University of Virginia Library

II

The easiest way for the Society to establish a corporate identity and also to serve the core community most directly was to hold public meetings, and over the next twenty years the group sponsored about 120 of them. The University and city newspapers invited local residents, while Society members received notice on one-cent postcards labeled by Addressograph plates. Most meetings featured a distinguished guest who gave an evening talk in front of the McGregor Room fireplace. Gemmill's discussion of Baskerville in October 1946 foreshadowed the pattern that developed once the Society was formally constituted in February 1947. Besides Bowers's presentation at that meeting, two other speakers appeared before the Society that spring: charter members Charles D. Hurt from the Stone Printing Co., Roanoke, speaking about "The Monotype" (18 April), and Charlton Hinman from Johns Hopkins on "Why 79 First Folios?" (6 June). When the Society reassembled for the next academic year, its roster of programs had attained the shape it was to hold for about two decades. A list of the talks given the first two full seasons shows something of the nature and range of the presentations. Providing these speakers was a significant contribution to the life of the University and town; the guests meanwhile gained an opportunity to encounter a pleasant part of the physical and intellectual world, and the Society benefited from the increased sense of its existence on the part of its visitors.

     

1947-48
Oct. 8	Kenneth S. Giniger (Prentice Hall, New York City), "The Effect of Modern Publishing Production Practices on Book Collecting"
Oct. 17	Walter L. Pforzheimer (Washington, D.C.), "On Copyright"

                         

Oct. 24	H. W. Tribolet (Chicago), "Processes of Hand Bookbinding and Restoration"
Nov. 17	Earl K. Fischer (Institute of Textile Technology, Charlottesville), "On Printing Inks"
Feb. 13	C. William Miller (Temple Univ.), "Henry Herringman"
Mar. 12	Coolie Verner (UVa), "First Maps of Virginia"
May 14	Giles E. Dawson (Folger Shakespeare Library), "The Career of R. Walker, Printer- Publisher, 1729-1750"
1948-49
Oct. 8	Charles H. Lindsley (Institute of Textile Technology, Charlottesville), "Scientific Incunabula: Scientific Works Printed before 1501"
Nov. 12	James G. McManaway (Folger Shakespeare Library), "Two Prompt Books of Hamlet"
Dec. 17	William B. Todd (Univ. of Chicago), "The Strange Case of the Monk: A Bibliographical Investigation"
Jan. 14	Edwin Wolf 2nd (Rosenbach Company, Philadelphia), "The Textual Importance of Manuscript Commonplace Books of 1620-1660"
Feb. 25	William B. O'Neal (UVa), "William Blake as Illustrator of Books"
May 12	Robert K. Black (Antiquarian Bookseller, Montclair, N.J.), "The Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Novels"
May 20	John Alden (Curator of Rare Books, Univ. of Pennsylvania), "Problems in Eighteenth- Century American Bibliography"

Even in the early years, then, the Society's speakers were drawn from the ranks of publishers, printers and binders, scientists, academics (including historians, literary critics, bibliographers, and textual scholars), collectors and curators, dealers, and art historians. The Society's breadth of contacts and its increasing recognition enabled it to lure speakers without duplication, though a number of them could be found close to home. As a talented crop of Fredson Bowers's graduate students came to maturity they joined the procession: Philip Williams and Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., in 1952, George Williams in 1955 and 1958, Oliver Steele in 1957, and Matthew Bruccoli in 1958. UVa alumni who were flourishing in the book world were obvious candidates--people such as Hinman, Miller, or John D. Gordan, Curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library (who spoke in 1954). C. Waller Barrett, whose collection of American literature would make the UVa library the preeminent repository of such materials, was likewise a natural choice (in 1951 and 1962).

