 | |  |
Notes
This paper was delivered as the J. Ben Lieberman Memorial Lecture of the American Printing History Association during Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, 18 July 1994. It was also delivered at the University of Toronto on 28 September 1994 as the inaugural lecture of the Toronto Centre for the Book.
"Autobiography of an Historian," in An Autobiography & Other Essays (1949), p. 13. He made a similar statement in a 1948 piece, "Stray Thoughts on History," included in the same volume: "Here, long before us, dwelt folk as real as we are to-day, now utterly vanished, as we in our turn shall vanish" (p. 82).
John Gielgud, in a 1993 interview reported by Mel Gussow, said "Every street in London is full of memory" (New York Times, 28 October 1993, p. C1).
The Idea of History (1946), pp. 305, 306. Earlier he states that the "proper task" of historians is "penetrating to the thought of the agents whose acts they are studying"; history is "the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's mind" (p. 228).
An historian who has made this point the basis for his approach to history is Arthur Bestor, who said that the historian "recovers the past . . . by carefully studying a group of objects or artifacts that exist in the present, and drawing logical conclusions therefrom about the particular past event which must have produced, or shaped, or at least put its mark upon these observable things"; this statement occurs in the opening paragraph of "History as Verifiable Knowledge: The Logic of Historical Inquiry and Explanation," in Research Methods in Librarianship: Historical and Bibliographical Methods in Library Research, ed. Rolland E. Stevens (1971), pp. 106-127.
A useful introduction is Jules David Prown's "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method," Winterthur Portfolio, 17 (1982), 1-19 (with a "Selective Bibliography" on pp. 16-19). For some indication of the difficulty historians have had with this approach, see note 11 below.
I do not underestimate the importance of handwriting as a means of transmitting visible language; even after the advent of printing from movable types, handwriting continued, and has continued to the present, to be indispensable in conveying verbal messages from one person to another. But for a significant part of the past five centuries, printed books were the primary means for disseminating verbal works, both new and old. What I say later about the connections between texts and the physical means of their production applies equally to manuscripts.
See Karen J. Winkler, "In Electronic Age, Scholars Are Drawn to Study of Print," Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 July 1993, pp. A6-A8. The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing was founded in 1991 and has published the SHARP Newsletter since then; its first conference was held in New York on 9-11 June 1993 (and is reported in Printing History, 34 [1993], 71-101).
On national trends in book history, see John Feather, "Cross-Channel Currents: Historical Bibliography and L'Histoire du Livre," Library, 6th ser., 2 (1980), 1-15. A collection of essays in this field is Books and Society in History, ed. Kenneth E. Carpenter (1983), which includes "A Statement on the History of the Book" (signed by the participants in the 1980 conference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries) and Robert Darnton's "What Is the History of Books?" (In my introduction to this volume, I attempted to show the relation of analytical bibliography to histoire du livre, as I also did in my Hanes Lecture, The History of Books as a Field of Study [1981].) A recent theoretical overview is Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker's "A New Model for the Study of the Book," in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Nicolas Barker (1993), pp. 5-43.
The best account of the development of analytical bibliography is F. P. Wilson's "Shakespeare and the 'New Bibliography,'" in The Bibliographical Society 1892-1942: Studies in Retrospect (1945), pp. 76-135 (reprinted as a separate volume, edited by Helen Gardner, in 1970); the early history of the Bibliographical Society is recounted by F. C. Francis in the same voume, pp. 1-22, and by Julian Roberts in "The Bibliographical Society as a Band of Pioneers," in Pioneers in Bibliography, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (1988), pp. 86-100. See also 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, or "The Evolving Role of Bibliography, 1884-1984," in Books and Prints, Past and Future: Papers Presented at The Grolier Club Centennial Convocation (1984), pp. 15-31. The fullest listing of examples of bibliographical analysis is in my Introduction to Bibliography: Seminar Syllabus (periodically revised; see, for example, pp. 135-162 of the 1994 revision).
On this general subject, see my "Reproductions and Scholarship," Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989), 25-54, and "The Latest Forms of Book-Burning," Common Knowledge, 2.3 (Winter 1993), 172-177.
