University of Virginia Library

II

As Tanselle notes, indexes devoted to bibliography are not the only sources:

It is true that bibliographical articles will be found under author headings in indexes of literature such as MLA and MHRA, along with articles devoted to biography, criticism, etc. And one might wonder

whether this is not as it should be: whether most articles have an author focus, and whether most users of indexes have an author interest.

But both indexes have sections devoted to bibliographical topics which have no author focus:

• MLA: General Literature and Related Topics: V. Bibliographical
• MHRA: Bibliography (including sub-divisions Binding; Book Design and Illustration; Book Production, Printing, and Textual Studies; Collecting and the Library).

MHRA in fact goes one better in providing a second entry in the Bibliography section for articles also entered in the author sequence; e.g. 'A Problem of textual transmission in the typescripts of Women in Love' appears both under Twentieth Century—Authors—D. H. Lawrence and under Bibliography—Book Production, Printing, and Textual Studies. This facility—being able to search an index from an author point of view and a bibliographical point of view—constitutes a marked advantage over other indexes.

Among the five comprehensive indexing services (see Summary Table at the end of this article) MLA and MHRA differ very little in their coverage of Library, PBSA and SB. MHRA indexes slightly fewer articles because of its careful application—perhaps too careful—of the 'English' criterion: the one item excluded from SB is 'English editions of French Contes de fées attributed to Mme D'Aulnoy'.

Where the two indexes differ is in their coverage of BC: whereas MHRA applies the same criteria as it applies to the other three, MLA indexes only the most obvious of the articles and omits manifestly eligible notes, like 'Swinburne's Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866)'. MLA also indexes nothing from Part 4, though it was not published particularly late (BHI was able to index it in issue 4 of 1974); and MLA for 1975 repairs none of the omissions.

Tanselle underestimates MHRA when he writes 'A selection of English and American items can be located in the "Bibliography" section' (p. 169): even at the time of his writing it provided something more than a 'selection', and today it constitutes the best coverage for Anglo-American bibliography. MHRA has the advantage over MLA in its greater coverage and its dual entries. It has the incidental advantage, too, in being much more pleasant to use, being better laid out, in larger type, on more substantial paper and better printed. But one great advantage that MLA has is that in recent years it has appeared as much as two years ahead of MHRA. (It is reported that additional resources are to be devoted to the compilation of MHRA, so that delays for future volumes may be reduced.) In the long run MLA will also presumably

have the edge in that its file is machine-readable and therefore capable of cumulation and manipulation for individual purposes.

Nonetheless, the fact is that taken individually either MLA or MHRA is superior to any of the other three indexes which cover all four of the major Anglo-American bibliographical periodicals. (Whether the continued existence of both is justified is a question outside my brief.)