University of Virginia Library

III

As the 1960s began, several changes were about to occur in the routine of the Bowerses' lives together. That routine, as it had developed over the postwar decade and a half, was of course primarily structured by the academic year—though professional duties, inside and outside the university, did not prevent his finding time to judge dog shows, write a column on classical recordings, and participate actively in a stamp club. In the summers Nancy Hale went to live with her mother on Cape

Ann, north of Boston, and Bowers taught at the University of Chicago. Otherwise they generally traveled together, both on trips abroad (usually biennial in the 1960s and 1970s, often lasting only a week or two in the 1960s and three months in the 1970s) and on short excursions for research or lecturing in the United States. A charming photograph of the two of them at one of the Bread Loaf Writers Conferences—where she was an instructor in fiction-writing from 1957 to 1965 and delivered as lectures some of the sprightly and perceptive essays later collected in The Realities of Fiction (1962)—indicated what a striking couple they made. Both were epitomes of graciousness and urbanity, with commanding presences, and seemed taller than they actually were (he was 5'10'', and she was two or three inches shorter); her graying hair was swept upward to form a coiffure that contributed to the regality of her bearing, and his nearly permanent smile, early balding, and rather full and ruddy face, together with his notably erect posture, conveyed an air of authority and of amused worldliness. His flair for the dramatic is suggested by two vignettes of the late 1960s and early 1970s: his entry into a committee room, flinging off his cape and taking snuff in the correct manner (snuff being at this time his substitute for the previously ever-present cigarette in a long holder); and his arrival at an important faculty meeting, fresh from the Farmington Hunt, wearing his riding habit (whereupon his impassioned speech favoring the retention of the foreign-language requirement carried the day). The Bowerses handled themselves with style and were a memorable couple not only on the Charlottesville scene (where they regularly attended the university concert series and participated in social events) but also in academic circles abroad (where they were welcome guests, always remarkably informed about the local cultural and culinary situation). What most altered the pattern of their lives at the beginning of the 1960s were their building a house and his taking on the chairmanship of the English department; a similarly notable shift in the middle of the decade was his giving up his Chicago teaching in favor of summers on Cape Ann.

Through the 1950s the Bowerses' Charlottesville residence was at 2016 Minor Road, a short walk west of the university grounds and north of the football stadium. Glimpses of life there crop up in Nancy Hale's wonderful autobiographical writings. In A New England Girlhood (1958, dedicated to Bowers), she reported, "I live in a house that has no view at all, since our Virginia town is set in a cup in the mountains. . . . However, the inside of my house is charming to look at—dark-green walls downstairs, with white woodwork, and upstairs, lighter

colors. In one bedroom I have a blue paper that reminds me of the paper in my old nursery" (p. 7). A later chapter depicted a typical evening: And in The Life in the Studio (1969), a recollection of Minor Road led to further reflection:

In 1960 the Bowerses decided to build a house in the country, on the land they had purchased over a decade earlier—some fifty acres in the wooded hills about five miles north of the university, a tract that later, when the South Fork Rivanna River Reservoir was created, had over a thousand feet of waterfront. The spot they cleared for building was carefully chosen so that the house—unlike the one on Minor Road "with no view at all"—would have a magnificent prospect of tree-covered rolling terrain, leading the eye onward to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. The two-story stucco house that was constructed had a formal and symmetrical interior, later furnished in dissimilar ways by the two occupants. A central front door led through a vestibule into a large living room, decorated in beiges, golds, and pinks and dominated by the dramatic view, seen through a floor-to-ceiling bay window. At the left end was a fireplace, with two facing sofas in front of it, and beside it a door led to Bowers's study; at the right end was the entrance to the dining room, flanked by folding doors that could be opened to reveal twenty-eight speakers for Bowers's record player, along with

shelves for housing his record collection. Bowers's small bedroom opened off of his study, and over the living room was a suite (sitting room, bedroom, and bath) for his wife. The cell-like appearance of his bedroom (enlivened only by two Cruickshank-style prints) and his congested but relatively colorless study contrasted with her suite, bright with chintz and filled with family mementos and her parents' artwork, as well as her own cluttered desks. The spaces were designed for two writers to work in: as Doug Kamholz, a local reporter, once said, "New stories are written there. Old ones are restored to authors' original intentions."