The arrangements for Gordon Ray's talk on 20 April 1966 show how the Society might go about planning a visit by someone with less direct ties to the University. Ray was already well known to many in the Charlottesville academic and bibliographic community, especially through his work as a Victorian scholar and his presidency of the Guggenheim

Foundation and the Grolier Club. On 24 January of that year, Bowers, who had to be ever alert for articles for Studies, sent a brief note to Massey: Massey accordingly wrote Ray, extending these terms: Ray accepted (14 March), the date was agreed on, and the subject of the talk chosen from the possibilities Ray had suggested: Ray flew into Charlottesville the morning of the 20th in time for lunch at the Masseys, where guests included many of the people he had declared (on 18 March) he hoped to see while in town: "the Blotners and the Ehrenpreises . . . the Barretts, the Bowers, the Shannons." His McGregor Room talk that evening on "Victorian Society and the Victorian Novel" was well received, and he returned to New York the next day. Bowers never did snare an article from Ray for Studies, although three years later in Ray's Foreword to The American Writer in England: An Exhibition (from Barrett's collection at UVa) he sided with Bowers in the debate that had arisen in the New York Review of Books over the editing of American writers, and he provided what proved to be the most cogent assessment of the controversy.

Still other visitors were pleased to book a Charlottesville engagement as part of a wider speaking tour. The recently published memoirs of Barbara Kaye (Second Impression, 1995) offer insight into such a stop from the visitor's point of view. In 1951 she accompanied her husband Percy Muir to speak to the Society on 24 October. The night before, he had given his talk "Rogues and Vagabonds in the Book Trade" at the Folger Library in Washington; they rode the C&O down to Charlottesville, visited the University and Monticello, dined at the Bowers home, went to the Society meeting, and then caught the 10:30 train for New York. The exhaustion created by such a pace may explain the slippery grasp of details in her account of their visit to "the university building" at the "University of North Virginia," where an "unusual and attractive feature" of the campus was a wall, which "stands there no longer." The

repast on the Bowers terrace was the "typical southern meal" that Mrs. Bowers, Nancy Hale, had promised: "southern fried chicken followed by strawberry shortcake." Barbara Kaye seemed taken aback to discover that Nancy Hale had written more novels than she had, but she found the Bowerses "good company" and as "human and friendly as everyone else we met." She enjoyed Charlottesville, but "Bill Jackson's schedule [for the Muir tour] allowed for no loitering, and after Percy had delivered his `Rogues and Vagabonds' talk at the university, the Bowerses saw us off on the night train" (208).

Although the evenings with formal papers were the most frequent Society gatherings, the group also met under other circumstances. The annual business meeting of the Society, chiefly to elect officers, eventually was combined with an evening lecture, but initially it served as the occasion for a "members only" introduction to special items in the University library or a viewing of films on printing or illustration. Beginning in the fall of 1949 and continuing at least to 1952, the Society sponsored a number of "Student Round Tables," informal discussion of bookbinding, type faces, imposition, and printing (including a demonstration of a hand press by Charles E. ("Chic") Moran, Jr., of the University Printing Office). These in turn led to the library's sponsorship of "Browsing Room Talks," "in part successor to the Society's Seminar talks" according to the Society's Secretary's News Sheet (SNS) 15. (Massey himself gave a Browsing Room Talk on Joyce on 18 March 1958.) In the winter of 1952-53 the Society and library together sponsored an experimental series of hour-long "Tea Meetings" in which, according to SNS 25,

Four of these were given: by Walter Harding of the English Department, on collecting Thoreau; by Mrs. Eleanor Shea, Society Councilor, on the T. Catesby Jones Print Collection of the University; by Harvey Deal, University reference librarian, on the use of the Union Catalog in research; and by John Cook Wyllie on "The Forms of Twentieth- Century Cancels." When Wyllie's paper under that title was published in PBSA in 1953, he noted that it "had its origin as one of a series of talks on twentieth-century bibliographical problems prepared at the request of the student seminar of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia." Tea and all it entailed was also a customary way for the Society to honor special guests, from at least the time in May 1951 when "The Secretary and Mrs. Wyllie" served "refreshments in the Library Staff Room immediately following the talk in order to give members an opportunity to meet the Barretts," and in 1953 to honor F. C. Francis of the British Museum, through 1967, when the visitor of distinction was Keith I. D. Maslen from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

