University of Virginia Library

I

The concept of ideal copy is central to descriptive bibliography, because it is the element that distinguishes bibliographical description from cataloguing: whereas a catalogue entry, regardless of its level of detail, exists to record a particular copy, a bibliographical description aims to provide a standard against which individual copies can be measured.[8] Thus the catalogue entry is tied to the physical features of a given copy, even if some of the features are actually post-publication imperfections of that copy. The bibliographical description, on the other hand, must be purged of such deficiencies of individual copies; it must be based on an examination of as much of the evidence as possible (that is, as many copies as possible), since there is no way to tell from the scrutiny of one or two or three copies how they compare to the edition as a whole without checking a considerably larger sample of that edition. Sometimes a thorough catalogue of a collection does make reference to additional copies outside the collection, but in doing so it is going beyond the function of a catalogue; and such a catalogue is particularly useful, for the very reason that a descriptive bibliography—being based on more evidence than a single collection can provide—has a broader usefulness than a catalogue. The bibliographical description rises above the limitations of a single copy by reporting what emerges as standard after an examination of multiple copies.

This much is widely understood and indeed seems elementary. The

difficulty arises in attempting to define more precisely the rationale for making decisions about what is abnormal or defective in a given copy and what is not. Some defects seem obvious, as when a leaf present in many copies is missing from another copy. But rarely are such matters as obvious as they may seem at first. Is it possible that the leaf was supposed to be canceled and that the presence of the leaf in some copies results from an oversight? Is it possible that the leaf was to be replaced with a cancel leaf, not present in the copies thus far examined? The answers to such questions can in some instances be deduced from the content of the text on this leaf and the adjacent leaves. But the principal evidence, of course, must come from still more copies. And if no other copies are extant, conclusive answers may not be possible. As is always the case with inductive investigation, what may seem clear at one stage may be shown to be incorrect when more instances are observed. Furthermore, when there are numerous differences among copies, no single surviving copy may be free of what the bibliographer concludes are deficiencies. Thus the ideal copy presented in the bibliographer's description may be an abstraction, for no such actual copy may be known to exist. The description is a historical reconstruction, based on the evidence of the extant copies; as such it is a hypothesis dependent on the bibliographer's judgment. But to say that raises more questions than it settles, questions that must be thought about if one is to understand what one is doing in setting up a bibliographical description.

The best point of departure is the matter of intention, which the concept of ideal copy is generally thought to entail: deciding that certain copies are anomalous is equated with deciding that they do not conform to what the producer of the edition intended. Greg, defining the aim of the descriptions in his Bibliography, says, "what I have in view is not any particular copy of a book, which may have its own imperfections or abnormalities, but a standard or ideal copy as it was designed and intended by its producer" (IV, cxlviii).[9] If only an imperfect copy is known, he adds, "I give the register of such a book in the fullest form that can be inferred from the existing evidence, with due warning of course of its possibly hypothetical character."[10] That the goal is the intended form of the book is reinforced by his explanation that his collation formulas represent "issue-registers" (the arrangement of the leaves as published) rather than "printing-registers" (the arrangement

as printed). He had been even more explicit in "A Formulary of Collation," where he equates "issue-formula" with the register of signatures defining "the make-up of the book . . . as it was meant to be issued" (p. 371). Thus when a printer uses the last leaf of the last gathering for the title, with the intention that the leaf will be placed first in the book as published, the bibliographer is to record the leaf in its intended place.[11] (Of course, for books that were sold in sheets and later bound to individual order, "binding-register" would sometimes be a more appropriate term than "issue-register.") Even if all copies examined by the bibliographer retain the leaf in its original position at the end, Greg was saying, the description would still place it at the beginning, for that is clearly its intended location, and the copies examined happen to have been anomalies.[12]

Bowers, in the standard definition of ideal copy, similarly makes the printer's intention the determining factor:

In the elaboration of the definition that follows, the producer's intention is again cited: The emphasis here is on the physical form of the book, on the order and completeness of the leaves[14] and not of their content. As Bowers points out, ideal copy does not imply "freedom from textual errors, misprints, variant uncorrected formes" and does not refer to "the quality of the text in any way as a criticism of the printer's final result." Nevertheless, textual considerations are not entirely irrelevant. A textual correction that results in a cancel leaf of course affects the physical structure of the book; but textual differences may exist that are not locatable through an alteration of the structure of the gatherings. Stop-press corrections may produce (and during the first two and a half centuries of printing routinely did produce) sheets containing various combinations of corrected and uncorrected formes, and books may be made up of various combinations of such sheets; no physical anomaly would call attention to the differences in text, which would be discoverable only through textual collation. Yet corrections or revisions of this kind are also encompassed in the concept of ideal copy. According to Bowers, while "ideal copy in its true sense of physical makeup is not affected," one would nevertheless "certainly choose the details of the corrected form to transcribe or note in one's description as the 'ideal' form, listing the other as a variant" (p. 114); the standards for ideal copy apply not only to the collation formula but also to the contents paragraph, "which should contain the contents in their most perfect state," including the correct form of variant catchwords, and the like. What Bowers is saying, in other words, is that the correctness of the text is an aspect of ideal copy to the extent that corrections were actually made within a given issue;[15] but errors that were not corrected do not prevent copies containing them from being ideal copies.

A principal difficulty in defining ideal copy therefore has to do with intention, for it is unreasonable to think that a printer's or publisher's intention is to produce errors, and yet the presence of errors—not corrected at any stage in the production of an issue of a book—is compatible with the concept of ideal copy. An analogy with editing—where another kind of intention figures—is instructive. Bowers, like Greg, points out that ideal copy may be "a purely hypothetical reconstruction" (p. 117).[16] One might therefore see a similarity between the descriptive bibliographer's usual concept of an ideal copy—a copy more nearly resembling the publisher's intention than any single extant copy may happen to do—and the scholarly editor's concept of a critical text—a text more accurately

reflecting the author's intentions than any single extant text may happen to do. There is an important difference, however. The critical editor's aim is to rectify errors in a text, whether or not they have ever been corrected in any previous edition; the editor's material is texts, which are arrangements of words and punctuation that happen to be given concrete embodiments in the form of printed editions. But the descriptive bibliographer's goal is to report the historical facts about an edition and not to perfect it or alter it beyond the latest point reached by those responsible for producing it; the bibliographer's material is the concrete embodiment of texts, not the texts themselves. Thus if all copies of an edition contain an obvious textual error, that error is a part of the ideal copy; but if some copies do not contain the error—either because a stop-press alteration rectified it during the course of printing or because the leaf or sheet containing the error was canceled and replaced with a corrected substitute after printing was completed—the description of the ideal copy would have to indicate the fact that the correction had taken place. The critical editor, on the other hand, is not limited by the fact that an error has not been corrected in documentary form, if its status as an error can be otherwise established. Both the bibliographer and the editor produce historical reconstructions; but the subject of the bibliographer's attention is a physical object, whereas the focus of the critical editor's attention is an abstraction. Critical editors must take the physical evidence into account, but it is of concern to them for what it reveals about the authority of particular readings, not for its own sake.[17]

One can see, therefore, that the introduction of the idea of intention into the definition of ideal copy is not without its difficulties. How it came about is easy enough to understand: when a leaf is missing, or a plate is inserted at the wrong point, or a canceled leaf remains alongside the cancel, the natural reaction is to say that these results were not intended—and that they are thus characteristics of aberrant or defective copies. But the recognition that something is unintended clearly provides no basis for saying that the intended form also exists (or once existed). If a given page in one copy of a book contains an obviously garbled text, one would not be inclined to jump to the conclusion that a corrected text exists in other copies, and one might even say that the matter is totally irrelevant to the determination of the ideal copy. But if another copy is located with the garbled text rectified by means of cancellation, ideal copy is certainly affected, because the description of the ideal copy would have to make reference to the cancel. Furthermore,