This house, which the Bowerses named "Woodburn" (but which some of the graduate students—and others—called "the pink palazzo"), was described by Roy Flannagan, Bowers's student in the early 1960s, as "an open neoclassical house that overlooked a vista that would have made Capability Brown proud to have designed it," a place where one could live "an Horatian ideal." One of the early visitors to the house was William Faulkner, who had come to the university in the spring of 1957 under the Balch Program for visiting writers (administered by a committee of which Bowers was a member). Although Faulkner served as writer-in-residence for only two spring semesters, he continued to spend considerable time in Albemarle County until his death in 1962, in order to be near his daughter Jill's family and engage in foxhunting. During the last two years of his life he was present at a number of gatherings at Woodburn and apparently got on well with Nancy Hale—"Miss Nancy," as he called her. (She had supposedly based on him the character Harrington in her 1959 novel, Dear Beast, a book that he read and respected; and she later wrote a revealing memoir of him for the 1 August 1963 number of Vogue.) Well suited to entertaining, Woodburn became the scene of annual departmental picnics and many black-tie dinners as well as a port of call for bibliographers from all over the world.

Shortly after the house was finished, Bowers had more obligation than before (as well as facilities) for professional entertaining, since in the fall of 1961 he became chairman of his department. By that time he had established himself as the mainstay of the Renaissance faculty, a dynamic teacher and a tireless participant in departmental affairs. When he had returned from his wartime service, resuming his teaching in the spring term of 1946, he picked up the courses he had previously taught (in Spenser and Milton, seventeenth-century literature, and non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama, plus the graduate-methods and the bibliography courses) and was made Associate Professor. Promotion to

Professor came only two years later. Throughout the 1950s he taught those same courses, adding from 1953-54 onward the Shakespeare seminar formerly conducted by James Southall Wilson (who retired in 1951) and from 1956-57 the Shakespeare survey. In his memorial resolution for Wilson, Bowers said that Wilson "made Shakespeare live" for "generations of students." But Bowers's own Shakespeare seminar became even more famous, and in his 1989 volume of essays on Shakespeare he described it in detail, beginning with some thoughts on his relationship to Kittredge: Some of the ideas on Hamlet expressed in this class were given a wider audience through the book-length introduction to the play, containing scene-by-scene analyses, that he prepared for 1965 publication in Barnes & Noble's series of "Outline-Guides" for students. His Shakespeare and other literature and bibliography courses won him many followers among the graduate students, including a number who wrote dissertations with him and later became prominent scholars in their own right.

One of those from the early 1950s, Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., has recalled that Bowers's students thought of him as a "master teacher." His clarity in explaining details was all the more effective, Cauthen believes, because he "knew when to switch from a movement through particularities to the larger general intellectual history that would provide the imaginative concept for the passage"—and could show "how literature fit within the vast universe of art and life." His respect for his students was shown in his thoughtful comments on their papers and in his repeated statement, reported by Cauthen, "that what really mattered was not the number of cards bearing his name in the library's card catalogue but his students." This concern for students was well expressed by another of his former dissertation students, George Walton Williams:

Roy Flannagan, still another dissertation student, recently summed up the demands made by Bowers's courses this way: "In his course on Shakespeare's tragedies, I needed to be so sharp for the examination I stood on my head in the hall outside the classroom, just in order to get the blood circulating in my brain, only to get the second-highest grade in the class (after Barbara Mowat): that was the kind of performance he inspired." George L. Geckle, a dissertation student at the same time, remembers Bowers's challenging instructions for the term paper in his Milton course—a six- to seven-thousand-word paper that was "to be original and to solve a problem." Bowers himself met both goals in his Milton lectures, which Geckle describes as "an impressive display that exuded both mastery of his material and true critical authority."

Until his retirement in 1975, he continued—even during his chairmanship—to

teach the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century and the bibliographical courses in varying combinations. In the bibliography course (which, as of 1962-63, came to be called "Introduction to Textual Criticism and Bibliography for the Literary Student"), the range of detailed examples increased to reflect his editorial projects; in 1966-67, for example, it dealt with "textual problems in Marlowe, Fielding, Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane." A memorable picture of Bowers during his chairmanship, as seen by a student in his Shakespeare class, was contributed by Clive Probyn to the group of tributes gathered in 1991 by the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand: Bowers's considerate attention to students is illustrated—from the same period—by his encouragement of Alexander Theroux. Martin Battestin, who has written an account of Theroux's Charlottesville years for the Review of Contemporary Fiction (1991), reports, "It was Bowers, then in the third year of his famous chairmanship, who saw the promise in Alex, not only admitting him to the graduate program but, by some ingenious creative financing, scraping together money enough to help pay his way" (p. 51).