The various interests to which the Society's constitution committed it all found expression in its formal meetings, but some members wished to follow particular interests more intensively. Accordingly, the budget for 1959 introduced a line for "`Typogs' and Student bibliographical awards." The linking of those two endeavors suggests that the "Typogs," later to be called the "Typographical Section" of the Society and to receive a separate budget allocation, were considered an additional way of serving University students. The student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, described the organization this way:

The size of the group fluctuated; the core members were Runge, Chic Moran, Charles Smith, and Joan Scholes--all non-students. An article in the June 1963 issue of the University's Alumni News said that participants "number from 15 to 20 (the total varies)," while thirty members attended the luncheon on 30 May 1963 honoring Smith on his retirement.

Luncheons in the cafeteria of Newcomb Hall, the student union, were one of the two main occasions on which the group manifested its corporate existence. Beginning in the fall of 1959, members met at 12:30 on Wednesdays, often accompanying their lunches with informal talks (such as those by Warren Chappell, book designer and artist, who spoke about type design on 24 May 1962, and A. Samuels, President of Charlottesville's Allen Company, speaking on processes for color separation on 7 November 1962).

The soul of the group, however, lay in its small printing establishment. In 1962 members adopted for it the name "Cockescraw Press," with a crowing rooster designed by Smith as its device. According to the Richmond Times- Dispatch,

(Before assuming that name, the fledgling establishment was briefly known as the "Ruptured Rooster Press.") At its peak of activity, in 1963, the Press had "two foot- powered printing presses, a few fonts of handset type, two proof presses (hand operated) and various other pieces of equipment," according to the Times-Dispatch. Most of the apparatus had been donated; the Society, however, purchased the workhorse of the operation, a 12" x 18" Chandler and Price press, recognizing not only the delight but also the instruction that would result.

The printers typically would meet on Monday nights, generally breaking off by 11:00 or 11:15 in order, according to Runge, to get a beer before midnight at the Gaslight Coffee House on West Main Street. Other deadlines were more problematic for the group; as Runge told the Alumni News, in order to have something printed one needed to "Just ask us and then wait a couple of years for us to do it." Under pressure of time, the Press would sometimes have its compositions printed by the University Printing Office--which at other times would set copy in linotype for the Cockescravians when their supply of type was too limited. (When those situations coalesced, the Cockescraw contribution was limited to design work.)

The largest printing jobs of the Press tended to be programs--for the Society itself, as on the occasion of its joint meeting with the Baltimore Bibliophiles on 11-12 May 1963, and, from February 1962 through April 1964, for the twenty-fourth through thirtieth Peters Rushton Seminars in Contemporary Prose and Poetry, the successors to McGregor Room Seminars that had in fact served earlier as models for Society meetings in that room. An undergraduate member of the Press, Gene Blumenreich, was editor-in-chief of the student literary magazine Plume and Sword, and with his staff printed its covers there. The two largest projects were booklets: Atcheson Laughlin Hench: A Check List, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-one, Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-two, a 1962 production to commemorate the work of the Society's third president and sometime Press member, and William B. O'Neal's Charles Smith: His Work in Book Design: A Checklist (one form of which was issued as SNS 50), in conjunction with a McGregor Room exhibition of Smith's typographical work opening on 16 May 1963, to honor him on the occasion of his retirement from the University.

