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The Concept of Ideal Copy
by
G. Thomas
Tanselle
Whenever physical objects are produced in groups of supposedly identical exemplars, close scrutiny will inevitably disclose differences among them. Whether such differences are of any significance is a relative matter, depending on the degree of precision required for a given purpose. Some objects are made with such precision that elaborate equipment is required to detect differences, whereas other objects can serve their function well and be considered "identical" even if certain differences among them are easily visible to the naked eye. Copies of books that publishers present to the public as identical may actually vary from one another in a variety of ways, and a basic task of the analytical bibliographer is to determine what level of difference is of potential significance in a particular instance. Imperfections in the weave of the binding cloth or differences in the amount of inking of the type pages may prove to be insignificant, but the presence on some copies of a completely different cloth or the appearance in them of a difference in what is printed at a given point would deserve to be reported and analyzed by the bibliographer. A central truth that affects everything a bibliographer does is the fact that books are not meant to be unique items and are normally printed in runs of what purport to be duplicate copies. Manuscripts are by their nature unique, and anyone analyzing the physical details of a manuscript has only the one object to examine.[1] But anyone wishing to discuss the physical features of a particular edition or printing can never be content with a single copy, because one cannot know whether it corresponds with other copies. The totality of the evidence consists of all the copies; although one must frequently make generalizations without seeing every copy, such generalizations will be subject to revision as further copies are examined. In one way or another, all bibliographical
This point has of course long been recognized, at least since the time when the nineteenth-century incunabulists inaugurated the serious physical analysis of printed books. And it was repeatedly discussed just after the turn of the century by Pollard, Greg, and McKerrow in their pioneer work linking analytical bibliography and textual study. Pollard, for example, writing in 1907 on descriptive bibliography, recognized that one object of a description is to provide information that "may be used to ascertain whether other copies are complete and perfect."[2] At about the same time, he and Greg, in another basic article on descriptive bibliography, noted, "one of the first things that the bibliographical beginner learns is that the individuals which constitute an edition are frequently not identical,"[3] and they went on to explain how various combinations of corrected and uncorrected formes can turn up in copies of Elizabethan books. Greg, in his Malone Society Reprints (1907-35), and McKerrow, in his edition of Nashe (1904-10), reported some of the differences among copies of individual editions, and McKerrow devoted a whole section to discussing this problem in his influential "Notes on Bibliographical Evidence" of 1913,[4] which was expanded as An Introduction to Bibliography (1927). Although the term ideal copy was not introduced into these discussions as a way of defining the object of a bibliographical description, it is clear that the distinction between a description of a single copy and a standard description of an edition, based on the examination of multiple copies, was well understood. As early as 1934 Greg spoke of the "ideally perfect copy,"[5] and his work over the decades leading to the completion of his great Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (1939-59) shows his practice in describing "ideal" copies, even though it was not until 1959 that his introduction appeared with the formal statement
In this as in other respects, Bowers's book clarified principles and procedures that had been evolving over the previous fifty years or more; the concept of ideal copy was not new, but he provided a workable formulation of it that has been standard ever since. That bibliographical descriptions must attempt to establish what the ideal copy in each case consists of would seem, at this late date, to be so widely accepted as to entail no further debate. And it would also seem to go without saying that the concept is equally crucial for the scholarly editor: if a descriptive bibliography of the work to be edited does not already exist, the editor must in effect produce one in order to be prepared for the job of editing. Yet, strangely, some bibliographies still appear that are based on the examination of only one or two copies of each item (in some cases following the erroneous assumption that more extensive investigation is unnecessary for twentieth-century books). And, similarly, some scholars still try to produce texts without engaging in much, if any, collation between copies of the same edition. The term ideal copy probably lends itself to misinterpretation, since it is not meant necessarily to imply a copy that is free from all error; but failure to comprehend the concept cannot be excused because of the infelicity of the term used to label it.
