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A Description of Descriptive Bibliography
by
G. Thomas Tanselle
[*]
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.
Notes
This paper was delivered as an Engelhard Lecture on the Book at the Library of Congress on 13 September 1991.
The story originally appeared in the March 1923 number (55: 269-281) of Pearson's Magazine (London) and was first collected in The Puzzle Lock (London, 1925; New York, 1926) and then reprinted in The Famous Cases of Dr. Thorndyke (1929), pp. 818-852. The latter text is cited here. (The periodical text contains slightly less physical description—with no reference, for instance, to "wire-lines" and "water-mark"—but it does include the explanation of dating paper from the presence of esparto. I am grateful to Richard Colles Johnson for calling my attention to this story.)
The original edition (1934) of An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets was reprinted in 1983 with corrections and an epilogue by Nicolas Barker and John Collins, who also published at the same time a companion volume, A Sequel to "An Enquiry."
"Detective Fiction," in New Paths in Book Collecting, ed. Carter (1934), pp. 33-63 (see p. 46); the essay was separately published the same year, under the title Collecting Detective Fiction (but with the original pagination), in Constable's "Aspects of Book-Collecting" series.
Verbal texts can be conveyed by other physical vehicles, of course, such as clay tablets, microfiche, and computer disks. The precise form that a physical description takes is obviously determined by the particular characteristics of the physical objects being described. Whether one uses the term "descriptive bibliography" to encompass the physical description of all objects carrying verbal, musical, and choreographic texts—or only those in codex and broadside form—is far less significant than whether one recognizes the importance of describing all such objects, since all physical forms have an effect on the texts they convey. I focus here on descriptive bibliographies of books in codex and broadside form because I am describing the field of descriptive bibliography as it has developed, not because there is any reason that descriptive bibliographies should not take up other vehicles of textual transmission as well.
Anthropologists, folklorists, art historians, and others who have developed the field of "material culture" have generally not included books in their conception of artifacts or used physical evidence from books. This point is illustrated by Jules David Prown's "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method." Winterthur Portfolio, 17 (1982), 1-19, which provides an overview of the field. An example of a writer who does see books in terms of other artifacts is F. N. L. Poynter, who in his Howell and Zeitlin & VerBrugge Lecture, Bibliography: Some Achievements & Prospects (1961), speaks of our "passion for preserving every record and relic of man's past, whether it be an old book or manuscript, a prehistoric stone implement, a Nubian temple, or an 18th century house which is threatened with demolition"; he says, "Historical research involves the critical investigation of original sources of knowledge, that is, the books, documents, and manuscripts and all the physical remains of the past which have survived to our own time" (p. 18). (On the difference between, on the one hand, verbal, musical, and choreographic texts in books and, on the other, visual works [or reproductions of such works] in books, see note 11 below.)
This strip, drawn by Jerry Scott (succeeding Ernie Bushmiller), was syndicated by United Features Syndicate on 22 March 1986. (I am grateful to Harrison Hayford for calling it to my attention.) The same theme also recently appeared in a New Yorker drawing by Benoît van Innis (18 March 1991, p. 39): the caption reads, "The author was most informative about his latest novel," and the drawing shows a man pointing out to two other men the details of a diagram of a book, with the cover labeled "red" and the measurements of the height, width, and thickness indicated.
Although some scholars studying the social history of books have recognized the role that physical evidence must play in their work, others have regarded the detailed analysis of such evidence as merely a narrow (and even unproductive) specialty. One of the most effective concise replies to this view appears in David L. Vander Meulen's Engelhard Lecture, Where Angels Fear to Tread: Descriptive Bibliography and Alexander Pope (1988): the position, he says, "ultimately is at variance with inductive logic itself, rejecting the evidence required for sound generalizations. Among bibliographers a steady source of bemusement is the scholars who think mysteries would be solved and careers established by the discovery of a document about the publication of a book but who meanwhile reject available evidence by ignoring the even greater insights that copies of the book themselves provide" (p. 10). The seminal book in the field of l'histoire du livre is Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's L'Apparition du livre (1958), translated into English by David Gerard as The Coming of the Book (1976). For an introduction to some of the issues raised by this development and for further references, see John Feather, "Cross-Channel Currents: Historical Bibliography and l'histoire du livre," Library, 6th ser., 2 (1980), 1-15; my Hanes Lecture, The History of Books as a Field of Study (1981); and the collection of papers entitled Books and Society in History, ed. Kenneth Carpenter (1983).
For further discussion of this point, see my Malkin Lecture, Libraries, Museums, and Reading (1991), and "Reproductions and Scholarship," Studies in Bibliography [SB], 42 (1989), 25-54. In a review of Joel Myerson's bibliography of Emerson (1982), Albert J. von Frank discusses what he sees as "two audiences of text-centered and book-centered interests" and asserts that "bibliographical theory has developed in the direction of satisfying students of the book or, rather, students of the history of the book" instead of students of texts. Unquestionably many bibliographers have slighted textual matters, but "bibliographical theory" is surely not responsible, since the main direction of twentieth-century bibliographical theory is a growing recognition of the interconnections between physical evidence and verbal works. It is not incorrect to claim that in general there have been "two distinct audiences" for bibliographies in the past, but to say that they have "largely unreconcilable expectations" (as opposed to "unreconciled" expectations) is to suggest that the two interests are conceptually or theoretically separate—and thus to perpetuate an old confusion. See "Emerson Bibliography: History and Audience," Review, 9 (1987), 189-203 (esp. pp. 202-203).
That is, accuracy according to whatever standard is selected. "Accuracy" of texts has traditionally meant conformity to authors' intentions (though precisely how authorial intentions are to be defined has never been agreed upon); but in recent years considerable attention has been devoted to texts as social products that emerge from the collaborative process of publication and thus embody the intentions of a number of persons. For a survey of such issues, see my "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology," SB, 44 (1991), 83-143.
For further exposition of these ideas, see my Rosenbach Lectures, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989), and Libraries, Museums, and Reading (see note 9 above). I emphasize, here and below, the process of reading the physical texts of certain works in intangible media (those media that can feasibly be represented by notation in books), because the relevance of the physical form in which such texts are conveyed is not widely understood. Visual material may of course also form part (or all) of the "content" of books, but naturally there is little misunderstanding of the necessity for studying original prints as physical objects, whether or not they are housed in books. There may, however, be some misunderstanding about the status of reproductions of works of painting, sculpture, and architecture in books: in the first place, they may be accepted as original works of visual art in their own right and are then no different from other original prints; but if they are approached as reproductions, they resemble the printed and handwritten texts of verbal, musical, and choreographic works in that they are not the works themselves, but they differ from the physical representations of intangible works in that they are simply reminders of works that can be located in physical form elsewhere, not essential pieces of evidence for the act of approaching and experiencing those works. (Visual art, of whatever kind, appearing in books must obviously be accounted for in bibliographical descriptions; see my "The Description of Non-Letterpress Material in Books," SB, 35 [1982], 1-42.)
