University of Virginia Library

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,

Although it is not Thorndyke's purpose to write a bibliographical description, he is engaging here in some of the analysis required to produce such a description; and his companion, who narrates the story, does present us with the beginnings of a physical description. The cover, he says, is "rusty calf," the paper "laid," with "very distinct wire-lines but no water-mark" (p. 832). Some of the physical features of the book arouse Thorndyke's suspicion: the fact that the edges and joints of the binding "are not more worn than the sides" and that the leaves are not more oxidized at the edges but "are equally discoloured all over" (p. 834). When he and his companion return to his laboratory, they test the paper further and find that it consists of "Mechanical wood fibre, with some esparto, a little cotton and a few linen fibres." "Then," Thorndyke concludes, "it is a modern paper. Mechanical wood-pulp—prepared by Keller's process—was first used in paper-making in 1840. . . . and esparto was not used until 1860" (p. 835). The paper was made more than twenty years after the purported date of the writing in the book.

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

than to a physical object. A few years ago the comic strip Nancy showed Sluggo writing the phrase "Rectangular, smooth and heavy," whereupon Nancy disdainfully comments, "When it says 'Describe the book,' I think they mean the story." The suggested superciliousness of her remark implies that any sensible person ought to know how irrelevant the shape and feel of a book are. Like the average person, she sees the ambiguity of the term "book" and yet immediately dismisses one of its meanings. The fact that the cartoonist expected this exchange to amuse his readers reflects his assumption that they would side with Nancy in finding Sluggo's response naïve. Sluggo's final comment—"I thought that one sounded too good to be true"—reinforces another aspect of the standard attitude by implying that the description of physical details is mechanical and straightforward—that is, "easy"—in contrast to the supposedly more difficult and challenging task of accounting for plot, characterization, and ideas.[7]

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,

layout, binding, and structure of particular books and thus bringing together in orderly fashion some of the evidence on which histories of printing and publishing practices, of graphic arts, of authors' careers, and of reading tastes must rest. In performing this task, they obviously make a valuable contribution to scholarship; and in recent decades the growth of l'histoire du livre, the historical study of the impact of books on society, has from time to time brought increased attention to the kinds of details that have long been examined by bibliographers.[8] But if descriptive bibliographies served no further function, their neglect by most readers would be understandable.

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

bibliographies contain details about textual variants, and some have left such information to the editors of scholarly editions, who naturally must report it. This situation reflects the symbiotic relationship between descriptive bibliographies and scholarly editions: both rest on the same research, the same body of physical evidence.

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

that some artifacts are intrinsically less deserving of preservation than others or that the reading of the physical evidence in books is irrelevant to the reading of the texts in them. The fame of an author and the market value of a book, two linked factors that determine much of the content of "rare-book" collections, have nothing to do with the process of reading or the usefulness of books as historical evidence. Reading the text of any book—whether it consists of notations for words, sounds, or movements—must entail the reading of all the evidence the book contains, not simply the inked notations on its pages. Those notations, after all, are not in most cases ends in themselves but rather the means for reconstructing works of language, music, or dance; and any evidence that can help one to judge the accuracy[10] of those notations is relevant to the ultimate aim of experiencing works, not simply particular texts of them. The uncritical acceptance by most readers (including literary critics) of the texts that happen to be present in the particular copies of books they are reading implies a belief that literary works exist within books and thus reflects a failure to distinguish works from texts. The only works that can reside in physical form are those that use tangible media, as works of painting, sculpture, and architecture do; in those cases physical objects are indeed the works, and sometimes works of this kind, such as engravings or lithographs, do occur between the covers of books. But works that are sequential rather than stationary, as verbal, musical, and choreographic works are, obviously employ intangible media and thus cannot exist as physical objects; in these cases, physical objects like books are used as a means of preserving instructions for the repetition of the works—a means that, despite its potentiality for error, is likely to be more reliable than oral tradition.[11]

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,

because textual scholarship in the early centuries of printing was primarily directed toward writings that had been initially disseminated in manuscript form.

