University of Virginia Library

IV

The most visible manifestation of the new Society's existence, and the one that ultimately would not only characterize the organization most widely but also serve as its greatest contribution, was its publications program. The following articles in this volume--the full list of those productions, the history of Studies in Bibliography in particular, and the author index to the first fifty volumes of Studies--reflect the relative importance of this aspect of Society life. In its first half century the Society was to produce not only 50 volumes of SB (and reprints of 20 of them) but also about 175 other publications, in addition to 53 issues of its Secretary's News Sheet. Though this publishing program was not fully envisioned at the Society's foundation, this activity and the concerns it represented quickly developed, as was noted by a description of the Society in a 1966 Bibliography catalog from the University Press of Virginia:

As striking as the publications program was to become, it was nonetheless the natural outgrowth of the original circumstances of the Society.

The earliest publications rose from the same need to establish a corporate identity that had prompted the Society to hold public meetings. Some method of ongoing communication was called for among those whose interests had caused them to associate, particularly for members outside of Charlottesville, and within a month of the February 1947 start Wyllie issued the first number of the Secretary's News Sheet. Even this came not ex nihilo, for Wyllie had as models the News Sheets issued by the secretaries of the Bibliographical Society in London (1894-1920)

and of the Bibliographical Society of America (1926-1951). Wyllie's initiative in fact closely paralleled that of the early secretary of the London society, A. W. Pollard, who (according to F. C. Francis in his account of that group on its own fiftieth anniversary) undertook as one of his "first actions" the "establishment of the Bibliographical Society's News Sheet, designed in the first place as a substitute for the postcards on which Notices of Meetings had hitherto been sent out." The Virginia society, furthermore, had itself used postcards to announce meetings, though it continued to do so for another forty years. (Among other similarities not readily apparent between the two groups are that each has been tightly entwined with a single library and that the archives of both are sadly deficient.)

The Secretary's News Sheet ran for 53 issues, from March 1947 to December 1967, with the Council confirming reality by voting to discontinue the series on 21 March 1969. All except the final half dozen were by Wyllie, whose role as Secretary passed to William Runge in 1962. Their frequency varied, but they tended to come out about quarterly (though dated by month of issue). The first twenty-nine were on 82" x 11" paper--the first twenty-five numbers mimeographed on one side of one to ten leaves, then the next four photo-offset double-sided with a heading set in Warren Chappell's ubiquitous Lydian display type. The contents themselves of all News Sheets except numbers 43 and 50 were typewritten. A further variation occurred in one of the first twenty-five: no heading had been included for SNS 15, and all copies had to be hand-stamped with the name, issue number, and date. From issue 30 (February 1954) the shape became squarish, about 6 3/4" high by 4 3/4" wide, but within that framework experiments in form continued. The typeset headings for 31-33 were printed in red; 31-33 and 35 were on coated paper; and with number 36 Lydian returned (except, again, for 50). Three cents of postage carried the copies to members--through 1952 in printed envelopes from Alderman Library, but after that bearing the stamped return address of the Society.

The News Sheets first of all communicated Society business: announcements of meetings, exhibitions, publications, reviews (that of SB 4 in the Stockholm journal Bokvännen clearly pleased the Secretary), contests and winners, gifts, and amendments to the constitution; annual financial statements; and, too soon, a necrology. News from members was welcome (including word that one was running for Governor of Virginia, or another's recommendation of a researcher in London, "six shillings an hour, funds to be deposited with her in advance"), and often copies of their publications were offered for distribution through the Society. Reflecting the embeddedness of the Society in Alderman Library, the News Sheet listed talks of other organizations that were to be

given in the McGregor Room. The most scholarly purpose the early newsletters served was to print bibliographical notes and queries. They presented and solicited corrections for a draft of Rollo Silver's list of the first presses in each of the United States, for instance; they entertained modifications and additional locations for Coolie Verner's Society publication A Further Checklist of the Separate Editions of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, with contributions by such people as Lawrence Wroth, Frederick Goff, and Thomas W. Streeter; and they provided additions and corrections to standard reference works, especially the Pollard and Redgrave STC, Wing's STC, and Evans's American Bibliography.

Because not every issue of the News Sheet needed to include reports of official Society affairs, entire numbers eventually were devoted to bibliographical checklists, ones ineligible for publication either as monographs because of their brevity or as SB articles because the journal generally eschewed enumerative listings. SNS 34 foreshadowed that development: this October 1955 number included a record of recent work on Joyce, but for the first time it had a separate cover (a drawing of Joyce by John Canaday). From 1958 through the final number in 1967 (SNS 39-53) most of the News Sheets could stand as independent publications (and were sold as such). These included checklists of works by or about Roger Duvoisin (39), John Davidson (40), Joyce (42, with additions in 48), Jefferson as architect (43), Eudora Welty (45), Andrew Lytle (46), and Charles Smith (50). The series concluded with two further supplements to Evans's American Bibliography.

The Secretary's News Sheets also formed a natural bridge between the Society's meetings and its wider publications program. With the first number was enclosed the handout Fredson Bowers had distributed the previous month at the inaugural gathering (item 1947.1 in the following checklist; his talk itself, on bibliographical description, was summarized in that first SNS). The logical next step was to publish the full text of talks, as the Society began doing with Charlton Hinman's presentation that spring (1947.2) and with those of Earl K. Fischer and C. William Miller (1948.1, 2) the following academic session (and as Wyllie was doing simultaneously with papers delivered at the McGregor Room Seminars in Contemporary Prose and Poetry). But if these mimeographed publications had more than ephemeral significance, they deserved more permanent form than as stapled sheets. Accordingly, starting in 1949, new publications were enclosed in stiff-paper covers (usually tan, except, in the case of a checklist of writings about R. E. Lee [1951.3], appropriately gray, and blue for a straggler in the series [1958.2]). But then there seemed no reason to limit these productions to Society talks;

already in 1947 Wyllie and Barbara Harris had produced a transcription of nineteenth-century copyright entries in Norfolk, and more scholarship that had not been first presented orally followed in 1949. The initial contributions came from the local circle: listings by Bowers (A Supplement to the Woodward & McManaway Check List of English Plays 1641- 1700), Miller (Henry Herringman Imprints: A Preliminary Checklist), and Wyllie (Preliminary Finding List of Writings on the Kentucky Book Trade, which he prepared for the Bibliographical Society of America as "Chairman for Southeastern States" of its Committee on Nineteenth-Century Publishers). But the range of authors immediately expanded: among the 1950 offerings was the first of the Society's important indexes to national bibliographies, the Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue by Paul Morrison, Curator of Rare Books at the University of Chicago. (Bowers arranged for the Index when he began summer teaching at Chicago in 1949.) The Society likewise began to publish talks that had been given in places other than Charlottesville: by Madeleine Stern at the Oneida, N.Y., Historical Society (1951.4), and by Helene Maxwell Hooker and Herman E. Spivey at the 1951 English Institute (1952.3, 9). Except for Morrison's Index, which had been lithographed, these publications were all mimeographed, on 82" x 11" paper. Except for one item announced in 1953 but not published until 1958 (1958.2), mimeographing ended in 1953, the same year the Society produced its first hardcover books.

Those books in boards grew out of what the young Society was already accomplishing. Richard Harwell's Cornerstones of Confederate Collecting (1953.2) was a revised edition of the mimeographed version issued the previous year (1952.2). Roger Bristol's Maryland Imprints 1801- 1810 (1953.1) complemented mimeographed checklists of early Tennessee and Lexington, Kentucky, publishing. Both books were manufactured by the University of Virginia Press, and they bore some of the first public acknowledgements (except for SB 4 and for the 1952 exhibition catalogue of Mrs. Roy Arthur Hunt's botanical books, the Society's first typeset publication other than Studies) of what would become a crucial link between the Press and the Society. Walter Harding's list of Walden editions (1954.3) and Mary E. Knapp's checklist of verse by David Garrick (1955.2) followed as hardcover editions in succeeding years, but the book whose presentation particularly suggested the Society was taking its publications seriously was another by Morrison, his Index of Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers in Donald Wing's Short- Title Catalogue . . . (1955.3). Advertising fliers reproduced the two-color title page of this large-format book, and the colophon recorded the name even of the person who laid and locked up the forms. The reception

was appropriately welcoming. Writing in College and Research Libraries in October 1955, Allen Hazen captured as well the way in which major scholarly advances quickly become assumed as part of the normal intellectual landscape: As the Society began to produce books in print runs larger than the needs of its own membership, it encountered the need to advertise. Accordingly, announcement of Society publications appeared in places such as Amateur Book Collector, American Book Prices Current, Antiquarian Bookman, College and Research Libraries, and the Wilson Library BulletinCusually in conjunction with other books from the library or the University Press.

