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Notes
Professor Bowers' definitions of the various branches of bibliography will be found, among other places, in his "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies," PBSA, 47 (1952), 186-208; "The Function of Bibliography," Library Trends, 7 (1959), 497-510; and "Bibliography," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1970 ed., III, 588-592 (hereafter cited in the text as "Ency. Brit."). Although anyone concerned with the definition of bibliography is certainly familiar with Professor Bowers' categories, they must be listed here once again as a matter of form. We will use the definitions as they are provided in "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography," pp. 190-197, since in that essay all five divisions are included. Enumerative bibliography involves the "construction of lists of books and writings on various subjects." Historical bibliography "[enquires] into the evolution of printing (including typefounding and papermaking), binding, book ownership, and bookselling." Analytical bibliography is the "technical investigation of the printing of specific books, or of general printing practise, based exclusively on the physical evidence of the books themselves, not ignoring, however, what helpful correlation may be available with collateral evidence." Descriptive bibliography exists "to examine a book by all the methods of analytical bibliography in order to arrive at a total comprehension of the maximum physical facts as a preliminary to writing these up in set terms as a definitive physical description of the book, its external appearance, and the internal evidence bearing on the details of this external appearance." Textual bibliography is "the application of the evidence of analytical bibliography, or at least of its pertinent methods, to textual problems where meaning of some sort is involved. . . ."
Herman W. Liebert, Bibliography Old and New, Bibliographical Monograph Series, No. 6 (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1974), pp. 15-16 et passim.
Lloyd Hibberd, "Physical and Reference Bibliography," The Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 124-134 (hereafter cited in the text).
Professor Bowers himself has used "critical bibliography" sometimes as a synonym for textual bibliography (as in "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography," p. 194) and other times as an alternative for analytical bibliography (as in Ency. Brit., p. 588 and 590). For further objections to the term see Hibberd, p. 123, n. 3.
We must call this an "apparent" combination of the two branches since Francis does not state expressis verbis that he is including descriptive bibliography as defined by Bowers in his own definition of that term (which consists mainly of enumerative bibliography). Since, however, Francis makes such statements under his section on "Descriptive Bibliography" as "[elaborate] rules have been evolved for compiling such descriptions [of rare books], which make it possible for a skilled bibliographer to reconstruct from the text before him the make up and appearance of a book" (p. 979), and since he does not mention descriptive bibliography in Bowers' sense under his section on "Critical Bibliography," we may conclude that this is the case. It should be noted, however, that in the list of references at the end of the article (p. 981), Francis includes Bowers' Principles of Bibliographical Description under the heading of "Critical Bibliography."
Rudolf Blum, "Bibliographia: Eine wort- und begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung," Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 10 (1970), cols. 1153-1158.
Jean François Née de la Rochelle, "Discours sur la science bibliographique et sur les devoirs du bibliographe," in Bibliographie Instructive, X (Paris: Gogué & Née de la Rochelle, 1782), xviii.
Blum, cols. 1115-1129. See also Louise Noëlle Malclès, Bibliography, trans. Theodore Christian Hines (New York: Scarecrow, 1961), pp. 72-76.
W. A. Copinger, "Inaugural Address," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 1 (1893), 31.
Harold Lancour, "Introduction," Library Trends, 4 (1959), 495.—It is in his chapter on enumerative bibliography (pp. 63-64) that Stokes himself, for example, discusses Brunet's work.
A movement has been initiated by some French-speaking bibliographers to utilize principles of Anglo-American analytical bibliography. See, for example, Wallace Kirsop, Bibliographie matérielle et critique textuelle: vers une collaboration, Biblio notes, 1 (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1970). A corresponding effort has also recently been made in German by Martin Boghardt, Analytische Druckforschung: Ein methodischer Beitrag zu Buchkunde und Textkritik (Hamburg: Ernst Hauswedell, 1977). German scholarship is, moreover, as keenly aware today as it has always been of the values and requirements of historical bibliography. See, for example, Paul Raabe, "Was is Geschichte des Buchwesens: überlegungen zu einem Forschungsbereich und einer Bildungsaufgabe," Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel, Frankfurt Edition, 32, No. 38 (11 May 1976), B319-B330.