Jules David Prown, for example, in his important essay "Mind in Matter" (see note 5 above), unwittingly illustrates the difficulty people have had in thinking about objects containing verbal texts; when, near the end, he says that artifacts "tell us something, but facts are transmitted better by verbal documents," he is failing to recognize the physicality of visible texts or to acknowledge that such texts are artifacts themselves, requiring the same kind of examination and interpretation as other artifacts. The neglect of this point on the part of many historians has caused them to believe that verbal texts speak to them more directly than do physical objects containing no words and thus to ignore the physical aspects of "verbal documents." (The common use of the word "artifact" to refer only to objects without verbal texts reflects the mistaken assumption that "verbal documents" are in a class apart from other objects.) This line of thinking has often led historians not merely to undervalue physical evidence but actively to disparage its use. Thirty years ago John Chavis criticized this attitude in a piece for Curator (the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History) entitled "The Artifact and the Study of History" (7 [1964], 156-162), deploring "the willingness of the academic historian to do without the utilization of the artifact." To represent the historians' position, he summarized William B. Hesseltine's "The Challenge of the Artifact," in The Present World of History, ed. James H. Rodabaugh (1959): although Hesseltine recognizes that verbal documents preserve physical evidence, he thinks of it as "external" to what the text "says" and naïvely believes that one cannot determine what nonverbal objects say. Chavis contrasted this view with E. McClung Fleming's in "Early American Decorative Arts as Social Documents," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 45 (1958-59), 276-284: Fleming believes that the artifact is "a social document" and regrets that "the historian has tended to ignore this primary source in his preoccupation with printed and manuscript materials" (p. 276). Some years later Fleming developed his point in "Artifact Study: A Proposed Model," Winterthur Portfolio, 9 (1974), 153-173 (in which he again laments the fact that the "use of material culture by historians and social scientists is minimal" [p. 154]). Similarly, Henry Glassie has said, "Because of his commitment to the primacy of print, the historian has been unable to produce an authentic history"; see "Archaeology and Folklore: Common Anxieties, Common Hopes," in Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things, ed. Leland G. Ferguson (1979), pp. 23-35 (quotation from p. 29). It is noteworthy, however, that even these cogent calls for greater attention to physical evidence do not explicitly place books and manuscripts in the world of artifacts. Anyone who wishes to encourage use of the physical evidence that resides in objects with verbal texts thus faces a double obstacle: not only the neglect of physical evidence in general but also the failure to regard verbal documents as artifacts. A notable exception to this common failure is Arthur Bestor's "History as Verifiable Knowledge" (see note 4 above): "a document is simply a special kind of artifact. The marks that were impressed upon it by past events are intelligible marks, produced as the result of the operations of a mind like our own." Furthermore, Bestor effectively makes the point that logically follows: however persuasive the verbal text may be, "the historian must not be misled into imagining that it speaks to him with such authority as to relieve him of the obligation of carrying out a critical and logical inquiry of his own" (pp. 108-109).
For an excellent account of Bradshaw's concern with the "relation of text to structure," see Paul Needham's Hanes Lecture, The Bradshaw Method (1988), esp. pp. 5-6, 10-12.
The classic examination of the Elizabethan compositors' practice of "setting by formes" (rather than following the numerical order of the pages) is Charlton Hinman's "Cast-Off Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 (1955), 259-273. An admirable brief treatment is provided by Peter W. M. Blayney in The First Folio of Shakespeare (1991), pp. 12-14. For some history of the bibliographical analysis of setting by formes, see my "Analytical Bibliography and Renaissance Printing History," Printing History, 3.1 (1981), 24-33.
On "frisket bite," see Walter J. Partridge, "The Type-Setting and Printing of the Mainz Catholicon," Book Collector, 35 (1986), 21-52 (esp. pp. 42-44); and Paul Needham, "Slipped Lines in the Mainz Catholicon: A Second Opinion," Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 1993, pp. 25-29 (esp. p. 29).
See Peter L. Shillingsburg, "Detecting the Use of Stereotype Plates," Editorial Quarterly, 1.1 (1975), 2-3. Two illustrations of such damage are figures 3 and 6 appended to the condensed reprinting of my article on "The Use of Type Damage as Evidence in Bibliographical Description" in Journal of Typographic Research, 3 (1969), 259-276.
