4. Book-Trade and Paper-Trade Journals
Other industries connected with book production, in addition to
printing, have their journals, and the listings in Ulrich and Küp under
the headings "Book Trade," "Paper and Papermaking," and "Ink," for
example, show how numerous they are. But there are fewer journals in
these areas with significant bibliographical contributions, because there are
practically no scholarly journals in English exclusively
devoted to publishing or papermaking—the journals in these fields
tend
to be limited to trade publications more than is the case with printing.
Nevertheless, their importance should not be underestimated.
Publishers' Weekly (1872- ), in particular, during its long
run
has published a great many historical articles, both on special aspects of
publishing and on individual firms, and almost no study of American
publishing can be undertaken without recourse to its pages. It is fortunate
that—aside from its own semi-annual indexes—it has been
covered in
IBZ since 1911, with some of these years duplicated in
Library Literature (1921- ) and in the
Readers'
Guide (1929-53, 1961- ). The English counterpart,
Publishers' Circular (1837- ), now called
British
Books, has not been so well treated, for one must consult three
indexes in order to cover the journal from 1925 on (
IBZ for
1925-29 and
Library Literature from
1933 to the present, with
IBBB filling the gap); and
Whitaker's
Bookseller (1858- ) has only had a tiny fraction of its long
run included in
IBZ. Of the several nineteenth-century
American book-trade periodicals which contain useful information, Sabin's
American Bibliopolist (1869-77) is, surprisingly, indexed in
Poole; but such other important magazines as the
American
Stationer (1873-1928) and
American Bookseller
(1876-92)
are not indexed at all. The leading journal of the antiquarian and
out-of-print trade is Sol Malkin's
Antiquarian Bookman
(1948-
), which frequently contains signed articles worth later reference, and it
is now (since 1955) indexed in
Library Literature. The only
publishing journal at present which seems something more than a trade
journal is Toronto's
Scholarly Publishing (1969- ), and the
relevant articles in it will presumably be listed in
SB.
Of the remaining fields related to the production of books, the paper
industry probably has the most publications, but only a few need to be
included in a selective list for bibliographers: Lockwood's Paper
Trade Journal (1872- ), the Paper-Maker and British Paper
Trade Journal (1891- ), and perhaps Direct
Advertising
(1912- ), as the leading trade periodicals for paper, and Hercules
Chemical Company's Paper Maker (1932- ), as the most
distinguished house organ, with numerous articles on the history of
individual paper mills. Other memorable journals could be named, such as
Paper World (1880-98), William Bond Wheelwright's
Paper & Printing Digest (1935-39), and particularly
Spalding's Quarterly (1923-39), with its historical studies of
watermarks.[23] But virtually all
material relating
to paper is conveniently listed in the excellent series of indexes called
Pulp and Paper Manufacture: Bibliography and Patents,
covering 1900-55 in five volumes and the years since 1955 in annual
volumes; although these volumes are primarily a guide to the technical
literature of the field, they do include, under the headings "History" and
"Watermarks," much out-of-the-way material of interest to
bibliographers.
[24] For the field of
bookbinding, one could cite
Bookbinding Magazine (1925-),
[25] and for ink the
American
Ink Maker (1923- ); and there are the trade journals for less
closely related fields, such as
Editor and Publisher (1901-
)
for newspaper publishing and
Printers' Ink (1888- ) for
advertising. But the indexing of such periodicals is practically nonexistent
in the standard indexes, and a specialized index which would pull the
relatively few articles of
bibliographical importance out of this mass of material would indeed be a
great contribution. All such trade journals, of course, constitute important
primary material for bibliographers studying the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, and anyone using them in this way would want to work
straight through the journals themselves; what a bibliographical index is
needed for is to segregate the small number of retrospective—if not
scholarly—articles from the large number concerned with current
matters.
