II
The examples of writings on bibliographical history that I have
mentioned were chosen to help delineate the contours of the field and to
suggest directions for further work. Although the literature of the history
of physical bibliography, as a field of scholarly inquiry, is not extensive,
there are nevertheless many other writings that could be named. The bulk
of them consists of retrospective pieces written by persons who were alive
at the time of the events they are discussing—a situation not
unexpected
in a field that has had its principal development in the twentieth century.
But some publications by scholars looking back to periods before their own
time do exist. In any case, whatever published material there is serves to
show how the field has been thought of and forms a body of literature that
future historians will have to know. It may be useful at this stage to give
some idea of what that literature consists of.
A natural category to begin with is the history of bibliographical
societies, best represented, of course, by F. C. Francis's essay ("The
Bibliographical Society: A Sketch of the First Fifty Years") in The
Bibliographical Society, 1892-1942 (pp. 1-22). Two earlier accounts
of the Bibliographical Society are also important (particularly the second,
by
the man who was the Society's guiding spirit for over forty years): Falconer
Madan, "The Bibliographical Society,"
Bibliographica, 2
(1896), 479-488; and A. W. Pollard, "Our Twenty-First Birthday,"
Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 13 (1913-15),
9-27.
[25] The Bibliographical Society
of America has been treated in two essays, the first by Henry B. Van
Hoesen ("The Bibliographical Society of America: Its Leaders and
Activities, 1904-1939,"
PBSA, 35 [1941], 177-202), the
second,
on the Society's seventy-fifth anniversary, by J. M. Edelstein ("The
Bibliographical Society of America, 1904-1979,"
PBSA, 73
[1979], 389-422); and there is a more specialized piece, on the early years,
by Wayne A. Wiegand ("Library Politics and the Organization of the
Bibliographical Society of America,"
Journal of Library
History, 21 [1986], 131-157). F. P. Wilson covered "The Malone
Society: The First Fifty Years, 1906-1956," in
Malone Society Collections, 4 (1956), 1-16; and Edward
Born
provided an anniversary history of the
Gutenberg-Gesellschaft,
1901-1976 (1976). A brief general treatment is Savina A. Roxas's
article (headed "Bibliographical Societies, Development of") in the
Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (2 [1969],
384-388)—an encyclopedia that includes historical accounts of
individual
societies, such as Roxas's on the Bibliographical Society (2: 401-405) and
J. M. Edelstein's on the Bibliographical Society of America (2:
395-401).
A sketch of the growth of bibliographical societies all over the world
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was provided much earlier
by G. F. Barwick ("Bibliographical Societies and Bibliography,"
Library, 4th ser., 11 [1930-31], 151-159),[26] and at the same time Ruth S.
Granniss,
the long-time librarian of the Grolier Club, wrote on "What Bibliography
Owes to Private Book Clubs" (PBSA, 24 [1930], 14-33).[27] As her essay suggests, any
examination
of the influence of organizations on the study of books as artifacts must
include bibliophilic and typophilic clubs as well as bibliographical societies.
The basic works, still not superseded, are, for British clubs, Abraham
Hume's The Learned Societies and Printing Clubs of the United
Kingdom (1847, 1853) and Harold Williams's Book Clubs
&
Printing Societies of Great Britain and Ireland (1929); and, for
American clubs, Adolf
Growoll's American Book Clubs (1897)—supplemented
by
Florence M. Power's "American Private Book Clubs," Bulletin of
Bibliography, 20 (1950-53), 216-220, 233-236—and Lois
Rather's
Books and Societies (1971).[28] Many individual clubs have
published
their own histories, such as Clive Bigham's The Roxburghe
Club (1928), Nicolas Barker's The Publications of the
Roxburghe Club (1964), John T. Winterich's The Grolier
Club (1950, 1967), and the collaborative volume The Grolier
Club, 1884-1984: Its Library, Exhibitions, & Publications
(1984).[29] All these works are useful
sources, but
there are gaps in the coverage, such as the post-World War II history of the
Bibliographical Society and the history of the Bibliographical Society of the
University of Virginia. And the scholarly history that would consolidate
these individual histories into a comprehensive study of the development
and achievement of learned societies and social clubs in the field of
bibliography remains to be written.