Bowers's critical reading of dissertations was similarly undiminished during his chairmanship: in the seven years between 1961 and 1968, ten of his students received their doctoral degrees. All told, he directed (or co-directed) dissertations by twenty-eight students at Virginia: Charlton J. K. Hinman (1941), William D. Hull (1941), Irene Mann Rinehart (1942), Alexander W. Allison (1949), John W. McCutchan (1949),

Lawrence G. Starkey (1949), Philip Williams, Jr. (1949), Irby B. Cauthen, Jr. (1951), Marion Hope Hamilton (1952), Dora Jean Ashe (1953), Cyrus H. Hoy (1954), Wallace S. Sanderlin (1955), Elizabeth Brock (1956), George Walton Williams (1957), Robert Kean Turner, Jr. (1958), Matthew J. Bruccoli (1961), Francelia Butler (1963), Brewster S. Ford (1964), Jeanne Addison Masengill (later Roberts, 1964), George L. Geckle (1965), Roy C. Flannagan (1966), Clauston L. Jenkins (1966), William S. Kable (1966), Albert C. Labriola (1966), Herbert R. Blackwell (1967), Joseph L. Simmons (1967), Paul L. Gaston (1970), and Sidney W. Reid (1972). Fifteen of these writers dealt with textual criticism or analytical bibliography (mostly of Renaissance books, but in five instances Restoration, eighteenth-century, or American books were treated), and the other thirteen wrote critical-historical studies, all on Renaissance literature except for one on Dryden and one on Poe.

At the time Bowers assumed the departmental chairmanship in the fall of 1961, he had already come to play an influential role in the department. He had been a force behind the scenes during the chairmanship of his predecessor, Floyd Stovall, and was particularly instrumental in the hiring of new assistant professors. During the summer of 1961 he consulted with the three who were to begin in the fall—Martin C. Battestin, David M. Bevington, and Francis Russell Hart—and worked out new courses for them. At his first meeting in the fall he persuaded the tenured members of the department to allow the nontenured ones to vote, and the new courses were then approved by the larger voting group. He set the tone for his chairmanship at this first meeting by showing not only that he had a vision for the department's future but also that he had the skills of administrative strategy to make it a reality. (Furthermore, he knew how to foster a sense of community: he wrote frequent and detailed letters, for example, to Robert Langbaum, who had joined the department the previous year but was on leave in 1961-62, and he regularly stopped by professors' offices for visits.)

During the next seven years he proceeded to build the department, not previously considered important in the academic world, into one of the top few English departments in the United States. This achievement is testimony to his astute diplomacy in dealing both with the first-rate scholars he wished to attract and with the university administrators from whom funds were needed. (He always paid credit to the president, Edgar Shannon, for selecting English as one of the departments to receive federal funds then available for improving the faculty.) David Levin remembers Bowers's recruiting letters as conveying "in every line" the image of "a decisive man who knew what he wanted for Virginia,

the best faculty he could get. He would try pre-emptive offers, but he did not, like Maynard Mack of Yale at that time, require a firm answer before the first of November." Recently E. D. Hirsch has recalled, The stunning roster of faculty recruited by Bowers included (besides Hirsch) Ralph Cohen, Douglas Day, Hoyt N. Duggan, William Elwood, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Alan Howard, George Garrett, Arthur C. Kirsch, Harold H. Kolb, Jr., V. A. Kolve, Cecil Y. Lang, J. C. Levenson, Peter Taylor, Charles Vandersee, and Anthony Winner. One can understand why Douglas Day called the department "better than excellent . . . superb" and said of it, "There's a kind of electricity in the community . . . something that encourages writing"—a statement chosen by Virginius Dabney for inclusion in his history of the university, where credit is given to Bowers for bringing the situation about (Mr. Jefferson's University [1981], p. 464).

The acquisition of outstanding scholars was not, however, the only aspect of the department's welfare to which Bowers gave energetic attention; one of his primary concerns was the relation of teaching to a graduate program (a subject on which he was becoming increasingly vocal on a national level), and he oversaw the department's successful 1966 application to the Danforth Foundation for the institution of a program for "College Teaching Career Fellows"—a program that (in the words of the proposal) "should serve as a model that will influence educational theory in this country." The achievements of Bowers's chairmanship came at the price of some hard feelings, for his decisiveness was not always seen in a favorable light: George Garrett, for instance, has depicted him running the department with "a heavy hand, if not an iron one" (Whistling in the Dark [1992], p. 155). But to most people the benefits of his chairmanship far outweighed such drawbacks. Testimony to Bowers's lasting influence on the department came in 1980 when the department decided to name its library in his honor; on that occasion V. A. Kolve, then the chairman, wrote to him, "You are not only the Founding Father, so to speak, of what we collectively are; but you remain an important source of the energy and good sense that continues to hold us together."

