my The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers (1993; published also in Volume 46 of Studies in Bibliography, pp. 1-154). (Several passages from that work, especially from pp. 34-39 and 130-134, have been reused in revised form in the present essay.) Two other treatments of Bowers and his journal are George Walton Williams, "Fredson Bowers and Studies in Bibliography," in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1991, ed. James W. Hipp (1992), pp. 226-228; and David L. Vander Meulen, "Fredson Bowers and the Editing of Studies in Bibliography," Text, 8 (1995), 31-36.

That this point was recognized early is shown by G. Blakemore Evans in his 1951 review of the first three volumes: "In these volumes," he said, "one sees for the first time an American publication offering a major challenge to the hitherto secure position of The Library" (Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 50: 421-423).

And some of those few were much delayed in their appearance. Three of the more important came out several years later in the form of comments on the first three or five volumes: in 1951 G. Blakemore Evans reviewed the first three volumes for Journal of English and Germanic Philology (50: 421-423); in 1952 Johan Gerritsen reviewed the first three for English Studies (33: 134-136); and in 1953 Philip Gaskell reviewed the first five for The Book Collector (2: 159-160). Even Bald's review (quoted below), solely of Volume 1, did not appear until 1951.

On 16 September 1949, Bowers wrote to Massey, "I have come to the conclusion that we should slightly change our title for vol. 2, and I want to see what you think of it since it should probably be a Council matter but we shall have to know before the page proof (expected daily) goes back. I think our present title is too cumbersome and somewhat gives to the outside world a too restricted idea of the scope of the Papers. I think if we are to achieve the national idea we want, we should have a more general title, with the present as a subtitle." The choice of "Studies in Bibliography" did not come easily, however; Bowers first suggested simply "Bibliography" and "The Bibliographer," and in a letter four days later he discussed "Bibliology" and "The Bibliographical Annual" as possibilities.

Bowers was not to read Todd's dissertation until the following summer, when he served on Todd's examining committee. An account of this event and of Bowers's excitement over Todd's treatment of press figures appears in The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers (see note 2 above), p. 76.

Dunkin had just previously criticized Bowers's ideas on descriptive bibliography in "The State of the Issue," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 42 (1948), 239-255; and he was to continue his attack in How to Catalog a Rare Book (1951) and Bibliography: Tiger or Fat Cat? (1975). For my comments on this controversy, see pp. 39-41 of "Descriptive Bibliography and Library Cataloguing," SB, 30 (1977), 1-56 (or pp. 75-77 of the reprinted form of the article in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 37-92).

See Williams, "Fredson Bowers and Studies in Bibliography" (note 2 above).

Although the previous April Bowers had regarded the possibility of their appearing in SB as a "pipedream," given the English Institute's usual custom of publishing its own papers, by mid- September he could report that he had "made a deal with the English Institute . . . whereby we secure rights to the four papers in this year's bibliographical section and the four in next year's" as long as the Institute was allowed to distribute offprints to its members. (These comments are from Bowers's letters to Linton Massey on 30 April and 16 September 1949.)

Bowers's role in these developments is discussed in The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers (see note 2 above), esp. pp. 48-49, 88-89; a fuller account of Greg's influence and the controversy it engendered is in my Textual Criticism since Greg (1987).

Although most reviewers that commented at all on the physical design of SB praised it, Bond was not the only one to have reservations. Philip Gaskell's review of the first five volumes in The Book Collector (2 [1953], 159-160) concluded this way: "The physical appearance of Studies is not unfortunately so admirable as its contents. Its typography . . ., although generally inoffensive, emphasizes the inability of most contemporary American commercial printers to design an aesthetically satisfying book; while the paper, which anyway seems unnecessarily opulent in quality, retains its machine-made deckle at the fore-edge: surely bibliographers, of all people, should know better?" There is justice in these remarks, but also from England came praise for the design: Greg's review of the first volume says that it is "tastefully and even sumptuously printed" and that the contents are "worthy of their handsome setting" (Modern Language Review, 45 [1950], 76), and F. C. Francis's review of Volumes 2 and 3 asserts that their "printing and get-up . . . are of the highest quality" (Library, 5th ser., 6 [1951], 62-64).