A related area is the history of bibliographical journals, which are
often produced by bibliographical societies, though there are illustrious
exceptions. A. W. Pollard predictably handled the early history of the
Bibliographical Society's journal in excellent fashion ("The
Library: A History of Forty Volumes," Library, 4th
ser.,
10 [1929-30], 398-418), and I have discussed its early newsletter ("The
Bibliographical Society's News Sheet, 1894-1920,"
Gutenberg Jahrbuch 1967, pp. 297-307). Pollard's important
three-year experiment, Bibliographica, has received some
well-deserved attention from Robin Myers ("Bibliographica,"
Private Library, 3rd ser., 2 [1979], 86-94). Desmond Flower
wrote up the story of his and A. J. A. Symons's Book Collector's
Quarterly ("The Book Collector's Quarterly,"
Private Library, 2nd ser., 1 [1968], 2-6; 3rd ser., 1 [1978],
39-48), and in that journal he had published an assessment
of Oliver Simon and Stanley Morison's splendid Fleuron
("Tradition and Experiment: The Fleuron I—VII."
Book
Collector's Quarterly, 2 [March 1931], 93-100; see also James
Moran, "The Fortieth Anniversary of The Fleuron,"
Black
Art, 1 [1962], 106-113). The Fleuron and two other
journals were given extended treatment by Grant Shipcott in
Typographical Periodicals between the Wars: A Critique of "The
Fleuron," "Signature" and "Typography" (1980), the published
version of a thesis at Oxford Polytechnic; I know of no other book-length
study of this kind, examining a group of related bibliographical or
typographical journals, and it is to be hoped that the presence of this book
will stimulate others to pursue similar topics. Several briefer overviews,
however, are available: Ruari McLean, "Some Typographical Journals,
1900-1939," in Liber Amicorum Herman Liebaers (1984),
pp.
307-315; Lawrence P. Murphy, "'Published for Book
Lovers': A Short History of American Book Collecting Magazines,"
Book Collector's Market, 4, no. 5 (September-October 1979),
1, 4-10; Claude A. Prance, "Elliot Stock and Some Old Book-Collecting
Magazines," Private Library, 3rd ser., 2 (1979), 42-48; and
Joseph Blumenthal, "American Book Arts Magazines," Fine
Print, 6, no. 1 (January 1980), 4-9.
Mention of Elliot Stock causes one to think of books in series, for he
is perhaps best remembered as the publisher of "The Book Lover's
Library," which in twenty-five volumes (1886-1902) is the most extensive
series of books on books yet produced. Prance has also written on this
aspect of Stock's career ("The Book Lover's Library,"
Private
Library, 3rd ser., 6 [1983], 132-139); Stock's role as publisher of
other bibliographical work in the early days of the Bibliographical Society
calls for further examination. (I should call attention here, parenthetically,
to the frequency with which the
Private Library has been
mentioned in the last page or so: the editors deserve praise for the space
they have devoted in recent years to the history of bibliophilic publications.)
The general subject of such series of books was well surveyed in the
mid-1930s by Ruth S. Granniss ("Series of Books about Books,"
Colophon, n.s., 1 [1935-36], 549-564). Another kind of
series—that of lectures—has recently been given some
welcome
historical attention. The series of Sandars (Cambridge, 1894- ) and Lyell
(Oxford, 1952- ) lectures have a significant place in the history of physical
bibliography, and David McKitterick has taken the basic first step in
studying them by producing
The Sandars and Lyell Lectures: A
Checklist (1983). In a preface he describes the foundation of the two
series, and in the entries he provides references to the manuscripts or
typescripts of the lectures when their locations are known (the Sandars have
usually been deposited in Cambridge University Library and the British
Library) and cites any published forms of them (including summaries in
contemporary periodicals). The way is now prepared for someone to
undertake a narrative history, and the Sandars series particularly demands
this treatment: it was intimately bound up with the early history of the New
Bibliography, having been established two years after the founding of the
Bibliographical Society and in the same year when Greg and McKerrow
entered Trinity College, Cambridge. (The remarkable roll of Cambridge
bibliographers and editors—from Bennet and Bentley to Bradshaw,
Housman, McKerrow, and Greg, and on to Carter and
Munby—gives it
a special place in the history of bibliography.)