See Maittaire's Annales typographici (1719-41); Ames's Typographical Antiquities (1749; augmented by William Herbert, 1785-90); and Panzer's Annales typographici (1793-1803).
Essay on the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1715). See Strickland Gibson, "Thomas Bennet, a Forgotten Bibliographer," Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951), 43-47; William A. Jackson, Bibliography & Literary Studies (1962), pp. 5-6 (reprinted in Records of a Bibliographer, ed. William H. Bond [1967], pp. 211-222 [see pp. 214-215]); and William L. Williamson, "Thomas Bennet and the Origins of Analytical Bibliography," Journal of Library History, 16 (1981), 177-186.
David Foxon, in his Howell and Zeitlin & VerBrugge Lecture, Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (1970), traces the use of title-page transcription to Capell's Prolusions (1760 [1759]) and believes that the practice was "born of his typographical ingenuity, probably reinforced by an antiquarian interest in the appearance of the original title-pages" (p. 13). See also note 53 below.
Thomas Hartwell Horne, writing in the ear of bibliomania following the Roxburghe sale of 1812 (the era chronicled voluminously by Thomas Frognall Dibdin from 1809 to 1838), implied these connections, however indistinctly, by treating as part of "bibliography" both the subject classification of works and the examination of the physical structure of books; in An Introduction to the Study of Bibliography (1814), he explains how sheets are folded to produce different formats and how chainlines in the paper can assist in identifying format, and he says that a "knowledge of the forms of books" helps "to prevent confusion in describing editions" (p. 288). In the autumn of 1852 Augustus De Morgan wrote a piece entitled "On the Difficulty of Correct Description of Books" for the Companion to the Almanac for 1853 (pp. 5-19); although by "description" he did not primarily mean physical description, he did discuss some of the problems (such as incorrect dating) that require attention to physical details. It is significant (given the activities of bibliographical societies and clubs at the turn of the century [see note 17 below]) that De Morgan's essay was reprinted three times in 1902: as a pamphlet by the Bibliographical Society of Chicago, with notes by Aksel G. S. Josephson; in the June 1902 number of the Library Association Record (4: 247-273), with an introduction by Henry Guppy; and as a pamphlet (reprinting the latter) by the Bibliographical Society of Lancashire. For some commentary on the historical importance of De Morgan's essay and on his other work, see A. N. L. Munby's Howell and Zeitlin & VerBrugge Lecture, The History and Bibliography of Science in England: The First Phase, 1833-1845 (1968), pp. 9-13; Munby quotes De Morgan in 1847 as saying, "The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation."
The best account of Bradshaw's bibliographical achievement is Paul Needham's Hanes Lecture, The Bradshaw Method (1988), which contains an appendix on "Henry Bradshaw and the Development of the Collational Formula" (pp. 24-33), tracing Bradshaw's formula (in the form "abcdefgh8/2;") back at least to April 1861. (Cf. note 29 below.) The other basic works for a study of Bradshaw are George W. Prothero's A Memoir of Henry Bradshaw (1888) and the two collections of Bradshaw's writings—Collected Papers, ed. Francis Jenkinson (1889), and Henry Bradshaw, 1831-1886, ed. Roy Stokes (1984). Stokes provides lists of Bradshaw's writings and of writings about him, including the several publications of his letters (see also Needham's first footnote for a concise overview of this material). Some unpublished letters of Bradshaw, particularly those addressed to William Blades beginning in 1859, show the early development of his ideas, as Needham has pointed out (pp. 14-17); Blades's role in this correspondence and his published work in The Life and Typography of William Caxton (1861-63), praised by Bradshaw, make Blades another formative influence on the early development of analytical and descriptive bibliography.
See the first volume of Madan's Oxford Books, entitled The Early Oxford Press (1895 [the early pages were printed in 1889]; cf. his "On Method in Bibliography," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 1 [1892-93], 91-102); Copinger's "Incunabula Virgiliana," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 2 (1893-94), 123-226; and Proctor's An Index to the Early Printed Books in the British Museum, with Notes of Those in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (1898). Systematic attention is given to collation by gatherings (and the examination of other physical features) in M. A. Einsle's chapter, "The Art of Describing and Cataloguing Incunabula, and the Method of Collecting Them," in Henri Bouchot, The Book: Its Printers, Illustrators, and Binders, ed. H. Grevell (1890), pp. 322-365 (though there is no suggestion here of a formula for recording signature collation, other than to say that "deviations from the usual system of signing must be expressly specified" [p. 335]). Cf. John P. Edmond, "Suggestions for the Description of Books Printed between 1501 and 1640," Library Association Record, 3 (1901), 133-142. Collation reports in the form "A-K, in fours" appear in several early Grolier Club publications, such as Catalogue of Original and Early Editions of Some of the Poetical and Prose Works of English Writers from Langland to Wither (1893) and Catalogue of an Exhibition of First and Other Editions of the Works of John Dryden (1900), as well as in Victor H. Paltsits's 1903 bibliography of Freneau. In 1899 John Ferguson listed "the signatures" and "the collation" among the features that are "now included in book description" (see p. 10 of "Some Aspects of Bibliography," Publications of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 4 [1899-1900], 1-102; published separately in 1900); significantly, he also stated, "Just, then, as biography follows from the existence of human beings, bibliography is the result of the existence of printed books. Bibliography is, in fact, the biography of books" (p. 9).
An admirable survey of the accomplishments of that half-century is F. P. Wilson's "Shakespeare and the 'New Bibliography,'" in The Bibliographical Society, 1892-1942: Studies in Retrospect (1945), pp. 76-135; a revised edition of it, edited by Helen Gardner, appeared as a separate volume in 1970. For a briefer treatment of a longer period, see pp. 61-68 of my "Physical Bibliography in the Twentieth Century," in Books, Manuscripts, and the History of Medicine: Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Osler Library, ed. Philip M. Teigen (1982), pp. 55-79; and for references to writings about the prominent figures in this movement, see my "Bibliographical History as a Field of Study," SB, 41 (1988), 33-63.