The surprise reception and luncheon the Cockescraw Press held for Smith on 30 May, with Warren Chappell as toastmaster and illustrator of a menu- keepsake, marked the apogee of the group. When Smith left the

Art Department that he had joined permanently in 1947, serving as its first chairman for most of that time, so did the Press's claim on space in the departmental quarters. Though as late as the following spring the Press was still printing Rushton Seminar programs, minutes of the Society's Council meeting on 23 October 1965 record its quick demise: Interest in printing itself did not die as readily, however, and the minutes of 18 September 1971 offer a brighter note: By 14 June of the next year Kendon Stubbs was able to write Massey, then in London: The "little broadside" contained a passage from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and the press was the Chandler and Price, which formed the nucleus of what over the next twenty years was known as the Alderman Press, on the first floor of Alderman Library. There the press itself was subsequently used to print the menu-keepsake for Fredson Bowers's retirement dinner on 26 October 1974 ("by C.S. & K.S. for I.C."--that is, Clinton Sisson and Kendon Stubbs for Irby Cauthen); type for the Society's limited edition of Faulkner's Marionettes (1975.3 in the accompanying list) was also set there. In the mid 1970s the establishment added a replica of an eighteenth-century common press, built chiefly by Lester Beaurline of the English Department and Clinton Sisson of the library, in order to provide better facilities for teaching bibliography.

One way for the Society to serve its wider communities was to host meetings with or for other organizations. Some of these groups were local--the University Library (whose distinction from the Society was often unclear), the Medical School Library, the student History and

English clubs, the University Press, and the local branch of the English Speaking Union. But soon they were also national, beginning with a joint meeting with the Bibliographical Society of America on 9-10 May 1952. The BSA met the first day, with talks by A. H. Greenly, Henry R. Wagner, and William A. Jackson. The following day Philip Williams, Irby Cauthen, Joseph Graves, and Fredson Bowers spoke at the BSUVa sessions, Bowers serving for the first time as the heavy artillery that the Society would roll out to salute visiting scholarly organizations. He gave the only talk when the Grolier Club came to Charlottesville on 24-25 October 1958 (at which time the local newspaper noted John Carter's delight in examining the library's Michael Sadleir- Robert Black collection of gothic novels), he gave the talk at the banquet when the Baltimore Bibliophiles held a joint meeting with the Society on 11-12 May 1963, and he spoke at the Saturday evening dinner when the Pittsburgh Bibliophiles visited on 24-25 September 1966. (Besides at the inaugural meeting in 1947, Bowers addressed the Society as well on 9 April 1957, 10 April 1958, and 20 March 1961--more often than any other speaker.) Despite its power, this ordnance seems not to have been overwhelming; one Baltimore visitor wrote that "Fredson Bowers capped the evening in a fascinating way," and another praised the "delightful dinner with Dr. Bowers making wisdom painless, even in the abstruse reaches of mechanized bibliographical description."

The Society also worked with a variety of other groups, in a number of ways. In its early days, for instance, it held a coffee for a regional meeting of the Virginia State Printers' Association (5 December 1953), and it hosted the Walpole Society (7 May 1954) and the Manuscript Society of America (27 May 1955); years later it co- sponsored, with the University's Center for Advanced Studies and the English Department, an Eightieth-Birthday Conference for Fredson Bowers (20-23 April 1985). One reason for multiple sponsorship of events was that the line separating the activities of people who served both as Society officers and as representatives of other organizations was not always clear; consequently, when an exhibition seemed in order for delegates to the International Congress of Archives (14 May 1966), for example, it was jointly arranged by the Society and the University Library. (The next day in the lobby of the library's Barrett Room the Society hosted a tea honoring two of the visitors, Sir David Evans, former Keeper of the Public Records, and Mr. Peter Walne, County Archivist of Hertfordshire.) The overlap of commitments and sponsorships is particularly evident in the case of Wyllie. Typical is the announcement in the final issue of another organization's News Sheet, that of the Bibliographical Society of America, at a time (1951) when the youthful Virginia society