After seven years in the chairmanship (1961-68), Bowers agreed to

accept the position of Dean of the Faculty. ("A relief, in fact, to be rid of the emotional involvement with building a department," he wrote to Jo Ann Boydston on 24 September 1968.) He brought to this position the same abilities and the same concentration, as many have testified. One of the professors he hired at this time, David Rubin of the French department, remembers his interview well, not merely because Bowers wore riding clothes but because Bowers seemed to have read his mind, understanding precisely why he wanted to move and what he would like to have at Virginia. To those he recruited, Bowers made clear his own belief in the importance of a faculty strong in both research and teaching, and first-class scholars could see—from Bowers's own impressive record of publication and teaching as well as from his conversation—that they were dealing with a kindred spirit. Among his accomplishments during 1968-69 were the expansion of the Religious Studies department (though he had no personal interest in religion) and the establishment of the Environmental Sciences department. Despite his skill at the deanship, he did not have his heart in the job as he did when he was constructing the English department. His energy, though phenomenal, had its limits, and he was increasingly feeling the need to find more time for his editorial projects. Although he had provisionally consented to hold the deanship for two years, he decided to give it up after a single year. E. D. Hirsch has said, "Those who dealt with Dean Bowers—department chairmen and professors alike—soon learned two things about him, that he had tough, demanding standards, and that he was completely fair and disinterested." The same would also be said by most of the hundreds of students who passed through his courses.

One evidence of Bowers's love of teaching was his desire to teach in the summers at the University of Chicago, despite his heavy academic-year schedule and his many extracurricular activities. With Allen Hazen's departure for Columbia in 1948, the University of Chicago English department was left without a bibliographical specialist, and Bowers filled that gap in the summer quarter of 1949 as the Frederic Ives Carpenter Visiting Professor in English. He liked the arrangement, and he returned there for the following fifteen summers, his title changing to Professorial Lecturer in English. Over that long period, he taught much more than bibliography. Besides a course in "Bibliography and the Techniques of Literary Scholarship" and a seminar called "Problems in Bibliographical Analysis," he gave courses at various times in Spenser and pre-1642 English drama and a seminar in the textual criticism of Elizabethan drama. According to Gwin Kolb, who received his Ph.D.

from Chicago and joined the regular departmental faculty the same year as Bowers's first teaching there, his courses were "brilliant triumphs": "Students who came to scoff at his brand of bibliography remained to admire—and to become converts." He undoubtedly saw his Chicago teaching as an opportunity to spread the bibliographical word, and his principal bibliography course was indeed influential, in part because one of the prominent library schools was on campus and a number of future rare-book librarians enrolled in his course. Bowers's influence also traveled through other faculty members: Bernard Weinberg of the Romance Languages department, for example, was interested in Bowers's approach, which thus came to play a role in a series of editions that Weinberg supervised.

The key moment for bibliographical history in Bowers's Chicago summers, however, occurred in the very first one. William B. Todd had just completed his dissertation, entitled "Procedures for Determining the Identity and Order of Certain Eighteenth-Century Editions," and the defense was scheduled for that summer. Bowers was already familiar with the direction of Todd's work from a talk Todd had given in Charlottesville the previous December, and he had scheduled an article of Todd's for the 1949 volume of Studies in Bibliography; but he had not read Todd's detailed study until asked to serve on the examining committee. He naturally recognized the extraordinary importance of Todd's application of analytical techniques to eighteenth-century books; and after an excited reading of the dissertation, he arrived at the defense with many scribbled pages of questions. Bowers's debut at Chicago, in effect, was thus his participation in an animated dialogue with Todd, while the other members of the committee listened in largely uncomprehending silence. When the committee moved into private session, Bowers explained how truly pioneering Todd's work was, opening up a whole area of research, and insisted that Todd's degree be awarded with honors. He then hastened to a telephone and called his editor at the Princeton University Press in order to make a last-minute addition, based on what he had just learned about press figures from Todd's dissertation, to his forthcoming Principles of Bibliographical Description. The "Addendum" on page 321 of the published volume was the result: it referred to Todd's dissertation as the most comprehensive demonstration of the "high value" of press figures in distinguishing impressions, announced that portions of the dissertation would appear in the third volume of Studies in Bibliography, and asserted that henceforth press figures would have to be recorded in descriptive bibliographies.

Over the years Bowers himself directed two dissertations at Chicago,

those of Frederick O. Waller (1958) and Shirley Strum Kenny (1965), both critical editions of plays; and he participated in other departmental affairs as well. His contributions to the department prompted on three different occasions the offer of a full-time position there, and each time he turned it down. But he clearly enjoyed those summers, and his presence in Chicago is memorably described in a letter (10 January 1992) from Gwin Kolb, who with his wife saw Bowers frequently: Among the acquaintances Bowers would have seen in Chicago was Allan Stevenson, whose work he had included in the first volume of Studies: in those years Stevenson was living in the University of Chicago neighborhood. Bowers managed to accomplish some bibliographical research in Chicago, but he rarely traveled up to the Newberry Library, though he did pay occasional visits there to Gertrude Woodward (whose checklist of Restoration drama he had supplemented in 1949). Despite the satisfactions of his Chicago summers, he decided after sixteen years to bring them to an end: as he wrote me (on 25 June 1965), "I have decided to give up my arrangement there and maybe live a few years longer and get a little more work done. Summers are about the only time I have to do my own work these days." The University of Chicago recognized his role in the life of the university, and in the world of scholarship generally, by awarding him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 1973.