I have attempted to demonstrate how analytical bibliography contributes to printing history in "Analytical Bibliography and Renaissance Printing History," Printing History, 3.1 (1981), 24-33, and to assess the controversies over the validity of analytical endeavor in "Bibliography and Science," SB, 27 (1974), 55-89 (reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 1-35). The best introductions to analytical bibliography, which are also landmarks in bibliographical history, are Charlton Hinman's The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) and Fredson Bowers's Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964). For references to some prominent illustrations of the relevance of physical descriptions to cultural and intellectual history, see my Libraries, Museums, and Reading (see note 9 above), note 13. (See also Vander Meulen's comment quoted in note 8 above.) Roy Stokes's summary accounts of descriptive bibliography emphasize the underlying role of analytical bibliography: in The Function of Bibliography (1969), he says, "No description of any value can possibly be produced until the critical analysis of the book has been completed" (p. 96, in the chapter on "Descriptive Bibliography," pp. 96-117); and in "Descriptive Bibliography: Its Definition and Function," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 18 (1979), 19-25, he says, "Descriptive work is fundamentally the recording in accurate, convenient, and understandable form of the results of analysis" (p. 19). Adrian Weiss, who has developed an important concept of font analysis that can contribute to the identification of Elizabethan and Jacobean printers, sees such analytical work explicitly as part of descriptive bibliography, as well as of editing: see, for example, his "Bibliographical Methods for Identifying Unknown Printers in Elizabethan/Jacobean Books," SB, 44 (1991), 183-228 (esp. pp. 183-187). Evidence concerning the identity of printers, he says, is "an essential component of a bibliographical description" (p. 185)—because "The purpose of descriptive bibliography is to record two kinds of information about a book: its physical characteristics and corresponding inferences about its printing history; and other details which may contribute to the general understanding of early printing" (p. 184).
Pollard and Greg, "Some Points in Bibliographical Descriptions," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 9 (1906-8), 31-52 (reprinted in Alfred William Pollard: A Selection of His Essays, ed. Fred W. Roper [1976], pp. 116-129); Pollard, "The Objects and Methods of Bibliographical Collations and Descriptions," Library, 2nd ser., 8 (1907), 193-217 (reprinted in Roper, pp. 98-115); Greg, "A Formulary of Collation," Library, 4th ser., 14 (1933-34), 365-382 (reprinted in his Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell [1966], pp. 298-313); Pollard (with A. J. K. Esdaile and J. V. Scholderer), Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Museum, Part I (1908; Pollard's "Introduction" covers pp. ixxxviii); Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (4 vols., 1939-59), the "Introduction" (drafted in 1942) appearing in Vol. 4, pp. i-clxxiv (esp. Excursus III, "Transcription and Quotation," pp. cxxxi-cxlviii, and Excursus IV, "Formulas of Collation," pp. cxlviii-clviii); McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), pp. 145-163 ("Some Points of Bibliographical Technique. The Description of a Book. References to Passages in Early Books"). Three other general treatments of these years are Falconer Madan, E. Gordon Duff, and Strickland Gibson, "Standard Descriptions of Printed Books," Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings & Papers, 1 (1922-26), 55-64; Iolo A. Williams, The Elements of Book-Collecting (1927), pp. 74-93 ("How to Describe a Book"); and Arundell Esdaile, A Student's Manual of Bibliography (1931), pp. 215-247 ("The Collation of Books"), 248-271 ("The Description of Books"). (The Esdaile work has had an extended life through the revisions by Roy Stokes in 1954 and 1967.)
Cf. Greg's statement, a few years earlier, that bibliography involves "the complete investigation of the material construction of the books enumerated and the whole history of their production"—that is, the "life-history of books" ("Bibliography—A Retrospect," in The Bibliographical Society, 1892-1942 [see note 18 above], pp. 23-31 [quotation from p. 27]). (Cf. Ferguson's 1899 statement in note 17 above.)
For a splendid analytical account of the reception of Bowers's Principles, see David L. Vander Meulen, "The History and Future of Bowers's Principles," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America [PBSA], 79 (1985), 197-219 (reprinted in Fredson Bowers at Eighty [1985], pp. 25-47). In the same gathering of essays, I offered my evaluation of Bowers's contribution to descriptive bibliography: see "The Achievement of Fredson Bowers," esp. pp. 181-184 (reprint, pp. 9-12). Another book of 1949 dealt with the same subject as Bowers's under the title Standards of Bibliographical Description and consisted of three Rosenbach Lectures delivered in 1947 by Curt F. Bühler, James G. McManaway, and Lawrence C. Wroth, who had exchanged ideas with Bowers and whose recommendations are not always in line with his; their lectures, as Vander Meulen points out, include responses to Bowers before the publication of Principles, and Bowers's book, in turn, responds to their lectures. Also in 1949 appeared a second printing of J. D. Cowley's Bibliographical Description and Cataloguing, originally published in 1939; intended for library-school students, it contained the most extensive summary of descriptive practices before Bowers.
"Religio Bibliographici" was first published in the Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 63-76; it was reprinted as the introduction to the catalogue of Keynes's library, Bibliotheca Bibliographici (1964), pp. ix-xxiii, and then as an appendix to his autobiography, The Gates of Memory (1981), pp. 373-391 (the text cited here). In the autobiography Keynes comments briefly on his approach to bibliography (pp. 308-310) and describes the meeting at which he delivered this "friendly attack on the Bowers school of analytical bibliographers" (asking for "less pedantry and more humanity"): "It chanced that Professor Bowers was present at the occasion. I was glad that he accepted the address in the spirit in which it was meant, complaining only that he had not thought of the title himself" (p. 309). Six years later Bowers referred to the attitude reflected in this address as "the very reverse of scholarly" (The Bibliographical Way [1959]; reprinted in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing [1975], pp. 54-74 [see p. 66]). This exchange was no doubt in F. N. L. Poynter's mind in 1961 when he offered his own views regarding the "mixed feelings with which his [Bowers's] work was received" (see Bibliography: Some Achievements & Prospects [see note 6 above], pp. 9-11. In 1971 Frank Francis quoted a long passage from "Religio Bibliographici" as part of an account of the split in bibliography between "uncompromising" scholars and "amateurs" or "dilettanti"; see "A Bibliographical Ghost Revisits His Old Haunts," Library Chronicle of the University of Texas, n.s., 3 (1971), 29-44 (the second Lew David Feldman Lecture, reprinted separately in 1972 [see pp. 13-14]).
