University of Virginia Library

Heading (D1). Following the system in Tanselle 1984, esp. p. 37, the arabic number following the letter designates the edition number. The rest of the heading is meant to offer a convenient shorthand designation in words for the edition under discussion. To say "First Edition" here would add no information to what is already conveyed by "D1," and it seems sensible to convey additional information in such headings whenever possible. Moreover, the phrases "original British" here and "original American" later emphasize a more important point than the simple priority in publication, by a few weeks, of the former over the latter.

Introductory discussion (following the D1 heading). For each edition treated in detail, one may wish to begin with some introductory commentary, partly to serve the same function for the edition that the earlier paragraphs did for the work, but also to assemble into a coherent narrative such evidence as there is regarding contracts, publication and copyright dates, the author's relations with the publisher, and the like. (On copyright, see Tanselle 1969.) In effect, all the kinds of details that come from sources outside the copies of the edition themselves can be gathered here, leaving the descriptions that follow to concentrate on the physical evidence. Many bibliographical descriptions in the past have placed such information in one or more sections called "Notes," following the treatment of physical details, and sometimes these sections are not narrative in form but are simply enumerations of relevant facts. This approach remains one possibility, of course, but I show here a different approach, which reflects more directly the concept of a bibliography as a work of historical scholarship. The crucial point is not the manner of presentation of the material but the underlying conception of the work: a bibliography is not a listing of points for identification but a historical account, partly biography and partly a segment of publishing history (which itself encompasses the history of the arts of book-making as well as economic and intellectual history). This view of bibliography underlies Bowers's Principles and his 1953, 1966, and 1969 essays; see also Tanselle 1984 (passim, but esp. pp. 2-3 and the references in footnote 3) and Tanselle 1985 (esp. pp. 46-61), as well as Vander Meulen 1985. Providing narrative introductions of the kind I illustrate here does serve to drive home the point—both to authors of bibliographies and to their readers—that bibliographies are histories and that, like all histories, they attempt to offer coherent readings of the past.

Different bibliographers will make different selections of details; what I show here seems to me one reasonable selection, but there are always more details that can be included. One point naturally to be kept in mind is what kind of scholarly coverage already exists. In the case of Melville, the existence of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition, with its historical and textual essays and records of variant readings, would make redundant in a bibliography an extensive account of the composition and reception of Melville's books or lists of variant readings. The research underlying a scholarly edition and that underlying a scholarly bibliography are complementary, and the published results can be complementary, too. Thus when, in the present introduction, I refer to the 79 substantive variants between the Harper and Bentley editions of Redburn, there is no need to record them, for they are already available in the Northwestern-Newberry volume, and readers of the bibliography would have been told in the general introduction to the whole work that for complete lists of variants they should turn to the Northwestern-Newberry Edition. I am free to be selective in my use of variants, and I have decided here that only one deserves mention, given the scale on which the bibliography is being written. (However, variants between copies of a single printing—such as those created by stop-press alterations or by type or plate wear—demand fuller treatment somewhere in the description, even if they have been reported in another work; see the paragraph on typography below.) Similarly, documentation of frequently used sources need not be repeated in each of these introductions; instead, the general introduction can explain, for example, that quotations from Melville's letters always come (unless otherwise specified) from Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman's edition (1960) or that certain kinds of detail always come (unless otherwise specified) from the Northwestern-Newberry Edition. Documentation would then be supplied only for unusual sources or for sources inconvenient to refer to without specific references (hence the citations here of particular pages in the volumes of Bentley Papers at the British Library). For those details repeated in this introduction from one of the later descriptions, documentation—if needed—would come at that later point, where the matter is likely to be more fully treated. I do not find any awkwardness in the shift from narrative in these introductions to the more formulaic style of the physical descriptions: the two parts deal with very different material. A formulaic rendering of dates, quotations, sums of money, and the like seems to resemble undigested raw material and is not the most effective way of conveying what is in fact a narrative. On the other hand, the formulaic style is generally more efficient in laying physical details out clearly and more convenient for readers who wish to check copies against the description. (Cf. Tanselle 1984, footnote 6.) I ought to add, however, that one should never hesitate to use sequential prose within a physical description when it seems to offer a clearer way to make certain statements.