Perhaps the most flagrant recent misunderstanding of the concept occurs in an article by Lorene Pouncey, who is misled by the word "ideal" into thinking that ideal copy represents an unattainable goal, which must continue to elude us as our conceptions of the ideal go on evolving; she reaches the extraordinary conclusion that ideal copy is "an absurd notion of analytical bibliographers . . . recognizable as part of the human 'habit of perfection.'"[7] Although the extent of her confusion is obviously not shared by the bibliographical world at large, there do seem to be some aspects of the concept that genuinely require
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
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
Bowers, in the standard definition of ideal copy, similarly makes the printer's intention the determining factor:
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
II
Ideal copy, as this account of it is intended to make clear, cannot be divorced from textual considerations. The fact that descriptive bibliography is concerned with physical details has caused some misunderstanding on this point and has led some people to think that ideal copy is unrelated to textual matters and therefore to editing. Ideal copy does, of course, refer to physical features of a book, but the inked type-impressions that transmit the text are physical features, and textual differences among copies are physical differences. Textual correctness is obviously something else, and descriptive bibliography is not concerned with it; but textual differences among copies cannot be ignored in descriptive bibliography, or in the concept of ideal copy. The idea that analytical bibliography—which underlies both descriptive bibliography
The relation of the textual interests of descriptive bibliographers and those of editors can be somewhat clarified by considering the use that editors of both critical and noncritical editions might make of bibliographical descriptions. Noncritical editions provide the more obvious starting point, because a noncritical edition is one that aims to reproduce exactly a particular manuscript or printed text—without, that is, calling upon the editor's critical judgment to provide emendations. For a noncritical edition of a manuscript, there is no question about what copy to follow, since a manuscript is unique; there may of course be a question about which of the various manuscripts of a given work is to be reproduced, but once a particular manuscript is settled upon as worthy of reproduction, there is no further choice to be made among copies. But with printed material the situation is different. Even after one has decided which edition—or impression or issue—of a work is the one to be reproduced, one still must face the problem of which copy should be used, since one obviously cannot assume—for books of any period—that all copies are the same. Whether the noncritical edition is to be a photographic reproduction or a new setting of type, it will contain that form of the text present in the copy selected, since no emendations are to be made, and the copy should therefore be chosen carefully. Of course, the copy used must be specified in the noncritical edition, and some editors may argue that the choice of copy is not crucial, so long as readers know exactly where they stand—so long as they are told that the noncritical edition follows the text of a particular copy and that it is thus limited to the documentary evidence present in that
Charlton Hinman's Norton Facsimile (1968) of the Shakespeare First Folio provides the natural focus for a discussion of this point. The Folger collection of eighty copies of the Folio made feasible Hinman's detailed study of the printing of the volume[28] and put him in possession of a thorough knowledge of the various mixtures of corrected and uncorrected formes present in different copies. Because each of the copies contains a mixture of earlier and later states of the text of those pages known to exist in variant states, a photographic reproduction of any one copy—though it would be useful in showing one of the forms in which the book appeared—would be limited to the chance combination of sheets present in that copy. What Hinman conceived was the idea of
Whether or not the result should be thought of as representing the ideal copy is a question that has engendered some disagreement. Hinman himself, after describing the basis for his choice of pages, calls it the first facsimile that undertakes to reproduce "such an 'ideal' copy of the First Folio" (p. xxiv). Those who object to this application of the term are apparently under the misapprehension that the concept of ideal copy has nothing to do with textual variants. Actually, the basis for possible criticism of the statement lies elsewhere. In the first place, if this collection of pages were claimed to be the ideal copy, one could object that the book appeared with various combinations of sheets and that the bibliographical concept of ideal copy must accommodate the divergent forms that in fact appeared; this combination of pages might indeed be an ideal copy, or one of the forms of ideal copy, but cannot be the ideal copy. Second, whether it is an ideal copy depends on whether it would have been a physically possible form for the printer to have issued. Obviously in preparing a facsimile text one cannot pick and choose among readings on the same page, combining a reading from one copy of the page with a reading found only in a different copy at another point on the page, if there is no evidence that these two readings ever existed simultaneously on the same page. But as long as it was physically possible for sheets printed with first formes in the latest state of alteration to be perfected with second formes in the latest state and for successive sheets in such a state to be assembled into individual copies of the completed book, one can legitimately posit that combination of "corrected" formes as falling within the range of copies encompassed by ideal copy. The fact that such a copy does not actually exist is not in itself a deterrent to the classification, since the extant copies are a random assemblage, and the combinations of sheets in them are also produced by chance. But the degree of likelihood that such a copy ever existed, if one is in a position to weigh that likelihood, may indeed be a
In any case, the question whether the Norton Facsimile can be considered to represent an ideal copy is of more use as an exercise in thinking about the implications of the concept than for any practical purpose it might serve. A thorough bibliographical description, after all, would record the various states of each forme (and, in the documentation, the combinations present in examined copies), but it would not endorse particular combinations of those states, except where there is evidence that certain states are linked together. And Hinman's facsimile—though it may indeed, as he claims, be a "reproduction of what the printers of the original edition would themselves have considered an ideal copy" (p. xxii)—need not be labeled an "ideal copy" except to the extent that it presents one of the possibilities that ideal copy for this book apparently embraces. What it does, to be more precise, is to single out from the various forms in which the book appeared or conceivably appeared the one that makes most sense, in Hinman's view, to reproduce for purposes of textual study. The historical question of whether a copy could have appeared, or did appear, in this form is of less moment for such purposes than the value for reference of having this particular assemblage of material. One should not forget, however, that editors and other students of the text cannot limit themselves to "corrected" formes, which are often less correct—at least as far as accidentals are concerned—than "uncorrected" formes.[29] They must be fully apprised of all variant states of the text and must therefore consult, or prepare for themselves, the information that a bibliographical description provides.