Bowers took note of this kind of sentiment when, in "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography and Literary Studies" (PBSA, 46 [1952], 186-208; reprinted in his collected essays [see the preceding note], pp. 37-53), he recognized "the frankly admitted nostalgia for the good old days before the tabby cat of bibliography grew into a tiger" (p. 39). Keynes replied, "I wish to maintain that even a 'tyger, tyger, burning bright' in the bibliographical forests is not the only beacon that beckons the contemporary bibliographer. The old tabby cat, innocent of streamlined brilliance, can still be well worth stroking by our firesides" (pp. 384-385). Bowers's cat metaphor also underlies Paul S. Dunkin's Bibliography: Tiger or Fat Cat? (1975), which continues Dunkin's criticisms of Bowers begun in his How to Catalog a Rare Book (1951; rev. ed., 1973); my own examination of Dunkin's position appears on pp. 39-41 of "Descriptive Bibliography and Library Cataloguing," SB, 30 (1977), 1-56 (reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 37-92 [see pp. 75-77]). The latest reference to the cat metaphor occurs in Nicolas Barker's obituary of Bowers (The Independent, 15 April 1991): describing Bowers's view of the former lack of rigor in his field, Barker says, "Bibliography was a domestic cat, purring by the library fireside, when it should be a tiger, stalking its prey, the vera lectio, in the jungle of printed texts."
He believed that, as a result of Bowers's book, "the rest of us are inclined to feel that we have been chastised with scorpions because we are not all Gregs or even imitation Gregs" (p. 375). Bowers did not, of course, mean to imply that there is "no place for the humbler bibliographical practitioner dealing with problems of less transcendent importance"; rather, he was saying that, whatever the subject matter ("transcendent" or not), it should be addressed with the greatest rigor attainable. Keynes failed to recognize that aiming to be anything less than an "imitation Greg" is not to do justice to the field or to one's potentiality as a human being. It is therefore hard to know how to take his statement at the end that "there is a place for more than one kind of bibliographer" and that "Each kind must maintain the highest standards of his craft" (p. 391)—for his earlier distinction between different kinds of bibliographers was based on different standards, different degrees of approach to what he calls "pure scholarship."
They behave in this fashion, he says, because they find themselves "in the company of scholars, who need to be convinced that bibliography really has serious claims on their attention," and therefore "they instinctively react by behaving as a small persecuted minority" (p. 377). There are people in all fields who for such reasons overstate the significance of their own work; but they are not the best representatives of their fields, and their presence should not stand in the way of an objective assessment of the scholarly method required in those fields.
The superficiality of his view of artifacts is indicated by his assertion that "Stamp collecting is an amusing game, but it is essentially sterile" (p. 386).
These lists focused on contemporary or near-contemporary authors. A few similar listings, dealing with authors of earlier centuries, had previously been published—e.g., John Wilson's Shaksperiana (1827), which includes (pp. 41-69) a list of the quartos and collected editions of Shakespeare's plays. As early as 1880, some criticism of previous lists was implied by Ralph Thomas (writing as "Olphar Hamst") in Aggravating Ladies: A List of Works Published under the Pseudonym of "A Lady," with Preliminary Suggestions on the Art of Describing Books Bibliographically; he objects, for instance, to any abbreviation of title-page wording (p. 20) and complains about the confusion between format terms and size (pp. 24-25).
See his "Memorandum No. 1," The Printer of the Historia S. Albani (1868)—reprinted in his Collected Papers (see note 16 above), pp. 149-163, and in Stokes (see note 16 above), pp. 106-126—where he states (p. 152 or p. 109) that "the descriptions here given, so far as they relate to books preserved at Oxford, are only portions of a similar catalogue, which I made in 1866, of about 100 quarto books, all printed (apparently) at Cologne, before the introduction of printed signatures, and all preserved in the Auctarium of the Bodleian Library." He gives a description of his style of collation report (pp. 150-151 or p. 108), which here takes the now-standard form—e.g., "a b c8 d6" (p. 156 or p. 114). At about the same time, William Frederick Poole was using typographical evidence (running titles and signatures) in preparing his edition (1867) of Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence; see William Landram Williamson, "An Early Use of Running Title and Signature Evidence in Analytical Bibliography," Library Quarterly, 40 (1970), 245-249.
See his "Memorandum No. 2," A Classified Index of the Fifteenth Century Books in the Collection of M. J. De Meyer, Which Were Sold at Ghent in November, 1869 (1870), reprinted in his Collected Papers (see note 16 above), pp. 206-236 (quotations from p. 221). The key passage, one of the landmarks of bibliographical writing, is worth quoting in full: "The method of arranging these early books under the countries, towns and presses at which they were produced is the only one which can really advance our knowledge of the subject. This is comparatively easy with dated books, though there is no safeguard against the misleading nature of an erroneous date. But the study is of little use unless the bibliographer will be content to make such an accurate and methodical study of the types used and habits of printing observable at different presses, as to enable him to observe and be guided by these characteristics in setting the date of a book which bears no date on the surface. We do not want the opinion or dictum of any bibliographer however experienced; we desire that the types and habits of each printer should be made a special subject of study, and those points brought forward which shew changes or advance from year to year, or, where practicable, from month to month. When this is done, we have to say of any dateless or falsely dated book that it contains such and such characteristics, and we therefore place it at such a point of time, the time we name being merely another expression for the characteristics we notice in the book. In fact each press must be looked upon as a genus, and each book as a species, and our business is to trace the more or less close connexion of the different members of the family according to the characters which they present to our observation. The study of palaeotypography has been hitherto mainly such a dilettante matter, that people have shrunk from going into such details, though when once studied as a branch of natural history, it is as fruitful in interesting results as most subjects" (p. 221).
"Degressive Bibliography," Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 9 (1906-8), 53-65. The term "degressive bibliography" has become widely used, in a broader sense than the one intended by Madan, to mean the practice of varying the amount of detail in entries treating different categories of books. An instructive exchange of letters on the subject appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 4 and 11 August and 1 and 22 September 1966, pp. 716, 732, 781, 884; the most thorough discussion of it occurs in Fredson Bowers's "Bibliography Revisited," Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 89-128 (reprinted in his collected essays [see note 23 above], pp. 151-195), which points out that abbreviation of reported detail should not imply abbreviation of research. Cf. my "The Arrangement of Descriptive Bibliographies," SB, 37 (1984), 1-38 (esp. pp. 25-28); and "Tolerances in Bibliographical Description," Library, 5th ser., 23 (1968), 1-12.
