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Historical Grist for the Bibliographical Mill
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by
Edwin Wolf, 2nd
American historical bibliography is still in its infancy-analytically speaking. Except in the field of the editing of manuscripts, as witness the textual studies of Body and Labaree, who incidentally never questioned the validity of the text of only a single copy of any printed work, there has been little textual criticism in depth of the works of an extra-literary American writer. (John Dewey: The Early Works [Southern Illinois University Press, 1969—] is a notable exception.) In the 1968 Studies in Bibliography Tanselle wrote an excellent historico-critical article on "The Descriptive Bibliography of American Authors." He noted that "In the United States attention was first given to the statesmen," and he cited bibliographies of Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington and Franklin published from 1886 to 1889. At this point the curtain came down on statesmen and has not since gone up. Miller's soon-to-appear Franklin is a bibliography of imprints and only overlaps writings insofar as the printer published his own works which, happily, he did with gusto. Except for Eames's Smith section in Sabin, Holmes's Mathers and Skeel's Webster, works which admirable as they are attempted no collation of known copies to record such recondite variants as must exist, Tanselle mentioned no other historico-literary or purely historical bibliographies which he rated higher than enumerative compilations or checklists. There were uncounted literary Americans who were treated in a manner ranging, in his judgment, from excellent to unspeakable.
Let me cite some examples. As I noted in an article in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society (1969), the variants of the proof copy of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence have not yet appeared in print. Nearer to home, if anyone has straightened out the editions and issues of the 1620 Declaration of the State of the Colony
I mentioned in the same article the major textual changes in two issues of that important Revolutionary play, John Leacock's Fall of British Tyranny. In 1798 at Petersburg, Virginia, there was printed Robert Munford's Collection of Plays and Poems. In the Library Company we have one complete copy and a fragment consisting only of the plays, The Candidates and the Patriots. A comparison of these shows that sheets C and N were completely reset. That fact is not recorded in the 1949 preliminary checklist of Petersburg imprints issued under the auspices of this and other Virginia institutions. I cannot tell you if this resulted in textual variants, but I submit if the fact of reprinting had been noted in a first edition of Hawthorne, we would have heard about it. by now.
From every point of view the Columbian Magazine, later the Universal Asylum, is one of the most important 18th-century American periodicals, as Mott is my witness. The articles which appear in it are of literary, historical and scientific importance. The engraved plates which illustrate it are among the best and most interesting series of early American prints, as Middendorf is my witness. In the bibliography at the end of Richardson's 1931 History of Early American Magazines, he stated: "Some numbers passed through a second edition requiring a resetting of the types." What numbers no one since has bothered to record. The Columbian Magazine is not as fashionable as the London Magazine. Bibliographically, we seem to be Anglophilic before 1800 and after that date jingoistically Yankee.
To return to the Columbian Magazine, the fact is that the issues from September, 1786, through February, 1787, were reprinted apparently to meet the demand for back numbers as the success of the periodical became assured. The pagination in the two printings is not quite identical, so that references to pages can be confusing. Furthermore, in July, 1787, two leaves were cancelled and the substitutes were printed with the supplement at the end. Sometimes the cancelling leaves were bound as intended, sometimes they were not. Their existence has not been noted. Although a number of collations of the magazine exist, no two seem to agree on the proper number of plates and none describes adequately the inserted advertisements, one of which depicts the earliest American portrait of Shakespeare. But this is not the only neglected early American magazine. Has anyone seen a bibliographical study in respectable detail of any? Yet, they are being filmed and reprinted from any old copy with gay abandon, perfect or not as chance decrees.
Talking of pictures, there are few more sanctified names in ornitholoical illustration than Audubon. One might have thought that someone would have recorded what is apparent at a glance, that there are two states of some of the lithographs in the first American, the first octavo, edition of the Birds. In one state the titles are in roman letters, in the other in cursive script. What this means in the publishing history of the set, I do not know, but surely there is some priority and some history behind the differences.