What Hinman did with photographs, some collectors have done with originals: to insert material from one copy into another copy. Of course, Hinman could move single pages, whereas those who are recombining originals cannot move less than a single leaf (containing a type page from an inner and from an outer forme). The practice of
To say that the "alteration of the condition" of a book by binders is accepted "unquestioningly" is to confuse the issue in several ways. First of all, it is one thing for a binder, in the process of binding a book that was not published in an edition casing, to rearrange certain leaves within a copy, as specifically called for by the printer (e.g., moving a half-title from the end to the beginning). It is quite another for that binder to undertake to remedy what are presumed to be defects in the copy by inserting leaves that were not originally part of the copy. If binders have often thought of this latter procedure as a routine part of their business, and if their clients have sometimes accepted the practice "unquestioningly," these attitudes do not justify the practice or provide grounds for later owners to continue it. Making up copies, whether by early binders or by later collectors, remains a tampering with the evidence. Furthermore, the situation is not simply one of continuing to mix sheets in the way that they were originally mixed; what is inserted later is hardly ever a sheet (a whole piece of paper as folded according to the format) but a leaf, thus mixing together a leaf from one sheet with the remaining leaf or leaves from another sheet. Students of the text naturally need to ascertain the order of any stop-press alterations and must therefore work out just what was on the press at any one time; but one can never know whether the text of inserted leaves is identical to that of the missing leaves, and inserted leaves obviously cannot stand as satisfactory substitutes for the originals. Of course, one should normally be able to tell that such leaves are disjunct, and one would then look at them with particular skepticism; but still one needs to know whether they are true cancels or later insertions, both for textual purposes and as a general matter of understanding the nature of the preserved evidence. Finally, there is the point about the "interchangeability" of leaves printed from movable type. The invention of movable type clearly has nothing to do with the matter, since other ways of preparing printing surfaces (such as that used for block books) were also intended to result in identical copies. The important point, however, is that the intention to produce identical copies cannot be accepted by the historian as equivalent to the deed; one cannot assume that all copies of a leaf were in fact identical and that missing evidence can simply be replaced by its supposed duplicate.
For all these reasons bibliographers and editors always try to be alert to the possibility of alterations made during the process of binding or other alterations made by individual owners. Books not issued in publishers' bindings or casings, as well as rebound or recased copies of
What is true of editors of noncritical editions is also true of editors of critical editions; and it is worth considering briefly why this is so, since one might at first think that establishing the forms of ideal copy would be less important to the critical editor, whose aim is not to produce a facsimile or an exact rendering of a single documentary text. The goal of the critical editor is to construct a text that conforms as closely as possible with some particular standard—normally, in scholarly editing, the author's intention. It may be that none of the documentary texts meets this standard, and the critical text constructed by the editor may be different from any that has gone before. Critical editors are not limited, in other words, to readings that have appeared in print in a
That states result from inadvertent as well as intended alterations and that later states are not always more correct than earlier ones is demonstrated over and over in editorial work. For example, progressive
Whether differences among copies of an issue are the result of accident or design, whether they improve or worsen the product, they qualify—so long as they were present in copies at the time of issue—for recording as states by the bibliographer and for examination as relevant textual evidence by the editor. Bibliographers, and theorists of descriptive bibliography as well, have been reluctant in the past to insist on the presentation of textual evidence in descriptive bibliographies;[34] it is tempting to say that an edition is the place for such information and to argue that further deterrents should not be brought forward to interfere with the production of descriptive bibliographies. But it is equally difficult not to agree with the view that textual differences are physical differences and that states of an issue or impression cannot be satisfactorily sorted out without taking textual variants into account. The notion that descriptive bibliographies should limit themselves to details necessary for identification, instead of providing fuller historical records, has now been discredited; but in any case, it is impossible to know what is necessary for identification—indeed, how many states there may be for identification—without being as fully acquainted as possible with all the differences among copies, including textual differences. A number of bibliographies during the last generation have incorporated the results of textual collation.[35] But where the interdependence of description and textual study has been particularly felt is in the large series of editions published in connection with, or following the guidelines of, the Center for Editions of American Authors and its successor, the Center
III
These considerations can perhaps best be summarized in the form of a new definition:
In particular, this approach departs from the usual concept of an ideal copy (in the singular) by suggesting that the standard to be described is not a single preferred form but a range of alternatives that encompasses all the states of each sheet as they were issued. It does not seem logical to distinguish those differences that affect the physical structure of the folded sheets (and thus the collation formula) from those differences that affect only the text printed on the sheets, and then to limit the concept of ideal copy to one of those categories. Both kinds of differences are physical, and both may result either from conscious intention or from accident—or from both at once, as when new errors are created in the process of making corrections. And it does not therefore seem reasonable to limit ideal copy to a single state or single collection of states: there is no reason to elevate either a first state or a second state to a position as a basic standard, since neither is necessarily closer to the "intended" standard of the producer. What a bibliography can more valuably concern itself with is constructing an accurate historical account of the various forms of an issue that were put on the market; the fact that one form of an issue may happen to be more "correct," either in the arrangement of its leaves or in the quality of its text, does not make it the standard for the issue, since copies exhibiting other states may also be authentic exemplars of the issue as a whole. The editor of a facsimile edition must select a single state of any given page to appear in the body of the facsimile (and may well choose the "uncorrected" state in many cases as being closer to the author's wishes); but the bibliographer has no such necessity for choice and indeed may offer a misleading historical picture if certain states are subordinated to a single "ideal copy." The bibliographer's task requires careful judgment and historical scholarship, just as the editor's does. But that judgment and scholarship must first of all be directed toward distinguishing between what has happened to copies of books since their release and what happened to them before that time. This essentially simple view of ideal copy—or whatever we choose to call the concept—emphasizes the distinction that must be basic to the historical study of books. And while the concept may be simple, the decisions to be made in determining the status of certain features of individual copies of books are frequently far from simple.
Thinking about ideal copy as a concept inevitably leads one to consider the nature of library cataloguing and its relation to descriptive bibliography. The fact that there is sometimes a confusion in cataloguing
It would seem that the Library of Congress has unwittingly been the culprit in fostering this confused view. The public distribution of LC printed catalogue cards, which began in 1901, has had its effect both on cataloguers at LC and on some cataloguers elsewhere: it has caused the former to subordinate the presumed defects of LC copies and the latter to believe, following the example set by the widely circulated LC cards, that the function of catalogue cards is to describe ideal copies. LC cards, it is true, mention what are taken to be imperfections in LC copies, but frequently in the form of notes to the basic entries, thus reversing the proper emphasis and placing in primary position entries that do not in fact correspond exactly to the copies they represent. Some people have argued that this approach does little harm in connection with twentieth-century books—and it is largely for twentieth-century books that LC cards have served other libraries' cataloguing needs. But it is a mistake to assume that differences are uncommon among copies of twentieth-century books: they are in fact quite common. Contrary to what many people still seem to believe, machine-printed books demand just as close scrutiny as hand-printed books and often present more perplexing problems. In any case, the distinction between a description based on a single copy and one that draws conclusions based on the evidence
The emphasis in discussions of library cataloguing has of course now moved from card catalogues to computers, but this blurred distinction between individual and ideal copy, inherited from card-catalogue days, is still with us, and in an insidious form. Those who talk about computer-assisted national bibliographic networks often refer to, or at least assume the future existence of, a data base containing entries that can be regarded somehow as standard, without considering how entries supplied by individual libraries become converted into a more authoritative statement utilizing the evidence from the various copies reported. The networks that presently exist, like OCLC and RLIN,[38] are used to a large extent by their subscribing libraries as a means for producing catalogue cards: the libraries check to see whether a given item has already been entered into the system; if it has, they make any alterations they wish in the entry and then indicate that they are ordering cards, and if it has not been previously entered, they enter it and order the cards. The real importance of the system has nothing to do with cards, and the central bibliographical problem will remain even when cards are no longer a part of the thinking of those who consult the record. Even though individual libraries can change the recorded entries for their own purposes—or to fit their own copies—the question of what description is to appear on the screen of the terminal is still a matter of considerable importance. Is it simply the first copy to be entered in the system? Or is the network to offer in some way what it regards as the "best" entry for a given item? Can any library or individual that calls up an entry infer that what appears on the screen represents a standard against which any given copy is to be measured? At present OCLC generally provides only a single entry for an item, whereas RLIN allows users to see multiple entries when they exist. The latter approach is the only one that is defensible from a scholarly point of view, and in the long run it is the approach that will have to be made available in a consolidated international network. When entries are based on individual copies—if, that is, they really are, as they purport to be—there is no mechanical or easy way of selecting from them a single "basic" or "standard" entry. Nor is there any reason why we should expect, or desire, a single entry to be chosen for us. It would be unfortunate if, in the early stages of a new medium, we were to allow the confusions
