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D4. "Standard Edition." Whether to describe a collected set at a single location, or to take up each volume separately at the point where it would have been described if it had not been connected with a set, is a question that should be decided individually for each bibliography. More important is the recognition that the individual volumes of sets must be entered at two places, once with a primary entry and once with a cross-reference. Because some economy, and perhaps clarity as well, results from treating an entire set at one place, I have chosen here simply to make a reference to the place—in section V, devoted to collected sets—where the Constable edition is described. The same treatment is accorded two subeditions (i.e., printings bearing another publisher's imprint or series designation) of the entire set (D4c, D4d). But the two subeditions of Redburn alone (D4a, D4b) are best treated here. On the arrangement and numbering of entries for subeditions, see Tanselle 1984, esp. pp. 9-20, 37. (Some might argue—and they would have a point—that the original printing, with the Constable imprint, should be numbered "D4a," allowing "D4" to refer unambiguously to the entire edition, encompassing all its subeditions. On the other side is the awkwardness of making the originating publisher's printings appear to be a subedition. Neither solution is entirely happy, and both of them can be defended.)

D4a. "Constable's Miscellany" subedition. This entry is an example of a condensed form of description that I suggest might be used for all editions of Melville's works after 1891, the year of his death. The idea of shifting, at some point in a bibliography, to a less detailed form of description—a concept sometimes called, following Falconer Madan, "the degressive principle"—has been much debated. By far the most thoughtful treatment of it is to be found in Bowers 1969 (supplemented by Tanselle 1984, pp. 20-28). The decision where to curtail description (if full description throughout is not deemed feasible) involves thinking through the primary purpose of the bibliography: the line would be drawn at one point if the focus is on textually important editions, at another if the aim is to write a biography in bibliographical form, and at still another if the emphasis is on how printers and publishers have handled the work of a classic author. But wherever the line is drawn, one must understand that shorter descriptions do not necessarily mean less research: one is still trying to establish and report certain facts, and the space finally given to them does not necessarily reflect the amount of time required to establish them. Furthermore, the condensed descriptions should still have logic and balance of their own. In the form proposed here some attention is paid to paper and to binding (nothing need be said about typography in an entry for a subedition, unless the typography is altered photographically, electronically, or by means of a Monotype roll); the recording of contents is selective, but the signature and pagination collations, being indispensable, are treated no less fully than they would be for a nineteenth-century edition. No precise form for condensed descriptions can, or should, be prescribed; the description I offer here is intended only as one example of a highly condensed and yet relatively well-rounded bibliographical account.

D4b. Richard R. Smith subedition. This entry, on the transatlantic counterpart to the preceding subedition, illustrates how one condensed description builds on another. (If the Smith publication were an issue of the "Constable's Miscellany" printing and not a separate printing, it would not receive an entry number and would be described in a subsection of D4a—following the principle of treating printings as entities, explained in Tanselle 1984, p. 18.)