The following year saw another major project, the more than two thousand pages in five volumes of Robert Turnbull's Bibliography of South Carolina 1563-1950. (An index volume followed in 1960.) Not only was the preparation of this work a large task; it was also especially convoluted. The book was produced "as an uncorrected typist's copy posthumously made from an author's uncompleted handwritten manuscript"; the typing, "not originally intended for photographic use," had been from dictation by the late author's wife, who had shipped the resulting cards to the Society only four weeks before her own death. Despite the Society's acknowledgement that the work was only provisional, it too was greeted with wide applause (a writer in the October 1956 Yale Alumni Magazine called it "monumental" and "remarkable"), and as a whole it has not yet been superseded. Amid continuing publication of paperbound books over the next few years, more items in hardcover also appeared. Notable among these were a two- volume bibliography of James Branch Cabell (1957.4; a volume each by Frances Joan Brewer and Matthew Bruccoli) and Frances Sharf Fink's Heads Across the Sea: An Album of Eighteenth-Century English Literary Portraits in America (1959.1). By far the most lavish, however, was the first in what would be a series completed in 1996 of eight Shakespearean prompt books from the seventeenth century, all edited by G. Blakemore Evans. The book consisted of two fascicles in stiff paper wrappers, the first consisting of editorial text, printed by letterpress, and the second a facsimile of the annotated seventeenth-century

edition, which the Meriden Gravure Company reproduced by collotype. These were gathered in a portfolio, which itself was stored within a 13"-high slipcase. The Antiquarian Bookman of 8 August 1960 called the volume "a magnificent example of bookmaking and the book arts," and James McManaway, writing in the Autumn 1964 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, identified the series as "one of the very important contributions of new material in Shakespearian studies and English theatrical history."

As the physical and scholarly quality of its publications rose, the Society was faced with the question of whether to continue offering work which proclaimed itself "preliminary." A related but separate question was how to keep its publications affordable. The earliest forms, the mimeographed items, accomplished both goals. Not that these were without scholarly value; as Johan Gerritsen pointed out in English Studies in August 1956, "Among the many bibliographical benefits which the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia has in recent years bestowed upon the world of scholarship must also be numbered a series of mimeographed publications on special subjects." But as the range of items issued by the Society expanded, their appellation changed from what they were ("the mimeographed series") to that from which they were differentiated ("near-print publications," a description used as early as 1952). The need for a less formal method of publication survived the demise of the Society's use of mimeography in 1953, and in 1954 several new forms were introduced.

The first was that of small- format books, slightly less than 7" x 5", unbound except for staples through the face of the book block near the spine. Four of these appeared (1954.1, 1954.5, 1955.1, 1957.1); the last was simultaneously available in a permanent casing which, except for its paper spine label, was the form in which five more publications of this size were issued (1958.1, 1958.3, 1959.2, 1960.4, 1960.6). (The same binding was used in those years for Barrett Library checklists of American literature.) Another change in 1954 was the issuance in two forms of the books that were slightly larger (about 9" x 6"). To ameliorate the cost of the Society's increasingly ambitious publications, members were sent unbound copies without charge, usually in advance of publication of the hardcover version (which they could then buy, at the price announced to the public). Five of these appeared, covering editions of Walden (1954.3), Garrick's verse (1955.2), Jefferson's books on the fine arts (1956.1), Thoreau's library (1957.2), and James Branch Cabell's writings (vol. 2 of 1957.4). All the unbound titles except the Jefferson one were stapled through the front; all except the Walden bibliography were on paper of the same quality as the hardbound issue.

Whereas those sets of paperbound items originating in 1954 seemed

to beg for permanent bindings, the books in a third group that began to appear then (but adumbrated by the Hunt exhibition catalog in 1952) gave the impression that they had reached their intended appearance. Though also paperbound and stapled (but on the spine), the outside of these small-format publications was a two-leaf fold wrapped around the other leaves, with the front as the title page. (Paper copies in the other groups had a half-title or a blank on the front.) That first year only a sole example appeared, Joseph Graves's account of Victor Hammer (1954.2), but the pattern would find expression in the 1955 number of the Secretary's News Sheet (34) that was issued with a cover and in the nine issues of SNS from 1958 through 1967 that were devoted to a single subject. This design began appearing repeatedly in the regular publications program in 1962, though with a slight variation: the three items issued that year (1962.3, 4, 5; each had wrappers larger than the text leaves) and in the two subsequent (1966.4, 1967.6) all were unfastened inside their covering. (Harkening back to earlier terminology, the catalog of James Monroe's library [1967.6] characterized itself as "The issuing in near-print of a manuscript designed ultimately for book form. . . .") They shared that feature with most of the special Secretary's News Sheets, though the two News Sheets at the end of the run in 1966 and 1967 were stapled on the spine, as was one of the non-SNS items (1967.13). Frontal stapling showed up in this series (as 1966.2 and 1967.5), but unlike earlier examples these items with multiple gatherings now had their first leaf as title page instead of a half-title or blank.

In their appearance, the "Technical Reports" that the Society introduced in 1967 were an obvious continuation of earlier publications: photo- offset, small format, wrappers with title on front, and stapling on the spine. They tended to be longer than their predecessors (the thickest, the catalog of Ellen Glasgow's library [1969.5], came to 309 pages), but what they particularly added was a new explicitness about the affordability and special nature of the items. One of the first, a bibliography of the Colombian poet José Eusebio Caro (1967.1), pointed out that these reports were available to members "at nominal prices, ranging from $.50 to $5.00, depending on the cost of production. [&] They are considered as being either preliminary and advance forms of manuscript preparation, or of such specialized interest as not yet to support letterpress publication." As such they filled the same function that some people find met today by the Internet. From 1967 through 1970 eleven of the Reports were published--seven being indexes to the figurative imagery of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists by Louis Charles Stagg.

With the termination of the Technical Reports, the Society by and large refrained from issuing material in subordinate forms for about two decades. One situation that did call for special attention, however,

was the intermittent need to reproduce articles from Studies in Bibliography. This happened only a few times and was initiated by the University Press of Virginia, which in 1965 republished G. Thomas Tanselle's The Historiography of American Literary Publishing for its own promotional purposes. In 1967 the Society itself reprinted Franklin B. Williams's Photo-Facsimiles of STC Books and in subsequent years three more essays by Tanselle: one for a customer's erroneous order (1968.5), one for the U.S. Copyright Office (1969.4), and one, on the editing of historical documents, for general circulation (1978.4). Special occasion to offer SB articles in separate form arose in 1993 for Tanselle's biography of Fredson Bowers and the accompanying list of Bowers's writings by Martin Battestin. Accordingly, the Society established a series of "Occasional Publications," intended for the reprinting of articles that deserved wider distribution and for works of less than monograph size. The Bowers book (1993.3) was the first, followed immediately by another article from the same volume of Studies about books for which Samuel Johnson subscribed (1993.2), and then by an edition of Johnson's translation of Sallust (1993.4).

Although all these publications divided into various subsets according to their form, in their subject matter they fit coherently into the Society's larger publishing program. Not surprisingly, checklists of primary or secondary materials or full-fledged descriptive bibliographies appeared more often than any other kind of book, and editions, especially of literary works, were also relatively frequent. The other major category of Society publications fit naturally with these: writings about bibliography and editing, and about the book trade more widely.

Individual publications are not always neatly assignable according to genre, but overall the Society produced about thirty author bibliographies and a further eighteen or so listings of other primary sources. Lists of secondary materials about authors and subjects were slightly fewer, about three dozen in all. Bibliographical description as a concern of the Society and the standards that could be achieved were manifest from the very start in the form of Bowers's handout on Wolfert's Roost (1947.1). But despite the publication (elsewhere) of Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description in 1949, his model was slow to take effect; the author of the checklist of Walden editions in 1954 specifically noted that "I have tried to keep bibliographical details to a minimum" (1954.3). Occasionally bibliographies included collation formulas (as in Bowyer's Junius, 1957.1) and samplings of variants (as in Bruccoli's Cabell, 1957.4b), but it was not until B. C. Bloomfield's bibliography of Auden in 1964 that the Society published full-fledged descriptions.