Beginning with the summer of 1965, then, Bowers was free to spend more time with his wife on Cape Ann, and for the next quarter-century their summers together at Folly Cove, Rockport, were a major element in the rhythm of their lives. The stone house, Howlets, which had belonged

to Nancy Hale's aunt and then her mother, came to mean a great deal to Bowers, though it did not have the childhood associations for him that it did for his wife. (In a letter of 9 October 1987, he wrote, "I have grown very fond of the place but wish the water were warmer for swimming. It's too cold for me except maybe 3-4 days a summer.") The house and its setting high on a wooded hill are affectionately described in a number of passages in Nancy Hale's writings. Perhaps the loveliest account of the surroundings occurs in The Realities of Fiction (1962): The house itself, built in 1911 of granite quarried from its own cellar, was constructed by a Swedish mason to look like a northern European farmhouse. (Bowers often said it was colder and damper than it should have been because the mason did not leave an air space in the walls.) After Philip L. Hale's death in 1931, his sister, Ellen Day Hale, who had built the house as her summer studio, presented it to his widow, Lilian Westcott Hale, who for the next three decades used it as her summer studio. Although in her later years she lived in Charlottesville (2004 Lewis Mountain Road) to be near her daughter Nancy, the two of them always summered at Howlets.

Upon Lilian Westcott Hale's death in 1963, the house passed to Nancy Hale, whose experiences in sorting through the accumulated objects there underlay the moving essays that make up The Life in the Studio (1969)—a marvelous meditation on the relation of past and present, and a book that has become a cult classic. By the time Bowers began spending entire summers at Folly Cove, she had made minor changes to transform the studio into a living room:

Still other relics of the room's former use remained, for one of the many visitors to Howlets, John Frederick Nims (the poet who contributed a parody of textual and explicatory criticism to the twentieth volume of SB), remembered the "comfortably sprawling two-storied studio still a repository for the easels and oil paintings of her celebrated mother" (Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1988). Bowers's oldest son, too, recalls "some half finished paintings, an easel together with brushes and partially used paints and other furnishings, not one of which ever changed its place." On many occasions the family gathered for picnics on the rocks overlooking the cove, the Bowerses "cooking hot dogs over a fire built in the crevice of one of the rocks." Another visitor was the neighbor Leon Kroll, who as a painter appreciated what he called the Greek classicism of the cove. (Bowers—in a letter to his oldest son on 8 August 1983—described Kroll as "a salty egoistic firstclass painter, with whom we used to play bridge summers once in a while"; Kroll had known Nancy Hale since she was an adolescent.) In 1983 the Bowerses edited Kroll's reminiscences for the University of Virginia Art Museum (where a large collection of Kroll's work is housed); and Nancy Hale's prefatory "An Appreciation" (from 1980) gave her another opportunity to reveal her feelings about the Folly Cove area, where she was "ravished by the scents, the pristine light, the secret morning conversations between birds." With the Bowerses in residence, Howlets became a writers' study rather than a painter's studio. Packing into the car all the papers they would need at the house each summer was an annual ritual, and they accomplished a satisfying amount of work within its calming and restorative atmosphere.

Many of Bowers's students were aware of his love of music, for he regularly met with students in the evenings to play records and comment on them. This interest, which had been evident when he was himself a student, no doubt predated his college years; but Ware's course in music appreciation at Brown may have played a role in the development of his serious interest in classical music. In any event, he certainly attended concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra while at Harvard. From then on music was—if, indeed, it had not always been—one of the great passions of his life, and its importance to him is symbolized by the vast amount of writing he did on the subject. His thoughts on music are even more fully available to us than those on dogs and stamps as

a result of a weekly column on records that he contributed, during a period of more than a quarter-century, to the Sunday editions of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It first appeared on 19 November 1939 (when he was still writing a monthly piece on Irish wolfhounds for the American Kennel Gazette), and the last one was published on 6 November 1966. (He once told David Vander Meulen that he quit when he ran out of adjectives.) In between those dates he wrote 1162 columns, each one averaging about eighteen column-inches in length and all of them together totaling approximately a million and a quarter words. During this long period, in which he commented on more than five thousand recordings, there were only three sizable gaps in his nearly invariable weekly production of columns: from June 1942 through February 1946 his military service coupled with the curtailed production of records allowed him to write only fifty-six columns, and he wrote none at all during two periods abroad, the first on a Fulbright Fellowship (7 September 1952 through 7 June 1953) and the second on a Guggenheim Fellowship (5 April through 2 August 1959). (He did, however, write a report on the London music scene for the issue of 26 April 1953.) His record after his return in 1953 was particularly impressive: except for the 1959 gap of four months, he missed only three columns in thirteen and a half years. The feat seems amazing, when one considers that he did make other (though brief) trips abroad during this time and spent the summers in Chicago: it is testimony not only to his energy and perseverance but also to his love of music, for writing regularly about music was not a burden to him.