Bowers later experimented, for reasons of economy, with placing the notes at the end of each article, but this experiment was fortunately short-lived (Volumes 41-43 only).

The colophon for Volume 18 (1965) states that the paper is Strathmore Pastelle, but the usual Pastelle watermark is not present.

These sources continued to be acknowledged in volumes of Studies through the twenty-first (1968). Surviving correspondence between Bowers and Massey gives a sense of how vital Massey's generosity was and how grateful Bowers was for it. Bowers's long letter of 14 April 1949, largely on financial matters, shows the difficulty of balancing the budget in the early years. "I cannot conceal that the financial troubles of the Papers have weighed very heavily on my mind," he said; and, regarding Massey's help, he added, "I now feel an enormous weight removed." Four and a half years later (on 18 November 1953), Bowers mentioned to him "your invariable anonymous generosity." Two years after that, Bowers wrote to Massey, "If and when we ever really get on our feet firmly, and are able to look back at all perils past, . . . it will become quite clear that it was truly your quiet assistance that kept us going and carried us over the hump."

By this time, the distinction between "articles" and "notes" had become more typographical than substantive, as James Kinsley suggested in his review of the fifth volume in Review of English Studies (n.s., 5 [1954], 102-104): "The 'Bibliograhica' at the end of the book are closely printed in small type. Some of these essays are long and commendably detailed bibliographical descriptions and arguments, and might have changed places, to the greater comfort of the reader, with more discursive contributions standing towards the beginning of the book in the dignity of large type." Besides the use of small type, the section of "notes" was marked in Volume 1 with the heading "Bibliographical Notes" and in the next four volumes with the heading "Bibliographica." After that, there was no labeling other than the type size; and the distinction between pieces set in one size and those set in the other was obviously not based on length or significance but rather reflected Bowers's decision to single out certain pieces (very few in some later volumes) as feature articles.

Or, indeed, before the beginning of the year for which a volume was dated. The Secretary's News Sheet for September 1953 (No. 28) reported that Volume 6, for 1954, was likely to be ready "before the Christmas mailing rush." And I happen to remember one occasion, in the early 1970s I believe, when my copy arrived in November, just before the Thanksgiving holiday. It is rare for scholarly periodicals to appear in the early part of the period for which they are dated, and even rarer for them to appear in advance of that period.

From the start, Bowers had been eager to have such articles: on 16 April 1949 he said, in a letter to Linton Massey, that he had wanted for the second volume a piece "like Stevenson's [in Volume 1] opening new ground in watermarks," since the second volume, though he thought it "overall superior to volume one, is often devoted only to individual books."

For brevity, I shall occasionally cite only volume numbers; a table listing volume numbers and corresponding years is given in footnote 26. (In the discussion of the reviews of SB below, some volume numbers are linked with slashes to indicate multiple volumes taken up in a single review.)

The others were John Russell Brown's "The Printing of John Webster's Plays" (6, 8, 15); Robert Hay Carnie and Ronald Patterson Doig's "Scottish Printers and Booksellers 1668-1775" (which appeared in Volume 12 and was followed in Volumes 14 and 15 by Carnie's two-part "Second Supplement"); Patricia Hernlund's "William Strahan's Ledgers" (20, 22); A. B. England's "Further Additions to Bond's Register of Burlesque Poems" (27, 28); Clinton Sisson's "Additions and Corrections to the Second Edition of Donald Wing's Short-Title Catalogue" (29-31, the first two parts in collaboration with Jeri S. Smith and the last with Timothy Crist); A. S. G. Edwards's "New Texts of Marvell's Satires" (30, 31, the first with R. M. Schuler); and Emily Lorraine de Montluzin's "Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine" (44-47, 49, 50). Bowers's own "The Textual Relation of Q2 to Q1 Hamlet (I)" in Volume 8 ends with the notation "to be concluded"; an explanation in the next volume says that the second part is "omitted . . . owing to lack of space but is planned for volume XI in 1958," but it never appeared. Similarly, Hans Walter Gabler's compositorial study of Cupid's Revenge in Volume 24 was labeled "Part I," but no second part came out. (Addenda to previously published articles are not counted here as instances of serialization.)