A good number of useful checklists both for authors and subjects nonetheless emerged in those years, most of them appearing in the inexpensive

series already noted. The authors here tended to be English and American literary ones, from Garrick to Maugham, Maxwell Anderson, and Welty, but they also included the political controversialist Junius, the French writer J. K. Huysmans, the architectural historian Fiske Kimball, and the Colombian poet Caro. The incarnation of later works of this kind in hardcover gave them additional dignity even as the range of coverage expanded: four such volumes, published after the Society issued its books through the University Press of Virginia, included bibliographies of Glasgow (1964.4; this one fit the earlier literary pattern); of George Abbot, a seventeenth-century archbishop of Canterbury (1966.1), and John Henry Newman (1978.1), these broadening the scope to religious writers; and of Arnold's letters (1968.1), which highlighted coverage of manuscript materials. Meanwhile the Society was also publishing checklists on other than single authors. Several of these covered genres: seventeenth-century English drama (1949.2, Bowers again proving an early model) and fiction (1952.4-6, reprinted as 1967.7), English prose fiction of the 1740s (1972.1), the Chilean novel (1961.2), and Virginia almanacs (1962.1). Still other lists fell into no convenient category: performance dates of D'Urfey's plays (1950.1), for instance; poetry occasioned by the death of Charles II (1958.1); and editions of the important eighteenth-century cartographical record of American waters, The English Pilot (1960.6).

A further category of checklist- related items includes some of the most important books published by the Society. Already in the early years had come forth a broad variety of imprint lists--of Henry Herringman in the seventeenth century (1949.3), of the Derrydale Press in the twentieth (1951.2), and of Maryland (1953.1), Tennessee (1953.3), and Lexington, Kentucky (1953.4) from the time printing began there. But what proved of exceptional value were the collateral materials the Society provided for three existing national bibliographies-- Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue for English books up to 1640, Donald Wing's continuation for books to 1700, and Charles Evans's American Bibliography for American books through the eighteenth century. The first contributions have already been noted: Paul Morrison's 1950 Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in the STC and his similar index to Wing in 1955. The Society published two supplements to Wing by John Alden based on holdings in Ireland (1955.1) and the British Museum (1958.2), and, by agreement with the Wing Revision, also recorded addenda and corrigenda in Studies in Bibliography for several years (in volumes 29-31, 1976-78). In 1961 Roger Bristol, a University of Virginia librarian, produced the first of his auxiliary works for the Evans bibliography, his Index of Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers for

names occurring there. His 1970 Supplement to Charles Evans' American Bibliography, published by the Society and the Bibliographical Society of America, and his Index to that Supplement the next year capped at least twenty years of his labors. Whatever limitations the original sources possessed affected all these progeny, but each of the new books enhanced its source by providing access not otherwise possible.

It was with a memorial gift from the Massey family after the death of Linton Massey in 1974 that the Society began in earnest to publish descriptive bibliographies. Up to then it had brought forth only the ones for Auden (1964.1, with a second edition as 1972.2) and Ernst Toller (1968.4). Except for Donald Gallup's bibliography of Ezra Pound, which was published in 1983 with St. Paul's Bibliographies, subsequent books of this kind were to be known as "Linton R. Massey Descriptive Bibliographies" and financed from the Massey fund. Seven of them have appeared: by Joe Maynard and Barry Miles (with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg) on William S. Burroughs (1978.2), Candace W. MacMahon on Elizabeth Bishop (1980.4), James A. Grimshaw, Jr., on Robert Penn Warren (1981.1), Stuart Wright and James L. W. West III on Reynolds Price (1986.3), Wright on Randall Jarrell (1986.2) and Peter Taylor (1988.1), and Michael Boughn on H.D. (1993.1). By this time serious work in bibliographical description anywhere looked to the guiding influence of Bowers (as the Wright and Boughn books acknowledge), but the MacMahon and Grimshaw volumes also had the advantage of his personal attention. The bibliographies in this series were a fitting tribute to Massey in part because of their similarity to his own book published by the Society, "Man Working," his catalogue of the Faulkner collections at the University of Virginia (1968.3). It was not a descriptive bibliography, but because even now none exists for the works of Faulkner, the thoroughness of his account has insured its continuing value for many of the reasons that full bibliographies are consulted.

One unexpected contribution of these bibliographies of modern authors is that many of them provide prefaces in which their subjects reflect on what it is that such works accomplish (and by which they also guarantee that the following account of their works is incomplete). Though not all of these writers seem to have read Bowers on the purposes of descriptive bibliography, they do offer reminders of the social context of the bibliographies themselves and of what is at stake in human terms. Elizabeth Bishop states concisely the theme common to all the commentators:

The image Robert Penn Warren chooses seems intended to portray his own perturbation rather than to comment on the book he is prefacing, but either way it is sobering: W. H. Auden invokes similar imagery: In his introduction to the bibliography of his friend William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg begins with more overt deprecation but ends, as the others do, with a recognition of potential good in this form of scholarship: And though Reynolds Price implies that bibliographers are among the stereotypical enemies of artistic creativity, he singles them out for commendation:

Linton Massey's death also prompted another publication, a facsimile of the Virginia copy of Faulkner's play The Marionettes. Designating the book as "A Linton R. Massey Memorial Publication," the Society published it in two editions: a sumptuous version of unopened and unbound sheets in a portfolio and slipcase, limited to 126 numbered or lettered copies (1975.3), and a trade edition, which included an introduction and textual apparatus by Noel Polk (1977.1). These were two

of the fourteen facsimile editions the Society has produced, eight of them in the series of Shakespearean prompt books from 1960 to 1996. Two of the others, Poe mementoes for the Society's twenty-fifth anniversary (1971.2) and a poem by Pound (1984.2), were in the nature of keepsakes, but the final two, like the Faulkner and the Shakespeare, were serious scholarly works--a facsimile of a copy of Pope's Dunciad into which a friend of Pope had copied readings from the manuscript (1991.1), and an edition of Johnson's previously unpublished translation of Sallust (1993.4). The first of those was marked by an extensive bibliographical apparatus; the second, by a new method of recording manuscript alterations.

Earlier the Society had commemorated the death of John Wyllie in a similar way. From the proceeds of a solicitation led by Matthew Bruccoli it produced two "John Cook Wyllie Memorial Publications": an edition of The Notebook of Stephen Crane, edited by Donald J. and Ellen B. Greiner (1969.2), and Edgar Allan Poe: A Bibliography of Criticism 1827-1972, by J. Lasley Dameron and Irby B. Cauthen, Jr. (1974.1). The Crane notebook was part of a larger grouping of scholarly editions that over the history of the Society had included Goldsmith's "Prospect of Society," edited by William B. Todd (1956.2); Hawthorne's poems, by Richard E. Peck (1967.3); the notesheets (1972.3) and early drafts (1977.2) of Joyce's Ulysses, by Phillip F. Herring; George Eliot's notebook, by Joseph Weisenfarth (1981.2); Frost's stories for his daughter Lesley, by Roger D. Sell (1984.1); Longfellow's John Endicott, by Edward L. Tucker (1985.2); and Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by Linck C. Johnson (1986.1). It is interesting that although the ideas of Fredson Bowers had formed the basis for the seals granted to editions by committees of the Modern Language Association of America, the nature of these Society books entailed that only one, the Thoreau, was eligible for their mark of approval (it received the award from the Center for Scholarly Editions).

