A major theme of twentieth-century bibliographical investigation and
editorial procedure has been the need to locate and examine all forms of a
work in order to understand its history. To commemorate the fiftieth
anniversary of one landmark in that scholarly tradition, Fredson Bowers's
Principles of Bibliographical Description, it
seems fitting to turn some bibliographical classics on themselves by
applying techniques their authors advocated. Principles itself is an obvious candidate for such consideration;
so also is a book with which it was linked from the time of its publication,
R. B. McKerrow's An Introduction to Bibliography for
Literary Students. Bowers's volume, first published by Princeton
University Press in late 1949, has been reprinted a number of times, without
any acknowledgment that changes have occurred; McKerrow's, originally
published by Oxford University Press in 1927, was reprinted the following
year (and often since) with “a few corrections and small
additions,” but without any specification of what was altered.
Knowing what happened to these works over their lifetimes may at the least
satisfy curiosity. If Bowers and McKerrow were right about the usefulness of
bibliographical analysis, it may also help us understand better both the
books and their authors.