The largest category of the literature of bibliographical history
consists of biographical writings. Although there are few book-length
biographies, and not many pieces of any length that are critical assessments
by scholars who did not know their subjects personally, this literature is
nevertheless a rich one because of the high quality of the memorial tributes
to the major figures. There is no better way to gain a sense of how the field
developed than to read these memoirs; even after a thorough scholarly
history appears, they will remain of value for their immediacy in displaying
the qualities of mind that shaped the field.
Of the five major figures before 1950—Bradshaw, Proctor,
Pollard,
McKerrow, and Greg—only Bradshaw (1831-86) has thus far been
the
subject of much scholarship, and he awaits a modern biography that would
give appropriate attention to his bibliographical achievements.
Two years after Bradshaw's death George W. Prothero published
A
Memoir of Henry Bradshaw (1888), a long Victorian life-and-letters
that emphasized Bradshaw's librarianship of Cambridge University Library.
A volume of
Collected Papers (edited by Francis Jenkinson)
appeared the following year, and in 1904 A. W. Pollard edited "Letters of
Henry Bradshaw to Officials of the British Museum"
(
Library,
n.s., 5: 266-292, 431-442). The next serious work on Bradshaw did not
occur until some sixty years later: Wytze and Lotte Hellinga's extensively
annotated two-volume edition of
Henry Bradshaw's Correspondence
on Incunabula with J. W. Holtrop and M. F. A. G. Campbell
(1966-78). Because Bradshaw's influence on other scholars resulted more
from his correspondence with them than from the publication of essays, his
letters are particularly important, and several further selections of them
have seen print (e.g., those edited by David McKitterick in
Hellinga
Festschrift [1980], pp. 335-338, and in
Quaerendo,
11
[1981], 128-164). At this time Robin Myers also contributed a basic
account of Bradshaw's work on Caxton ("William Blades's Debt to Henry
Bradshaw and G. I. F. Tupper in His Caxton Studies: A Further Look at
Unpublished Documents,"
Library, 5th ser., 5 [1978],
265-283). In 1984 Roy Stokes performed a valuable service by editing a
volume (
Henry Bradshaw, 1831-1886) containing a selection
of
Bradshaw's work, along with an introductory essay and lists of Bradshaw's
publications and of writings about him.
[30] (This volume is the sixth in a
series called
"The Great Bibliographers," published by the Scarecrow Press, the first five
being on McKerrow, Pollard, Dibdin, McMurtrie, and Sadleir.) Bradhaw
had thus been far less neglected than most bibliographers by the time of the
centennial of his death, which was marked by several events: an exhibition
at Cambridge University
Library; the publication of McKitterick's history of the Library, containing
new information about Bradshaw; and Needham's delivery of his Hanes
Lecture, the most penetrating discussion of Bradshaw yet written, and a
model for historians of bibliography.
Robert Proctor (1868-1903), the next great figure in the history of the
analysis of bibliographical evidence and a follower of Bradshaw's, was the
subject of a memorable obituary essay by A. W. Pollard
(Library, n.s., 5 [1904], 1-34; reprinted in his 1905 edition
of
a collection of Proctor's Bibliographical Essays); Pollard also
put together a record of "Robert Proctor's Work" (in the same volume of
the Library, pp. 192-205, 223-224). In 1951 Victor
Scholderer
commented on excerpts from Proctor's diary ("The Private Diary of Robert
Proctor," Library, 5th ser., 5: 261-269; reprinted in
Scholderer's Fifty Essays [1966], pp. 31-37); and recently
Barry
C. Johnson published a pamphlet, Lost in the Alps: A Portrait of
Robert Proctor (1985), which records some new information
but seems more interested in the mystery of Proctor's death than in the
details of his bibliographical scholarship.