While Dameron and Cauthen's bibliography of Poe criticism was special in paying tribute to Wyllie, it was also part of the Society's ongoing attempt to trace the responses of readers by listing their printed reactions. Although enumerations of criticism never became a chief form of Society publication, a fair number of these did appear, usually on literary subjects. Some were in the paperbound publications-- lists of Master's theses on Spenser (1950.4) and Wordsworth (1962.4), and an earlier version of Dameron's Poe list (1966.2). Sometimes they arose as adjuncts to descriptive bibliographies, as in the accounts for Auden, Toller, and (in the Massey series) Bishop, Warren, and H.D. But a number of full books were devoted to these as well: on Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburh (1969.3), Valéry (1970.1), Austen (1973.2, 1985.1),

Carlyle (1976.2), and Carroll (1980.2, in conjunction with the Lewis Carroll Society of North America). The same patterns obtained for writings on other than specific literary authors, beginning already in the mimeograph days (with checklists of appearances of the "American hero" [1950.2] and of books about Robert E. Lee [1951.3]). Beginning in 1954 the Society also co-published four books (in the series Bonner Beiträge zur Bibliotheks- und Bücherkunde) that listed German contributions to the study of non-German writing: doctoral dissertations on English and American (1954.4), romance (1958.4), and Scandinavian language and literature (1959.3), and German translations of American belles lettres (1961.5). In addition, the Society published John M. Spalek's massive guide to archives of Germans who emigrated to the United States after the rise of National Socialism (1978.3).

Though books such as the Austen checklists quickly brought needed revenue and performed a useful scholarly service, the chief concerns of this bibliographical society were not in principle literary, and publications on the order of its two cumulated checklists of bibliographical scholarship (1957.3 and 1966.5; these had first appeared in Studies) or its list of published facsimiles of early music printing (1962.5) were more in accord with its original purposes. The study of collecting and collections also came closer to those interests--and indeed honored the concerns both of those who established the Society for bibliophilic reasons and of those who had more specific scholarly purposes in mind. Several of the early mimeographed papers were on collecting: on the Sadleir-Black assemblage of gothic novels (1949.1), on confederate imprints (1952.2), and on southern fiction (1952.7). A surprising number of publications itemized the contents of important libraries--those of literary figures Thoreau (1957.2), Faulkner (1964.2), Emerson (1967.2), Glasgow (1967.13), and, most dramatically, Fielding (1996.2); of American presidents Jefferson (1956.1, covering his fine arts library; the keepsake 1952.10 also provided Jefferson's recommendations for a basic gentleman's library) and Monroe (1967.6); and of the early nineteenth-century president of the Bank of the United States (1950.6; the paper was first presented as a talk to the Society by the Virginia professor, David McCord Wright, who had re-collected these items). Books by Linton Massey (1968.3) and by Robert W. Hamblin and Louis Daniel Brodsky (1979.1) were accounts of collections, as were in their own ways the exhibition checklists for the Hunt botanical books (1952.1) and the Grolier Club's W. S. Gilbert display (1963.1). The uses made of collections was also a concern: Paul Kaufman's Borrowings from the Bristol Library 1773-1784 (1960.4) presaged the more recent fascination with the study of such records.

Also in harmony with the constitutional goals of the Society were the

publications it sponsored about bibliography, textual study, and book trade history. Actual bibliographies and editions themselves constituted a form of commentary (and often contained explicit discussions as well), but separate reflections on these subjects were also present--from the first official meeting, in fact, when Bowers talked about the description of modern books. In the title of the other Society talk of early 1947, Charlton Hinman asked one of the most incisive questions in either bibliography or textual criticism as he pondered the scholarly significance of having seventy-nine first-folio editions of Shakespeare's works available in a single library, the Folger (1947.2). Discussions specifically of textual matters were also present from early on: Edwin Wolf 2nd talked about the textual importance of manuscript commonplace books from the seventeenth century (1949.4), and two papers published by the Society on behalf of the English Institute addressed the need for organized records of literary manuscripts (with the goal of preparing standard editions of American authors) and the value of non- literary (here, "historical") papers for literary students (1952.9, 1952.3). Hardcover books devoted to textual questions dealt with the composition history of novels by Faulkner (1975.2), D. H. Lawrence (1979.3), and, pictorially, Dreiser (1985.3) as well as transmission of motifs in Aesop (1979.2) and the grammar of substantives in Shakespeare (1976.1). But by far the most important discussion of bibliographical and textual matters in separate publications of the Society occurred in books by Bowers and Tanselle. A collection of Bowers's essays (Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing) appeared shortly after his retirement from the University (1975.1); summaries of his ideas also pervade Tanselle's biography of him (1993.3). Tanselle's essay on the editing of historical documents was reprinted from SB (as 1978.4) and had wide influence in that editing community. The activity of the Society's monograph publications program and of its journal overlapped in three volumes of Tanselle's articles that it has published: Selected Studies in Bibliography (1979.4), Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle (1987.1; both of those works collect essays that first appeared in SB), and Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (1990.1; this one contains material from SB as well as from other sources).

The Society also published a variety of books dealing with printing history and the book trade; these, too, emerged in the earliest days of the Society. One of its very first productions was a documentary record, the list of nineteenth- century copyright entries for the Eastern District of Virginia (1947.3). That item, chiefly the responsibility of Wyllie, was soon followed by a list of writings on the Kentucky book trade (1949.5) that he had compiled as regional chairman of the Bibliographical Society of America's "Committee on 19th Century Publishers." In line with the checklists of imprints and the personnel indexes to national bibliographies

considered earlier, the Society published A Directory of the Book Trade in Greenfield, Massachusetts, 1792-1899 (1954.1); other works explored the role of printing in fifteenth-century England (1967.4) and, as a festschrift, books ". . . in America's Past" (1966.6). A number of publications dealt with important individuals: Valentine Simmes (1968.2), Ralph Crane (1972.4), and Henry Herringman (1948.2) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; William Williams in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Utica, New York (1951.4); Samuel Snowden in nineteenth-century Virginia (1952.8, 1954.5); and Victor Hammer in nineteenth-century Vienna and subsequently much of the rest of the world (1954.2). In addition, the Society issued an expanded form of D. F. McKenzie's SB listing of Stationers' Company apprentices as the first volume in his important series of such accounts (1961.3). Finally, the Society published a group of works on the processes and materials of printing. A couple of these were paperbound: an account of printing inks (1948.1), and a Technical Report reprinting advertising cuts from the eighteenth-century Virginia Gazette (1969.1). The others were more substantial: Richard E. Huss's The Development of Printers' Mechanical Typesetting Methods, 1822-1925 (1973.1), and Rollo Silver's classics, Typefounding in America, 1787- 1825 (1965.2) and The American Printer, 1787-1825 (1967.8).

Overall, then, the Society's publications became characterized by their range and by their affordability. Many carried prefatory notes of thanks to Society officers not only for help in the course of production but also for suggestions that had generated the items in the first place. Frequently the books reflected the particular interests of the same officers. The ones on American imprints, for instance, fit well with Wyllie's former role as an editor of the Virginia Imprint Series, just as the items on South American literature accorded with his facility in Spanish (he had grown up in Santo Domingo). One of the especially interesting features of many of the books is what would now be called their "interactive" quality; they were often explicitly recognized as stages of an ongoing discovery. That activity was possible most readily when the Society conducted its Secretary's News Sheet, for here it could solicit and report updates on its own publications--Bristol's Maryland Imprints, for instance, or Verner's record of Jefferson's Notes on Virginia. The most vivid example of such building is undoubtedly the work that led to Bristol's Supplement to Evans. New "Evans Addenda" in seven issues of the News Sheet contributed to a large "checking edition" issued in twenty-three 32-page fascicles from 1962 through 1964 and then collected in 1965; responses to these appeared in the final two numbers of the News Sheet in 1966 and 1967, and then all the new materials were gathered in 1970. The Society's publications also interacted with themselves

in other ways. The second part of Mish's English Prose Fiction cited its indebtedness to an article in SB 2; the republication of Morrison's index to the STC was made from Wyllie's annotated copy of the original (with a new note emphasizing that modifications were "Still welcome"); and the second edition of the Auden bibliography announced that the University Press would act as the ongoing agent for corrections and additions. Such ongoing interest for their offspring is not inevitable among publishers or authors, and it represented another way in which the Society attempted to be of special service to its field.

The ongoing adjustments in the physical form of the Society's publications entered a significant new phase in 1996 when the Society established a site on the World Wide Web. With that home page came two electronic publications: a searchable index of authors and titles from the first forty- nine volumes of Studies in Bibliography (1996.3), and the complete and searchable contents of volume 7 of Studies (1996.4). The latter was the prototype for what will be made available early in 1997: the complete backfile of forty-nine volumes of SB, all encoded to be searchable electronically (1997.3). As such, Studies will be the first scholarly journal to make its full retrospective file available electronically without charge. The publications of 1996 also show the Society's flexibility in choosing the method of textual reproduction most appropriate to the circumstances. In that year it produced not only these electronic publications distributed on the World Wide Web but also a book set by computer and printed by xerography as well as one set by linotype and printed by letterpress.

