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In 1923 R. Austin Freeman published "The Apparition of Burling Court," one of his Dr. Thorndyke stories, in which the learned doctor, journeying by train out of London with his companion, examines a book en route.[1] "First," we are told,

This fictional episode anticipates by eleven years a famous real-life announcement of the similar detection of a bibliographical crime. When John Carter and Graham Pollard published in 1934 their evidence for condemning as spurious certain pamphlets by nineteenth-century authors (now known as the Wise-Forman forgeries), the presence of esparto in the paper was a major element in their demonstration (along with an analysis of the type faces).[2] One is not surprised to learn that in the same year Carter mentioned the Dr. Thorndyke stories in a pioneering essay on the collecting of detective fiction.[3] The more significant link between the two discoveries of forgery, however, is the recognition—illustrated by both—of the role of physical evidence in evaluating the status of written and printed language. Thorndyke was concerned with a handwritten book and Carter and Pollard with printed pamphlets, but in each case the starting point for a critical approach to the language conveyed by an artifact was an examination of the physical characteristics of that artifact. The results are not often so dramatic as the revelation of forgery; but the possibility of forgery, always present even if not always likely, underscores the way in which our assessment of the relative reliability of texts is tied to our evaluation of all the evidence present in the artifacts carrying those texts. Even when a manuscript or printed book is authentic as a whole, some of the clues it contains to its own production history may call into question various elements of the text or suggest how textual errors might be corrected. Texts come to us either through oral tradition or in tangible form as parts of physical objects; and the investigation and recording of all that can be learned about such objects is thus fundamental to the appreciation of a major segment of our cultural heritage. What has come to be known as descriptive bibliography is a genre of writing that aims to set forth the physical characteristics and production history of the objects that we call books.[4]

That such a type of historical writing exists should not seem surprising. Artifacts that survive provide our tangible link with the human past, and they must all be of intense interest to anyone concerned with that past. It seems natural that human beings should pore over the objects they inherit, noting down their measurements, colors, and designs and attempting to read in them the story of their production and the meanings they held for their producers—just as Belzoni, in Emerson's words, "digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes."[5] We regard it as perfectly normal that people write verbal accounts of the physical properties of paintings and drawings, buildings and sculptures, vases and goblets. Because these works of art and craft use physical media, any comments on their physical characteristics are comments on their artistry as well and are thus a form of art criticism. Books, however, are not as commonly approached in physical terms, as constituents of material culture, since they exist largely for the purpose of transmitting verbal (or musical or choreographic) texts;[6] and many persons who wish to read and appreciate those texts do not consider the physical aspects of books relevant to their concerns. As the narrator of the Thorndyke story noted, "An ordinary person would have opened the book and looked through the contents" (p. 831), not examining its physical features, which would not be regarded as part of its "contents."
People use the word "book" to refer to a verbal work more often

This cluster of misconceptions is the greatest obstacle that descriptive bibliographers face in explaining their work to an audience larger than their fellow specialists; indeed, so widespread are those misunderstandings that even some bibliographers themselves seem to be unaware of the full significance of what they are doing. Most readers, if they pay any attention at all to the physical features of the books they read, do not connect those details to their attempt at associating meaning with the verbal texts they find in the books. (This failure to see the significance of the physicality of texts is equally characteristic of those who believe that meanings are lodged in texts by authors and those who believe they are placed there by readers.) Presumably many readers do recognize—or would quickly do so if they gave thought to the matter—that the design of any book is worthy of study as a reflection of the taste of its time, as an indication of the stature of the author and genre represented in it, and as a clue to the nature of the audience expected for it. They would then assume that specialized studies of these matters must exist but that such work constitutes a byway of literary history, not a field of central importance to the majority of readers of books.
In the first of these assumptions they would be correct, but not in the second. A large number of descriptive bibliographies do exist, recording—in varying degrees of detail—information about the paper, typography,

The information they provide, however, is intimately related to evaluating the texts of the books described, and texts are what readers are interested in. The very arrangement of most descriptive bibliographies of authors reflects an emphasis on texts, for the commonest plan is to take up successive printings and editions of one work before moving on to the next work. Chronology of an author's whole career yields to a series of separate histories of the presentation of the texts of particular works—in each of which chronology may be further violated by treating together the successive printings of one edition (the copies resulting from one setting of type or act of keyboarding) before proceeding to the printings of the next edition. The classification—into editions and printings—of all copies of books purporting to present the text of the same work is a basic function of descriptive bibliographies and a prerequisite for the study of textual history. Although textual relationships do not necessarily coincide with the chronology of editions (since any edition may of course be based on a text other than that of the immediately preceding edition), a knowledge of what editions and printings exist is the starting point for any study of the textual history of a work, and thus for any historical approach to the reading and interpretation of that work. Some