Though he appeared twice in three of the volumes. These figures exclude the checklists of bibliographical scholarship: thus they do not count the first checklist (which he helped to compile) as one of his contributions or the tenth volume (consisting entirely of checklists) as one of the volumes he edited.

Note, for example, the opening sentence of A. N. L. Munby's review of Volume 19: "The most important contribution to the current number of Studies in Bibliography comes from the editor's hand" (Modern Language Review, 61 [1966], 671-672).

The strength of the total roster of contributors is shown by the fact that a distinguished list can be formed from names not so far mentioned--it would include the following one-time contributors: Hyder E. Rollins (9), William Charvat (12), Ian Watt (12), A. N. L. Munby (14), J. C. T. Oates (16), Clifford Leech (23), Frederick Burkhardt (41), and David Bevington (42).

Cf. Robert Donaldson's comment, in his review of Volume 22, that some may believe McKenzie's article has "injected so much uncertainty into the already immensely complicated structures of analytical bibliography that it is no longer worth the time and concentration necessary to develop them" (Library, 5th ser., 25 [1970], 158-160). And see Bowers's remark in the next footnote.

In one of the new footnotes in his 1975 volume of collected essays (Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing), Bowers said of McKenzie's article: "I find I cannot accept his attempted disintegration of relatively efficient and economical printing practices in a small London competitive commercial printing-house in the early years of the 17th and the later years of the 16th centuries from the special evidence of the late-Restoration Cambridge University Press printing practices operating on a non-commercial and non-hurried basis without pressure for completion applied by a commercial publisher. Unless one is to scrap analytical bibliography altogether (as Dr. McKenzie comes perilously close to recommending) it may seem sounder to base one's reconstructions on the hypothesis of attempted efficiency, as in Moxon, instead of deliberate inefficiency" (p. 250).

Note, for example, his criticism of Zeller's article in two new footnotes in his 1975 volume of essays (see the preceding note): in one, he characterized its attitude as a "fetish" (p. 409), and in the other he questioned its use of the word "critical" to describe its approach (p. 527).

The fact that SB's fiftieth volume appears in the fiftieth year of the Society seems at first quite obvious and expected; but when one notices that two volumes were published in 1957, one realizes that the relation of volumes to years is not so simple. The complexities all occur in connection with the first ten volumes; from Volume 11 (1958) onwards, there has been a regular progression. Each of the first five volumes carries an academic-year designation (starting with 1948-49) in the center of the title page along with the volume number, though in the imprint at the foot of the page only a single calendar year is given (starting with 1948). Beginning with Volume 6, calendar-year designations are given in both places, but in that volume the one in mid-page is 1954 and the one at the foot of the page is 1953. From Volume 7 (1955) on, the same year is given both places, and the only irregularity after that is the assignment of both Volume 9 and Volume 10 to 1957. Because Volume 1 did not appear until the end of the Society's second year, the publication of two volumes in 1957 actually served to bring the volume numbering into line with the Society's age. For the reader's convenience in correlating years and volume numbers, the following table shows the year designation that should be cited for each volume:

Defined, in the footnote to the 1950 list, as through 1550.

Robert Donaldson began his review of Volume 21 by saying, "Few bibliographers can have failed to make use of the selective checklists of bibliographical scholarship that end each volume of SB" (Library, 5th ser., 24 [1969], 156-158).