Although the SB volumes from nearly a half century were newly keyboarded for the electronic project by a commercial firm, the tagging with computer codes was performed by the staff of the University Library's Electronic Text Center, which also mounted the files on the Internet. This Center, which has become an international leader in the presentation of electronic materials, maintains a particular advantage in that its director David Seaman and many on his staff are experienced in bibliography and textual criticism and thus have special insight into the texts they are dealing with. That expertise has also come into play for two other electronic publications to be made at the same time as the full SB: searchable page facsimiles of G. Blakemore Evans's complete series of seventeenth-century Shakespearean prompt books (1997.2), and a combined and searchable edition of the six installments of Emily Lorraine de Montluzin's attributions of authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine (1997.1) that had earlier appeared in Studies.

The cooperation involved in these electronic projects is a new form of the oldest collaboration in which the Society has engaged--with the University Library. Though that connection was strongest at the beginning,

when the Society almost appeared to be an agency of the Library, in some form or other it has always been maintained. Harry Clemons, who was Librarian at the Society's inception, instantly recognized the benefits the Society brought the library. On 12 October 1949 he wrote Massey that he "deemed it fortunate for this Library that it could serve as headquarters," and he noted that the Society had "brought to the Library interesting speakers and interested audiences." Even today, four members of the Society's Council are from the library staff.

But particularly for the Society's publications, as for the various joint meetings noted earlier, the group has also entered into partnerships with a number of other organizations, among them the English Institute (1952.3, 9), H. Bouvier u. Co. in Bonn (1954.4, 1958.4, 1959.3, 1961.5), the Thoreau Society (1957.2), the American Association of Architectural Bibliographers and the Society of Architectural Historians (1959.2), Ediciones de Andrea of Mexico City (1961.2), the James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library (1967.6), Southeast Missouri State University (1979.1), the Lewis Carroll Society of North America (1980.2), St. Paul's Bibliographies (1983.1), the New York Public Library (1991.1), and the Johnsonians (1993.4).

By far the most important relationship for publications, however, has been with the official printing and publishing arms of the University itself. The blurry distinctions between University Library and Bibliographical Society extended to these other relationships as well; the positive result was that, with the Society and its leaders operating at the center of this activity, the name of the University early in the Society's life assumed the connotation it would long hold as a place associated with the serious study and production of books. Already on 30 May 1953 the Antiquarian Bookman wrote that "It is a dull month when the University of Virginia, in all its branches, does not contribute something useful for bookmen." The "three particularly pleasant items" it noted for the current month were two Society publications, Bristol's Maryland Imprints and Mitchell's Preliminary Checklist of Tennessee Imprints, and a book from one of the other "branches," a pamphlet of Increase Mather published for the McGregor Library--that is, one in a series of editions from the McGregor collection published by Wyllie. All three were ostensibly published by still another division, the "University of Virginia Press." That unit, which Wyllie had reorganized at the behest of the University president in 1948, was at this time largely a printing service, though stimulated by Wyllie's interest in issuing books it had also developed into the rudiments of a publishing press. According to Chic Moran, who was the establishment's director for twenty years starting in 1954, the University allowed this Press considerable autonomy, thereby adding to its accessibility for the Society. It was at the Press

that many of the Society's early publications (as well as SB volumes 4 and 9-30) were printed, and it was from the Press that its first hardcover books were issued.

For some time people both inside the University and out (the latter included Julian Boyd, who had written a forceful proposal to that effect) had thought that a formal scholarly press was a necessary concomitant to UVa's aspirations as a research institution and to its perception as such. According to Edgar Shannon, who was then University President, "Fredson Bowers and some other distinguished faculty were having to go to be published at other places and to some extent what could be our own reputation was being bled off that way" (Shannon's remarks came in an interview reported in the Winter/Spring 1996 newsletter of the Press). Under the leadership of Shannon the University Press of Virginia was founded in October 1962. Its name was chosen to reflect its design to serve organizations throughout the state; the former University of Virginia Press, meanwhile, became known as the University of Virginia Printing Office. For a five-member committee to propose organizational guidelines for the new Press, Shannon drew on two stalwarts of the Bibliographical Society, Bowers and Wyllie. For the seven-member governing board that was subsequently established, the Society provided two others: William B. O'Neal and Arthur Stocker.

The first director of the new Press, Victor Reynolds, arrived in April 1963. Working from an office in the Rotunda that contained "a table and two chairs and a telephone and some scratchpads and pencils" (according to Francis L. Berkeley, Jr., in the same 1996 interview for the Press's newsletter), Reynolds quickly had to establish a list of books. One approach to doing so found expression in a letter he wrote the Society on 11 April: "The Board of Directors of the University Press of Virginia has authorized me to tell you that the Press will consider it a privilege to take over the stock of books previously published by the Bibliographical Society of Virginia on the following terms." Indeed, of the seventy- five titles listed in the Press's first catalog that fall, thirty-two (six of them volumes of SB) were Society publications. (Together, books from the Society and McGregor Library constituted 60% of the Press's first list.) Society publications also provided range, appearing in four categories (Art, Bibliography, History, and Literature) out of the seven in a related checklist of items being taken over from the former University of Virginia Press. Reynolds also discovered another advantage of collaborating with the Society. As the Society's Publications Committee chairman Arthur Stocker noted to fellow Councilor Anne Ehrenpreis on 5 October 1966, a certain bibliographical book "is in the hands of the Press, but Victor Reynolds habitually refers bibliographical matter to us, as a source of publication funds." As the Press became established

and gradually obtained better quarters, it was better able to take physical control of the books it was offering for sale. Acquiring a warehouse meant consolidating the books that had been scattered around the University Grounds, though it turned out that the symbolism of the books' physical location could prove ambiguous. As a result, Wyllie wrote to the University auditor on 1 August 1967 to clarify ownership as well as to summarize the Society's arrangements with the Press:

The Society, too, clearly benefited from the new arrangements. Physical consolidation of the volumes the Press was offering first of all meant that the Society could reduce the stock it was storing in the Rare Book Room. But the chief benefits lay elsewhere. As Massey explained in a letter of 14 August 1969 to Frederick Goff, President of the Bibliographical Society of America (about Bristol's forthcoming supplement to Evans's American Bibliography), "Once the publication of a book has been authorized they [the Press] relieve us of all further concern." Though the Society still went through the vexatious process of having manuscripts evaluated and of superintending whatever revisions were necessary, the Press increasingly took care of production and, of particular importance, advertising and distribution. Shortly after the launching of the Press the Society published on its own a few remaining works that had been in the pipeline as well as some more Technical Reports, but in the late 1960s it also initiated a few last items for which it would have sole responsibility: Hawthorne's Poems (1967.3), the new edition of Mish's fiction checklist (1967.7), the book on Valentine Simmes (1968.2), and Stephen Crane's Notebook (1969.2). The latter, a memorial to Wyllie, unwittingly signaled that the Society would no longer be able to sustain an independent publishing program, for one of its workhorses was now gone. In a memorandum to the Council on 28 February 1969, Linton Massey explained the Society's situation:

Particularly on the minds--and hands--of the Council was the Wyllie memorial volume; as Massey wrote Matthew Bruccoli on 8 August 1969, "This book was produced through the University Printing Office, not the University Press; we are thus obliged to merchandise the volume ourselves. Wish us luck and a larger sale this autumn!" In volumes 23 through 25 (1970-72) of SB two publications lists appeared: for items available through the Press, and through the Society. The Society offerings were mostly the Technical Reports, but they included the four books; by the end of 1970, those hardcover publications had been transferred to the Press and the remaining Reports discarded.