See "Practical Bibliography," Library, 2nd ser., 4 (1903), 144-151 (Brown), 151-162 (Pollard; quotation from p. 161); reprinted in Roper (see note 20 above), pp. 86-97. Brown's aggressive polemic is yet another indication of how strong the resistance has been to the study of physical evidence: "It is a remarkable thing that bibliographers . . . should spend all their time squabbling about type-founts and the merely material side of books. . . . The value of detailed registration of pages, signatures, watermarks, sizes by paper-folds or centimetres, blank leaves, and all the other etceteras of exact collation, never struck me as being more than a dreadful waste of time, save as regards very old books. . . . but to see bibliographers seriously quoting such scraps of the obvious, in the case of comparatively modern books, regularly paged and easily identified, is really a solemn sham. It is an endeavour to provide with a series of formidable looking symbols a simple art which would be ever so much more rational if stripped of all this pseudo-scientific garnishing" (pp. 145, 149-150). Pollard's witty and effective reply affirms (in response to Brown's agitation over the description of blank leaves) the importance of knowing book structure in all instances ("I must confess myself to a preference for being told whether even a modern book which begins on the third leaf of a sheet has lost a half-title and a portrait, or only two pieces of white paper" [p. 155]), and it explains briefly why "the historian of literature and the critical editor must rely greatly on the help of bibliographers if they are to do justice to their subjects, and avoid serious errors" (p. 160). Brown repeated his attack on the "almost painful accuracy and exhaustiveness" of the "'natural history' method" in A Manual of Practical Bibliography (1906), pp. 61-63: "If any of the items set out with so much care were variable, one could appreciate the value of so much patient industry, but as the same editions of a book never vary from one another, save in regard to imperfections or misplaced sheets or leaves, it must be confessed that most of the descriptive collation in cases like this is a sheer waste of time, money, and space."
By the early 1880s, Shepherd had treated Tennyson (1866), Ruskin (1878), Dickens (1880), Thackeray (1880), Carlyle (1881), and Swinburne (1883). Among the other lists of the eighties were Furnivall's of Browning (1881-84), Johnson's of Thackeray and Dickens (both 1885), Chew's of Longfellow (1885), and Anderson's appended to biographies of Rossetti, Dickens, and the Brontës (all 1887), of Scott (1888), and of Byron and George Eliot (both 1890). The best examinations of the early "author bibliographies" (showing their relation to collecting trends) are provided by Michael Sadleir's "The Development during the Last Fifty Years of Bibliographical Study of Books of the XIXth Century," in The Bibliographical Society, 1892-1942 (see note 18 above), pp. 146-158 (which includes a list of such works from 1868 to 1914 [pp. 148-149]), and by John Carter's Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting (1948), esp. Chapters 2 and 3. (Ferguson [see note 17 above] also gives a list of early author bibliographies on pp. 91-95.) Here and later, I normally cite author (or press) bibliographies simply by the name of the bibliographer, the name of the author (or press) treated, and the year; full citations of many of these bibliographies (often with references to reviews) can be found in the lists of British and American author bibliographies in (respectively) T. H. Howard-Hill's Bibliography of British Literary Bibliographies (1969; supplemented by his Shakespearian Bibliography and Textual Criticism, 1971) and my Guide to the Study of United States Imprints (1971).
On Forman, see Nicolas Barker and John Collins, A Sequel to "An Enquiry" (1983), pp. 23-42 (esp. pp. 30 and 33 for the Shelley bibliography).
Wise's bibliographical volumes fall into two sequences, the bibliographies (all but one published by 1920) and the descriptive catalogues of his author collections (published mainly in the 1920s): the succession of bibliographies dealt with Ruskin (substantially the work of James P. Smart, 1889-93), Robert Browning (1897), Tennyson (1908), Coleridge (1913; supplemented 1919), Borrow (1914), Wordsworth (1916), the Brontës (1917), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1918), Landor (1919), Swinburne (1919-20), Conrad (1920; revised 1921), and Byron (1932-33); the catalogues (primarily reprinted, with revisions, from The Ashley Library [11 vols., 1922-36]) covered Shelley (1924), Swinburne (1925), Two Lake Poets (1927, dealing with Wordsworth and Coleridge), Byron (1928), Conrad (1928), Landor (1928), the Brontës (1929), the Brownings (1929), Dryden (1930), and Pope (1931). Simon Nowell-Smith has assessed Wise's achievement in descriptive bibliography in "T. J. Wise as Bibliographer," Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 129-141; see also Michael Sadleir's perceptive comments in his essay for the Bibliographical Society's jubilee volume (see note 18 above), pp. 151-152, 155-156, and John Carter's Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting (1948), pp. 15-16 (noting that Wise lacked "a disinterested wish to arrive at the truth").
The entry for every edition gives a signature collation, the measurement of the type-page, and the catchwords of the first page of each quire, as well as the physical characteristics of each copy. The relation of this detail to textual study is taken for granted in the substantial introduction (which is omitted in the 1939 edition expanded and revised by Bartlett). See also Bartlett's Mr. William Shakespeare of 1922.
Some discussion of the dispute between Wise and Griffith appears in my "The Descriptive Bibliography of Eighteenth-Century Books," in Eighteenth-Century English Books Considered by Librarians and Booksellers, Bibliographers and Collectors (1976), pp. 22-33 (see pp. 24-26); and in Vander Meulen's Where Angels Fear to Tread (see note 8 above), pp. 6-7, 11-12, 18, 21.
Ten years later Williams published another important bibliographical work, Points in Eighteenth-Century Verse (in Michael Sadleir's "Bibliographia" series, which carried the significant subtitle "Studies in Book History and Book Structure"); in an introductory essay, he said, "I have tried to state each case, as known to me, fully, and to give the reader every facility for coming to an opposite conclusion to my own if he considers my reasoning faulty" (p. 35).
Sadleir later reinforced these views about the place of publishing history in bibliography: see "The Development during the Last Fifty Years of Bibliographical Study of Books of the XIXth Century," in The Bibliographical Society, 1892-1942 (see note 18 above), pp. 146-158. The importance of Sadleir and his circle in the history of bibliography is suggested by Dan H. Laurence's reference to him as "that annunciatory angel Michael Sadleir" in his Engelhard Lecture, A Portrait of the Author as a Bibliography (1983), p. 12.
Keynes treated Donne (1914; revised 1932, 1958, 1973), Blake (1921), Thomas Browne (1924; revised 1968), William Harvey (1928; revised 1953), Jane Austen (1929), Hazlitt (1931; revised 1981), John Evelyn (1937; revised 1968), John Ray (1951), Rupert Brooke (1954; revised 1959, 1964), Robert Hooke (1960), Timothie Bright (1962), Siegfried Sassoon (1962), William Petty and John Graunt (1971), George Berkeley (1976), and Henry King (1977). Keynes also published a bibliography of George Cumberland in the Book Collector, 19 (1970), 31-65.