For a reproduction of the corrected state of the text, see Charlton Hinman's The Norton Fascimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare (1968), p. 737. (In Hinman's "through line numbering," the variant—"Looke where he haue [not] crown'd dead Cassius"—occurs in line 2587.) A list of substantive variants in copies of the First Folio appears on pp. xxi-xxii. The large number of press-variants of all kinds (those in punctuation and spelling as well as in substantives) are listed and discussed in Hinman's The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963), pp. 226-334.
This variant is discussed in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Typee, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. T. Tanselle (1968), pp. 310-311. (The point of variation—"religious attendants of the grove[s]"—occurs on p. 101, line 31, of the 1846 edition, and on p. 91, line 37, of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition.) See also my "Textual Study and Literary Judgment," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 65 (1971), 109-122 (esp. pp. 115-116), reprinted in Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (1990), pp. 325-337 (see pp. 330-331).
For an excellent introduction to this subject, see David McKitterick, "Old Faces and New Acquaintances: Typography and the Association of Ideas," PBSA, 87 (1993), 163-186. He points out that "bibliographical analysis has much more to offer the social and enumerative historian [of reading] than, so far, seems to have been demonstrated" (pp. 164-165).
That analytical bibliography furnishes information for printing history was the point of my article entitled "Analytical Bibliography and Renaissance Printing History" (see note 13 above). And in 1987 I emphasized analytical bibliography in outlining an agenda for printing history—see "Thoughts on Research in Printing History," Printing History, 9.2 (1987), 24-25.
"Paper Chase," Metropolis, 4.4 (November 1984), 24-26, 32 (quotation from p. 32). (Prudon supervised the restoration of the Woolworth Building.)
A Life of Learning (the Haskins Lecture of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1994), p. 2 Cf. Arthur Bestor's comment quoted at the end of note 11 above and John Lancaster's quoted in note 22 below.
See "William Somervile's 'The Chace,' 1735," PBSA, 58 (1964), 1-7 (which was the first bibliographical article to make use of the Bowyer ledgers). Fleeman's discussion of other discrepancies follows the same pattern that he uses for the one in sheet A: thus his assumption that the attribution of pressmen in the ledgers is correct forces him to state that the Long Primer figure 3, which appears in the inner forme of C and in outer E and G, signifies one pair of pressmen in the first instance and a different pair in the other two instances; similarly, he claims that the larger figure 3 designates one pair of pressmen in outer H and a different pair in M, N, and O (and, further, that this latter pair of pressmen was the same pair that used the Long Primer figure 3 in inner C). Because Fleeman does not ask what reason there could be for such a shifting use of figures, it is ironic that he concludes, "without the benefit of the printing records kept by Bowyer, a good many serious misinterpretations would have been the result of the usual kinds of analysis." For information on the ledgers themselves, see the admirable work by Keith Maslen and John Lancaster, The Bowyer Ledgers (1991); their entry for The Chace is no. 2156, p. 170. Lancaster called attention to the Somervile example in his address to the Grolier Club on 15 June 1993, during his exhibition marking the publication of the ledgers. That address, in its published form in Gazette of the Grolier Club, n.s., 45 (1993), 63-81, notes Fleeman's "premise that the ledgers are accurate" and provides an appropriate warning: "the ledgers —like most human documents—are not infallible, and must be used with caution like any other historical evidence" (p. 68). I am grateful to Lancaster for providing me with the materials for examining this instance of discrepancies between ledger entries and the printed item to which they refer.
"A Bibliographical Imbroglio: Hidden Editions of the 'Encyclopédie,'" in Cinq Siècles d'Imprimerie Genevoise, ed. Jean-Daniel Candaux and Bernard Lescaze (1981), pp. 71-101.
The variation among copies would not prevent, for example, the attempt to determine whether the pages supposedly set by different compositors do in fact display different characteristics. Darnton's comments throughout on the confounding of bibliographers by the randomness of the process by which sheets were mixed together in individual copies displays a lack of understanding of bibliography as a form of history; the goal of descriptive bibliography is not to present neat collational formulas or to seek uniformity among copies but to report as accurately as possible the true situation.
See "The Dunciad in Four Books and the Bibliography of Pope," PBSA, 83 (1989), 293-310. The points in question are Bowyer's references to cancelled and reprinted sheets and leaves (pp. 302-303).