A much greater problem was created by one of the most popular and most common of all official publications of early western exploration, Emory's Notes of his expedition from Leavenworth to San Diego, printed in Washington in 1848. Wagner-Camp simplified the situation by describing three forms of the work: a Senate printing, called "the first issue of the first edition" with Emory's rank given as "Lieut.
For instance, I have found three printings of the first sheet and multiple printings of others, including major differences at one place caused by the addition of a letter from the west which arrived during the course of printing. In a few copies sheets from the Senate or House edition, the same except for headlines, have been mixed in the binding. The lithographic plates were a major feature of the work. For some three different lithographers made stones of the same subject, and some of the scenes were executed on as many as five different stones. Once upon a time I began to try to make some order out of this vast confusion. After looking at a score of copies I found that I was only confusing myself. I have abandoned the effort until I have time and a collating machine at my disposal. What is amazing is that with all the possible combinations and permutations of text and plates not a word, except the simplistic statement in Wagner-Camp, has crept into bibliographical literature. Yet, in terms of number of copies printed, and Emory-Abert report was one of the biggest bestsellers of its day.
This concern of mine has been very expensive for the Library Company. Our information about variations has come from a comparison of presumptive duplicates. We sell our duplicates, as I hope you are all aware; we keep our differing copies, as any good library should. And I am talking about gross differences: variant titles, reprinted sheets or pages, the adding or substracting of text, and, of course, wholly separate editions. For our Parke-Bernet sale early last year I noted that there were two printings of the New Testament of Aitken's Bible of 1781-82. The earlier bore the address in the imprint: "opposite the Coffee-House, Front Street"; the later: "Three Doors above the Coffee-House, in Market-Street." Aitken moved to the second location in 1781 while the book was being printed; all copies of the general title, dated 1782, bear the Market Street address. Our rebound duplicate containing the earlier New Testament fetched an amazing $13,000 at the sale. The same auction house later sold another copy in mismatched contemporary bindings for less than half that price, and Goodspeed's not long after offered another one in matching bindings for only slightly more. Neither mentioned which New Testament was present.
Perhaps, our bibliographical virtue was rewarded. On the other hand we have turned up more variations, hidden under a single entry in bibliographics old and very new, than we would have dreamed of. These could not, therefore, be sold and turned into that every satisfying kind of new-purchase-money. In James Murdock's play, The Politicians, Philadelphia, 1798, there is an added "Editor's Note" on a page inserted between A1 and A2 giving valuable information concerning the writing of the piece, and the final line of the text was removed in one issue. For some reason in William Barton's anonymous Observations on the Trial By Jury, Strassburg, Pennsylvania, 1803, two notes were reset on pages 11 and 14. A much more important change took place in Benjamin Smith Barton's Fragments of the Natural History of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1799. Leaf C2 contains a section on birds resident in Pennsylvania. On the basis of additional, later information Barton updated the original material, apparently five or six years after the work was first issued, and the revised version was printed as a cancellans, quite obviously in a different and later type. James Cheetham's violent political attack, A Narrative of the Suppression by Col. Burr, Of the History of the Administration of John Adams, New York, 1802, has so many sheets which exist in different printings that there must be a history of unusual publication behind the changes. I note only that, in what seems to be the second printing of p. 11, Cheetham left out the words: "the wretched heralds of his will" to describe Burr issuing his mandates to his political tools. For no apparent reason sheet A of William Griffith's Washington funeral Oration, Trenton, 1800, was reprinted to add "(At the Request of The Committee" to the indication of the prayer at the end, and to eliminate "of Arrangement" from the denomination of the Committee on p. 2.
Let me continue with a sample of the multiplicity of variations, and a tiny sample I can assure you it is. On page 139 of Anthony Benezet's Some Historical Account of Guinea, Philadelphia, 1771, a highly significant change was made in the wording of his suggestion that all slaves be freed. At first he wrote that they shall be declared free "after serving so long as may appear to be equitable"; then he added two lines to make the phrase read: "after serving so long as shall be adequate to the money paid, or the charge of bringing them up, which may be decided by courts of justice." Since this is a work of major importance in the history of the anti-slavery movement, I would consider that recognition of the two issues is of more than minor interest.