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

can be observed before the turn of the century in the collation formulas of Falconer Madan and W. A. Copinger and, most notably, in the identification of the printers of fifteenth-century books by Robert Proctor.[17] The Bibliographical Society, founded in London in 1892 with Copinger as president, became the organized force that stimulated the growth of this approach to books; under its aegis, a great triumvirate of bibliographical scholars, A. W. Pollard, R. B. McKerrow, and W. W. Greg, led many others to see the connection between the physical and intellectual aspects of books and to help develop during the first half of the twentieth century a field that came to be called the "New Bibliography."[18]

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,

not with printing and publishing history or with descriptive bibliography. Yet any conclusions that can be drawn about printing-shop processes from clues found in books are contributions to printing history, and analysis of physical details must underlie the description of the physical product as a whole.[19] Analytical bibliographers need not have as their goal the writing of full-fledged descriptions, but descriptive bibliographers must always engage in analysis (and examine previous relevant analyses). Analytical bibliography results in specialized articles and books; descriptive bibliography results in comprehensive accounts. The intimate connections between them, and between each of them and editing, are epitomized in the work of Pollard, McKerrow, and Greg: their textual interests led them to establish patterns not only for analytical bibliography but for descriptive as well. Pollard and Greg presented a pioneering paper on descriptive bibliography to the Bibliographical Society in December 1906; Pollard published another basic essay the following year; Greg produced a classic piece on the collation formula in 1934; the two of them framed the half-century with magisterial descriptive works containing important introductions, Pollard's first volume of the British Museum incunable catalogue (1908) and Greg's bibliography of the pre-Restoration English drama (1939-59); and McKerrow, in An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), provided what turned out to be the most widely read and cited treatment of bibliographical description before mid-century.[20]

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]

The key illustration is perhaps offered by the March 1953 meeting of the Bibliographical Society in London, where Geoffrey Keynes delivered an address, "Religio Bibliographici," summing up his "aims and beliefs as an amateur."[23] One might have expected Keynes, as the author (at that time) of eight acclaimed bibliographies and the president of the society that had fostered the growth of scholarly bibliography, to welcome Bowers's book; instead, he held it responsible for a "shadow which seems in recent years to have descended over our amiable bibliographical discipline." The publication of the Principles, he said, "brought home to our consciousness the fact that what we had thought in our innocence was a pleasant, if sometimes exacting, pastime, was in fact a prime example of 'pure scholarship,' to be pursued with the mind of a detective, the spiritual temperature of an iceberg, and the precision of a machine" (p. 374).[24] Although Keynes did wish to contribute to "the sum of knowledge" (p. 391), he did not, strangely enough, seem to understand that any bibliographer, amateur or professional, with such an aim must strive to work at the highest level of precision and rigorous thinking—nor did he see that this approach does not exclude humanity from the work.[25]

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

runs through the history of the field. The division is not really between professionals and amateurs but between those who do and those who do not bring to books an understanding of the fundamental importance of the physical evidence in all artifacts.

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

and the initial approach to the study of nineteenth-century books, which became the new dilettantism. The contrast was not simply between two levels of sophistication or between the serious and the frivolous but between two basically different approaches to books: on the one hand, the concept of bibliography as history, as a means of uncovering the past through artifactual evidence; on the other, the idea of bibliography as a guide to collecting, with little thought given to the fact that even in this role it could not be effective without thorough historical research. Falconer Madan in 1908 symbolized the depth of this split by his concept of "degressive bibliography," for he was a serious bibliographer of early books who nevertheless believed that later books did not require extensive treatment.[31] This idea has not yet vanished from the scene, but the history of descriptive bibliography is the story of the gradual triumph of the methods that stem from Bradshaw. It would be hard to imagine a more concise statement of the rationale for Bradshaw's approach than the response A. W. Pollard made in 1903 to James Duff Brown's attack on physical bibliography: "so long as literature in order to be communicated has to take material form," Pollard said, "so long will it be to the advantage of the little world which cares for literature that every point which concerns this material form should be carefully and thoroughly investigated."[32]