The previous cumulative volume, it should be noted, was published in two forms: one had the SB title page (labeled "Volume Ten") and the SB cover and spine labels; the other had a title page and cover label reading simply Selective Check Lists of Bibliographical Scholarship 1949- 1955 and a spine label abbreviating this title, with no reference to SB (except that the copyright page identified the volume as "a separate issue of sheets from Volume X of Studies in Bibliography"). Obviously the non-SB form was later needed to fill out sets of SB, for in some copies there is an inserted slip with a two-sentence message, the second sentence of which reads: "In spite of the oblique note on the copyright page this is the complete Volume X of the series and should be catalogued as such." The casing of the 1966 volume containing Series B was made approximately to match that of the non-SB form of the 1957 volume.

See further B. J. McMullin's evaluation of the situation on pp. 2-7 of his "Indexing the Periodical Literature of Anglo- American Bibliography," SB, 33 (1980), 1-17. He discusses the limitations of the SB lists (their selectivity and their inadequate indexing) and of ABHB and concludes that the indexes of the Modern Language Association and the Modern Humanities Research Association are superior to any current index focusing on the book world in their coverage of "the major Anglo-American bibliographical periodicals." (I had earlier commented briefly on the SB lists at the beginning of "The Periodical Literature of English and American Bibliography," SB, 26 [1973], 167- 191--praising them in what turned out to be their penultimate year.)

Although the article contains some sensible observations on "degressive bibliography," it seems illogically fearful of what it calls "bibliography for bibliography's sake." It concludes with this sentence: "The operation of the admirable machinery evolved by Greg, Bowers and Tanselle must not become an end in itself, for descriptive technique is the bibliographer's servant, not his master or his god." That an article largely celebrating Bowers's achievement should end on this cautionary note reflects a persistent debate that always surrounded Bowers. Although one can reasonably argue that "technique" should not be an end in itself, what is really at stake here is the idea that bibliography is a genre of scholarly writing; Bowers's logical concept of bibliography as history has itself had a strange history of arousing resistance.

This particular phrasing is from Karl J. Holzknecht's review of Volume 7 in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 49 (1955), 190-195. But the phenomenon itself was remarked on by J. C. T. Oates in his review of Volume 9: "It is usual to begin a review of Studies in Bibliography with the statement that the new volume is full of meat" (Library, 5th ser., 13 [1958], 70-71)--an observation that is literally true, for L. W. Hanson's review of Volume 7 in the same journal had said, "This volume, like its predecessors, is full of meat" (5th ser., 10 [1955], 295-298), and Holzknecht's review had called Volume 7 "one of the meatiest volumes so far issued." Another reviewer who commented on the repeated encomia was Roy Stokes, who began his review of Volume 14 (Library Association Record, 63 [1961], 222-223) this way: "There is some slight danger that the chorus of praise which greets the arrival of this annual offering of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia might become monotonous." (Then he added, "It is difficult to over-estimate the cumulative importance of these volumes.")

The presence of SB has been maintained in a literal sense as well, for the volumes have been kept in print most of the time. The financial statements for 1958-63 (in Secretary's News Sheet Nos. 41, 44, 47-49, 51) indicate that the stock of Volumes 2 and 6 was exhausted during 1959, that of Volume 7 during 1960, that of Volumes 3, 11, and 14 during 1962, and that of Volumes 1, 10, 12, and 13 during 1963 (with the stock of the other early volumes very low). Accordingly, in October 1964 the first reprints were produced, and by June 1972 the first twenty-one volumes (except for Volume 10, the checklist volume) had been reprinted--in nine batches, as follows: October 1964 (1-3, 5), April 1965 (6-9), February 1966 (11-14), May 1966 (4), January 1968 (19), July 1968 (20), January 1970 (15, 21), and June 1972 (16). These reprinted volumes differ in a number of ways from the originals--as if to illustrate the bibliographical point that reprints cannot be assumed to be identical with the originals! The primary difference is the omission of the checklists of bibliographical scholarship. The reprint of Volume 3 (the first volume to include a checklist) carries this statement in brackets on page 292: "Pages 292-302 having been reprinted in Vol. X with some corrections and an index, they are not repeated in this reissue." Similar notes appear in the succeeding reprinted volumes to explain the missing pagination, since the pagination of the material that followed the checklists is not altered. Other items are also omitted, such as the advertisements and the lists of Society publications for sale; sometimes (but not always) the colophons and the mailing addresses of Society officers are omitted, and sometimes (but not always) the tables of contents are modified to reflect omissions. The occasional notes of errata and addenda at the ends of some of the original volumes appear sometimes on different pages in the reprints (the Stevenson note in Volume 4 is moved from p. 235 to p. 91, and the Gaskell in Volume 6 from p. 286 to p. 266); in one instance the information on an errata slip in the original (regarding Miller's article in Volume 3) is printed on the page just preceding the article in the reprint, in another instance (Guilds's errata note in Volume 9) the errata are incorporated into the article, and another time (the Garner note in Volume 17) the note is simply omitted. The reprint of Volume 20 contains the notice "Reissued, with corrections, July 1968" and does incorporate corrections of several typographical errors. In the same year as the first reprints, the University Press of Virginia was engaged as the distributor of Studies; and the title-page imprint beginning with Volume 17 (1964) has been "Published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the University Press of Virginia." New title pages were provided for the reprints of the volumes preceding the seventeenth.