And the other three volumes in the Indiana Historical Society series, Dorothy R. Russo's George Ade (1947) and Dorothy R. Russo and Thelma L. Sullivan's Booth Tarkington (1949) and Bibliographical Studies of Seven Authors of Crawfordsville, Indiana (1952). These bibliographies, produced under the patronage of Josiah K. Lilly, Jr., reflect advice from Jacob Blanck (whose other projects for Lilly include a bibliography of Harry Castlemon [1941] and the Bibliography of American Literature [1955- ]). Blanck's belief in the importance of publishing history in bibliography is expressed in The Title-Page as Bibliographical Evidence (1966). See also pp. 16-17 of my "The Descriptive Bibliography of American Authors," SB, 21 (1968), 1-24.
John Carter, writing in 1948, declared that during the seventy-five-year development of author bibliography "perhaps a score of really first-class performances have been achieved" (Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting, p. 107).
The Soho series, published originally by Rupert Hart-Davis and later (as of 1976) by Oxford University Press (with revisions of earlier titles sometimes published elsewhere), was initially supervised by an editorial board consisting of John Carter, John Hayward, W. A. Jackson, and A. N. L. Munby. The series contains Allan Wade's Yeats (1951; revised 1958, 1968), John Carter and John Sparrow's Housman (1952; revised 1982 by William White), A. E. Gallatin and L. M. Oliver's Beerbohm (1952), Geoffrey Keynes's Rupert Brooke (1954; revised 1959, 1964), John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon's Joyce (1953), Cecil Woolf's Norman Douglas (1954), Woolf's Frederick Rolfe (1957), Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence's Henry James (1957; revised 1961, 1982), B. J. Kirkpatrick's Virginia Woolf (1957; revised 1967, 1980), Keynes's Siegfried Sassoon (1962), Cosmo Gordon's Lucretius (1962; revised 1985), Richard Fifoot's Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell (1963; revised 1971), Warren Roberts's D. H. Lawrence (1963), Miriam Benkovitz's Ronald Firbank (1963; revised 1982), Donald Gallup's Pound (1963; revised 1983), Philip Gaskell's Foulis Press (1964; revised 1986), William B. Todd's Burke (1964; revised 1982), Kirkpatrick's E. M. Forster (1965; revised 1968, 1985), Keynes's Berkeley (1976), Kirkpatrick's Edmund Blunden (1979), David Gilson's Austen (1982), Laurence's Shaw (1983), Richard Lancelyn Green and John Michael Gibson's Conan Doyle (1983), William S. Peterson's Kelmscott Press (1984), and Kirkpatrick's Katherine Mansfield (1989). The significance of the Soho series is suggested by Dan H. Laurence, who says that modern author-bibliography has been "inspired and influenced in large measure by the emergence" of the series (A Portrait of the Author as a Bibliography [1983], p. 6 [cf. p. 12]), and by Anthony Rota, who criticizes bibliographies that depart from the arrangement of the "Soho formula" (Points at Issue: A Bookseller Looks at Bibliography [1984], p. 10). An earlier indication of the influence of the series is "The Soho Recipe," Times Literary Supplement, 25 October 1963, p. 876.
The "Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography," beginning publication in 1972 with an advisory board consisting of Fredson Bowers, Matthew J. Bruccoli, William R. Cagle, and Charles W. Mann, includes the following: Joseph Schwartz and Robert C. Schweik's Hart Crane (1972), Bruccoli's F. Scott Fitzgerald (1972; supplemented 1980; revised 1987), J. M. Edelstein's Wallace Stevens (1973), Jennifer McCabe Atkinson's O'Neill (1974), Ernest C. Stefanik, Jr.'s John Berryman (1974), Bruccoli and Richard Layman's Ring Lardner (1976), Craig S. Abbott's Marianne Moore (1977), C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr.'s Hawthorne (1978), Bruccoli's John O'Hara (1978), Joel Myerson's Margaret Fuller (1978), Bruccoli's Raymond Chandler (1979), Layman's Dashiell Hammett (1979), Bruccoli's James Gould Cozzens (1981), Raymond R. Borst's Thoreau (1982), Myerson's Emerson (1982), Bruccoli's Ross Macdonald / Kenneth Millar (1983), Myerson's Emily Dickinson (1984), Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman's Nelson Algren (1985), Carol Johnston's Thomas Wolfe (1987), Rodger L. Tarr's Carlyle (1989), Bruccoli and Baughman's James Dickey (1990), and Stephen Garrison's Edith Wharton (1990). The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, publishing through the University Press of Virginia, began in 1978 to label its bibliographies as belonging to the "Linton R. Massey Descriptive Bibliography Series": Joe Maynard and Barry Miles's William S. Burroughs (1978), Candace W. MacMahon's Elizabeth Bishop (1980), James A. Grimshaw, Jr.'s Robert Penn Warren (1981), Stuart Wright's Randall Jarrell (1986), Wright and J. L. W. West III's Reynolds Price (1986), and Wright's Peter Taylor (1988). In the two decades before 1978, the Society had published several descriptive bibliographies, such as Frances Joan Brewer's Cabell (1957), William W. Kelley's Ellen Glasgow (1964), and B. C. Bloomfield's Auden (1964; revised 1972 by Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson). Other recent series are the "Pall Mall Bibliographies," published by Dawson (Folkestone, Kent), and the "St. Paul's Bibliographies," published by the firm of the same name (Godalming, later Winchester). The "Pall Mall" series includes A. F. Allison's Thomas Lodge (1973) and Robert Greene (1975) and M. R. Perkin's Abraham Cowley (1977). The "St. Paul's" series, which is made up of bibliographical studies (and reprints of such studies) in addition to descriptive bibliographies, has recently been organized into subseries, such as the "19th Century Writers Series" and the "20th Century Writers Series," which contain reprints (with addenda) and revisions of descriptive bibliographies published earlier (some in the Keynes and the Soho series) as well as new works—including (among those not previously mentioned) Tom Dunne's G. M. Hopkins (1978; original 1976), Michael Collie and Angus Fraser's George Borrow (1984), Collie's George Gissing (1985; original 1975), Fred H. Higginson's Robert Graves (revised 1987 by William P. Williams; original 1966); Philip M. O'Brien's particularly noteworthy T. E. Lawrence (1988), and Peter Eads's H. E. Bates (1990). (See also note 41 above.)