Blum, col. 1223, is an example of such criticism: "Bei aller Hochachtung von den bahnbrechenden Leistungen von Greg und seinen Kollegen kann man ihnen daher nicht den Vorwurf ersparen, dass sie auf die im übrigen Europa endlich erreichte Einengung des mehrdeutigen Terminus Bibliographie nicht die geringste Rücksicht genommen haben. . . . Was man jetzt in England critical bibliography nennt, ist für kontinentale Begriffe nicht Bibliographie, sondern Philologie."
It is also true, however, that Hibberd himself does sometimes imply that he is simply substituting the term "reference bibliography" for "enumerative bibliography," and "physical bibliography" for "analytical bibliography," as on p. 125, n. 1, or in the following sentences on p. 133, n. 2: "Following his [Bowers in Ency. Brit.] preliminary remarks, he devotes about two and a half of the remaining six and a half columns to an excellent summary of reference bibliography (which he calls enumerative or systematic bibliography). In the Americana article, Verner Clapp, like Bowers, recognizes the basic division into systematic and analytic (i.e. reference and physical) bibliography . . . ." Yet one should note that a central feature of Bowers' encyclopedia article is the division between enumerative bibliography and the constellation analytical/descriptive/textual bibliography. Hibberd (p. 128) has dispensed with this division, added "historical bibliography" from Bowers' earlier writings, and consolidated all five branches as sub-divisions or sub-phases under his term "physical bibliography." To equate Bowers' use of "analytical bibliography" with Hibberd's "physical bibliography" (or "enumerative" with "reference bibliography") is consequently impossible.
For arguments concerning this see H. Curtis Wright, "The Immateriality of Information," The Journal of Library History, 11 (1976), 297-315.
Saussure's major work (originally published posthumously in 1915) in his Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1975). Peirce's writings are assembled in his Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, et al., 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1931-58) (hereafter cited in the text).
John J. Fitzgerald, Peirce's Theory of Signs as Foundation for Pragmatism (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), p. 35.
See James Feibleman, An Introduction to Peirce's Philosophy Interpreted as a System (New York and London: Harper, 1946). For a more historical approach which views Peirce's philosophy rather as a succession of systems, see Murray G. Murphey, The Development of Peirce's Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961).
Later Peirce decided that there are not nine divisions of signs (three trichotomies) but rather sixty-six separate types. See Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks, "Peirce's Sixty-Six Signs," Journal of Philosophy, 42 (1945), 383-388.
It should be noted at once that there are, of course, from the standpoint of the analytical bibliographer, many other signs in a document (e.g. watermarks, format) than those supplied by or through the typography. Yet as Professor Bowers has remarked (in "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography," p. 192): "It is worth emphasis that this analytical method operates only on the physical evidence of the book, and generalizes from that. It is far from true, however, that a book with blank leaves would serve as well, except for the most elementary of analytical operations."
From this point on the words "essential" or "essentially" will be used in this essay only in specific reference to those characteristics of an activity (with relation to its Object) which separate it from any other activity.
Edwin Eliott Willoughby, The Uses of Bibliography to the Students of Literature and History (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1957), p. 17.
Theodore Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography, 2nd ed. (London, 1940; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), p. 2.
Louise-Noëlle Malclès, La Bibliographie, 3rd ed., "Que sais-je?" 708 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), p. 7, my italics. Hines' translation (see n. 13 above) of the first edition, revised, in which the identical sentence appears, reads: "The [bibliographical] lists printed since the 15th century, which today number in the tens of thousands, are lists of the names of works, printed in the same way as the works themselves" (p. 1).
Creativity in enumerative bibliography usually manifests itself—much as it does, say, in photography—in such matters as selection and perspective. Creativity in most scholarly disciplines (including analytical bibliography), on the other hand, normally involves the analysis of the Object rather than its duplication. As a result, the creative aspects of enumerative bibliography are invisible to many scholars, which is one reason why enumerative bibliographers seldom receive the recognition they deserve.
If annotations contain specific criticism of content, then obviously the result is not purely bibliographical but is rather a mixture of bibliography and criticism. The construction of such a work demands non-bibliographic skills. This is probably one reason which lies at the bottom of Malclès' distinction between "bibliographie de l'érudit" and "bibliographie du bibliographe" (in Cours de bibliographie [Geneva: E. Droz, 1954] pp. viii-x).
Philip Gaskell, "Photographic Reproduction versus Quasi-Facsimile Transcription," The Library, 5th ser., 7 (1952), 135-137.
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