Pollard (1859-1944), whose important work first on incunabula and
then on Shakespeare made him a transition figure between the
nineteenth-century analytical bibliography and that of the twentieth century
and whose leadership caused the New Bibliography at first to be thought of
as the "school of Pollard," did see into print some fragments of
autobiography: "Reminiscences of an Amateur Book-Builder"
(Colophon, part 4 [December 1930]) and "My First Fifty
Years" (in A Select Bibliography of the Writings of Alfred W.
Pollard [1938], pp. 1-15, and completed by Henry Thomas's "From
Fifty to Seventy-Five," pp. 16-20), in addition to Two Brothers:
Accounts Rendered (1916, 1917), on his two sons who were killed
in the war. Following his death John Dover Wilson wrote a thorough and
moving memoir (Proceedings of the British Academy, 31
[1945], 256-306) and, a quarter-century later, devoted a section of his
autobiography, Milestones on the Dover Road
(1969), to Pollard ("The Scholar as Saint: Alfred Pollard," pp. 237-249).
F. C. Francis contributed an obituary to the Library (4th ser.,
25 [1944-45], 82-86), and the Bibliographical Society's annual report in the
same issue called Pollard "the creator of the Society as we know it to-day"
(p. 101). The 1938 checklist of Pollard's voluminous writings is
supplemented in the volume in the "Great Bibliographers" series,
Alfred William Pollard: A Selection of His Essays (edited by
Fred W. Roper, 1976), which also reprints Wilson's earlier memoir and
includes an essay by Roger Leachman (based on his Master's thesis at the
University of North Carolina) entitled "Alfred William Pollard: His
Influence on Contemporary Bibliography" (pp. 58-77).
R. B. McKerrow (1872-1940), who published several of the
monuments of the New Bibliography (the edition of Nashe, the
Introduction to Bibliography, the registers of publishers'
devices
and title-page borders, the Prolegomena for the Oxford
Shakespeare), was given a fine memorial tribute by W. W. Greg
(Proceedings of the British Academy, 26 [1940], 488-515)
and
a checklist by F. C. Francis (Library, 4th ser., 21 [1940-41],
229-263). Besides the essay by Fredson Bowers mentioned earlier, the only
other major publication about McKerrow is the volume in the "Great
Bibliographers" series, Ronald Brunlees McKerrow: A Selection of
His Essays (edited by John Philip Immroth, 1974), which includes
Greg's memoir and a revision of Francis's checklist. Robin Myers has also
written an account of the Introduction to Bibliography in her
"Key Works in Bibliography" series (Antiquarian Book Monthly
Review, 5 [1978], 8-9, 11).
W.W. Greg (1875-1959) produced an even larger body of important
work than the others, and with good reason F. P. Wilson called him the
"hero" of his account of the New Bibliography. Greg's
Biographical
Notes, 1877-1947, written in 1948, were privately printed at the
Bodleian in 1960; a checklist of his writings was prepared by F. C. Francis
in 1945 (
Library, 4th ser., 26 [1945-46], 72-97, where
Francis
says that his work was marked "by a singleness of purpose rarely aspired
to and practically never attained") and was supplemented by D. F.
McKenzie fifteen years later (
Library, 5th ser., 15 [1960],
42-46). F. P. Wilson wrote a substantial memoir of Greg
(
Proceedings
of the British Academy, 45 [1959], 307-334), and a collection of
tributes (by J. C. T. Oates, J. Dover Wilson, Alice Walker, Muriel St.
Clare Byrne, Fredson Bowers, and F. C. Francis) was gathered in the
Library (5th ser., 14 [1959], 151-174). Greg's
A
Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration
(1939-59) has been discussed by
Robin Myers as one of the "Key Works in Bibliography"
(
Antiquarian
Book Monthly Review, 5 [1978], 98-100, 102). In 1966 J. C.