it is difficult to see how the situation would be any different if the correction had been made during the press run, though there would then be no cancel to draw one's attention to the textual alteration. In either case there is a physical difference among copies of a single issue: in one, the difference is of inked type-impressions only; in the other, it is that plus a change in the physical structure of a gathering. To make only one of these situations a factor in the determination of ideal copy, and the other one not, would be to insist on an artificial distinction and thus to trivialize the concept of ideal copy. As Bowers's discussion recognizes, stop-press alterations do affect ideal copy; defining "ideal" so as not to imply freedom from textual error does not mean that textual matters are to be ignored. If a printer corrects one error—either during the press run or by cancel—but in the process overlooks another on the same page, that remaining error is of course a part of the ideal copy; but where the alteration is in fact made, the altered form must be taken into account in thinking about the characteristics of the ideal copy. It is true that textual correctness is not relevant to ideal copy; but when textual differences actually exist between copies of an issue, determining which readings were the replacements (whether or not they were "corrections") is a necessary activity in describing the ideal copy for that issue. Authorial intention is beside the point; the question is not whether the printer's alteration brought the text into greater conformity with what the author intended but simply the determination of which reading the printer intended as the replacement. Intention is involved in ideal copy, then, only to the extent that alternatives to choose among exist in physical form in the issue as a whole. Which of two forms a printer intended as a replacement for the other is the bibliographer's business to ponder; but when only a single form was produced, the question of intention does not come up, even though some of the features of that form are not in fact what the printer intended.

If some of the differences among copies were created by the activity of individual owners or were caused in some other way after the time when the copies involved had left the hands of their producer, one could say that such differences were not intended by the producer. It could well happen, however, that some of these differences might actually be a fulfillment of the producer's intentions. Obviously if a leaf is lost from a book through rough treatment over the years, this loss is not a cancellation intended by the printer; but if some owner has a misplaced leaf moved to its correct location, this action carries out what the printer intended. Yet it is equally irrelevant to the bibliographer's concerns, for it is not a part of the production history of the book. Intention of the printer or publisher is therefore not really the most satisfactory

way of approaching the question of ideal copy. The crucial point—at least the first crucial point—is to distinguish those differences among copies attributable to the producer of the book from those not so attributable. The fundamental purpose of establishing such a concept as ideal copy, after all, is to segregate characteristics of a book that occurred during its production from those that occurred at some later time. There are further considerations that the concept leads to, but its basic function is to enable one to identify which features of a given copy of a book were present when the book was released or put on sale and which ones originated after that point. The intention of the printer or publisher of a book has nothing to do with the matter: unintended features may be present in copies as they are released, and intended features may be brought about later.[18] But the bibliographer, as a historian of the production of the book, must be interested in the former and is not concerned with the latter.[19]

What the bibliographer must decide, to put it another way, is which differences among copies constitute states and which result from the history of individual copies following their release from the publisher or printer.[20] In bibliographical terminology, a state refers to any part of a copy of a book that differs, at the time of such release, from the corresponding part of other copies, within the same issue or impression, as a result of an error or the correction of an error, or for any other reason