Government documents are a jungle unto themselves, as the Emory-Abert volume indicates. Unless they happen to be the Declaration of
It is these later reprints of which I speak. What I believe to be the second printing bears the undated imprint of Richard Folwell, No. 33, Carter's Alley. It was probably printed in 1798. It contains, as did the first printing, a two-page table of contents of the first session only. We have found two inexplicable printings of pages 3 to 6. When Folwell in 1799 issued Volume IV of The Laws of the United States, from his new address, No. 63, North Front-Street, he included as many copies of the Carter's-Alley first session as he had left, and then reprinted it using the Front-Street address. Copies exist with or without the two-page session index, but a volume index was issued. We are not finished. When Matthew Carey published another edition of Volume IV of The Laws in 1803, he had Folwell supply him with the first session, which he did with a third address, at William Penn's Head, No. 23, Strawberry-street, Corner of Trotter's Alley. This incomplete information comes from only two copies of the separate second edition, two copies of the 1799 Laws, and one of the 1803 Laws. Imagine what a thorough examination of many more copies would turn up! Needless to say, there is no hint of Folwell's successive editions in bibliographical literature.
We shall jump back in time a moment to emphasize the haphazard nature of all these findings. Some years ago I bought for myself a copy of what I believe to be the first book of Jewish authorship, excepting, of course, The Bay Psalm Book, printed in America. It was the then-unrecorded Wonderful, and most Deplorable History of the Later Times of the Jews by, and so stated on the title, Joseph ben Gorion (also known as Josippon), printed at Boston by John Allen for Nicholas Boone in 1718, or so at least the imprint reads. The chronicle of Josippon, the 11th edition of the Encylopedia Britannica will inform any reader, is not by the better-known Flavins Josephus - Wing,
Joseph ben Gorion's work was not known to Dr. Rosenbach, but he did record in his American Jewish Bibliography and reproduced the title of a 1719 edition of an epitome of the honest-to-goodness Flavius Josephus, printed at Boston by S. Kneeland for N. Buttolph. It was not photographed for the Readex cards, because the American Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis is quite a distance from Worcester, so the present location was not known. Shipton-Mooney described a variant copy at the American Antiquarian Society, lacking some leaves, printed by S. Kneeland for B. Eliot. Evans 2226 and Dr. Rosenbach went on to describe a second American edition of the real Josephus of 1721, the entry based on an advertisement of Daniel Henchman in a Boston 1723 Westminster Confession of Faith. No copy of such an edition is presently known, and I believe that it was still another variant of the 1719 printing with Henchman's name given as the bookseller.
Nonetheless and notwithstanding, Readex reproduced the imperfect American Antiquarian Society copy of the 1718 Joseph ben Gorion, and Shipton-Money recorded it, as the 1721 Josephus, the latter stating that it had been filmed from the Boston Public Library copy. How mixed up can one be? To make things more complicated Shipton-Mooney and Readex did microprint under a supplementary number (it is also Bristol B627) the Huntington Library copy of the Joseph ben Gurion, calling it Josephus. It has a defective imprint. The problem is further confused in that all known copies — my now two (of which one is imperfect), the Boston Public Library's, the Huntington's, with a small piece missing from the lower corner of the title, and the American Antiquarian's, lacking the title and with a few following leaves defective — there are leaves at the end, an integral part of the last sheet, and a page of advertisement dated 1722. The book is a triumph of bad printing. Types change from larger (34 lines to a page) to smaller (38 lines to a page) not only within a forme, but on the same page. Since this was the reprint of an English text, the title is an integral part of the first sheet with the prefatory material and the beginning of the text. What Allen's printing problems were, I cannot guess. I can only believe that the bookseller Boone had trouble with him or his market, began his enterprise in 1718, but did not issue it until 1722. What is the story?
Shifting to another aspect of American life, let me remark that by virtue of its history and by the steady accumulations of the 19th century the Library Company has a major collection of black history material. Thanks to a Ford Foundation grant we are now cataloguing the hundreds of relevant pamphlets which library values of the past relegated to limbo. Many of these appear in the Library of Congress catalogue or that of the Schomberg collection of the New York Public Library, some in the bibliographical works of Work or Dumond. None reveals the differences we have found by comparing multiple copies.