Maxwell edited Greg's
Collected Papers, incorporating some
revisions from Greg's notes. Although there is not much directly
biographical writing about Greg, his ideas have been the subject of
extensive discussion. Because he made a number of important general
statements about the field, as well as basic contributions to the development
of thinking about descriptive bibliography and scholarly editing, there is an
enormous literature that comments on his work. A large part of what has
been written on textual criticism in English since 1950, for example,
analyzes his essay "The Rationale of Copy-Text." Most of this writing is
not specifically historical in aim; it is the kind of discussion that grows up
around any figure whose work is influential—as it has done, indeed,
around the other great bibliographers (though Greg seems to be the subject
of
more of it). But some of the commentary does try, however briefly, to
account for the origins or timing of Greg's ideas,
[31] and it is of course part of the
material that
the biographer of Greg must deal with.
One may read in some detail about the lives of a few of the other
figures active in the Bibliographical Society in its early years, such as J. Y.
W. MacAlister (1856-1925), a founder of the Society (Sir John
Young
Walker MacAlister: A Memorial for His Family and Friends,
1926—which includes Pollard's memoir originally printed in the
Library, 4th ser., 6 [1926], 375-380), Talbot Baines Reed
(1852-93), the first Secretary of the Society (Stanley Morison's
Talbot
Baines Reed, 1960), and Francis Jenkinson (1853-1923), President
of the Society from 1900 to 1902 (H. F. Stewart's Francis
Jenkinson, 1926). T. J. Wise (1859-1937), President of the Society
from 1922 to 1924, has become—as a result of his bibliographical
crimes
rather than his bibliographical scholarship—the focus of a whole
historical industry. The fullest account of the
forgeries, as well as the best guide to the writings on the subject, is Nicolas
Barker and John Collins's
A Sequel to "An Enquiry" . . . The
Forgeries of H. Buxton Forman & T. J. Wise Re-examined
(1983); John Carter and Graham Pollard also described the "Aftermath of
'An Enquiry'" in an essay published as the epilogue to the 1983 printing of
An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century
Pamphlets. David Foxon takes up another of Wise's crimes, the
removal of leaves from books in the British Museum library, in
Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama (1959). In
the
midst of all this, there is one essay on Wise's place in the growth of author
bibliography (Simon Nowell-Smith, "T. J. Wise as Bibliographer,"
Library, 5th ser., 24 [1969], 129-141). A contemporary of
Wise's, M. R. James (1862-1936), who was active in the Bibliographical
Society somewhat later and was one of the inaugural recipients of its Gold
Medal in 1929, has inspired a
considerable literature (partly because of the interest in his ghost stories),
from S. G. Lubbock's
A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James
(1939; with a checklist by A. F. Scholfield) to the recent books by Richard
William Pfaff (
Montague Rhodes James [1980], with a new
checklist of his scholarly writings) and Michael Cox (
M. R. James:
An Informal Portrait [1983], with a list of writings about James).
His
reminiscences,
Eton and King's (1926), help to paint the
picture
of Cambridge at an important time for bibliography. (Another
contemporary, A. E. Housman [1859-1936], was not a member of the
Bibliographical Society, but his textual work should be taken into account
along with that of the early members of the Society, and a great deal has
of course been written about him.)
[32]
A figure of the next generation who should be mentioned with this group
is J. B. Oldham (1882-1962), whose work on bindings earned him the Gold
Medal of
the Bibliographical Society; he is now the subject of a book (
J. B.
Oldham, 1882-1962, 1986) by M. L. Charlesworth, who does not,
however, say much about his bibliographical work. A still later member of
the Bibliographical Society but a contributor (the only American
contributor) to its anniversary volume, W. A. Jackson (1905-64), has been
well served by William H. Bond, who in
Records of a
Bibliographer (1967) presented an admirable biographical sketch and
a checklist, as well as a selection of Jackson's essays.
A few individuals earlier than Bradshaw can be seen, in one respect
or another, as forerunners of modern physical bibliography. Thomas Bennet
(1673-1728), whose An Essay on the Thirty Nine Articles of
Religion (1715) employs printing evidence derived from collation
in
considering the authenticity of the opening of the twentieth article, has been
discussed both by Strickland Gibson ("Thomas Bennet, a Forgotten
Bibliographer," Library, 5th ser., 6 [1951], 43-47) and, in
an
excellent
piece of bibliographical history, by William L. Williamson ("Thomas
Bennet and the Origins of Analytical Bibliography,"
Journal of
Library History, 16 [1981], 177-186). The
Prolusions
(1760) and other writings of Edward Capell (1713-81) have been examined
by David Foxon for their role in the development of quasi-facsimile
transcription (
Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical
Description, 1970).