Purdy's Hardy receives well-deserved praise as a "landmark" in Dan H. Laurence's A Portrait of the Author as a Bibliography (1983), p. 13. And Marjorie G. Wynne calls it "one of the most useful, substantial, and innovative studies of a major modern author," placing Purdy "in the forefront of bibliographical scholarship," in her obituary of Purdy in the Yale University Library Gazette, 65 (1990-91), 118-120.
I am not attempting to list all of them here, but I shall name a few more that are notable in one way or another (and not mentioned elsewhere in the present essay): R. W. Gibson's Bacon (1950) and More (1961); Leslie N. Broughton, Clark S. Northup, and Robert Pearsall's Browning (1953); Philip Gaskell's Baskerville (1959; revised 1973); Audre Hanneman's Hemingway (1967; supplemented 1975); Edwin T. Bowden's Thurber (1968); Daniel Heartz's Pierre Attaignant (1969); Sidney L. Gulick's Chesterfield (2nd ed., 1979); Leon Voet's Plantin Press (1980-83); Joan Crane's Willa Cather (1982); R. A. Sayce and David Maskell's Montaigne (1983, on the Essais); and Jay A. Gertzman's Lawrence (1989, on Lady Chatterley's Lover). Two outstanding descriptive catalogues of collections are Allan Stevenson's volume of the Catalogue of Botanical Books in the Collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt (Vol. 2, 1961) and Joan St. C. Crane's Robert Frost: A Descriptive Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia (1974).
There are many subject or imprint bibliographies that provide some physical detail (such as title-page transcriptions and signature collations) for a large number of books; I single these three works out here as excellent examples of the much smaller class of bibliographies that offer even more detailed descriptions of extensive quantities of books. (The category of "short-title catalogue" obviously aims for abbreviated description; but Katharine Pantzer's great revision [1976-91] of the first "STC"—A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave's A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640 [1926]—makes explicit in many entries the extensive analysis that underlies such bibliographies at their best.) On the relation of subject and imprint bibliographies and "short-title catalogues" to descriptive bibliography, see my "The Evolving Role of Bibliography, 1884-1984," in Books and Prints, Past and Future (1984), pp. 15-31 (esp. pp. 23-27); and "The Bibliography and Textual Study of American Books," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 95 (1985), 291-329 (reprinted in Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book: America, 1639-1876, ed. David D. Hall and John B. Hench [1987], pp. 233-271)—which recognizes the lack of attention to book structure in the tradition of recording "Americana."
Three of these were by Bowers himself: "Purposes of Descriptive Bibliography, with Some Remarks on Methods," Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 1-22; "Bibliography and Restoration Drama," in Bowers and Lyle H. Wright, Bibliography: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar (1966), pp. 1-25; and "Bibliography Revisited" (see note 31 above). (All three are reprinted in his collected essays [see note 23 above], pp. 111-134, 135-150, 151-195.) He also made some trenchant comments on descriptive bibliography in other essays, such as "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies" (see note 24 above), pp. 43, 48-51; "The Bibliographical Way" (see note 23 above), pp. 65-68; and "Four Faces of Bibliography," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 10 (1971), 33-45, reprinted in his collected essays, pp. 94-108 (see pp. 100-103). Two comprehensive post-1949 treatments of descriptive bibliography are Greg's 1959 introduction to his pre-Restoration drama bibliography (see note 20 above) and Allan Stevenson's 1961 introduction to the second volume of the Hunt catalogue (see note 46 above), pp. cxli-ccxliv. Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), though it contains only a brief chapter on the writing of bibliographical descriptions (pp. 321-335), provides essential background for any examination of books as physical objects. The two dozen other major studies supplementing Bowers's book—by Gavin D. R. Bridson, Willem Daniel Margadant, Allan Stevenson, David L. Vander Meulen, and me—are listed in my "A Sample Bibliographical Description with Commentary," SB, 40 (1987), 1-30 (see pp. 3-5). A more extensive list appears in my course syllabus, Introduction to Bibliography: Seminar Syllabus (Literature G4010, English Department, Columbia University, 12th revision, Fall 1990; distributed by the Book Arts Press, Columbia University School of Library Service, 1991), pp. 49-52. (Some of these essays, and some others, were reprinted by John Bush Jones in Readings in Descriptive Bibliography [1974].) Some thoughts about current directions in author bibliography, and their relation to publishing and textual history, are offered by David McKitterick in "Author Bibliographies," Book Collector, 32 (1983), 391-393, 395-396, 399-402, 405-406, 409-410. For a superb account of what present-day descriptive bibliography at its best involves, see Vander Meulen's Where Angels Fear to Tread (see note 8 above); and for two model reviews of descriptive bibliographies, see Vander Meulen's review of Gilson's Jane Austen in PBSA, 79 (1985), 435-442, and B. J. McMullin's review of Bettye Thomas Chambers's Bibliography of French Bibles (1983) in Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 10 (1986), 1-24.
I have summarized the story briefly on three retrospective occasions: "Physical Bibliography in the Twentieth Century" (see note 18 above), pp. 68-74; "The Evolving Role of Bibliography" (see note 47 above), pp. 17-23; and "Issues in Bibliographical Studies since 1942," in the forthcoming volume commemorating the Bibliographical Society's centennial. I have also attempted to tell the story in more detail for two areas, American authors and eighteenth-century British authors: "The Descriptive Bibliography of American Authors," (see note 41 above); "The Descriptive Bibliography of Eighteenth-Century Books" (see note 37 above). See also my "Bibliography and Science" (see note 19 above); "The Literature of Book Collecting," in Book Collecting: A Modern Guide, ed. Jean Peters (1977), pp. 209-271 (esp. "Bibliographies and Checklists," pp. 234-248); and "The State of Bibliography Today," PBSA, 73 (1979), 289-304 (esp. pp. 297-300)—reprinted in The Bibliographical Society of America, 1904-1979: A Retrospective Collection (1980), pp. 542-557 (esp. pp. 550-553).