How entrenched this habit became is amusingly epitomized by a note in his 1975 volume of collected essays (see note 24 above): in a new footnote appended to a sentence (written in 1941) on the possibility of using headlines to detect page-by-page (rather than forme-by-forme) printing, he wrote, "For reasons that escape me, I never have pursued this promising lead. Perhaps some interested bibliographer will have a look at the problem (and let me publish his results in SB . . .)" (p. 207). Even in his collected essays, he could not resist the urge to stir up contributions.

Bowers's respect for the writings of contributors is one of the ways in which he revealed his understanding of the connections between the scholarly editing of classic works and the editing of articles for a journal--a connection that is rarely made. His experience in thinking about textual matters in his scholarly editing surely lies behind his sensitive treatment of various aspects of contributors' manuscripts--his recognition, for instance, that it is more sensible to let British scholars retain their British spellings than to enforce a formal consistency from article to article.

Gillian Kyles in the volumes for 1974-76, Clinton Sisson in the 1975 and 1976 volumes as well, and Susan Hitchcock in the 1977 volume.

Vander Meulen's account of what Bowers's attention meant to him is in "Fredson Bowers and the Editing of Studies in Bibliography" (see note 2 above).

Only twice before had volumes of SB carried dedications: Volume 22 (1969) was dedicated to John Cook Wyllie, the rare-book librarian at Virginia who had been the Society's secretary-treasurer from the beginning; and Volume 28 (1975) began with a dedication to Linton R. Massey, the collector who had been the Society's president in 1948-49 and 1951-74, as well as a loyal (though anonymous) benefactor of Studies (see note 14 above).

Vander Meulen has acknowledged this development in "Fredson Bowers and the Editing of Studies in Bibliography" (see note 2 above): "One innovation quietly underway is a series of `lives of the bibliographers,' an attempt to understand the past and hence the present of bibliography."

These figures do not include the checklists of bibliographical scholarship, the introduction to Volume 10, and the double foreword to Volume 20. (If they did, the number of contributors would be increased by five—since Lucy Clark, Derek Clarke, Frank Francis, Anne Freudenberg, and Howell Heaney did not contribute otherwise.) The figures do treat as separate contributions any notes of addenda to articles in preceding volumes, whether or not those notes are listed in the tables of contents (but they do not count the errata listed at the ends of some volumes).

These figures do not take into account whether the pages are of the larger type size for feature articles or the smaller size for the other articles and notes. If the measure were the number of lines rather than pages, a few names (of persons whose articles, or some of them, appeared on the smaller-type pages with more lines) would of course move somewhat higher up in the list.

The great advantages of the electronic form do not, of course, make the original printed volumes superfluous--a point obvious to all those who (like bibliographers) understand the role of physical evidence in the transmission of verbal texts. See my article in Volume 42 of Studies ("Reproductions and Scholarship") and my more recent essay on "The Future of Primary Records," in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 58 (1996), 53-73 and in Biblion, 5.1 (Fall 1996), 4-32.