His column—originally called "Music on Records" (with minor variations), then "Music Off the Records," and finally, from 1950 on, "Music Off Records"—usually followed the pattern of concentrating on what he regarded as the major release of the week, assessing the performance it reproduced and the quality of the reproduction, and then commenting briefly on some other new recordings or recounting some trade gossip. He did not consider it his function to discuss the music itself in detail, but the breadth of his familiarity with music (and with other recordings of the pieces under review) was evident through the allusions and comparisons he made, and his attitudes inevitably emerged in some of his observations on individual performances. These characteristics (along with his concern for advising the reader) are neatly combined in a statement in his first column: commenting on a Columbia recording of Bach's Sonata No. 3 in G Minor for harpsichord and viola da gamba, he asserted that it "is the best of the three that he wrote for these instruments,

and beautifully played here [by Ernst Wolff and Janos Scholz], but to an extent it is best appreciated by a full-fledged lover of Bach. For the ordinary listener there are more important Bach recordings."

Sometimes he did make outright judgments about the music, as when on 15 February 1942 he proclaimed William Walton's work "brilliant, intense, complex in mood, and warm in feeling," or when on 31 December 1950 he claimed that Samuel Barber's music is "usually thin in content for the form chosen," or when on 8 July 1962 he said, "Mahler's Symphony No. 9 is the greatest symphony of the twentieth century." He felt that "Mostly one can take or leave medieval music" (6 November 1966); the "Haffner" Symphony he considered "the most thoroughly delightful of all Mozart's symphonies" (7 April 1940); regarding the first movement of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1, he said, "I feel often that Brahms is lifting himself by his own bootstraps and that the emotional violence is . . . a bit hollow and labored" (14 July 1940); and in Dvorak's Symphony No. 2 he found the composer "still assimilating the Brahms influence," though it "has gone past the stage of imitation" (22 May 1960). Steady readers of the column would have noticed Bowers's developing tastes: on 1 January 1950, for example, he advised only "hardy souls" to "plunge" into the first movement of Charles Ives's Piano Sonata No. 2, since the idiom "takes some listening to penetrate," though after "about 15 hearings the sonata is really fun"; ten years later (3 January 1960) Ives was described as a "talented" composer, and the finale of his New England suite was "one of the most ecstatic pieces of nature music written in America"; and on 16 January 1966 Bowers called Ives "quite simply . . . the best composer that America has produced."

His judgments of performers were not normally severe, but he did not hesitate to warn readers about flawed performances: the "comparatively inexperienced" Mildred Miller, for instance, was "most disappointing" in Das Lied von der Erde because she possessed "a voice of insufficent body" and had "little idea of Mahler style" (20 November 1960); and Eleanor Steber's vibrato was "distressing" in a recording of selections from Verdi (17 December 1950). Bowers had certain bêtes noires that came in for regular criticism, such as Leopold Stokowski and Leonard Bernstein (e.g., 1 February 1942, 25 August 1957); but there were others who repeatedly earned high praise, such as Thomas Beecham ("the greatest living conductor of Mozart," 7 April 1940), Bruno Walter ("the great Mahler conductor," 20 November 1960), and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau ("incomparable," 27 March 1966). He made discriminations even among those he admired (on 12 November 1950 he asserted

that Arthur Rubinstein's "virtuoso" performance in Schumann's Quintet in E Flat for Piano and Strings lacked "the tenderness and intimacy which Serkin displays"), and he was always glad to recognize new talent, such as Daniel Barenboim ("a new young pianist who is sure to make his mark," as he said in his last column).