Individuals or institutions (i.e., individuals representing institutions) may wish to construct such historical accounts, and there is nothing wrong with their entering the results into a data base, so long as what they enter is clearly labeled. Indeed, such scholarship should be encouraged and welcomed, just as printed bibliographies are welcomed when they mark an advance in knowledge through the play of an informed intelligence over the assembled pieces of evidence. This kind of description should have the same status whether it appears on a cathode ray tube or on a printed page; it is an act of integration, and it can be well done or badly done, and it may stand as the authority for a considerable time or be superseded in short order by superior work. The quality of particular pieces of research cannot be legislated, nor can scholarly authority be upheld by decree or administrative fiat. Thus any attempt to construct an electronic bibliographic network in which one description is elevated over others is ill-conceived; and there is similarly no legitimate way to admit into the system only a single attempt to describe ideal copy, any more than one can limit the number of printed bibliographies of a writer or subject, since each involves the interpretation of evidence, and more than one responsible interpretation may exist.
The most satisfactory way of handling the situation is to require that every entry placed in the system be labeled as to whether it is an attempt to record a particular copy or an attempt at a more generalized description based on the examination of multiple copies; it goes without saying that the source of each entry should also be indicated. Then if one wishes, in consulting the system, to see what entries for the socalled ideal copy of a given book exist, one can call up those entries; or if one prefers to begin with, or place principal reliance on, the entry supplied for its copy by a particular library, one can proceed in that fashion. The user would be free to exercise judgment in selecting among the entries offered. In some cases one might wish to see the entry prepared by the library specializing in a given field (for an eighteenth-century American imprint one would want to see how the American Antiquarian Society had handled it); in other cases one might decide to look over all the entries for specific copies in the system, or perhaps only at those entries that attempt to generalize, depending on how reliable
The same points naturally apply also to work on union catalogues or so-called short-title catalogues, which are the counterparts in printed or card form of the new computer networks. Such works contain entries for specific copies, but they also frequently contain consolidated entries that are meant to stand for a number of supposedly identical entries. The latter kind of entry comprises somewhat more evidence than
One cannot generally think of the entries in such catalogues as ideal copies, because frequently insufficient detail is provided to distinguish among states; on the other hand, the entries often represent more than one copy and rise above what are deemed to be the peculiarities of those
Notes
A manuscript or typescript may be reproduced photographically, but there is still only one original, and all the evidence is located in it. Typescripts produced from the same cards by a magnetic-card typewriter, however, would take on the characteristics of an edition.
"The Objects and Methods of Bibliographical Collations and Descriptions," Library, 2nd ser., 8 (1907), 193-217 (quotation from p. 210). He also said, "If a book is complete and perfect—i.e., in its original condition—or when we have ascertained how far it falls short of completeness and perfection, we have still to determine what relations it bears to other copies of the same work" (p. 207).
"Some Points in Bibliographical Descriptions," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 9 (1906-8), 31-52 (p. 41). There follows a discussion distinguishing "such differences as have been introduced by subsequent treatment, binding, mutilation, etc." from the "already important distinctions" with which copies left the press—the most important of which are the variant textual states of individual formes (pp. 41-42).
Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 12 (1911-13), 213-318 (see "On variations in different copies of the same edition," pp. 282-289).
"A Formulary of Collation," Library, 4th ser., 14 (1933-34), 365-382 (p. 371); reprinted in his Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), pp. 298-313 (p. 303).
"Criteria for Classifying Hand-Printed Books as Issues and States," PBSA, 41 (1947), 271-292 (esp. p. 290).
"The Fallacy of the Ideal Copy," Library, 5th ser., 33 (1978), 108-118. This paper has been succinctly criticized (as one "which will no doubt cause considerable harm and confusion" by Rolf E. DuRietz in "'The Fallacy of the Ideal Copy,'" Text, 2, no. 1 (1978), 31-34. In his comments DuRietz hopes that I will publish a "refutation of all this nonsense as soon as possible." The present essay was written before DuRietz's remarks appeared and was not conceived of as a reply to Miss Pouncey. Insofar as her remarks will be taken seriously enough to require a reply, DuRietz's comments serve the purpose very well. And although my own essay is not organized as a systematic examination of the points Miss Pouncey makes, I believe that it does contain the arguments required to reply to those points.
