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The works that I have alluded to here are only a sampling of what exists—but, I hope, a sampling that suggests the range of the published material and one that includes most of the basic items. Many more books and essays that are retrospective in one way or another could be mentioned, particularly those that are anniversary or obituary tributes to particular individuals. There is a large roster of people, active during the Bibliographical Society's first half-century, who deserve attention, in addition to those already mentioned as subjects of historical writing—among them, G. F. Barwick, R. W. Chapman, W. A. Copinger, Cyril Davenport, E. Gordon Duff, F. S. Ferguson, F. C. Francis, Stephen Gaselee, Strickland Gibson, E. P. Goldschmidt, Konrad Haebler, G. D. Hobson, Falconer Madan, Henry R. Plomer, Charles Sayle, Percy Simpson, Henry Thomas, Edward Maunde Thompson, W. H. J. Weale, H. B. Wheatley, Harold Williams, Iolo A. Williams, F. P. Wilson, and J. Dover Wilson. One can locate obituaries, DNB articles, and the like for these figures and others, just as one can find—through indexes, guides, and patient searches—further bibliographical writings with some historical perspective. Voluminous as this literature is, it is largely the natural by-product of the development of the field, not the result of disinterested scholarly investigation. Of the works that I have named, the majority

are personal reminiscences. The field may not be old, but it is old enough that independent judgments concerning the accomplishments of its earlier years are possible.

The writings mentioned here, and others like them, should be familiar to all bibliographers, for they show what traditions have grown up in the field and how previous bibliographers have looked at their colleagues and predecessors. But the historian of bibliography, in addition to knowing this retrospective work, must of course return to the bibliographical scholarship itself and to any unpublished material relating to it. The scholarship is not as conveniently indexed as one might wish, and some of it remains hidden in monographs and essays indexed only under the authors of the books analyzed, not under the bibliographical approaches employed. But much of the material is in fact accessible through a series of indexes and guides,[41] though their presence should never cause one to neglect the systematic searching of shelves and of periodicals, a process by which one's sense of the growth of a field will more fully emerge. The whereabouts of the relevant collections of unpublished letters and papers are, as in all fields, less easy to determine. Scholars' papers, when they are preserved at all, are likely to be in the institutions with which they were associated, for such papers are regarded more often as part of institutional archives than as manuscripts of independent interest. As long as the papers are properly cared for, one should perhaps not complain; many scholars do, after all, play prominent roles in their institutions and deserve a place in the collections that support institutional memory. But many scholars (and not always different ones) have taken important parts on the broader stage of international scholarship; and the fact that their papers are often regarded as being primarily of local interest suggests the position that the history of scholarship occupies in the hierarchy adopted by many collectors of manuscripts in institutional libraries.

Writing history—the attempt to reconstruct some segment of the past —is always a creative activity. The shapes that historians give to the past are the products of particular points of view and particular selections of details. As we move forward, our sense of how we got to our present location changes, and new versions of the past continually emerge. When the subject of our history is humanistic scholarship, we are looking at individuals who were historians themselves, individuals who chose the study of the past as their way of coming to terms with the world. Historians of science and of belles lettres, painting, music, and the other arts deal with the same kind of individuals, who happen to have taken different routes to satisfy the same creative urge, the urge to place the stamp of human control on what seems to be the chaos outside the mind.

Some novelists and scientists may decide that chaos is the ultimate reality, but even then they have imposed a human conception on the exterior world and can thereby feel that in some way they have mastered it. F. C. Francis's reference to the "sense of common adventure" that characterized the Bibliographical Society in its early years can be applied more generally: for all who think about their relation to their surroundings, and endeavor to explain the past or present or future, share a common adventure. Biographies give us the story of that adventure, life by life, showing how creative pursuits relate to the exigencies of living. And the story of a field is a shaped collection of such biographies. The number of lives that have been devoted to bibliography is not large, because the significance of the field, and thus of bibliographical lives, is often underestimated. But the concerns of the field are of fundamental importance to all literate beings: everyone who reads is affected by bibliographical discoveries and concepts, for every text is likely to be altered in the process of its transmission; and a knowledge of how the physical objects that bear verbal messages were produced will influence how one approaches any text.[42] When we write bibliographical history we are adding to the record of human creativity and in the process showing what bibliography contributes to the life of the mind.