The texts of printed books are physical, consisting of inked letter-forms on paper or a similar surface; and studies of books as physical objects cannot logically avoid reporting on the texts in them. On practical grounds, however, they may sometimes legitimately omit such details in order to avoid duplication, if a thorough edition has already accounted for the textual variants or is about to do so. Under other circumstances, if bibliographers fail to comment on textual variants, both within and between editions, one must suspect them of not understanding the relation of physical evidence to reading. Some bibliographers, despite their having elected to spend substantial portions of their lives recording physical details about books, share with the bulk of the human race a confusion about how books work, about where verbal statements (or musical or choreographic ones) actually exist. This confusion is symbolized by what goes on in many research libraries, where in one part of the building brittle books are microfilmed and the originals discarded, while in another area, usually called a department of "rare books" or "special collections," books are housed with great care, regardless of how brittle they are, in an effort to preserve them. The former activity implies that photocopies of texts are equivalent to the originals and thus ignores the role of physical evidence in reading; the gathering of material into "rare-book" rooms, on the other hand, seems to suggest a recognition of the importance of artifactual evidence. The two activities rest on contradictory assumptions, and the library profession has been no more successful than the reading public in constructing a coherent rationale that encompasses them both.[9]
There can in fact be no way to justify on rational grounds the notion


Books themselves are works of graphic art and may of course be studied as such; but a large majority of them are also utilitarian objects that serve to convey written directions for recreating dances, pieces of music, and verbal statements (including the ones we call literature). Those directions, not being the works themselves, may at any point be inaccurate reflections of the works; and every feature of the objects carrying such texts—whether present by design or by chance—is potentially significant for judging how those texts came to be what they are and why they were interpreted as they were in the past. Historically minded readers—those interested in readers' responses as well as those interested in authorial intention—along with those not interested in any historical approach must read all the physical clues that books have to offer, not just the inked letterforms, in an effort to decide how the texts should—for their purposes—be constituted. This kind of critical reading (different from what is commonly meant by "critical reading") does not convert literature into a tangible art (though there are of course instances of mixed-media works, like concrete poems, that do combine the verbal with the visual). Rather, this reading of physical evidence provides the basis for freeing oneself from the limitations of particular objects, from the contingencies of the single past moment reflected in each artifact. All readers, regardless of their degree of interest in history, must equally face the possibility of altering the texts they encounter, even though the arguments by which they reach their decisions on the matter may be very different. It is for these reasons that descriptive bibliography, by recording and analyzing the physical features of books, contributes directly to the process of reading and is thus a crucial cultural activity.
The gradual growth in the understanding of the connections between physical and intellectual aspects of books—between the processes of book production and the states of texts—is one of the fascinating (and neglected) stories in the history of thought. It is largely a story of the twentieth century, though foreshadowings can—as in any history—be located. The textual criticism of manuscripts goes back to antiquity, and from time to time over the centuries editors have used some of the physical characteristics of manuscripts (such as spacing and lineation or shifts in ink and handwriting) to support arguments for needed textual corrections. This flickering recognition of the significance of physical evidence in reading was not readily transferred to printed books—understandably,

By the eighteenth century, however, some scholars began to look at the earliest printed books as examples of printing. Michael Maittaire, Joseph Ames, William Herbert, and G. W. F. Panzer, in their various works that spanned the century, arranged incunabula by year or by printer, rather than by author or genre of writing, and thus emphasized the artifactual aspects of books.[12] Thomas Bennet in 1715 used typographical evidence (such as the spacing and damage of types) to order several sixteenth-century editions (the variously titled 1571 editions of the "thirty-nine articles of religion").[13] The editing of Shakespeare, which was undertaken several times in the eighteenth century, also directed some attention to the details of specific printed editions, and one Shakespeare editor, Edward Capell, engaged in the practice of transcribing printed title pages, indicating line endings and imitating type styles—a practice that became, more than a century later, a standard feature of bibliographical description. Because the function of these typographical exercises was not clearly articulated, it has been easy for some people to regard them as instances of "mere antiquarianism."[14] But antiquarianism is never "mere," even if some antiquarians do not have a conscious and coherent rationale for their activities: an interest in the details of artifacts, as reflected in Capell's transcriptions, indicates a sense, however undeveloped on a conscious level, of the fundamental role that objects must play in forming our sense of the past. The evolution of bibliophily from the collecting of works (that is, any copies of the texts of selected works) to the collecting of texts (that is, specific copies) is at once the triumph of antiquarianism and the prerequisite for the serious study of the transmission of verbal works.[15]