The identity and recognition that the Society books gave the Press from the start was strengthened as the Press began to handle publications for a number of other institutions of the book world. In a letter on 1 June 1972 to the Masseys abroad, Walker Cowen announced with glee that "I have concluded an agreement to distribute . . . the past publications of the Grolier Club." From its earliest days the Press had made available the productions of the Virginia Historical Society, the Virginia State Library, and the Tracy W. McGregor Library. The number of affiliated institutions grew, and the bookish ones among them came to include not only such major establishments as the American Antiquarian Society, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Folger Library, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and St. Paul's Bibliographies, but also such organizations as the American Association of Architectural Bibliographers, the New York Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Columbia Historical Society, the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Colonial Williamsburg, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Bryn Mawr College Library, and Prospect Books. (In an instance of multivalent cooperation, SB 32 in 1979 included a list of titles from the Bibliographical Society of America that were available from the Press.) Although the Press did not deal solely with bibliography, it quickly became the first source to check for new publications in that field. That status was reinforced by special "Bibliography" catalogs the Press issued in 1966 and 1974, two of only a dozen or so subject catalogs the Press has issued during its existence (and most of those later, in the 1990s), and by the covers of its biannual catalogs that were based on new Society publications such as Massey's Faulkner volume, the Society's Poe keepsakes from 1971, the Marionettes, or Frost's Stories for Lesley. Cowen himself had joined the Press under Victor Reynolds and succeeded him as director in 1969; in 1971 he also became a member of the Society's Council. To the Press's other strengths were added two excellent designers who often worked on projects of the Society: Edward Foss for the first decade and a half, and, from 1980, Janet Anderson.

The death of Walker Cowen in 1987 kindled changes in the relationship of the Society and the Press. Early signs of a shift appeared as the

Press ended its association with the organizations whose presence in its list had contributed to its reputation as a preeminent American press for publications dealing with the book world. A more direct complication arose when the Press accepted only grudgingly a book that the Society considered one of its more important contributions, a collection of G. Thomas Tanselle's essays entitled Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing. Reluctant to accept the judgment of the Society, the new Press director requested that "future projects be accompanied by an outside expert evaluation." Believing that "such collections do not make a new contribution to scholarship" and would lose money, the Press also required that the Society receive a smaller share than usual of the proceeds from the Tanselle book. (Sales later required that the book go into a second printing.) It was about this time that other complications also arose and that the Society began to think anew about resuming full responsibility for its publications program.

An occasion to do so arose in the early 1990s. As a parting token to his friends, Fredson Bowers had on his death in 1991 left some money to the University's English Department in order that it could prepare for them an updated checklist of his writings. Martin Battestin's work on that list developed in conjunction with Tanselle's preparation of a biography of Bowers, and it seemed appropriate to apply the Bowers bequest to reprint together these accounts that first appeared in SB 46 (1993). The mechanics of doing so were quite straightforward (though the reissuing provided opportunities that had to be seized for slight revision and for the addition of an index), and with the new volume the Society not only began its series of "Occasional Publications" but also resumed publishing on its own. The second item in that series, a checklist of books to which Samuel Johnson subscribed, was reproduced from the same volume of Studies and held minimal challenges, but the third, an edition of Johnson's translation of Sallust, required more decisions about production. The Society's two 1996 productions in hardcover, the final volume of the Shakespearean prompt books and the account of Fielding's library, were likewise produced independently. It remains to be seen whether the Society will wish to proceed without the set of services the Press would otherwise provide, but in at least one regard the Press has become irrelevant, for the publishing the Society has begun on the Internet enables it to produce new kinds of works and to bring them to audiences more efficiently than with print. The Society's connection with the Press has not been severed, however; as a symbol of that continuing relationship, the Press continues to store and distribute the copies of Studies that remain after the Society has sent out the volumes to members.

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia (renamed Studies in Bibliography for volume 2), the journal that the Times Literary Supplement said "came forth to astonish all the bibliographers of Europe" (27 April 1966), was the Society's most hazardous publishing venture: publication in the form of a book was expensive, and there was no assurance of adequate sales to recover the cost of production. Such a project had been latent as far back as Wyllie's 1946 questionnaire that gauged interest in a society. About half the respondents--including Bowers--said they would like to see "an annual volume of studies." (Slightly more hoped for "Printed announcements of exhibits.") In a letter to Massey after the appearance of volume 1, Bowers pondered the future of Studies and summarized the attendant problems:

As the local Daily Progress noted (on 15 January 1949), issuance of volume 1 did indeed mark formally "the growth into a national organization of what was originally a small group of people meeting occasionally in the McGregor Room of the Alderman Library to hear talks on books." From that point, Studies served symbolically as "monumental evidence" of the "work and worth" of the Society itself (according to Richard Shoemaker in Library Trends, January 1967). F. C. Francis likewise affirmed that representativeness in his Foreword to volume 20: "the Society with the prestige it now enjoys and the great success it has had is substantially the image of its Editor." The development of the journal's reputation can be charted by the responses it evoked from the TLS: recognition was instant ("the Papers [as the first volume was called] . . ., under Dr. Bowers's aegis, are rapidly earning their place on the same reference shelf as the transactions of the senior societies of London, New York, Edinburgh and Oxford" [24 August 1951]), and its

leadership soon came to be taken for granted ("Professor Bowers's annual has become so firmly established a pillar of the bibliographical establishment that the reviewer could perhaps confine himself to a list of this year's contents" [1 July 1965]) and its place with respect to the earlier journals uncontested ("The new periodical rapidly established an authority rivalling that of The Library, and it has maintained its distinguished position ever since; by now every bibliographer is in its debt" [27 April 1966]). In 1962 the French journal Études Anglaises observed, "Cette publication annuelle est peut-être la plus remarquable que nous offrent les grandes presses des Etats-Unis: l'érudition est à l'honneur quand elle est aussi magnifiquement servie par la typographie et réciproquement, car celle-ci reçoit alors un hommage que trop souvent elle dédaigne. [This annual publication is perhaps the most remarkable offered by any of the great publishing houses of the United States. Its erudition is well served by the typography which, in turn, does honor to the erudition, usually disdainful of such mundane matters.]"

Despite the instant success of Studies, three early anxieties persisted and became permanent concomitants of the journal: where would the articles, money, and editorial assistance come from to produce the next volume? Bowers's assiduity in pursuing papers is a theme in the broader history of SB that G. Thomas Tanselle treats elsewhere in the current volume, but it is worth identifying here as well, for it typifies the way that Studies preoccupied Bowers for forty-five years. Tanselle notes how Bowers served on William Todd's Chicago dissertation committee in the summer of 1949 and how (by arrangements already underway) Todd's series of important contributions to Studies began that year; that same summer Bowers not only compiled his Supplement to . . . Woodward & McManaway (1949.2) and garnered Paul Morrison's personnel index to the STC (1950.3) for publication by the Society, but he also consummated an agreement with the English Institute to print papers from its bibliographical section. One of those was "a magnificent paper by Greg which I had been sweating blood to get" (letter to Massey, 16 September 1949). Extant letters also show some other ways that articles came about. He once wrote Massey (3 Sept. 1963) that at a professional meeting he had seen a scholar whose "tongue was hanging out to give a paper here before the Society . . . and then hand it over to Studies" (the topic, moreover, promised to appeal to "our British friends"). Just as Bowers solicited on behalf of other activities of the Society, other Society members looked out for Studies. Hence when Wyllie noted an item of special interest in Waller Barrett's collection, he told Bowers, who "is writing direct to Waller to ask him to write the thing up for a note in the next volume" (Wyllie letter to Massey, 5 November 1954). Sometimes the

crucial step was simply to ask, as is implicit in a 12 May 1955 letter to Bowers from Faulkner scholar Carvel Collins ("I do know your Studies in Bibliography and am flattered that you should ask me to submit a piece for it") or explicit in my own case, in which, after my work came to Bowers's attention while we were in the British Library in 1978, he invited me to let him see it when I had something written up. To the end of his life he was anxious about where copy for the next volume was going to come from.

The concern over finding material to print was compounded by the need for the volumes to appeal to appropriate constituencies. The desired range was broad, but the scholarship available did not always match. Though a large number of pieces in the first volume were by local writers and three of them were of special local interest (each touching in some way on Jefferson), and though he recognized the importance of local supporters to the continuing existence of Studies, Bowers also realized that "by their nature our Papers will probably grow less rather than more Virginian." "John is rightly very concerned that we print in the Papers a reasonable number of American bibliographical articles," he wrote Massey on 19 April 1949;

His suggestion was to expand the purview of mimeographed publications to include writings related to Virginian and American history-- "if they could be brought in any broad sense under the term `bibliographical' as being concerned with documents of whatever nature." While appreciating other activities of the Society for their own sake, he also recognized the complex interdependency of the group's undertakings: "I agree thoroughly with your ideas about more meetings and talks drawing on local talents and on such subjects as you suggest. . . . the Society exists as more than simply a publishing organization, and if we wither here, we shall wither nationally. . . . There is, possibly, a delicate balance between our local membership, the size of our dues, and the financial requirements of the Papers, to say nothing of possible monographs in the future if we can get the proper backing."