needed all the attention from Wyllie that it could garner: "Publication of the Index to the Society's Papers [that is, of the BSA] . . . has been delayed by the death of Mr. David M. Matteson. Mr. Matteson's work will be carried on by Mr. John Cook Wyllie of the University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia." Recognition of the importance of serving the wider bibliographical world was indeed a persistent characteristic of the Society. When in 1958 Donald Hyde as Vice-President of the BSA organized regional advisory councils, Dorothy Miner, who as chairman of the Southern Area Board solicited Wyllie's participation, cautiously tested whether his work for the Virginia society had made his interests more parochial. He happily accepted the post, pointing out that he had been a member of the BSA longer than he had been of the Virginia society (and that he had no inclination to loosen that tie). Paradoxically, service that Society leaders could divert from the Society to the larger world worked to strengthen the Society--and in that way too served the larger cause of bibliography. Wyllie was not formally acting in his Society capacity when, as Secretary of the Rare Book Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, he arranged for its first major conference to be held at the University (18-20 June 1959). One accomplishment of that visit, however, was to establish even more indelibly the connection between the University and the care and study of books. Fifteen years later, on 30 June-2 July 1974, when the ACRL's Rare Book and Manuscripts Section Pre-Conference again met in Charlottesville, the effect was the same-- except that this time the Society formally participated by sponsoring a cocktail party, quietly funded by Massey, before the final banquet.

Though the activities of the Bibliographical Society and the University Library sometimes could not be differentiated, one special function the Society served from the start was as a Friends group for the library. (Indeed, about six months after Wyllie died, C. Waller Barrett began to organize the group called the Associates of the University of Virginia Library and asked Massey to serve on the Sponsors' Committee.) An advantage of having supporters under the immediate direction of the people they purported to help lay in the efficiency of the operation. Besides sponsoring book-related talks in the McGregor Room, as the Associates would do later (sometimes in conjunction with the Society, as for the lecture on 23 November 1970 by Edwin Wolf 2nd), the Society solicited donations for the library and arranged exhibitions. In Massey's presidential report for 1948 (circulated with SNS 9) he called attention to "the valuable books acquired through the Society, many of which have been described in the Secretary's News Letters" (e.g. in SNS 2 and 3, and later 10 and 13). After the visit by Mrs. Roy Arthur (Rachel McMasters

Miller) Hunt and the exhibition of her botanical books in 1952, Wyllie wrote Linton and Mary Massey, But whereas building the library's collections may have been an implicit goal of the Society, providing displays of books was explicitly announced as early as Wyllie's 1946 letter accompanying his questionnaire (even if a motivation behind such exhibits might ultimately have also been to develop University collections). In his 1948 report Massey reported on the development of this goal, linking it with the Society's attempt to spur interest in collecting at the student level:

He had further presentations to report the following year (in his 1949 report distributed with SNS 13): Over the years (to the present) the books of the student winners have continued to provide interesting displays in the library, even after the practice of showing members' collections faded.

Numerous other opportunities also arose for exhibitions. Sometimes speakers would bring their own materials--a pattern established with Chalmers Gemmill's Baskerville talk in 1946. (That collection then went on public display at the library.) One of the earliest attempts to provide such visual aids miscarried when Nathan Van Patten's train from Stanford

was snowbound in Utah and he was unable to speak on 10 February 1949 and show his books published in Greenland. But others did successfully tell and show, among them Eric Kessler, from the Swiss Legation, on "The Contributions of Switzerland to Book Making" (9 March 1950); Irvin Kerlan, Acting Director of the Food and Drug Administration, on children's books (15 May 1953); John D. Gordan, from New York, on "The Collecting of the First Works of English and American Authors" (8 October 1954); W. Hugh Peal, also from New York, on letters of Charles Lamb (4 November 1955); and Charles Feinberg, businessman from Detroit, on "Walt Whitman's Difficulties with Publishers and Book Sellers" (15 February 1957). Sometimes the library arranged relevant displays from its own collections, as it did for Calhoun's talk "John Bartlett and His `Familiar Quotations'" (30 September 1957), for Feinberg's return on 21 March 1958 (where his own examples were supplemented with holdings of the Barrett Collection); and Richard Harwell from Emory University (12 February 1953), whose exhibition consisted of sound recordings of Confederate songs, complemented with a display of Confederate sheet music arranged by Miss Ruth Byrd of the Alderman staff.