[33] Thomas
Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) and Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862) may
be less easy to relate to modern methods, but their activities and
reminiscences (e.g., Dibdin's
Reminiscences of a Literary
Life,
1836; Horne's
Reminiscences Personal and Bibliographical,
1862) are part of what the historian of physical bibliography has to take into
account for the early nineteenth century (see also William A. Jackson's
An Annotated List of the Publications of the Reverend Thomas
Frognall Dibdin, 1965; and the
1978 volume,
Thomas Frognall Dibdin: Selections, edited by
Victor E. Neuburg for the "Great Bibliographers" series). An important
contemporary of Bradshaw—indeed, one of Bradshaw's principal
correspondents—was the printer William Blades (1824-90),
championed
as "the founder of modern scientific bibliography" by Stanley Morison (who
was thinking of the study of typography, not the New Bibliography) in his
introduction to
Type Specimen Facsimiles (edited by John
Dreyfus, 1963 [p. xix]; reprinted with another essay as
Letter
Forms, 1968). Talbot Baines Reed wrote a memoir of Blades (with
a checklist) for the posthumous publication of
The Pentateuch of
Printing (1891). Blades's work on Caxton and his connections with
Bradshaw have been repeatedly discussed, as in James Moran's "William
Blades" (
Library, 5th ser., 16 [1961], 251-266), Robin
Myers's
1978 article (mentioned above) and her "The Caxton Celebration of 1877:
A Landmark in Bibliophily" (in
Bibliophily, edited by Myers and Michael Harris, 1986; pp.
138-163), and Lotte Hellinga's
Caxton in Focus (1982; see
"William Blades," pp. 36-40). Blades's (and Bradshaw's) relations with
Tupper are explored in Robin Myers, "George Isaac Frederick Tupper,
Facsimilist, 'whose ability in this description of work is beyond praise'
(1820?-1911),"
Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical
Society, 7, part 2 (1978), 113-134.
The next generation after Greg's produced a remarkable group of
bibliographers from the ranks of publishers and booksellers. The mentor of
many of them was the publisher Michael Sadleir (1888-1957), whose
Trollope bibliography appeared as early as 1928; he wrote some "Passages
from the Autobiography of a Bibliomaniac" for the great catalogue of his
collection, XIX Century Fiction (1951) and was the subject
of
an amusing piece by Simon Nowell-Smith ("Sadleir Sadleirized,"
New
Colophon, 2 [1949], 135-142). At his death both John Carter
(Book
Collector, 7 [1958], 58-61) and Graham Pollard
(
Library, 5th ser., 13 [1958], 129-131) wrote tributes, and
Simon Nowell-Smith prepared a checklist (
Library, pp.
132-138). Robin Myers made
XIX Century Fiction the first
work discussed in her "Key Works in Bibliography" series
(
Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 4 [1977], 394-398), and
Roy Stokes edited (with introductory essay and revised checklist) a volume
on Sadleir for the "Great Bibliographers" series (
Michael Sadleir,
1888-1957, 1980). No doubt the most celebrated members of this
group were John Carter (1905-75) and Graham Pollard
(1903-76)—both
from the antiquarian book trade—because of their exposure in 1934
of
Wise's fabrications through a pioneer use of physical analysis applied to
nineteenth-century materials. This aspect of their lives is of course well
covered by Barker and Collins in
A Sequel to "An Enquiry."
Carter wrote some reminiscences of other parts of his life,
such as "Sotheby's of London, New York: The Early Days; Some
Egotistical Reminiscences" (
Art at Auction 1970-71, pp.
34-47),
and he supplied a biography of Pollard for
Studies in the Book Trade
in Honour of Graham Pollard, edited by R. W. Hunt, I. G. Philip,
and R. J. Roberts (1975), a volume that also includes a checklist of
Pollard's published work. Nicolas Barker wrote substantial memoirs of both
Carter and Pollard (
Book Collector, 24 [1975], 202-216
passim; 26 [1977], 7-28
passim), and P. H.