In his important earlier article, "A Formulary of Collation" (see note 5 above), he refers to "the ideally perfect copy" as the subject of the collation, without at that point mentioning intention. But that intention is involved the context makes clear: cf. my further quotation from this piece in the discussion to follow.
Its character is certainly hypothetical; what differs from instance to instance is its likelihood of being true.
Although its original place as printed may also, when known, be made clear in the collation formula—as in "π1 (=M8)."
That is, they may be defined as anomalies on the basis of the evidence they present. Whether or not they are anomalies in a statistical sense cannot be known, since the evidence in the copies now lost cannot be recovered.
In his 1947 article (see note 6 above), he had defined it as "that form of the book which the printer or publisher wished to represent the most perfect and complete form to leave his shop" (p. 290). James G. McManaway used similar language in his contribution to the 1946-47 series of Rosenbach Fellowship lectures, where he defined ideal copy as "the book in the precise state in which the publisher intended it to be put on sale as complete and perfect" (Standards of Bibliographical Description [1949], pp. 70-71).
At a later point Bowers succinctly says, "the intention of the printer should take precedence over what happened to be the practice of various binders" (p. 122).
An issue, because it is a consciously planned publishing unit, can be thought of as having an ideal copy (or perhaps more than one); an issue or impression may in turn consist of states, but because they do not represent discrete publishing efforts, they are not given separate descriptions as distinct ideal copies. States are subdivisions of an issue, produced by the effort to make corrections or additions that are not to be called to the public's attention; they are not intended as identifiable publishing units. Cf. G. T. Tanselle, "The Bibliographical Concepts of Issue and State," PBSA, 69 (1975), 17-66.
One in which, as he says, "Nothing is invented. . . . Instead, all the evidence to be gained from the examination of numbers of copies is analyzed on the basis of the printing history of the edition, so far as it can be determined, in order to discover what was the actual most perfect form of the book achieved by the printer within an issue" (p. 113). The point is that this "form" is a composite of details from various copies and does not necessarily agree with any single actual copy.
The editor of a noncritical edition offers a closer parallel with the descriptive bibliographer; this point is discussed more fully below, in Part II.
This point is ironically demonstrated by the number of Rolf DuRietz's Text in which he comments on the Pouncey article (see note 7 above). At the center are two folds (eight pages) that are not counted in the pagination; they are blank except for the recto of the second leaf and the verso of the third. On the former of these is an announcement beginning, "These two inmost folds outside the pagination do not belong to the ideal copy of a complete bound volume 2 of TEXT. They are intended, most unbibliographically, to be removed and cancelled by the binder." DuRietz goes on to explain three functions that they serve (protecting the "inmost regular text fold" from the staples that hold the number together, protecting copying-machine glass from the staples, and providing space for listing errata) and adds information about the quality of the staples and the paper. The errata list, on the other printed page of these eight, is to be "reprinted on a regular page in a forthcoming issue of TEXT." However, despite the announced intention that these four leaves are to be excised and not to be considered a part of the ideal copy, history cannot be undone: the journal was in fact published with these leaves, which do contain text, and they are a part of the publication, whether its editor wishes them to be or not. In the future, copies lacking these leaves, far from being considered "ideal," will have to be regarded as defective.
Except to the extent that the present characteristics of individual copies must be recorded as documentation.
One cannot say simply "post-publication history of individual copies": if publication is taken to mean the time when the first copies are put on sale, then some post-publication changes can certainly be part of the production history of the book, in cases where the printer or publisher orders changes to be made in the copies not yet released. The distinction being made here relates to individual copies: what happened to each one before the time of its release as opposed to what happened to each one after that time.
When the publisher does call attention to a particular group of copies, as through a new title leaf or special binding, the result is a new issue of the book, which then has its own ideal copy. For more detailed discussion, see note 15 above and the article cited there.