The events that lead to historians' conclusions are examinations of documents and other artifacts. Some elaboration of this point, showing how scientific investigation involves historical method, can be found in Arthur Bestor's "History as Verifiable Knowledge" (see note 4 above), esp. pp. 111-113.
See McKenzie's Panizzi Lectures. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986), p. 7. I have discussed these lectures, and this passage, further in "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology," SB, 44 (1991), 83-143 (esp. pp. 87-99). (McKenzie has been expressing doubts about analytical bibliography since at least 1969, when he published "Printers of the Mind" in SB, 22: 1-75; for responses to that essay, see Peter Davison's "Science, Method, and the Textual Critic," SB, 25 [1972], 1-28, and my "Bibliography and Science," SB, 27 [1974], 55-89 [esp. pp. 73-78].) In a later lecture, "What's Past is Prologue": The Bibliographical Society and History of the Book (1993), McKenzie continues to show a bias against analytical bibliography, referring to A. W. Pollard's activities as "sensitive to the primacy of trade documents as historical evidence" (p. 12) and asserting, "Enumerative bibliography in Britain opened up riches . . . well beyond the reach of descriptive and analytical bibliography" (p. 17)—as if he thinks of these approaches as rivals, competing with each other. He does, however, also express a recognition of the importance of physical evidence and offers a useful statement of the "premise" underlying analytical bibliography: "that the forms [of books] themselves encode the history of their production" (p. 24).
Cf. Richard Rorty's concept of "conversation" in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979): e.g., the idea that "objective truth" is "the normal result of normal discourse" (p. 377). See also such statements in his Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) as the proposition that there is "no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions" (p. xlii).
"Slipped Lines in the Mainz Catholicon: A Second Opinion" (see note 14 above), p. 25. Cf. the following comment in his "Corrective Notes on the Date of the Catholicon Press" (Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 1990, pp. 46-64): "The arguments involved in these preliminary issues do not depend on bibliographical knowledge. I hope they will be accessible to every reader who is even peripherally aware of the Catholicon 'question'" (p. 61). Lotte Hellinga, in the same volume of the Gutenberg Jahrbuch ("Comments on Paul Needham's Notes," pp. 65-69), makes this unconsidered remark: "The more elaborate our arguments and the more they are confined to what is presented by the printed books themselves, the greater the need to recognize these inevitable limitations of our perception, and to be alert to the possibilities that lie beyond them" (p. 69). The last part of her sentence is undeniably correct: we must always be mindful of the "limitations of our perception" and the "possibilities that lie beyond them." But the "need to recognize" these points is equally present in all situations and is not "greater" when arguments are "more elaborate" or "confined" to the evidence found within printed books. The elaborateness with which one argues and the sources of evidence one employs do not in themselves make arguments questionable; what is crucial to the acceptance of an argument is the care with which one goes about collecting and evaluating the evidence (whatever it is) and then constructing inferences from it (however elaborate they may be). The controversy between Needham and Hellinga should be examined by all who are interested in the process of scholarly argumentation by which historical facts come to be established. See (in addition to the articles already mentioned) Needham, "Johan Gutenberg and the Catholicon Press," PBSA, 76 (1982), 395-456; Hellinga, "Analytical Bibliography and the Study of Early Printed Books with a Case-Study of the Mainz Catholicon," Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 1989, pp. 47-96; Needham, "Further Corrective Notes on the Date of the Catholicon Press," Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 1991, pp. 101-126; Hellinga, "Proof for the Date of Printing of the Mainz Catholicon," Bulletin du bibliophile, 1991, 1:143-147; Hellinga, "Slipped Lines and Fallen Type in the Mainz Catholicon," Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 1992, pp. 35-40; Hellinga, "Eltville and Mainz: A Tale of Two Compositors," Book Collector, 41 (1992), 28-54; Needham, "Mainz and Eltville: The True Tale of Three Compositors," Bulletin du bibliophile, 1992, 2:257-304. (See also the Partridge article cited in note 14 above and Needham's reply, "The Type-Setting of the Mainz Catholicon: A Reply to W. J. Partridge," Book Collector, 35 [1986], 293-304.)