The role of bibliographies as biographies is suggested by the title of Dan H. Laurence's Engelhard Lecture, A Portrait of the Author as a Bibliography (1983). Laurence (author of two Soho bibliographies, on James [with Leon Edel, 1957, 1961, 1982] and Shaw [1983]) points out how the modern bibliographer has "assumed the mantle of the biographer" (p. 13), engaging in "the graphic recreation of the subjects' lives in the context of their professional business involvement and experience; of their struggles and frustrations and yearnings reflected through commercial intercourse" (p. 17). (Laurence is rightly intolerant of the volumes listing collectors' "points" that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, but he does not do justice to the real value of "points" in the serious examination of physical evidence [cf. pp. 11-12].) Another treatment of the biographical aspects of descriptive bibliography is Scott Bennett's "The Profession of Authorship: Some Problems for Descriptive Bibliography," in Research Methods in Librarianship: Historical and Bibliographical Methods in Library Research, ed. Rolland E. Stevens (1971), pp. 74-85—in which Bennett conceives of a bibliography of Howells as telling "how he made a living as a writer—what sort of life he made" and bringing us "nearer to that man and to the world in which he lived" (p. 84). Cf. note 60 below.
On this point, see my "The Concept of Ideal Copy," SB, 33 (1980), 18-53. For a thoughtful, if brief, discussion of the relation of checklists of works to descriptive bibliographies of physical books, see D. W. Krummel, Bibliographies: Their Aims and Methods (1984), pp. 34-36 ("The Physical and Intellectual Book").
For example, Donald Gallup, the author of widely praised bibliographies of T. S. Eliot (1952; revised 1969) and Ezra Pound (1963; revised 1983), has stated, "Special details necessary to distinguish between states or issues of particular books may be added here and there without the bibliographer's being obliged to encumber the whole bibliography with data which for most of the books would be superfluous"; more specifically, he claims that "Collation by signatures is unnecessary for most contemporary books except in special cases" and asserts that for modern books an indication of leaf size is "of little use to anyone" and that title-page transcriptions "would seem seldom to be essential" if photographic reproductions were supplied. See his "'Boobliography' and Ezra Pound," Texas Quarterly, 10.4 (Winter 1967), 80-92, reprinted as On Contemporary Bibliography with Particular Reference to Ezra Pound (1970); the quotations are from pp. 20, 8-9, of the latter text. (Gallup is called the "most revered of contemporary bibliographers" by Anthony Rota in Points at Issue [see note 43 above], p. 11.) Another example is David Foxon, author of a distinguished bibliography, English Verse, 1701-1750 (1975), which provides signature collations (usually) and notations of watermarks (sometimes) but not quasi-facsimile title-page transcriptions; in his Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (1970), he disparages such title-page transcription because it is generally not necessary to identify editions. I have responded to the arguments of Gallup and Foxon in "Title-Page Transcription and Signature Collation Reconsidered," SB, 38 (1985), 45-81 (which includes references to other discussions of these two subjects).
Liebert, who had been president of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1964-65, delivered this talk, under the title "Bourbon Old-Fashioned Bibliography," at the BSA annual meeting on 26 January 1973. He had earlier delivered it, under the title "Bibliography Old & New," as the third Lew David Feldman Lecture in Bibliography at the University of Texas; it was published in the Library Chronicle of the University of Texas, n.s., 4 (1972), 11-22, and as a separate in 1974. Page references are to the latter publication.
On the first point, he says, "The purpose of all this is to assume the cloak of the wizard and to support esoteric professional standing" (p. 11). On the second: "I think the fad for machines has pushed it [bibliography] past the point where judgment of the significance of data is more important than the accumulation of them" (p. 18).
He does favor "investigative work" if the resulting data are digested and shown to be meaningful (p. 20). But the presence of numbers seems to trigger an automatic response: "some recent bibliographies are more like tables of logarithms or tides" (p. 20); "Bibliographers do not need to hide behind an assumed cloak of scientific professionalism by the use of numbers and tables and symbols. Let them go honestly about their work" (p. 21); "Let us not seek to establish the worth of our studies or our own professional status by resort to a scientific apparatus of symbols, mensuration, and statistics" (p. 24). An egregious recent example of this point of view is John Byrne's review (blatantly entitled "Sense over Science") praising J. Howard Woolmer's bibliography of the Poetry Bookshop (1988) for its lack of "mumbo-jumbo" and "quasi-chemical formulae," asserting that the "foremost requirement [of a bibliography] is an incontrovertible identification of the item to hand" (Times Literary Supplement, 10-16 March 1989, p. 247).
David Vander Meulen, after examining seventy-five copies of one edition of the Dunciad (and eight hundred altogether) and recording more details than any other bibliographer (of any author) has probably ever recorded, speaks of "the alluring joy of the work" and "the thrill of the chase," and he concludes, "Bibliography is fun" (Where Angels Fear to Tread [see note 8 above], p. 28). Liebert compares bibliographers with biological taxonomists, who he says fall into "splitters" and "groupers" (pp. 15-16); but the "splitters" do not always, as Liebert suggests, create categories based on irrelevant evidence, and the work of the "groupers" must be regarded as superficial if it does not accommodate the complications produced by the "splitters."
The "fundamental purpose" of a bibliography, he believes, is to tell people "what edition it is that they have" (pp. 11-12). His praise of favored bibliographies takes this form: "They have told me everything I have needed to know about the books of which they treat, and nothing that I did not want to know" (p. 20). An appropriate reply (made in a different context) comes from D. W. Krummel: "The best way to kill bibliographical scholarship is to persuade readers that citations that fail to expose bibliographical details still tell them all that they need to know" ("Citing the Score: Descriptive Bibliography and Printed Music," Library, 6th ser., 9 [1987], 329-346 [see p. 345]).
Although William P. Barlow, Jr.—in his Engelhard Lecture, Book Collecting: Personal Rewards and Public Benefits (1984)—says that "Collectors are not scholars" (p. 21), the tenor of his remarks as a whole shows that his approach is indeed scholarly (cf. his explanation for acquiring multiple copies: "not only to provide a copy of each known state but to search for unknown states" [p. 10]).
Liebert does say later that books are "parts of men, and usually the only surviving parts of those men" (p. 25); but in the same sentence he says that books are "not sterile, inert entities that can be fully contained in a collational formula," as if those who use formulas, or examine books as "machine-produced items of merchandise," thereby ignore the connection of books with human beings. On this point, as on so many others, David Vander Meulen is exemplary: as a bibliographer of Pope, he certainly uses collation formulas and investigates book production in detail, and he believes that the process brings him "not only closer to the minds and actions of those who manufactured the books but also, ultimately, into the presence of Alexander Pope himself" (Where Angels Fear to Tread [see note 8 above], p. 28).
Of course, the achievement of a printer actually consists of physical objects, and descriptive bibliographies of printers, like catalogues raisonnés of painters, provide verbal accounts of visual end products rather than of objects that serve as intermediaries.
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