Among the precursors of twentieth-century descriptive bibliography, the most important by far was Henry Bradshaw, librarian of Cambridge University from 1867 to 1886. His approach to books and manuscripts was founded on a study of their physical structure, of the way sheets had been folded to form the conjugate leaves that made up the sewn gatherings in them; he explored the relation of this structure to the texts on the pages thus formed, and in the early 1860s he developed a collation formula to express concisely the number of conjugate leaves in each gathering of a book and the number of sheets (or part-sheets) required to make up those leaves—a formula that, modified by Greg and Bowers, is still in use today. He also demonstrated that one could classify incunabula as to source and date by examining the characteristics of the typography in them, not only the types themselves but also the peculiarities in their deployment, and in this activity he foreshadowed some of the compositorial studies of later analytical bibliographers.[16] After his death in 1886, his insights and methods affected the work of several scholars—as

The work of these scholars, motivated in large part by an interest in establishing the texts of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, involved such analytical practices as the tabulation of variant spellings and of identifiable types in an effort to link sections of text with particular typesetters and to determine the order in which pages of type had been set and printed. This kind of work is now usually called "analytical bibliography" and is associated in many people's minds with scholarly editing,


It was from this tradition that Fredson Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description emerged in 1949. Bowers's great book was a creative synthesis, consolidating what had gone before and adding to it. Every statement in the book presupposes the value of descriptive bibliography as a branch of historical scholarship and affirms the importance, for the study of the past, of placing on record the details that characterize the various objects called books. As Bowers says at the outset, a descriptive bibliography treats a series of books "so that the relations of their texts are clarified and the method of publication of all forms of each individual volume is determined" (p. 16, in italics); a bibliography aims "to present all the evidence about a book which can be determined by analytical bibliography applied to a material object" (p. 34).[21] His book provides a model both for thinking about the subject at large and for handling the multitude of individual situations that can arise: it is the central document of its field, and not likely to be supplanted.
Its arrival on the scene was not greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm, however, and the misgivings it aroused in some people are profoundly significant for understanding the peculiarly divided history of the field.[22]


His complaint that academic bibliographers "exaggerate the claims of bibliography until it comes to be an end rather than a means" (p. 377)[26] illustrates the unresolved dilemma in his own mind: he felt that "bibliophily is not enough" (p. 386) but held back from making it the basis of "pure scholarship," not fully realizing that bibliophily and scholarship coalesce when one understands the artifactual basis for historical study.[27] Whether scholarship is an end in itself is a fruitless question that can be asked in every field of endeavor; but Keynes seemed unable to conceive of bibliography as scholarship in the first place. If Bowers represents par excellence the tradition of descriptive bibliography as historical scholarship, Keynes symbolizes another strand that

The contrast between Bowers and Keynes in the mid-twentieth century echoes the contrast between Bradshaw and Richard Herne Shepherd in the 1860s. Shepherd published in 1866 a little volume entitled Tennysoniana, which may perhaps be regarded as inaugurating the era of what came to be called "author bibliographies";[28] it presented in a concise listing the information a Tennyson collector was presumed to require, with scarcely any attention given to the details of bookmaking. In the same year Bradshaw prepared a catalogue of the early Cologne books in the Bodleian, noting their typographical characteristics and using collation formulas to record their physical structure.[29] Descriptive bibliography thus became a divided stream: the study of physical details as historical evidence was associated with early books, while simultaneously books by nineteenth-century authors, just then becoming attractive to collectors, were treated in brief checklists aimed at providing the titles to be collected along with the occasional notation of points that supposedly distinguished first from later printings.
When Bradshaw in 1870 made his famous statement that the study of physical details in books is like "a branch of natural history," with the output of a press being a genus and each book from that press a species, he noted that the study of "palaeotypography" had previously been "a dilettante matter."[30] A similar contrast could be made between his work


Before the 1920s, however, there was scarcely any more direct challenge to the checklist approach to modern books. Shepherd's several listings were joined in the 1880s by similar lists from F. J. Furnivall, Charles Plumptre Johnson, Beverly Chew, John P. Anderson, and others.[33] In

The beginnings of a different point of view can be seen in E. T. Cook's statement, in his 1912 bibliography of Ruskin, that a bibliography "contains the life-history of an author's work" (p. xx). Another significant step was taken in 1916 in Henrietta C. Bartlett and A. W. Pollard's A Census of Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, 1594-1709, which built on the bibliographical analysis in Pollard's epochal Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (1909) and which recognized the importance of later editions and of examining all surviving copies.[36] And Wise was directly criticized a few years later in Reginald Harvey Griffith's two-volume bibliography of Pope (1922-27), a further demonstration of the necessity in an author bibliography for examining multiple copies of every printing

An instructive measure of the slow progress of this evolution is offered by Keynes's famous series of bibliographies, from the Donne in 1914 to the Henry King in 1977.[40] The series invites comparison with Wise's, for both consist of substantial volumes based on the bibliographers' own collections: if Keynes's reflects a general rise of bibliographical