Letter from Los Angeles (1990), pp. 6-7. More than half a century ago G. M. Trevelyan called it "a common opinion" (which, he said, "I myself share") that "the historian's work is partly scientific, partly artistic"; see "Bias in History," in An Autobiography & Other Essays (1949), p. 81. There have of course been many discussions of the subjectivity of historical scholarship. Two recent treatments (which include the history of such discussions) are Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (1988) and Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (1994). (See also note 32 below.)
Although Schama has somewhat clouded the reasons for such a view of the bases for proceeding, his last line does seem to me to be in this positive spirit: if, he says, "our flickering glimpses of dead worlds fall far short of ghostly immersion, that perhaps is still enough to be going on with." But he could have made clearer, I think, that "enough" has no connection with quantity; whatever we have must always be "enough," if we are to do any thinking at all. He is right to speak of the "gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration"—that is, historians' "unavoidable remoteness from their subjects" (p. 320). (And he makes eloquent use of James's The Sense of the Past in this regard.) But his wavering over the relation between imagination and scholarship in the effort to build a bridge to the past does not provide a satisfying preparation for a positive conclusion.
Quoted from a 1991 lecture at the New-York Historical Society in Peter Stevenson, "Lights, Camera . . . Schama!", New York Observer, 27 September 1993, p. 15. Another historian, an economic historian, who has recently received considerable attention for stressing the importance of literary methods in historical writing is Donald N. McCloskey. In The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) and If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990), he argues that narratives and metaphors are an indispensable part of all "factual" discourse, whether in history or in science. James Atlas, in an article occasioned by a 1991 conference in Albany on the writing of nonfiction, says that the truth of a narration is not simply a matter of "facts" (which are themselves "slippery"): "The truth is in the prose, the style, the quality of representation that compels us to believe" ("Stranger Than Fiction," New York Times Magazine, 23 June 1991, pp. 22-23, 41, 43 [quotation from p. 43]). The way was paved for this kind of discussion by Hayden White's pioneering and influential Metahistory (1973); two recent examples are his The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987) and Lionel Gossman's Between History and Literature (1990).
The phrase "visible language" has been given some prominence by its use as the title of a journal (on matters relating to typography, handwriting, and reading) now published by the Rhode Island School of Design.
I use this phrase in order to encompass such texts as those of motion-picture films and sound recordings as well as of objects (like books) that display written language. My specific concern in this paragraph, as in the essay as a whole, is with the latter, but I recognize that the study of textual transmission involves other kinds of objects as well.
At the end of "What's Past is Prologue" (see note 27 above), McKenzie seems to think that, if the field of bibliography embraces (as he hopes it will) "the dynamics of the increasingly volatile texts of our new age," the move will "represent a radical departure" from the earlier concept of bibliography based on "the primacy of the physical artefact (and the evidence it bears of its own making)" (p. 29). But the electronic processing of texts, like the earlier methods of processing them, uses physical means to produce physical texts. (How could it be otherwise?) McKenzie refers to the capacity of computers for "modelling" as if this characteristic were new to the history of text-producing processes; but all of the technologies that have made the reproduction of texts easier—such as movable type or xerography—have also made easier the process of using old texts to generate new ones. One thinks of stop-press corrections and the alteration of standing type for a new impression, for example, or cutting and pasting followed by xerographic copying. We have lived for a long time with technology that encourages the proliferation of variant texts; and the latest instance, computerization, marks a change of degree, not of kind. It has tremendously eased the process of textual manipulation, but it has not altered the fact that visible texts are the products of physical routines, which leave their traces in the texts. McKenzie's suggestion that bibliography in the electronic age "could come to deal, less in specific manifestations of a work, than in the formulae for their realisation" is like saying of earlier bibliography that it could focus on printing technology rather than on printed texts. Of course the technology is always important in its own right, but it is also always important for understanding the resulting texts, whether they are on paper or computer tapes and disks. The future study of texts will have to take new technology into account, but it will be dealing with an old situation.
It is useful to recall, in this connection, the title of a pair of lectures delivered by Alvin Eisenman at Dartmouth on 28-29 October 1992: "Printing as Memory." This wording implies not only the idea of printed texts as the memory of human thought but also the role of printing, as a technical and artistic activity, in the memorial process.
| | |