that causes the publisher not to call attention to the difference as a discrete publishing effort.[21] A state is one of the forms of a sheet or a casing available to a purchaser at the time of the release of individual copies; but it is by no means necessarily an intended form. States do often, it is true, originate in a printer's or a publisher's effort to correct an error discovered in previously printed, but not yet released, copies, and such corrected states are indeed intentional. But states can equally well derive from errors that occur during the process of production, making the later states less correct than the earlier. An omitted or a duplicated gathering, or a page with severe type damage along one margin, is clearly not an intended feature of a book; but a copy that reached the market in this condition could not be dismissed by the bibliographer, because this feature is a part of the production history of the copy. The number of copies involved cannot be the test, any more than intention can. Even if only one copy lacks a given gathering when put on sale, or shows type damage, that is still one of the states in which the book emerged from production; and if twenty copies of a book have by coincidence had identical leaves removed from them after their release, that curious situation has nothing to do with the production of the book, and those copies would not represent a state. Of course, the evidence of a single copy (or a very small number) is often difficult to interpret, and one might conclude on such evidence that a particular feature was not present when the copy was released, and yet might conclude differently if more copies exhibiting this feature were located; if, however, the nature of the evidence allows one to know, even from a single copy, that a feature was indeed present at the time the copy was released, one must take it into account somehow, even if one wishes to stress its insignificance.[22] The point is that the number of copies exhibiting a particular feature cannot by itself determine whether that feature qualifies for inclusion in a standard description. The primary decision for the bibliographer, therefore, is whether or not a given feature of a book is a product of its printing and publishing history. The decision is not a simple one: because intention and statistics are not determining factors, an obviously unintended feature observed in a single copy cannot automatically be ruled out as not constituting a state.

The concept of the ideal copy of an issue—though the term is usually expressed in the singular—must accommodate all the states of the issue. A single copy cannot be expected to contain all states, of course, but all the states must be a part of the description of an issue. The notion that a description of an ideal copy must be set up as a description of a single copy no doubt results from what is perceived as the practical necessity of choosing certain features—a particular title page, collation formula, list of contents, and so forth—for primary representation in the description. The only real necessity, however, when two versions of the same thing exist, is to describe one first, and there is no reason why the one presented first need be thought of as "primary" in any qualitative sense. In fact, the historical purpose of the description is best served by reporting—for any given feature that exists in two states—the first state first, followed by the second.[23] It is true that in some cases this

arrangement would mean that the less correct state would be reported first—but not always, for a first state is not always less "correct" than a second, since a state can result from accident as well as intention. And in any event, the presence of a less correct state of a given sheet in a copy of a book does not make that copy any less "ideal," because the copy still represents one of the forms in which the book was offered to the public. A state by definition relates only to one part of a book, such as a sheet, and not to a book as a whole; when several sheets are produced in variant states, it is possible for a particular copy of a book to have earlier states of some sheets and later states of others. Thus the description of variant states must be a part of a description of an issue or impression, and the "ideal" being described encompasses certain sets of alternatives. Although alterations to title pages often produce new issues because they identify a discrete publishing effort, some variations in title pages may produce only states; in such cases a description would have to provide two title-page descriptions, one labeled "first state" and one "second state." When variant states affect the collation formula or the contents paragraph, alternative accounts of the affected element can be reported; or when stop-press alterations result in variant formes, the various possibilities can be outlined. The important point to recognize is that the standard description, or ideal copy, of an issue must allow for the variations identified as states.[24] A different issue will be represented by a different ideal copy; but for any given issue, ideal copy is likely to embrace a set of alternatives.[25]

The most difficult problem, therefore, is not the mechanical one of setting up a description so as to accommodate different states but the prior question of how to decide which variations are in fact states and which are alterations resulting from the vicissitudes that a copy has endured after the time of its release. The latter must of course be recorded in the section of the description identifying the individual copies examined; that section constitutes the primary documentation on which the description is based, and peculiarities of particular copies must be mentioned there, so that readers can know what evidence the bibliographer surveyed. But the variations that can be classified as states—those occurring during the process of production—become part of the body of the description itself. Indeed, the purpose of the concept of ideal copy is to cause the bibliographer to think about this distinction; to put the matter concisely, ideal copy is concerned with those differences within an issue that can be regarded as states. It follows, to repeat two points not widely understood, that textual differences are to be included among the physical variations with which ideal copy is concerned; and that the producer's intention is relevant only when variations actually existed among the copies as they were issued, and then only to the extent that it may be of use in thinking about the order of those variations.