Muir
also recorded some recollections of Carter for the
Book
Collector (24: 271-276
passim). Muir (1894-1979),
another bookseller-bibliographer closely associated with this group,
published an informative autobiography,
Minding My Own
Business (1956) and was honored on his eightieth birthday with a
booklet edited by Laurie Deval (
P.H.M. 80, 1974); in 1980
Barker wrote an obituary tribute for the
Book Collector
(29: 85-88), and three years later Muir's widow was responsible for the
appearance of
P. H. Muir: A Check List of His Published
Work
(a supplement was added in 1985, and in 1986, under the name Barbara
Kaye, she published
The Company We Kept, her sequel to
his
autobiography). John Hayward (1904-65), dominant force behind the
Book Collector for seventeen years, was the subject of a
particularly evocative group of tributes edited by John Carter ("John
Hayward, 1904-1965: Some Memories,"
Book Collector, 14
[1965], 443-486; also published as a pamphlet). And A. N. L. Munby
(1913-74), librarian of King's College, Cambridge, for twenty-seven years
and himself a bibliographical historian of distinction in his five-volume
work on the collection of Thomas Phillipps (
Phillipps Studies,
1951-60), has been taken up in several memoirs besides those by Barker in
the
Book Collector (24 [1975], 191-201
passim)
and
(with checklist appended) in
Munby's
Essays and Papers (1978): Patrick Wilkinson,
Alan Noel Latimer Munby (1975); Harold Forster, "'Munby
Ltd,'"
Book Collector, 31 (1982), 331-338; John R. Gretton,
"A. N. L. Munby: A Tribute," in
Essays in Book-Collecting
(1985), pp. 76-80.
As these names and citations show, book collecting and antiquarian
bookselling intersect bibliography so extensively that most biographies of
individuals associated with any of these areas are relevant to a study of the
others. For a picture of the bibliographical world of the first half of the
twentieth century, one should not neglect, for example, such biographical
accounts of dealers as Rosenbach (1960), a detailed biography
of the great Philadelphia dealer by Edwin Wolf 2nd with John Fleming, and
Dukedom Large Enough (1969), the reminiscences of David
A.
Randall, who was in charge of rare books at Scribner's in New York while
John Carter was Scribner's rare-book representative in London. Similarly,
the famous physician-collectors William Osler (1849-1919) and Geoffrey
Keynes (1887-1982) have a place in bibliographical history, the former for
Bibliotheca Osleriana and Incunabula Medica
and
the latter for his long series of bibliographies of
writers he collected (both were presidents of the Bibliographical Society).
For both, we have their own statements about their collecting ("The
Collecting of a Library" in Bibliotheca Osleriana [1929];
"Religio Bibliographici" in Keynes's Bibliotheca
Bibliographici
[1964], earlier published in the Library, 5th ser., 8 [1953],
63-76) and full-length biographical accounts (Harvey Cushing's massive
The Life of Sir William Osler [1926] and Keynes's
autobiography, The Gates of Memory [1981]), along with
some
later assessments (particularly Charles G. Roland's of Osler and Nicolas
Barker's of Keynes).[34]
Dealers and collectors seem to have engaged in more autobiographical
writing than have bibliographers, some of it not perhaps immediately
related to the concerns of analytical bibliographers but all of it contributing
to a picture of that part of the book world in which analytical bibliography
exists.[35] And this picture has been
extended by a number of scholarly studies of dealers and collectors, some
notable examples (besides Rosenbach and Phillipps
Studies) being Wilmarth Lewis's Horace Walpole's
Library (1958), Wyman W. Parker's Henry Stevens of
Vermont (1963), B. L. Reid's The Man from New
York
[John Quinn] (1968), Cyril E. Wright's Fontes Harleiani
(1971;
following his and Ruth C. Wright's edition of The Diary of
Humphrey
Wanley, 1966), Anthony Hobson's Apollo and
Pegasus
[Grimaldi] (1975), and Nicolas Barker's Bibliotheca
Lindesiana
(1977), along with such catalogues as Allen
T. Hazen's A Catalogue of Horace Walpole's Library (1969),
Gabriel Austin's The Library of Jean Grolier (1971), and
Edwin
Wolf's The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia (1974).