The instant praise that Studies elicited brought an equally speedy

offer from the University of North Carolina Press to publish subsequent numbers as well as any separate monographs the Society might produce. Massey noted that proposal in an April 1949 letter to University President Colgate Darden, who had just written to thank Massey for a major gift that guaranteed that the second volume of the journal would appear. Massey pointed out what he believed (and what proved to be right) but what was also calculated to encourage Darden's favor: his gift to the Society had been "actuated solely from my interest in it and my conviction that through it the University has a unique opportunity to enhance its reputation for scholarship throughout the world in a field offering little academic competition." These remarks and the reference to North Carolina were particularly shrewd because the University was still smarting from an article a decade earlier (June 1935) by Edwin R. Embree in the Atlantic Monthly. Appraising American universities, Embree had found that no university in the South ranked as "eminent" or even "leading," and that out of 206 university departments in the country rated as distinguished, only one was in that region--at North Carolina.

In Massey's 1956 history of the Society he described the precarious financing of the first volume of Studies:

Meanwhile the Society also needed to divert cash for other projects, including any separate publications it was to produce (and which might produce financial profits). The $800 deficit that remained from the first SB was funded from the next year's dues and then bumped along from year to year. Several times the Society appealed to the University for a grant that "would thus place us beyond any strict need for deficit financing of the sort that we have been committed to for a decade" (letter of Wyllie to Provost Joseph Vaughan, 13 December 1957); on 22 October 1959 President Edgar Shannon wrote that in order to get the Society "completely out of the red" he was approving $1013 from the Alumni Fund for the Society, noting that "I don't have to tell you how interested I am in the Bibliographical Society, and how proud I am of its accomplishments since its inception."

The money was also gratifying in that it marked formal University support of the Society. Massey had called attention to the lack of such recognition in his letter of request (on 24 October 1959):

The earlier funds had indeed been useful, but they had to be applied for annually, they were fairly small to begin with, and they kept declining (down to $200 for volume 15, with a spurt in the final year, for volume 17, to $480). Grants from the Richmond Area University Center shared those features, except that they were even smaller, usually to cover the cost of publishing articles of individual faculty.

The shaky financial standing of the journal quite naturally concerned no one more than Bowers. The gratitude in his response (on 14 April 1949) to Massey's gift toward volume 2 was therefore profound:

Bowers in fact felt so buoyed by the surety of adequate pages in volume 2 that he stayed up into the early hours of the next day to expand a note he had written into an article. With his heavy personal investment in the journal, it is not surprising that he responded to Massey much the same way a few years later: Bowers was known for his long, single-spaced letters, but his series to Massey in April 1949, when the future of SB and the direction of the Society lay in question, reiterate in their appearance how seriously he took these questions: his calculation of possibilities on the 19th, for instance, contains about 3000 words typed on four dense pages, with a 500-word postscript by hand on a fifth sheet. Meanwhile Bowers was looking for ways in which he could help directly. When it was unclear whether money was sufficient to add a few pages of short but important notes to the next volume, he told Massey, "Although I don't have the folding money to indulge myself in this sort of thing, I am prepared to put up, strictly anonymously, a hundred dollars to help get this other material in print so far as it can be done for this sum" (30 April 1949). A few years later he noted the local Research Committee's friendly hope that "we should be self-supporting in the future" but observed that "I do not anticipate trouble next year. Both Gemmill and I are now in the inner sanctum group which actually makes the awards" (18 November 1953).

The financial security that the Society sought for Studies based on a permanent subsidy never materialized. Bowers had hopes for lasting support particularly after he returned in 1949 from his first summer of teaching in Chicago--with "a flattering offer to come out there" for good, as he wrote Massey on 16 September. "A similar journal bulked very large in the Chairman's mind at Chicago, and he stated it would be subsidized there without question. I had a very interesting summer seeing how the other half lives. Everyone at Chicago knew of the Papers and admired them." On the other hand, he also understood the realities of local politics:

Gradually, as separate publications began generating their own profits and the annual dues of members covered production costs of the journal, this centerpiece of the Society's activity did achieve relative financial stability. But throughout his life Bowers remained mindful of the Society and journal's contingent existence (on 23 April 1981 he wrote Kendon Stubbs that "Since I have got in the habit of thinking of the Society as poor, I have too often substituted my time for money that perhaps should have been spent on professional readers" for Society publications). Partly by nature he looked constantly for little ways to improve the financial situation of Studies. When the Richmond Area University Center was providing publishing grants to faculty, he planned to have Coolie Verner apply: "The saving to us will not be great, since it is unlikely that Verner's article in type will run to more than five or six pages, but every little bit helps and is worth a distinct effort, which we shall give it" (letter to Massey, 30 April 1949). The switch from 16-page

gatherings to 32-page ones in 1985 was to save a slight bit of money, as was the transfer of footnotes from the bottom of the page to the end of the article in 1988 through 1990. His frequent advice to trim the size of articles came from his good editorial sense, but Bowers was also mindful that what was not worth publishing was not worth paying for.

The third worry that dogged Bowers as Studies editor was the need for a suitable assistant- -and eventually for a successor. At first various minor but incessant chores were taken care of in the library, though Bowers recognized (in a letter to Massey, 19 April 1949) that "how long we can expect the library staff to do our clerical work for us is an open question." At the start, when all officers devoted themselves equally to all activities, the other leaders helped with the Society's journal. In those early days he wrote Massey, "I am 100 per cent behind your ideas for expanding the activities of the Society and creating a more general interest. To my mind this is as important as the Papers; and I am against anything which would tend to make the Papers seem my own private project. No one knows better than I do that they are not, and without John's hard work and your encouragement there would be no Papers" (20 September 1949). Proof for the articles went not only to Bowers but also to Wyllie, whose secretary Miss Jean McCauley would prepare a table of contents and other preliminary matter. Permission to proceed with printing required the authorization of the Council, especially in the early days when the availability of money to do so was never assured, and until at least the late 1970s the Council received reports on the cost per page of the current volume. On the other hand, Bowers was also in control of various non-editorial details from the start. An early letter (13 July 1949) from Wyllie to Willis Shell at the William Byrd Press reveals that Bowers was the one who decided to use different binding colors from year to year:

In later years, through preparation for the 1989 volume, the color selection became the subject of an annual ritualistic visit by Bowers to Janet Anderson at the University Press.

As time went by, the duties connected with producing Studies only increased, as did the proportion of them that fell to Bowers, especially about the time Wyllie was promoted to University Librarian. Several younger colleagues whom he hoped would be able to help fell victim to English Department politics or left the University for other reasons. His frustration boiled over several times in 1957. In one letter to Massey (6 February) he reported that he had told the English Department chairman-- Atcheson Hench, former president of the Society--that "I seemed

to be expected to take over all the business details with the Press down to seeing the last reprint gets out on time; and I was disinclined to do some of the work expected of me and wanted some help." He added that "we need people on the Council who will do some work and contribute more to the Society than a sociable evening," also pointing out that he had "just fired the proofreader Wyllie hired, as incompetent, and will do the work myself again." He was still distressed that fall, writing Massey, "I suspect we should consider printing in England, pretty soon. I am determined from now on not to substitute my time for the normal printer's proofreading. In fact, I haven't got the time, nor do other members of the Society. This last year or two has been a nightmare for me about proofs . . ." (20 September).