All these points inevitably lead to the central question: how one can possess the requisite physical evidence for knowing whether differences exist among copies of an issue, and then for deciding which of them occurred during the production of those copies and which occurred at later times in their histories. Naturally, one begins by looking at numerous copies, when they exist. Even though the number of copies exhibiting a given characteristic is not necessarily a criterion for classifying it as a state, one can in fact frequently decide that a certain characteristic appears too many times to be attributed to the independent action of individual owners. And of course, the inspection of multiple copies is necessary simply to locate what the points of variation are. But the process raises difficult questions. How can one know when all variations have been discovered? How many copies constitute a sufficient sample? May it not happen that all surviving copies, even when there are many of them, do not form a large enough proportion of the total

edition to serve as a reliable sample? If it is not feasible to see every copy of an issue (and generally it is not, either because they do not all survive or because the issue was too large to make tracking them all down a practicable undertaking), can the attempt to generalize about the issue as a whole be justified?[26] The first answer is to say that these questions can be asked about any inductive investigation; that, as one becomes expert through the process of investigation, one is in a position to make an informed judgment about the extent of the evidence required or the sufficiency of the obtainable evidence; and that careful generalization, based on cautious and responsible use of the located evidence, is valuable, even if it is later shown to be erroneous in certain respects. These points do of course apply to bibliographical research; but because descriptive bibliography is not always recognized as the branch of historical scholarship that it is, some further comment on these questions may help to clarify the nature of bibliographical descriptions.

Suppose, for instance, that one has examined four copies of a book, all of which have a dedication leaf at the end of the last gathering, presumably intended to be cut out and inserted among the other preliminaries in the first gathering. Does the seeming obviousness of the intention justify constructing a collation formula for the ideal copy indicating the insertion of this leaf into the first gathering? How could one be certain where in the gathering to indicate its insertion? If the leaf bore a special signature or a page number or some other guide to its intended location, would the case for placing it in the preliminaries be strengthened? If one looked at twenty-five, or fifty, copies of the book and still found all to have the dedication leaf at the end, would the question be affected? Would one's thinking about the matter be different depending on whether the book was issued in a publisher's casing or whether it was from an earlier period and was bound according to the wishes of individual owners? These questions illustrate why one has to consider whether the purposes of bibliographical description ever require that a printer's or publisher's intention take precedence over the historical fact of what actually happened. If (for the sake of argument) this hypothetical book was from the period of publisher's binding and if the entire issue was bound with the dedication leaf at the end, the bibliographer would have no justification for altering its position in describing the ideal copy, even if in fact this position was not the intended one. If the

book was from the period before publisher's binding (or from a later period but issued in sheets), one might more relevantly raise the question of intention, because the producer of the sheets would not necessarily have had control over the binding of any copies. Even so, if all copies were bound with the dedication leaf at the end, there would be little reason for presenting a standard description that differed from them—unless clear evidence existed to show that all the binders had disregarded the printer's binding specifications. In practice, of course, one can scarcely ever be in this omniscient position with regard to the issue as a whole. But the value of thinking about an extreme situation is that it may make clearer the framework within which more realistic situations need to be viewed. A standard description of a book is a historical generalization, rising above the idiosyncrasies of individual copies but resisting the temptation to substitute what should have been for what was. Perhaps there would be less need to make this point if "ideal" had not been the adjective in the generally accepted term.

In actual situations, much of the difficulty in distinguishing what the producer was responsible for from what later owners were responsible for arises from the fact that one does not have access to all the evidence. Even if one examines all surviving copies of a book, the portion of the original issue that one has not seen may still be sizable; making generalizations about the issue as a whole can therefore be an uncertain business. Acts of historical reconstruction must very often be based on something less than the full evidence and are thus dependent on the judgment of the historian in weighing such evidence as there is. Different historians may of course come to different conclusions, and more than one account may legitimately exist at the same time. Descriptive bibliographers must make numerous decisions in the process of interpreting the evidence of individual copies and constructing from it a generalized account. There are a great many variables that they must consider, such as the printing, binding, and publishing customs of the period, any external evidence bearing on the situation, and the number and nature of the surviving copies. So much inevitably depends on the learning and judgment of the bibliographer that it would be futile to attempt to set up detailed rules regarding ideal copy.

