:: :: University of Virginia Library

In 1966, the correspondence files of the Macmillan Company of New York were presented to the New York Public Library. Had a similar, simple arrangement been followed in disposing of the vast archive of Macmillan & Company of London, the story just recounted would be less interesting, but the convenience to scholarship would be infinitely greater than it now is. In the broadest and most charitable sense, scholars must be grateful that a correspondence file of such importance and magnitude has been made more generally accessible in public collections. We can take some consolation from the fact that a public sale, which would have dispersed the materials from Texas to Timbuctoo, was forestalled, but, clearly, the decisions taken regarding the London archive have in a very real sense violated a major collection of primary documents. Imagine for the moment the scholarly significance of so extensive an archive retained intact, properly housed, preserved, and catalogued, and fully indexed, calendared, and crossreferenced so that complete retrieval by subject, author, and chronology was instantly achievable. The collection could then have been used by the widest possible assortment of scholars in a dozen fields of pursuit. Dispersed to four libraries on two sides of the Atlantic, and stripped of its chronological sequence, the Macmillan archive can never again be consulted as a unified historical record.

All too little has been said about the specific textual significance of the Macmillan papers. To the bibliographer, their special interest must inevitably reside in those documents which in any way touch upon the text of a given author. Even without a detailed examination of the uncatalogued archive, it is possible to anticipate material which would be bibliographically crucial in the reciprocal correspondence files which discuss matters of emendation and revision. Correspondence with printers confirming these points, cancel orders, invoices for type corrections charged to authors, surviving proof (especially corrected), printers' copies of manuscripts, stock reports, even binding details which might assist in establishing priorities — all are documents which might illuminate or elucidate the text by providing direct or indirect evidence to the bibliographer which reinforces the legal, commercial, and general aspects of bibliography that is the strength of the whole collection.

The archives of Macmillan & Company offer an interesting example of the care that must be maintained in preserving, cataloguing, and disposing of important manuscript documents. Through an unfortunate comedy

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of errors, for which no one was really responsible, the archive has been disengaged, dismembered, and dispersed, making it virtually impossible ever to reassemble it in its original state. The loss is both practical and historical, for the fragmentation of the collection violates the continuity that it once possessed. The handling of the Macmillan archive, in this age of relative bibliographical sophistication, provides its own moral that should serve as a warning to both scholars and publishers of the priority of claim which the preservation of primary documents must be given. To those scholarly explorers concerned with surveying the vast tracts of uncharted territories, the literary dark continents, of the nineteenth-century, Simon Nowell-Smith offers wise counsel in the conclusion of his new book on Victorian copyright (p. 105): "Move quickly":

The intricacies of international law are fully documented even though bibliographers may not have fully studied the documents. But the documents vital to the historian of nineteenth-century publishing, such as survive, are fast being destroyed or dispersed. . . . It would be regrettable if other Victorian records of the kind were to be allowed to disappear or to disintegrate. Time for the bibliographer is running out.