University of Virginia Library

One of the peculiarities in the historical development of descriptive bibliography has been the small attention paid to paper. Since paper and inked type-impressions are the two principal physical ingredients of a book and since paper is the one which gives a book its most obvious physical characteristics (shape, size, weight, bulk), it would seem natural for a description of paper to occupy a prominent position in any description of a book. Yet the majority of descriptive bibliographies of the past make no mention of paper, except the indirect references afforded by an indication of format or leaf measurement. Those that do include some description of paper generally provide no more than a few words, such as "Wove paper, unwatermarked" or "Printed on white wove paper."[1] Some, like Fred H. Higginson's A Bibliography of the Works of Robert Graves (1966), offer bulk measurements and careful descriptions of watermarks. And occasionally a bibliography which does not give particular attention to paper recognizes its usefulness for analysis and identification, as when Karl Yost distinguishes the first printing of Millay's Renascence by the "AGM Glaslan" water-mark[2] or when Donald Gallup says of Eliot's The Dry Salvages, "Late copies of the first impression are printed on slightly thicker paper without the watermark adelphi."[3] But it is safe to say that most descriptive bibliographies — including many classic ones — make no attempt to record the nature of the paper used in the books under examination.

There are several reasons for this situation. In the first place, the bibliographical interest in type-impressions has tended to deflect bibliographers' attention from the paper on which those impressions appear. It was natural that early bibliographers should have regarded type-impressions as the more promising field for analysis, since there are many immediately apparent impressions on every page and since the possibilities for variation in their arrangement, in the design of individual letters, and in the damage suffered by individual types are infinite. Because the nineteenth-century incunabulists found the analysis of type faces to be an effective tool in the identification of printers and the classification of editions, a concise description of type faces became a standard part of their descriptions of the books. Following in this tradition, bibliographers of Renaissance books have discovered important information about the printing of the books through elaborate analysis of typography and damaged types — information which, in turn, has a bearing on the establishment of texts. Furthermore, the natural interest in the text of a book serves in itself to call attention to typographical features, for the eye in reading observes the type-impressions more directly than the paper. As a result, misprints, broken types, or other typographical peculiarities which may serve to distinguish issues, states, or impressions are noticed and reported more frequently than the distinguishing features of paper. Given the historical evolution of analytical bibliography, descriptive bibliography, and editing, it is not difficult to see why typographical evidence has entered into descriptive bibliographies to a larger extent than have details about paper.[4]

Another factor is the tradition of book collecting out of which descriptive bibliography grew. Some descriptive bibliographies—aimed primarily at collectors — have concentrated on those points which distinguish first impressions (or states or issues of first impressions). In the case of books issued in publishers' bindings or casings, one result has been an emphasis on the description of bindings and endpapers. Since publishers frequently do not bind all copies of an impression at one time but instead bind small batches as required, variant states of bindings are common occurrences, especially on nineteenth-century books; when priority can be established, collectors are often concerned with knowing the characteristics by which the earliest copies can be identified. The upshot is the absurd — but extremely common — situation in which a bibliographer describes the endpapers of a book, the

binders' leaves, or the inserted advertisements in great detail, without ever mentioning the sheets on which the main text of the book is printed.

In addition to these reasons for the neglect of paper, there is the simple one of ignorance: bibliographers have not known what to say about paper. They have generally been able, of course, to distinguish between laid and wove, to use the direction of the chainlines for assistance in determining format, and to compare the general characteristics of each leaf for identifying cancels.[5] But when it came to a description of paper in its own right, they could produce little more than a three-word phrase such as "white laid unwatermarked" — and even that, when included at all, was often inserted in a mechanical fashion, with seemingly little notion of the reasons for doing so. Paper-making is a complex field with an immense technical literature,[6] and any bibliographer who is not also a specialist in the study of paper may be expected to feel somewhat uncomfortable in confronting the task of describing it. The situation is analogous to that faced by the bibliographer in describing typography: he may be able to utilize evidence from type for analysis without being able to say much directly about the type, owing to a lack of technical knowledge and vocabulary. But, since bibliographers historically have examined type faces more often than paper, their knowledge of types, however fragmentary, is generally greater than their knowledge of paper.

Nevertheless, many bibliographers have harbored a lingering uneasiness over this neglect, for in the back of their minds are always the classic examples of the use of paper evidence. As early as 1908, W. W. Greg discovered the false dating of the Pavier quartos of Shakespeare through a study of their watermarks;[7] in 1934 John Carter and Graham Pollard exposed the Wise forgeries by analyzing the ingredients

of the paper;[8] and, most recently, Allan Stevenson has conclusively dated the so-called "Constance Missal" by comparing the states of the watermarks in it with occurrences of those watermarks in other books.[9] These are the spectacular achievements, but during the last thirty years there have also been several encouraging indications that increasing attention is being directed toward the description of paper as a routine part of bibliographical investigation. In 1942 A. T. Hazen said, in his introduction to A Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press, "I have paid special attention to the paper on which the books and Detached Pieces are printed; possibly to some people the development of this method will be the most interesting part of the book" (p. 10); and he proceeded, in the first entry, to prove that the thick-paper copies of Gray's Odes (1757) were printed in 1790 or later (pp. 24-29). Then in 1949 Fredson Bowers, in his Principles of Bibliographical Description, recommended that a paragraph on "Typography and Paper" be a standard part of a description (pp. 444-446);[10] a decade later two outstanding bibliographies appeared which included separate paragraphs on paper in each entry — Philip Gaskell's John Baskerville: A Bibliography (1959) and Allan Stevenson's Catalogue of Botanical Books in the Collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, Volume II (1961). And during the last two decades Stevenson, in many essays, has singlehandedly evolved a methodology for the bibliographical analysis of paper and has demonstrated the uses to which that analysis can be put.

There can by this time be no doubt that a bibliographer's routine examination of a book is deficient if it does not include an analysis of paper as well as of type-impressions. The descriptive bibliographer is then faced with the question of how much of the information turned up in such analysis ought to be recorded in a descriptive bibliography. If a bibliography is regarded simply as a handbook for the identification of particular impressions or states, then only those facts would be reported which serve to distinguish impressions or states — the usual practice in the past. But if a bibliography is to take on its proper

function and serve as a history of the forms in which an author's works have appeared and thus as a partial history of the book trade, details about paper become an important part of the descriptions, whether or not they furnish "points" for the recognition of impressions or states. The usefulness of paper evidence and the description of paper, though separate matters, are obviously related. As more descriptive bibliographers take seriously the responsibility of furnishing careful descriptions of paper, the store of information amassed in this way will become correspondingly more valuable as an aid to further investigation; conversely, progress in the bibliographical analysis of paper can only be slow if bibliographers, whenever they examine a book, do not contribute to that store of information by recording the characteristics of the paper as they observe them.

It should go without saying, in other words, that a descriptive bibliography, if it is adequately to describe certain books as physical objects, is obligated to include some description of the paper used in those books. But bibliographers have no place to turn for detailed instructions about which features to record, how to present them, and how to vary the treatment so as to preserve the overall proportions of the description. A standard procedure for these matters is desirable, both to insure balanced coverage in the recording of information and to facilitate later reference to the information. The present state of research on paper — though much work remains to be done — is sufficiently advanced that it does not seem premature to begin thinking about such a procedure. I shall attempt, in the pages that follow, to draw together some of the previously formulated techniques for the description of paper and to make a few preliminary suggestions for presenting the material in a descriptive bibliography.