The Society furthermore cooperated in publicizing travelling exhibitions in which its own involvement is unclear--a display of British Books arranged by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, for instance (November 1950); a model paper- making machine from the Hammermill Paper Company (December 1951); a show on Modern Swedish Bookbinding (December 1952-January 1953); and books from private presses, organized by The Society of Printers of Boston and including the work of Society members Hunter Middleton, Joe Graves, P. J. Conkwright, Ben Grauer, and Willis Shell (October 1953). Another exhibition of private presswork opened with a Society- sponsored talk by James Babb, Librarian of Yale, on 16 October 1953. The Society's involvement with exhibitions reached full expression with two major ones it supported directly: those of botanical books of Mrs. Roy Arthur Hunt (accompanied by her talk on 25 April 1952) and of the typographical work of Charles W. Smith (opening on 16 May 1963).

An exhibition of quite a different kind consisted of what might now be known as performance art: a presentation of Charlton Hinman's mechanical collating machine in action. Wyllie had whetted public curiosity about the invention as early as December 1947 in his Secretary's News Sheet 5:

Wyllie's inveterate interest in technology prompted him to purchase one of the first of the new machines for the library, and the interest of Hinman's former dissertation director Bowers in textual study prompted Bowers to spur his students to use it. A burst of publicity accompanied the arrival of the device in early 1956; with the enthusiasm that characterized the early Society in general and Studies in Bibliography in particular, Bowers told the Charlottesville Daily Progress that "A whole new field of investigation is opening before us" (11 February 1956). Given the research then going on at the University, he was particularly excited that "This equipment will reveal previously unsuspected printings from [nineteenth-century printing] plates, and will put these in their proper order." With his recollection of problems he had earlier tackled himself but also his characteristic practicality, he went on:

At the annual business meeting of the Society a couple weeks later (on 27 February 1956), Matthew Bruccoli, one of Bowers's students who was to make great use of the machine, demonstrated it for members and for guests from the student English Club. Meanwhile news of the arrival had spread to Richmond. The book editor of the Times-Dispatch, Lewis F. Ball, devoted one of his Sunday columns to it, in the process providing probably the most vivid description the machine has ever received:

Other guests invoked similar imagery. During the Society's preparation of a bibliography of his writings, James Branch Cabell wrote Wyllie after a visit to the library that "I liked too finding out something about that mystic Hinman machine" (28 January 1958). After the 1963 meeting of the Baltimore Bibliophiles in the McGregor Room, one member noted in her letter of thanks to Massey that "I was ever so glad to see the Hinman machine--a creature about which I had heard so much and only now understand." Hinman's collator, whose presence at UVa was the product of the interests of early members of the Bibliographical Society, remains in use today. Because the machines were expensive and generally required some understanding of the bibliographical purposes they might serve, only a few dozen libraries ever acquired them; because many libraries that did so have since removed them from service, the University of Virginia library has assumed renewed significance as one of the best places in the world to conduct bibliographical research.

Behind the public face of the Society lay not only weekly attention by its officers and committees but also formal meetings of the Council twice a year. From at least 1949 these were held at Kinloch; the business session would be followed by a dinner proverbial in local circles for its excellence. The 4 June 1977 occasion was a landmark, prompting this tribute from the Council:

This tradition had continued even after the death of Linton Massey on 9 November 1974. In the memorial resolution Bowers read before the University faculty, he observed that "The menus of these dinners, preserved over the course of twenty-five years, themselves deserve publication as a bibliography of dining. The minutes of the meetings we may leave in decent obscurity." Massey's wife Mary, who had always been close to the Society, continued to host the Council until her poor health forced cessation after the 17 November 1989 dinner, though the Council visited Kinloch for a business meeting one last time on 30 April 1993. The minutes that Bowers spoke of recorded official business, of course, but those of 13 December 1958 show the potential inclusiveness of the Secretary's observations:

Meanwhile the Society's annual business meetings, which had begun as "members only" occasions for electing officers, modifying the constitution, and engaging in some special activity such as examining treasures

of the University Library, viewing movies on book production, or watching the Hinman Collator in action, had already in early years lost their distinctiveness as special occasions and had been blended into one of the evening lecture meetings (from the mid 1950s to the mid '60s) or held as short late- afternoon sessions attended only by Council members. From 1969 through 1992 the latter were held in the office of the University Librarian, with the meetings successively establishing records for their brevity.