Francis Lieber's anonymous No Party Now, But All For Our Country, Philadelphia, 1863, exists in two completely different printings, although there is no statement of that fact in the pamphlet itself. The Way to Attain and Secure Peace by William D. Kelley, a Philadelphia anti-slavery Republican and long-time congressman, who became so staunch an advocate of a protective tariff that he was nicknamed "Pig Iron" Kelley, was printed in Washington in 1862. That it went through two editions became obvious from a glance, although no catalogue listing so informs us. An address by a Negro, William T. Catto's Semi-Centenary Discourse, Philadelphia, 1857, exhibits the kind of variation which is discussed in detail in the BAL; it was published in dark brown cloth with a gilt title on the front cover and in printed wrappers. A curious permutation was found in copies of Robert Dale Owen's Future of the North-West, Philadelphia, 1863. In one issue the printed wrapper does not bear an imprint, but there is a colophon on the last page of text; in the other there is a wrapper imprint, but no colophon at the end of the text. There are two issues of Felix Kirk Zollicoffer's State of Political Parties, [Washington, 1856,] one with an advertisement for The Weekly American Organ on the last page, and one without.
I make no claim that these differences are significant. I cannot be sure that they are not. The examples above were haphazardly pulled from literally hundreds of similar unrecognized, unrecorded and disregarded anomalies. As we have become aware of 18th-century press numbers — even if we are not yet quite sure how to use them — so we should be alert to the fact that two copies of a 16-page pamphlet of the 19th century, although ostensibly issued at the same place by the same printer in the same year, may represent two states, issues or editions. The new STC will painstakingly list all manner of issues and editions formerly lumped under a single entry. The BAL has routinely picked up and noted bibliographical "points." Sabin, Evans, Shipton-Mooney and Bristol have just as routinely ignored them. T'ain't fair!
But is it important? In orthodoxy it depends upon whose ox is gored. Bibliography has never hesitated to record the trivial merely because it was trivial. Neither enumerative nor analytical bibliographers have made value judgments. In practice, it is sometimes a later edition of a deservedly forgotten work which has been spotlighted as the key to a certain facet of printing procedure. Theoretically, the motto of the bibliographer should be: "Nihil impressum me alienum."
Let me end by discussing a text which was important enough to make the Grolier and the Princeton American "100," John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. It was, before Paine's Common Sense, the single most popular pamphlet of the Revolution. There were seven American pamphlet editions within two years, and the Letters appeared contemporaneously in nineteen American newspapers from Boston to Savannah. An excellent article by Carl F. Kaestle on the public reaction to the work appeared in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society in 1968. In it he noted that the Letters were first printed in Goddard's Pennsylvania Chronicle, but that Dickinson continued to revise thereafter. The author's final word, he told James Otis, was the version in Hall and Sellers' Pennsylvania Gazette. It was these latter printers who issued it first in pamphlet form. That sounds great. Print the text of the first edition and you are home safe.
I have not studied the text of the Farmer's Letters, but I have worked over some Dickinson manuscripts and seen many more, as well as several of his own copies of his own writings. If ever there was a second-thinker, it was Dickinson. I find it difficult to believe that with the opportunities presented by subsequent printings, he did not make further alterations. The printing chronology gave "the penman of the revolution" ample time for his usual worry about the right words in the right order. The last letter appeared in the Chronicle on February 15, 1768, and in the Gazette two days later. Hall and Sellers' first edition was advertised on March 17, their second on June 16, and the Bradfords' third not until October 17. Dickinson's statement that the Gazette text was to be preferred was made on January 25, 1768, even before the last installment had appeared. Well, who knows what? has any attempt been made to find out if, indeed, changes were made from the first edition to the second, and from the second to the third? Perhaps, there were none, and, perhaps, Bernard Bailyn was textually safe printing the Farmer's Letters from a single copy of the first edition available to him. On the other hand, maybe he was not.