Duplicated leaves are commonly regarded simply as a redundancy rather than a state. Yet if they become a feature of a copy during production rather than later, it is hard to see how logically they can be considered anything other than a state. Of course, one can always decide in certain cases that this one class of states will be relegated to the notes on individual copies and not be reported in the body of the description. Although this arrangement may seem best at times, in many instances it is bound to seem somewhat arbitrary and to raise more problems than it settles. If a substantial number of copies were found to contain the duplicated leaves, they would no doubt be regarded by most bibliographers as deserving of more attention. But when one is dealing with less than the full evidence, it is always difficult to say what relation a single copy with certain features bears to the whole issue. And in any case, if a feature is worthy of being recorded when it exists in large numbers, how can it be ruled out, when it is known only in a single copy, as not exemplifying one of the states in which the book was issued? The number of copies involved is likely to have an effect on one's thinking, but it cannot logically be allowed to determine what is reported as a state, if state is to be a term of historical classification, referring to what in fact took place. A cautionary example, involving what may be a cancel, is furnished by Jane Austen's Emma (1816). A copy was recently discovered in which M11 of volume 3 is a disjunct leaf pasted to a stub. Since this leaf corresponds exactly—textually and typographically—with the usual copies of M11, which are integral, one might be led to conclude that this copy is "made up"—that a missing M11 has been replaced by the corresponding leaf from another copy. However, a brief search has now turned up two more copies in which M11 is disjunct; the existence of three such copies makes one think that this supplied leaf may after all be a product of something that happened during the production of the book. The matter remains a puzzle: could the supplied leaf really be a cancel for a state of the text not yet located? The situation nevertheless illustrates that what may seem obvious when only one copy is known should not be confidently taken to be the correct explanation.
Something close to this point is implied by Philip Gaskell in his discussion of ideal copy in A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972). He says that a description of an ideal copy would note all leaves "which belonged to the most perfect copy of the work as originally completed by its printer and first put on sale by its publisher. This is the basic ideal form; and the description of ideal copy is completed by the addition of notes of any subsequent changes made by the printer or publisher . . . and of any unintentional alterations to its form" (p. 315). Despite the reference to a "basic ideal form," Gaskell seems in this passage to be moving toward the view I am setting forth here, suggesting that the description of idcal copy contains within it in chronological order the various states that historically existed. If, however, intended and unintended differences in copies put on sale later than the time when the first ones were put on sale are to be recorded, it is difficult to see why the "most perfect copy" as "first put on sale" should be the starting point, since there may have been other less "perfect" copies also offered for sale at that initial time and thus also deserving of a place in the historical record. When Gaskell repeats his definition of ideal copy a few pages later (p. 321), he introduces a significant difference: "It will be recalled," he says, "that the basic form of ideal copy is the most perfect state of a work as originally intended by its printer or publisher following the completion of all intentional changes." Of course, he had earlier, and more appropriately, used the phrase "as originally completed" instead of "as originally intended."
Bowers agrees that the "complete bibliographical description . . . apprises the reader of all variant states in which the described issue of the book is found" (p. 123). Where my approach is somewhat different from his is in suggesting that these states may be presented chronologically at the appropriate points in the main description, rather than that some of them be appended to a description of a single ideal copy. The information set forth is the same either way; but the rather arbitrary choices sometimes required to construct a single ideal copy may occasionally produce a misleading effect, one that can be avoided by treating the various states at the points where the elements they concern come up within the framework of the description.
In addition to the alternatives occasioned by the correction or the occurrence of error, there are of course planned differences among copies (as when copies are issued in various colors of casing cloth) and differences resulting from the nature of the publication plan (as when different original prints or other illustrations are tipped in to different copies). There are also those publications that allow for the rearrangement of their parts (such as boxes containing loose pieces, as in Marcel Duchamp's 1934 publication of facsimiles of 93 examples of his notes); in these cases there may or may not be any one arrangement of the pieces that can be described as standard or "ideal." Allan Stevenson, in his long introduction to the second volume of the Catalogue of Botanical Books in the Collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt (1961), is bothered by such variability among copies: finding that the positions of the plates in different copies of botanical books vary greatly, he calls ideal copy for these books a "will-o'-the-wisp" (p. clxxii). Yet ideal copy, by definition, must exist, regardless of the number of variations. If the publisher is responsible for the binding of copies, and thus for the insertion of the plates, then all the variations originally present become part of the description of ideal copy; if the plates were inserted by binders employed by individual owners of copies, then the variations are of little significance compared to any binders' directions that were issued or any indications on the plates themselves announcing their intended locations.
For a discussion of the probabilities involved in drawing conclusions from a limited number of copies of an issue, see David Shaw, "A Sampling Theory for Bibliographical Research," Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), 310-319. The problems of interpreting bibliographical evidence, including that arising from the existence of variant formes, are thoroughly analyzed by Fredson Bowers in Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964).
An example from Greg's "Bibliography—An Apologia," Library, 4th ser., 13 (1932-33), 113-143: "what the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his" (pp. 121-122). Reprinted in his Collected Papers (see note 5 above), pp. 239-266 (p. 247).
This study is of course most fully set forth in The Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963).