From the time of Bowers's Principles—1949—onward, advances came at an accelerated pace, if in isolated instances. Beginning in 1951, the series of Soho Bibliographies, despite its unevenness, became an influential and largely beneficial model;[43] and several later series (particularly



What becomes apparent as one follows this story[49] is the increasing

This understanding of descriptive bibliography as history, as a genre of historical writing, implies certain requirements for bibliographical procedure. It entails, first of all, the examination of multiple copies of every impression of a printed book (from any period), for every copy is a separate artifact and thus a separate—and unique—source of evidence. If one's object is to describe an edition as a whole, not simply a single copy, the only basis for such generalizations is a knowledge of the individual items that make up the edition—ideally every surviving copy, but at least, in instances where the survival of a large number of copies makes that goal unrealistic, an extensive sampling. And later editions are just as deserving of such treatment as are the firsts, for they have

These ideas, which are the outgrowth of a hundred and fifty years of bibliographical thinking, constitute a sound basis for responsible work in book history. Yet they are still resisted by some people. Nothing better illustrates the persistence of the split that has characterized descriptive bibliography throughout its history than the continuing reluctance, on the part of some prominent bibliographers, to regard descriptive bibliographies as anything more than collectors' guides to the classification of copies of books.[53] A generation after Keynes's address, for instance,


For Liebert, extensive detail can drive "all the fun . . . out of the enterprise" (p. 14). But surely there is more fun, more satisfaction, for bibliographer and collector alike, in subjugating a greater multiplicity, in accommodating and ordering a larger portion of the welter of complexities that inhere in every situation.[57] Willfully ignoring the articulation of such detail trivializes bibliographical research and makes it unfit to serve even the modest function that Liebert sees for it—as when he says that the "true bibliographer . . . works for the people (librarians, collectors, book-dealers) who seek to assemble the materials for scholars of many sorts" (p. 23).[58] To him, the study of books as physical objects is "a valuable adjunct to literary and historical research" (p. 19)—"valuable," to be sure, but an "adjunct" nevertheless. His failure to recognize that bibliography is historical research and that book collecting is scholarship undercuts his wish to promote the useful roles and the pleasures of both activities.[59]
The most poignant defect of the line of thinking that includes Keynes and Liebert as its major exponents is the tendency to regard the detailed study and description of physical objects as unhumanistic—as a technical specialty far removed from, if not inimical to, the love of literature. A classic statement of the position is Liebert's: "The book as physical object is consequential to the humanist for what it contains. . . . and the recitation of the facts of its production, when they reveal nothing about its contents, belongs to the history of technology" (p. 19). It is true that the majority of books are utilitarian containers; but since what they contain is the evidence through which we can approach verbal or musical or

All artifacts are important as the principal class of evidence for reconstructing what human beings were doing and thinking in the past. Descriptive bibliography is a quintessential humanistic discipline because it rests on that irreducible fact. It begins—where we all must begin if we wish to approach the past—with the objects that have come down to us. Traditionally descriptive bibliographies have focused on one category of objects, those that carry symbolic renderings of intangible media like language, musical sounds, and dance movements. Thus they recount the lives of writers, composers, choreographers, printers, and publishers from the perspective of the documents that constitute the tangible residue of their achievements.[61] In the process, bibliographers evaluate those documents by every means available, internal and external, and thereby instruct their readers in how to read, in how to go about recreating—as each reader must—the intangible works represented by the texts of the documents. And by so doing, bibliography provides a model for other endeavors, since nearly all historical accounts, whether organized according to individual lives or other groupings of events, are exercises in assessing physical evidence.[62] Sometimes oral tradition is available, but more often we have to use—or decide it is preferable to use—tangible evidence, found in such objects as books and computer disks, statues and urns.

We live in a network of artifacts, which significantly affect our existence, our approach to the present as well as to the past. As Nancy Hale said of the objects in her mother's studio, they "seem worlds in themselves," each one "speaking of a real time, a real place."[63] The reality that we create from artifacts can be a view of the past, or it can be a view of the present. We each form our present this way, at least part of the time, simply from being surrounded by artifacts; but some of us also wish to try to glimpse the human past through the fragments of it that remain, and as a result to see into the present from a new perspective. No one knows better than descriptive bibliographers the power of objects to suggest the past; and no one is more aware of the evanescence of things, of the destructiveness of time, than bibliographers who confront cracked and faded bindings, torn and stained leaves, or incomplete and disheveled copies of once-splendid books. Yet through such relics we build up our visions of the past; and the recorded details of those relics—however manifold, however minute, however technical—contribute to the richness and comprehensiveness of our conception of the lives and ideas that have preceded our own. If we are interested in the human past, and the role it plays in the present, descriptive bibliography tells a story that we have to understand.
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