The tradition of a wall separating bibliography as applied to literary works from bibliography as applied to historical or political works
The original address began with these remarks:
Sometime in the year 1939 I, the little boy cataloguer in the back room, began to compile a catalogue of English Plays to 1700 from the rich stock of the Rosenbach Company. That was what can only be described in Renaissance terms as the Petrarchian age of American analytical bibliography. The enumerative bibliographers had and were doing works of quality. McKerrow and Greg were advancing the science — or is it an art? — suggesting more accurate standards of description and offering a more definitive terminology. Jackson had just entered on his new career at Harvard and was correcting the proofs of his model Pforzheimer catalogue. McManaway, assistant to the director of the Folger Library, had just completed his variorum edition of The Faerie Queene. Bowers did not yet have tenure at the University of Virginia, and Hinman was still working on his thesis there. The rather meager literature of such analytical bibliography as existed was available to me, so that it was no surprise to discover
Solemnly, painstakingly and without the aid of mirrors I compared dozens of what Dr. R had thought to be other copies of the same book. Solemnly and painstakingly I described all the observed press corrections in the catalogue which appeared in 1940. If primitive art be collected for its naivete, this catalogue should be sought as the first in the history of bookselling which recorded in an innocent fashion the wave of the future.
I was so exhilarated by my findings in the process of writing that catalogue and its successor, English Poetry to 1700, that I decided to be a pundit. I wrote about all kinds of things like two-skeleton methods, and inner and outer formes, and headlines as evidence, quoting my fellow nouveaux arrivés, Bowers and Hinman. You must remember that all the modern aids like press numbers, Hinman collators, time and motion studies in retrospect, the identification of compositors and pressmen and Studies in Bibliography were still in utero. For the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America I wrote, and it published, a book-shattering article, "Proof Corrections in 16th and 17th-Century Quartos." It has disappeared from the literature of bibliography, because, like those superb 17th-century treatises on squaring the circle, it just was not so.
Not discouraged in my pursuit of academic accolade, I turned to textual criticism. What does a bookseller's cataloguer do about a clutch of 17th-century manuscript commonplace books of poetry. Gee, gosh and golly, I thought, nobody has really looked at the poems which circulated in personal collections years before they were solidified in print. My soundest scholarly article, a mélange of careful collation, oral transmission and Freud on error, was published in PMLA. It dealt with the transmission of the text of "If shadows be a picture's excellence," the single most popular poem of the early Stuart period, judged by the frequency of its appearance in contemporary commonplace books and printed miscellanies. That surge into uncharted waters resulted in an invitation to address the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia in 1949 on "The Textual Importance of Manuscript Commonplace Books of 1620-1660." That survives only in mimeographed form on perishable/impermanent paper.
As I disappeared, like Achilles, from the arena of analytical bibliography and textual criticism, the whole field blossomed. At first, I read the articles which appeared in the trade journals, but gradually
Just then the Hinman collator made possible another giant stride for bibliography. More quickly and more accurately than the human eye the machine was able to signal with a flicker the slightest difference between two states of the same setting of type. First Folios, the plays of Dryden, a whole carload of first, second, third and subsequent editions of American authors have undergone the scrutiny of textualists. Not the smallest sign of the deterioration of a letter nor the wear of a stereotype plate has escaped them. Page after page of variants has appeared in one journal or another. Multi-volume editions of "Works," based on this clinical analysis, are being published. Following the lead of "Daniel Boone" Bowers, Todd, Tanselle, Bruccoli and others are civilizing the textual wilderness. Lest anyone fear that this is a Spironian attack on intellectuals, I hasten to state that I admire scientific color standards and illustrated binding definitions, that I stand in awe of the broken question mark. I, too, wonder what these road signs of printing and publishing mean, and whither they can lead us toward knowledge. My complaint is not what the novus ordo seculorum has done, but what it has not done. Not being a certified member of academe, I am able to skip gazelle-like from literature to science to history to art. I realize that it is not quite so easy for the English Department to tell the History Department what to do.
Notes
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