The special association of the
University of Virginia with books is a
connection that began with the founding of
the school. The establishment of the
University itself was one of the three
accomplishments for which the institution's
material and intellectual architect, Thomas
Jefferson, sought to be remembered in the
epitaph on his tombstone; the physical and
symbolic center of the "academical village"
that he fashioned was the Rotunda; and the
most important space in that most significant
building was its Dome Room, designed to house
the library. Despite the local propensity to
invoke Jefferson at every opportunity, no one
has yet contended that he was instrumental in
creating the Bibliographical Society of the
University of Virginia. It has been the
Society, however, that more powerfully than
any other instrument has linked books with
Mr. Jefferson's University in the public
mind.
That the opening two articles in
the first volume of the Society's
Papers--to be known from
the second volume as
Studies in Bibliography--
dealt with Jefferson reflects the Society's
origins but is ultimately incidental to the
larger connection. That the name of the
University became a codeword for the analysis
of books as physical objects, the study of
the transmission of texts, and the
preparation of scholarly editions, however,
arose chiefly from the constellation of
activities that the Society instigated. In
his "warm welcome" to the Society and its
journal in the January 1950
Modern Language Review,
W. W. Greg noted this distinctiveness
immediately: "Certainly the University of
Virginia is the centre of a very live and
extended school of Bibliography in all its
aspects, not least in these highly technical
ones that a small band of American scholars
have made peculiarly their own." Ten years
later a former University of Virginia
professor then at the Claremont Graduate
School, Sears Jayne, could attest in a letter
to the Society's founders that "Since
returning to California I have had many
reminders of the fact that the name of the
University of Virginia is known around the
world primarily through the influence of its
Bibliographical Society."
But while the international
renown and influence of the Society are easy
to verify, the reasons for its growth are
not. How is it that a diverse group of
people connected with a small university in
the American South created an organization
that would symbolize a scholarly approach and
would produce a journal,
Studies in Bibliography,
that from the start the
Times Literary Supplement
declared (on 23 March 1951) "must take its
place in the first rank of such publications
anywhere in the world"?