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

1886 H. Buxton Forman's The Shelley Library was a step forward[34] and led directly into Thomas J. Wise's long series of bibliographical volumes, running from the Ruskin in 1889-93 to the Byron in 1932-33. Wise was enormously influential in establishing the author bibliography as a special genre of publication; he was a pioneer in examining the structure of nineteenth-century books and providing signature collations for them (which he did after 1901), and his bibliographies helped to publicize the importance of preserving nineteenth-century books in the original publishers' paper and cloth covers rather than in custom-made leather bindings. Like his predecessors in this field, however, he intended his bibliographies to be no more than collectors' guides and indeed used them to glorify his own collections, which he implied should set the standard for others.[35]

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

and for providing detailed evidence to support conclusions.[37] Additional important adjustments to the old point of view in the 1920s came from three other bibliographers. Iolo A. Williams, in his Seven XVIIIth Century Bibliographies (1924), noted "typographical peculiarities" even if they occurred in every copy he examined, thus recognizing that bibliographies serve more functions than mere identification.[38] Michael Sadleir's bibliography of Trollope (1928) made clear, by pronouncement and by practice, that the analysis of "book-building" caused bibliographies to be contributions to the history of publishing; the Trollope was, Sadleir said, "not only a reference work for collectors of that particular author but also a commentary on the book and publishing crafts of mid-Victorian England" (p. ix).[39] Frederick A. Pottle's Boswell bibliography, the next year, emphasized the biographical significance of bibliographies, stating that "a thoroughgoing application of the principles of scientific bibliography to the whole of a literary career" is a fruitful way "of coming to understand the character of the author" (p. xviii). These three works are landmarks in the process by which the descriptive bibliography of post-Renaissance authors evolved into a scholarly pursuit.

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

standards in its superior scholarship and technique, it does not represent much of an advance in bibliographical thinking, given Keynes's sense of division between scholarship and bibliophily. A better way to view the development of descriptive bibliography in the 1930s and 1940s is to examine several serious bibliographies by other scholars, such as Thomas J. Holmes's series on the Mathers (1931, 1940), Francis R. Johnson's Spenser (1933), Robert E. Spiller and Philip C. Blackburn's Cooper (1934), H. L. Ford's Shakespeare 1700-1740 (1935), William M. Sale's Richardson (1936), Thomas F. Currier's Whittier (1937), Hugh Macdonald's Dryden (1939), Thomas H. Johnson's Jonathan Edwards (1940), J. E. Norton's Gibbon (1940), Anthony J. and Dorothy R. Russo's James Whitcomb Riley (1944),[41] and Allen T. Hazen's three works on Johnson and Walpole (Samuel Johnson's Prefaces & Dedications [1937], Strawberry Hill Press [with J. P. Kirby, 1942; revised 1973], and Walpole [1948])—all of which exemplify descriptive bibliography as historical scholarship.[42]

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

those published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia)[44] have continued to set high standards. Among the bibliographies (both within those series and independent of them) that can serve to illustrate new directions are Richard L. Purdy's Hardy (1954), with its accounts of composition as well as publication history; [45] Matthew J. Bruccoli's Notes on the Cabell