What is important, instead, is to have a clear idea of the rationale that should underlie specific decisions. Surely such a rationale must start from the premise that, while the production of a standard description is a creative activity, none of the points that go into it can be invented. Everything else follows from that. If a leaf is obviously missing, or an obvious typographical error is present, in all examined (or known) copies, one cannot invent a corrected state. But if tangible evidence

exists, one may then be legitimately faced with alternatives. It is then that one begins to weigh the various characteristics of the specific instance—the printing practice of the time, the number of copies seen, and so on. If a dedication leaf consistently appears at the end of the known copies of a book, one may still decide to note it in the description at the conventional location, if one has reason to believe that all the known copies are idiosyncratic—if few exist, for example, and if they were bound by individual owners. Under different circumstances, one might decide that the standard description should show the leaf in its position at the end—if, for example, a great many copies, all in publisher's binding, have been seen. In neither case is one inventing evidence: the dedication leaf exists. And in the first case one is not falsifying the evidence, for a standard description does not purport to be identical with any given copy; by noting the dedication leaf at its conventional place, one is expressing an informed and reasoned opinion that the evidence supports the choice of this position as the place where the dedication leaf would have appeared if the printer had had control over the binding. Printer's intention thus can play a role for books not issued in a binding or casing, but only when compelling evidence exists that the order of the leaves as bound is not the printer's intended order. Even so, it is important to have the description show the order as printed as well as the intended order of issue. And in other respects the printer's intention is irrelevant, for intention does not necessarily coincide with performance. Projecting what was true for the issue as a whole is not the same as projecting what was intended; both activities are of interest, but the bibliographer must keep the distinction clear and understand which governs the description of a so-called "ideal" copy. (In making this distinction one must remember, in other words, that leaves intentionally printed at one point for insertion at a different point constitute a special case: in books issued unbound their presence at the original location at the time of issue is not an error, as it would be in books issued in publisher's casing, and thus a bibliographer's decision to record both the proper position as well as the original position of such leaves is not an instance of correcting an error but simply a way of clarifying the nature of the issue.)

There are times, of course, when intention and actuality coincide; but if bibliographers are to have a firm understanding of what they are about, they must be prepared to deal with situations where the two do not coincide. All decisions regarding ideal copy must be reasoned ones; none can be automatic or mechanical. Less misunderstanding about ideal copy would probably have arisen if the status of descriptive bibliography as history had been better understood. Once one leaves the

security of describing individual copies and attempts to produce a standard description that will accommodate not only all examined copies but those not examined as well, one is engaging in the creative scholarship of historical interpretation. Responsible historical accounts do not depart from the facts, but they are more than assemblages of discrete facts; they bring the facts together in such a way as to reveal a meaning or order in them—not the meaning and order, because the facts may well, and probably will, support other interpretations. Such an account is thus necessarily hypothetical, but for all its lack of certainty it marks an important advance in understanding; even several conflicting (but responsible) accounts are more informative than the undigested facts. A description of a standard or ideal copy of a book, in other words, is "truer" than the description of any one copy, even though it rests to a greater degree on subjective judgment. Good descriptive bibliographies are normally more useful than catalogues because they are based on a qualified individual's reasoned assessment of the evidence relating to the edition or issue as an entity. When one focuses on the fact that a bibliographical description is a piece of historical scholarship, one can readily see that the standard copy or copies it describes cannot necessarily be equated with a copy that fulfills its producer's—much less its author's—intentions. A standard description reports the "ideal" only in the sense that it records the features (or variations in them) thought to characterize individual copies as they emerged from the printer or publisher. Any other construction of the word, or of the concept of ideal copy, would conflict with the historical aims that "description" suggests and would confuse rather than clarify the orderly delineation of past events.