The fortunes of the annual meetings mirrored the fate of the public lecture series, whose last talks were sponsored in 1967. The subsequent abandonment coincides with the 1968 death of Wyllie, whose loss deprived the Society of crucial energy in a program that had already been confronted by decreased interest. Attracting an audience had, in fact, been a challenge from the start. As early as 18 April 1949 Massey had written Bowers proposing an informal series of talks that might lure more people (that suggestion soon led to the Student Round Tables). Some guide to actual attendance can be gleaned from Wyllie's advice to Howard Mott before his talk on 8 November 1951; he told Mott to expect twenty to thirty people. The day after Gerald Stevenson addressed the Society on private presses in Iowa (on 4 January 1962), Chalmers Gemmill wrote Massey, "I thought that Mr. Stevenson did a good job last night. It was too bad that more people did not come out to hear his talk."

In the same letter of 18 April 1949 Massey had pondered the appropriateness of the setting for the lectures:

Bowers responded the next day saying that he agreed thoroughly; a few years later he had occasion to express his thoughts more fully to Massey about a number of the issues at stake.

Even after the Society had gotten on its feet, then, it continued to wrestle about its appropriate emphasis. Whether the selections of speakers happened to fit with prevailing Society goals or not, they had immediate practical effects: in an overview of Society activities, the Cavalier Daily reported that "Attendance at meetings varies from 20 to 150 or more" (11 May 1962).

With only two exceptions, assistance with the talk by Edwin Wolf 2nd on 23 November 1970 and, notably, with the Charlottesville conference honoring Fredson Bowers on his eightieth birthday (20-23 April 1985), the Society sponsored no public lectures for twenty-seven years. That hiatus ended in 1994. Under the leadership of its new president, G. Thomas Tanselle, the Society's annual business meeting on 22 April was combined with a program--in the McGregor Room--conducted by local graduate students. Moderated by Monique Dull, the session included Carter Hailey ("George Steevens and the Revision[s] of Johnson's Dictionary"), Kelly Tetterton ("Paperbacks as an Area of Bibliographical Study: The Case of Virginia Woolf's Orlando"), David Gants ("Pictures for the Page: Techniques in Watermark Reproduction, Enhancement and Analysis"), and Peter Byrnes ("Byron and the Pirate: The Case of Poems upon His Domestic Circumstances"). Besides reestablishing the Society as a visible presence at the University, the aim was to recognize and encourage student bibliographical activity by providing a public venue for discussion of that work. Students were able to benefit further by drawing on the advice of Council members as they prepared their talks. The program was remarkably successful, though by skimming the cream of current work it reduced the array of papers available the next year. For the following meeting the Society consequently pursued another idea it had considered, that of hearing from University faculty members doing bibliographical or textual work other than in the English Department, where traditionally the Society's chief academic constituency lay. The speaker that year, on 21 April 1995, was Gary Anderson from Religious Studies, who addressed the group on "The Life of Adam and Eve in Text and Iconography." By the next year another crop of excellent student papers had matured; with David Gants as moderator at the 29 March 1996 meeting, Frank E. Grizzard, Jr., spoke on "A Collector's Progress; or, Why I Have 500 Copies of the Same Book [Pilgrim's

Progress]," Elizabeth A. Jordan talked about "Imposing a Canon: The Curious Printing of Bell's Poets of Great Britain," and Andrew M. Stauffer examined the textual implications of "Byron's Monumental Epitaph for His Dog." The revived public meetings convincingly showed that bibliographical study at the University had a promising future.