In the prewar and postwar years, when Bowers was writing, there were many technical developments in the recording industry (not least the shift from 78 rpm to 45 and 33⅓ rpm and the effect of frequency-modulation broadcasting), and he often devoted considerable space to discussing them and advising his readers on how to deal with them. (He regarded the subject of postwar advances in the production of records and record-players important enough for two feature articles on 10 and 17 April 1949, in addition to his regular columns.) His attention to the technical side of record-making, and its effect on the fidelity of the reproductions that result, is of particular interest in view of his work in analytical bibliography and his thorough understanding of the effect of physical media on the texts of the works transmitted by them. Recordings are "editions," and Bowers's approach to them was analogous to his approach to editions of verbal works. Their goal, he felt, should be fidelity to the composers' intentions, and he judged both performance and reproduction from this point of view. In the process he sometimes undertook such experiments as playing the same record on different phonographs (e.g., 1 February 1942) or comparing different copies. Variations among copies of a single printed edition are a fact of life for analytical bibliographers, and Bowers, obviously recognizing the analogy, warned his readers (on 25 April 1943) that "they should play each record side before purchase," since one cannot assume that the pressing is unflawed in all copies. Bowers himself certainly listened to every side before writing a review, noting in the case of one multi-record set that only sides 2 and 10 were "free from some fault." His willingness to invest time in his column is further illustrated by his playing a record one hundred times in order to report on the "wearing qualities" of plastic (30 December 1945) or his standard offer in the 1940s to reply to readers' letters.

These columns, taken together, are fascinating as an extended chronicle of the tastes and techniques of the recording industry over a quarter-century, viewed from the uniform perspective of a single lively, sensible, cultivated, and tenacious intelligence. In their authoritative sweep, interrupted occasionally by confessions of the subjectivity of taste, they suggest the depth of Bowers's feeling for music. But for a direct statement

of that feeling one must look outside the columns, to a lecture, "The Ideal Record Collector," which Bowers delivered at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond on 5 March 1961, as part of the third series of lectures called "The Eager Listener." This talk, buttressed with thirteen excerpts from recorded music, ranging from Bach and Mozart to Mahler and Bartok, amounted to a mini-course in music appreciation. His aim was to explain how the novice collector of records can gradually develop musical taste and enjoyment and, instead of becoming discouraged and abandoning music, can become an enthusiast for whom music is an essential part of life. He emphasized the importance of beginning with what one naturally likes, not what one is supposed to like, and learning to listen carefully to the language of each instrument before moving on to other pieces. ("Just go ahead," he said, "and learn the musical language from the composers you like to hear tell you stories." Later he added, "Musical tastes cannot help changing, as well as deepening and refining, when music on records becomes a part of one's daily life.")

The comparison between the "languages" of music and literature recurs throughout; the language of music can "communicate an emotion, even something of an idea—certainly some form of transferred experience—as much as words can, and oftentimes better than words can":

Just as "relatively cultivated people do not necessarily curl up in a chair every night with Virgil's Aeneid or Milton's Paradise Lost in their laps," so one is not always in the mood for the complexity of a symphony. "In this connection," he said, "I want to deliver a strong plug for chamber music on the phonograph as one's usual day-to-day form of music on records, leaving symphonies for special occasions"—not only because of the demands of the two genres ("chamber music invites, whereas symphonic music commands"), but because of the limitations of record-players and living-rooms.

Anyone in his audience following his common-sense step-by-step approach would inevitably gain some insight into what music appreciation

involves and, more importantly, would witness a case study in what musical enthrallment means. He describes how, with active listening, When one participates in music in this fashion, it gives "a pleasure that no other art can provide"—it gives a "shiver" up the spine and makes one's "back muscles squinch up with pleasure." Although Bowers admitted that, for him, "Mozart is the prince of composers on records as one's constant companion," he revealed deep admiration for a great variety of styles and genres, from Beethoven's late quartets to the piano concertos of Bartok ("a very great composer"), including operas and songs.

This lecture conveyed in concentrated form the breadth of musical knowledge and the depth of musical experience that underlay the columns. In stressing enjoyment—enjoyment that increases, the more one learns—he was in fact expressing his approach to literature as well as to music. But he perhaps felt freer to express his passionate devotion to music, since it was not his professional field and since—on the occasion of this lecture—he was speaking to a similarly nonprofessional audience. At a literary conference he would probably never have stated that "pleasure and culture are NOT antagonistic," but he could say it here. From time to time in his professional writings, his love of literature did get expressed with some explicitness, but such opportunities did not occur frequently. Given the chance, he would certainly have applied to books what he said about records at the beginning of his Richmond lecture: "To have music at one's fingertips is almost life's greatest blessing."

Another passion of the same years was stamp collecting. It is likely that more of Bowers's scholarly acquaintances outside of Charlottesville knew about his interest in stamps than were aware of his other avocations, because his envelopes were usually plastered with old stamps and he always asked correspondents to return them to him. Contributors to Studies in Bibliography were accustomed to seeing their proofs arrive in large reused brown envelopes covered with spectacular displays of unfamiliar stamps—the denominations so small that it was necessary for the stamps to be overlapped in order for the required number to fit on the envelopes. (Bowers once told me that he had obtained special permission

from the Charlottesville Post Office to overlap the stamps.) Once back in his possession the stamps would be steamed off, none the worse for the overlapping. Correspondents could assume that they had become part of an inner circle when Bowers took for granted that they would return the stamps without being reminded.