For this reason, Bowers recommends the choice of uncorrected formes generally for facsimile editions (and they are the formes that would normally supply copy-text for critical editors). This point and related matters regarding press variants are carefully explored in his "The Problem of the Variant Forme in a Facsimile Edition," Library, 5th ser., 7 (1952), 262-272. He describes "the ideal photographic facsimile" as "a collection of formes from any number of copies, these formes being chosen first according to the principle of their textual state, and second according to clarity and fidelity of the inking" (p. 263).
Or to those in a given manuscript text; but the focus here, in the context of ideal copy, is of course on printed texts.
Miss Pouncey asks, "Can any Anglo-American analytical bibliographer be persuaded that the literary works which are the content of printed books are the products of the creative imagination, and that the creative imagination disallows mechanistic studies of its productions?" (p. 115). This question obviously confuses the works themselves with their means of transmission. The workings of the creative imagination are not mechanical; but so long as the resulting creations are transmitted by physical means, a "mechanistic" study of those means is clearly necessary for an informed approach to the content of the works thus transmitted. She had earlier asked, in similar vein, "to what avail is knowledge of the printing process when the editor must make a choice based on intuition?" (p. 109). But a detailed knowledge of the printing history of a book may settle some textual points conclusively and is thus necessary for establishing the limits within which editorial judgment (or "intuition") can operate. No matter how far editors may finally move beyond the physical evidence in their attempt to define the products of creative imagination, they must begin with that evidence and cannot in their speculations contradict it.
The latter two examples are recorded in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Mardi (1970), p. 706, and White-Jacket (1970), p. 484; the former two will be reported in the forthcoming editions of The Piazza Tales and Moby-Dick.
For example, Fredson Bowers, in "Purposes of Descriptive Bibliography, with Some Remarks on Methods," Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 1-22, says, "I do not see how, ordinarily, a descriptive bibliographer can be responsible for collating the texts" (p. 15), though he adds that the bibliographer should be able to "guarantee that every page of every listed copy is in the same setting and imposition unless specific exceptions have been made" (p. 16). Reprinted in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing [1975], pp. 111-134 (pp. 127, 128). And I have myself said that "collations are theoretically part of the necessary background for every descriptive bibliography, whereas from a practical point of view it is unreasonable to demand them"—"The Use of Type Damage as Evidence in Bibliographical Description," Library, 5th ser., 23 (1968), 328-351 (p. 351).
A recent example is James L. W. West III, William Styron: A Descriptive Bibliography (1977), which includes tables of variant readings.
A convenient list of these editions appears in the Modern Language Association's The Center for Scholarly Editions: An Introductory Statement (1977), pp. 5-6; this Statement is also printed in PMLA, 92 (1977), 586-597.
These and other networks are identified, among other places, in an extremely useful introductory discussion of some of the issues that bibliographers should be aware of in relation to computer cataloguing: Terry Belanger and Stephen P. Davis, "Rare Book Cataloguing & Computers," AB Bookman's Weekly, 63 (5 February 1979), 955-966.
The Independent Research Libraries Association has established a committee (which first met in Washington on 13-14 March 1979), under the chairmanship of Marcus A. McCorison, to consider ways of supplementing AACR2 (the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules) and ISBD(A) (see the following note) to accommodate the interests of those concerned with the physical aspects of books. No library can be required to include extensive records of physical details in its cataloguing; but it is important to reserve spaces now that will allow for the recording of such details and to provide a standard framework for them so that any libraries wishing to note certain details will be doing it in the same way. It would be a mistake not to plan in this fashion for the future orderly accumulation of bibliographical details in a system that can make them easily retrievable.
The 1978 draft of ISBD(A)—that is, the International Standard Bibliographic Description designed to be a counterpart, for antiquarian (A) books, of ISBD(M), which is primarily concerned with current monographs (M)—states specifically that it deals with the special problems of "older books." Its scope is defined as "requirements for the description and identification of non-serial printed items issued before the year 1801, as well as for later works when the items are produced by hand or by methods continuing the tradition of the hand-produced book" (0.1.1.). Machine-produced books, however, are also of interest as artifacts, and recognition should be given to the fact that details about their production can be equally valuable to have on record. Thus when the introduction to ISBD(A) says, "for older books all leaves are important, even blanks," the opening prepositional phrase is actually superfluous and imposes an unnecessary limitation. The particular approach to books which ISBD(A) attempts to accommodate is in fact not limited to hand-produced books: what distinguishes that approach is a focus on books as physical objects, a focus which obviously is relevant to any books of any period.
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