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Collections at the University of Virginia (Virginia, 1957) and Warner Barnes's Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1967), with their identifications of printings based on evidence discovered through use of the Hinman Collator; Norma Russell's Cowper (1963) and Edwin T. Bowden's Irving (1989), with their sections of narrative history; William W. Kelly's Ellen Glasgow (Virginia, 1964), with its grouping of printings into plate families; William B. Todd's Burke (Soho, 1964) and Donald D. Eddy's John Brown (1971), with their thorough recording of press figures; D. F. McKenzie's Cambridge University Press 1696-1712 (1966) and William S. Peterson's Kelmscott Press (Soho, 1984), with their extensive use of printers' archives; Joseph Schwartz and Robert C. Schweik's Hart Crane (Pittsburgh, 1972) and George W. Crandell's Ogden Nash (1990), with their attention to later impressions; Alan Tyson's Beethoven (1963) and James L. W. West III's William Styron (1977), with their reports of textual variants; David L. Vander Meulen's Dunciad (Wisconsin dissertation, 1981), with its details on presswork and paper; and David Gilson's Jane Austen (Soho, 1982), with its extensive notes on typography (by Nicolas Barker). Many other effective bibliographies were published during this period,[46] including several that manage to treat extremely large bodies of material with great detail—such as Greg's Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (1939-59), C. William Miller's Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia Printing, 1728-1766 (1974), and Patricia Lockhart Fleming's Upper Canadian Imprints, 1801-1841 (1988).[47] And simultaneously a number of studies of descriptive theory and techniques were appearing to supplement Bowers's Principles, particularly in regard to post-Renaissance books, the concepts of issue and state, and the treatment of paper, type, illustrations, and publishers' bindings.[48]

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

attention to physical details for their own sake, the increasing recognition of the necessity for recording the physical characteristics of artifacts as the first step in reading the past through those artifacts. Books inevitably contain clues from which one can read, in greater or lesser detail, the history of their manufacture and of the relations between the authors and publishers involved in their production. When these details are supplemented by information from printers' and publishers' archives, authors' letters, copyright records, magazine and newspaper advertisements, and other external documents, one begins to see how the study of books as physical objects, as commercial products, illuminates literary history by shedding light on the behavior of authors, publishers, and readers. Bibliographies conceived in this way can serve the function of quick reference, for purposes of identification, more reliably than brief checklists; but they serve many other functions as well and can be read with profit by anyone interested in biography or intellectual history.[50]

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

their place in publishing and textual history.[51] Furthermore, the characteristics to be described are the ones that existed at the time the books were released for sale; any features (a binding, perhaps, or the absence of certain leaves) that date from a later time are part of a different story, the post-publication history of individual copies rather than the history of the production and publication of the entire edition.[52] Descriptive bibliographers thus do not simply record the details of extant objects; rather, like other historians, they interpret the evidence in surviving materials for the purpose of reconstructing the past. It follows that conclusions drawn from the analysis of physical evidence ("analytical bibliography") are essential to descriptive bibliography—and that textual variants, being physical differences between copies of an edition or between editions, are a part of the body of evidence to be considered. Information located in external documents forms an important part of a thorough account, but its status as secondary evidence—as far as the books themselves are concerned-must be kept clearly in mind.

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,

another president of another bibliographical society took up the same theme. Herman W. Liebert, speaking before the Bibliographical Society of America, issued "a plea for the re-direction of the course of bibliography away from its prevailing tendencies and back toward an older kind" (p. 10).[54] In his view the presence of Greek letters in collation formulas reflects a desire for mystification, and the use of collating machines and gutter measurements leads to "atrophy of the judgment" (p. 18).[55] It cannot be denied that some people—in all fields, not just bibliography—feed their self-importance by using arcane terminology and inflicting masses of undigested detail on the public. Liebert is right to deplore such behavior, but it is sad to see him regarding precision and elaboration as signs in themselves of self-aggrandizement or an abdication of the responsibility for making critical judgments.[56] The reason to employ collation formulas is that in many instances they are clearer and more easily usable than long paragraphs in words would be; describing in some fashion the structure of the gatherings is essential, and when formulas can help, it is foolish to be put off by their quasi-mathematical appearance. As for lists of such details as shifting or damaged types, they must—like all details in good writing—be integrated into the description as a whole; but their mere presence is not cause for alarm, since there can be no a priori dividing line between appropriate and inappropriate levels of detail.

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

choreographic works, and not the works themselves, there can be no details of their production that are irrelevant to evaluating that evidence and thus to reconstructing and experiencing those works. The history of technology is inseparable from the history of the arts, all of which are transmitted either directly or indirectly by manufactured objects—objects, that is, made by human hands. I would therefore rewrite Liebert's sentence as follows: "The book as physical object is consequential to the humanist because it was made by human beings."[60]

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.