Scholars of typographic history are another class of students of the physical
book: the
most thoroughly discussed is Stanley Morison (1889-1967), the subject of
a biography by Nicolas Barker (1972) and of many shorter memoirs;
[36] but volumes of collected essays
and
Festschriften, usually containing checklists and introductory appreciations,
provide a starting point for biographical work on a number of others.
[37]
In the second half of the twentieth century the dominant
bibliographical scholar is Fredson Bowers. He, like Greg, has been the
focus of a great deal of commentary; but the most clearly historical pieces
that have thus far appeared about him are probably two essays included in
"Fredson Bowers at Eighty" (PBSA, 79 [1985], 173-226; also
printed as a separate)—David Vander Meulen's (mentioned above)
on the
Principles and mine on "The Achievement of Fredson
Bowers."
A pictorial booklet, A Keepsake to Honor Fredson Bowers,
marked the occasion of his retirement in 1974; a checklist of his writings
is included in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing
(1975), pp. 531-548, and is supplemented in PBSA, 79
(1985),
221-226. His own tribute to Charlton Hinman (Book
Collector,
26 [1977], 389-391) is worth examining for his comments on the other
primary developer of analytical bibliography in this period. Robin Myers
has discussed both
Bowers's Principles and Hinman's The Printing and
Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) in her "Key
Works" series (Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 6 [1979],
362-367 passim; 8 [1981], 219-223).[38]
All these biographical accounts, and the studies of bibliographical
societies and journals, provide glimpses—sometimes scholarly,
sometimes
journalistic and anecdotal—into particular segments of bibliographical
history. Such writings form part of the basis, along with the bibliographical
work itself, on which more comprehensive histories can be constructed. But
very few efforts of broader scope have been attempted. Greg's "Notes on
Dramatic Bibliographers" (Malone Society Collections, 1,
parts
4-5 [1911], 324-340; 2, part 3 [1931], 235-238) limits itself to lists (from
1656 to 1812) of English plays—making the point that "a familiarity
with
the history of dramatic bibliography is often necessary for the criticism of
current and received opinions" (p. 324). A true precursor of F. P. Wilson's
essay is Percy Simpson's "The Bibliographical Study of Shakespeare"
(Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, 1, part 1
[1923],
19-53), an excellent piece of work
that "attempts to show historically how recent scholarship has worked with
effect on the problems of the text of Shakespeare" (p. 49) and sees Pollard
as the leading figure.[39] There has
been nothing, however, like Wilson's piece since. George Watson Cole, in
1929, published "A Survey of the Bibliography of English Literature,
1475-1640, with Especial Reference to the Work of the Bibliographical
Society of London" (PBSA, 23, part 2: 1-95),
which—though it is not a continuous narrative—is a useful
(and
neglected) work: it consists of a chronological sequence of historical
sketches (some several pages in length) of individuals and institutions that
have produced important bibliographies, with appended sections listing the
bibliographies and reproducing sample entries from them.
[40] Some sense of historical
development is
often conveyed in the introductory comments to scholarly books and
articles, but they rarely become full-fledged historical studies. One
exception is Morison's long essay "On the Classification of Typographical
Variations," prefixed to
Type Specimen Facsimiles
(mentioned
above for its discussion of Blades), a large part of which (pp. xvii-xxviii)
deals with the history of typographical scholarship. Foxon's
Thoughts
on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (cited
earlier
for its recognition of Capell) is another rare instance of historical
attention to an aspect of physical bibliography, in this case the conventions
of title-page transcription. My two essays on twentieth-century
bibliographical history are much broader in scope than Wilson or Morison
or Foxon but are much less detailed. Obviously this survey of the literature
of bibliographical history must be anticlimactic: there are many
reminiscences and some detailed studies but very little that tries to pull the
disparate parts of the story together.