Bowers did not write as much about stamps as he did about dogs and music, nor was he as well known among philatelists as among record collectors in Virginia and Irish-wolfhound lovers nationally. But he always became knowledgeable about any field he was involved in, and he kept abreast of developments in the stamp-collecting world. In a 1961 history of the first quarter-century of the Charlottesville Stamp Club, prepared by Bernard P. Chamberlain, Bowers was named as one of a small number of members "who keep up better than most with national and international philatelic news and keep the club pretty well informed as to what is going on in the stamp world." Bowers had become a member of this club in 1951 and of the American Philatelic Society in 1954, and the height of his activity in the field of stamps came in the 1950s. He served as vice-president of the club in 1955 and as president in 1956—a significant year in which to be president because on 13 April, Jefferson's birthday, the Charlottesville Post Office was the site for cancellation of first-day covers for the twenty-cent Monticello stamp. The cancellation in fact read "Monticello Rural Station," but because the Rural Station at Jefferson's estate was in a small gift-shop, the covers were canceled by machine in Charlottesville. Bowers and the other members of the club felt, however, that some covers should be canceled at the actual location, and they supervised the canceling of a small number of covers with the hand stamps in use there, one of which carried the misspelling "Montecello." In order to distinguish those with the correct spelling canceled at the Rural Station from those canceled in Charlottesville, Bowers placed his authentication and signature on the reverse of all copies of the former. He also wrote an account of this situation (describing as well the variations in cancellation produced in Charlottesville) for distribution to the philatelic world, and it was printed in the Western Stamp Collector on 19 May 1956.

In the same year he wrote articles on highway-post-office postmarks and covers. His interest in this subject may have had a local connection, since the first trip of a highway-post-office bus (on 10 February 1941) was between Washington and Harrisonburg, Virginia, not far from Charlottesville. In any case, he became a member of the National Highway Post Office Society in early 1956 and served on its board of directors for the next several years. He published a general article on highway-post-office

cover collecting in Linn's Weeky Stamp News on 26 March 1956: after setting up eight criteria for cover collecting, he showed why this form of cover collecting "scores 100 per cent in a manner unmatched by any other form." For HPO Notes (the journal of the National Highway Post Office Society) he wrote a series of detailed articles, involving considerable research and serving as a basic reference source. One (in three parts, February-April 1956) was a historically annotated checklist of the changeover postmarks in the twenty or so instances between 1952 and 1956 in which highway-post-office buses were operated by railroads and continued to use the railway-post-office postmarks until required to change at the beginning of 1956. This list was followed in succeeding months by a closely reasoned definition of provisional postmarks (July-August 1956) and a consideration of variant provisionals (June and October 1957)—along with a general article on provisionals for Linn's (29 July 1957). Most interesting from a bibliographical point of view, however, was his list of "Current HPO Steels" (January and November 1957, February 1958), in which he worked out a system for describing postmarks—an analogous problem to title-page transcription in bibliographical description. In each of some ninety entries the measurement of the diameter of the postmark in millimeters is followed by a transcription of the circular legend, an indication of the style of killer (canceling bar), and a classification and measurement of the trip indicator. That this list was based on envelopes sent to, and returned by, the foremen of the lines suggests the effort he was willing to invest in amassing philatelic data; and in each of these articles he drew on information from some collections other than his own and asked readers to send him further details. Another specialty of his was British colonials, of which he developed a fine collection as well. In keeping with the Charlottesville Stamp Club's program for encouraging members to collect "topicals," he also collected stamps depicting books and printing; and when the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia mounted an exhibition celebrating the club's twenty-fifth anniversary (22 April-15 May 1961), Bowers's contribution to the show was a set of United Nations stamps.

That Bowers should have been interested in stamps is not surprising, since—like books—they are printed artifacts that require, for their study, a detailed knowledge of the process by which they are produced and an understanding of the kinds of variation in the finished product that can result from it. He chose not to collect books, but his collecting of stamps shows that he did have the collecting urge. When he was listening to Geoffrey Keynes's address in 1953—the one in which Keynes criticized Bowers's approach to descriptive bibliography—Bowers had further reason

to be annoyed when he heard Keynes say, "Stamp collecting is an amusing game, but it is essentially sterile." Bowers would have seen the shallowness of this statement, for his extended study of the physical evidence in books had given him a profound knowledge of how the details of artifactual evidence contribute to cultural history, and he recognized the application of this insight to all artifacts. Eventually, however, he sold his collection (keeping the United Nations series until 1987) and filled the spring binders in which he had housed it with the notes for his bibliography of Restoration drama—a move that was symbolic of his increasing concentration on that project in his later years. But this kind of shift did not become a general one: Bowers's life of scholarship was always set in a rich backdrop of other enthusiasms.