Significant help arrived in the fall of 1960 in the form of Lester Beaurline, who joined the English Department after receiving his Ph.D. earlier that year at Chicago, where Bowers had gotten to know him. Part of his attractiveness to the Department, Bowers later wrote, "was the solution of the SB problem" (letter to Beaurline, 2 March 1973). In volume 17 (for 1964), Beaurline first appeared on the title page, as Assistant Editor. He held that designation the following year as well, and then from volumes 19 through 27 (1966 through 1974) worked as Associate Editor. (In 1967 he and Bowers also published a two-volume edition of Dryden's plays.) The measure of his ever- increasing responsibilities during that period can be gauged by a gentle admonishment he received from Massey about the volume for 1969: "As I am sure you have been reminded many times Studies 22 was a bit long, and we did exceed our budget figure" (29 March 1969). The difficulty had arisen when a commissioned but tardy article arrived after others had been accepted to fill the apparent void; the counsel from Massey suggests the large role Beaurline had come to play. In his years at the journal his responsibilities grew, just as they had earlier for Bowers, and for his final half-dozen years there he had the assistance of graduate students for clerical and proof-reading jobs. In those years his interests had changed as well; to the extent they remained bibliographical, they found expression especially in building the replica of a common press for the Alderman Press and in printing books of poetry there.

About 1970 Bowers asked Beaurline whether he would like to take over as editor if Bowers himself resigned; Beaurline decided he would not, and he participated in the recruitment of a candidate for the English Department who would fill that role. That person declined, just as he had turned down a position in the Department in the mid 1960s. On 28 February 1973 Beaurline submitted to Bowers his resignation. "I really have too many other duties and interests to carry on with Studies any longer," he wrote; "As of June 1, I'll have to turn to my own research &

writing--none of which I have touched for two years." Bowers was concerned that the Department, having thought the "SB problem" was settled, might be less amenable than earlier to hiring someone to serve as a replacement for Beaurline and then successor to himself. But the following year, Bowers's penultimate before retirement from teaching, the Department did extend another offer; that prospect too declined. Meanwhile various Assistants to the Editor were hired to perform some of the work for Studies: Gillian Kyles for volume 27 (for 1974, the final one Beaurline worked on) through volume 29; Clint Sisson for volumes 28 and 29; and Susan Hitchcock for volume 30.

But Bowers's decades-old problem remained. On 18 November 1984 he wrote his oldest son that "There is a young man just hired at the University who seems promising and maybe I shall see if he is interested and start breaking him in within a year or so, and then see if he can take over." That fall the English Department had invited me to join the faculty, with the special duties of teaching eighteenth-century English literature courses as well as classes in bibliography and in textual criticism, and with the responsibility of helping Bowers on Studies. What was in effect my probation began that autumn as Bowers asked my thoughts about some articles that had been submitted. In the familiar pattern for those who have worked with SB, activity quickly picked up, and at the end of the following year I was listed in the forthcoming volume (39, for 1986) as "Assistant to the Editor." "Assistant Editor" followed for four years, and after that "Associate Editor." Bowers's death on 11 April 1991 forced the question of his successor once and for all, and the Council of the Society appointed me to the editorship of Studies, adding Elizabeth Lynch as a part-time Assistant to the Editor in 1994.

The continually changing nature of the Society's publication program required steady adjustments in the organizational structure of the Society as well. Duties in the early days were shared, though if the number of acknowledgements in prefaces is an accurate gauge, authors of works published in the first decade perceived Wyllie as most involved and Bowers as also providing significant help. As the Society finally shed the financial debt that had clung from the start and as its ventures into hardcover publishing provided a sense of what it might accomplish, Massey in 1959 formally established an "Editorial Advisory Committee for Monographic Publications." Wyllie described this group in a letter of 8 April 1964 to a prospective contributor:

This system continued until the death of Wyllie in 1968. But even within it different poles of attraction operated, with Massey and Wyllie less committed than Bowers to devoting the publishing program exclusively to serious scholarship (Wyllie differed from Massey, however, in being more willing to publish work in progress). Not that those two were unscholarly, by any means. In a characteristic reaction, Wyllie expressed disappointment after his first Rosenbach Lecture in 1960 over the audience's lack of seriousness; in the same vein, Massey reminded a member of the Faulkner concordance project in 1971 that "such concordances based on faulty texts will have little value; definitive texts are a necessity, I should imagine, before any considerable work could be done on concordances." But they also kept themselves from becoming overwhelmed by the gravity of what the Society was up to. In Secretary's News Sheet 8 (September 1948), Wyllie spoke as one whose feelings were not engaged in what obviously mattered to others: "Two of our members, Mr. Fredson Bowers and Mr. Paul Dunkin, are having a running fight over definitions of state and issue in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America." When an angry correspondent wrote Wyllie in 1958 that a graduate student's article had made him look like an "ignoramus," Wyllie replied, "Bibliographers are a funny breed anyway, and all I try to do is coexist with them." Massey's distance surfaced intermittently in his reminders to people that he was not an academic insider (and, indeed, that he wouldn't necessarily wish to be); as he wrote a friend on 25 December 1970, "I have always kept myself well in the background, and I should be reluctant to find my successor [as Society President] using the office to promote himself, as can so easily happen in the Groves of Academe."

These attitudes came to bear on the publications program at the Council meeting of 30 April 1966, when Massey asked, "Should the Society enlarge its aims?" According to the minutes, "The President expressed his fear that, having identified itself largely with analytical bibliography, the Society is losing ground quantitatively, and that consequently it should broaden its appeal to include book collectors and others for whom analytical bibliography is of limited interest." The debate, then, was over the same questions the Society had faced at its inception twenty years earlier. The minutes continue: "In reply, Mr. Stocker argued that the particular strength and distinguishing mark of the Society has been its emphasis on analytical bibliography; and it was pointed out by others that both the monograph publications and Studies itself have by no means been devoted exclusively to analytical bibliography." The outcome of the discussion was the establishment of a new

series to be edited by Walker Cowen and "intended to merit the interest of members in areas of literature beyond analytical bibliography." One such volume was ultimately produced, the edition of Hawthorne's Poems in 1967.

In the necessary discussion about reorganizing publications after Wyllie's death, Stocker wrote Massey that customary procedure "when our Committee had completed consideration of an item" had been to "turn it over to John Wyllie, who carried on all the negotiations with the Press" (31 May 1968). (Wyllie's major role had prompted at least one author to call him "Editor of the Monograph Series" [1960.4].) Massey now proposed a three-member Finance Committee, with himself as chairman, that would create an overall plan for publishing ventures, that would receive proposals from what was now called the Publications Committee, and that upon review of the Society's finances would give authorization to print. By subjecting decisions about publishing to wider scrutiny, he hoped the new system would lead to "fewer titles, better books, and far fewer Technical Reports" (letter to Stocker, 25 October 1968). One of the victims of the housecleaning was the "serial analyticals," library catalog cards for individual articles in Studies that the Society provided (at 324 to 64 each over the years) for all volumes through 1969 but for which requests were now diminishing. (An example of this series, in effect another Society publication, can be seen at the top of the third column of volume 217, page 303, of the National Union Catalog.)

The two-committee system proved cumbersome, and after consulting the Council Massey replaced the groups early the next year with a single Executive Committee consisting of Bowers, Cowen, Ray Frantz, and himself. Its duties combined those of the separate committees: to supervise the disposition of tendered manuscripts and to administer the Society's publication funds in an orderly way. Each new manuscript was to be forwarded by the Society's Secretary to Cowen, who would either reject it out of hand or submit it to an expert reader. Calling for "fewer and much better titles and texts," Massey said in a memorandum of 28 February 1969 that only after "the book has met our rigid scholarly standards" would the committee itself formally consider the project and its attendant scheduling and financing. One of his special hopes was that the system would thwart the possibility of publications becoming the custody of a single person. In a report on the status of Society activities after the death of Massey in late 1974, Kendon Stubbs described this plan as it had by then evolved, including in its name:

In 1977 Bowers was elected chairman of the committee; all three major founders of the Society had now served the equivalent of that role. One of his first actions was to meet with Cowen "to discuss various ways of lowering publication expenses," according to the Council minutes of 4 June 1977, and he fretted over the number and quality of incoming manuscripts as much as his predecessors had (this accounts in part for his editorial work noted earlier on several descriptive bibliographies). Minutes of 17 November the next year reveal that the committee's general procedures were straightforward: "As in the past, all new manuscripts are to be sent to Mr. Bowers, who will in turn present them to the committee"-- which at that time consisted also of Cowen, Mrs. Massey, and Stubbs. Bowers acted in that capacity for over a decade, followed by Stubbs and then, in 1991, by another member drawn from the existing committee, Ruthe Battestin.