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Sources, Treatment of Text, Acknowledgments
Sources. The surviving papers relating to Ray's work on these lectures fall into five categories: (1) correspondence with officials at Oxford, friends, and librarians—the last group of letters including some of the lists of books he wished to see and some of his orders for slides; (2) holograph notes made at libraries and at home while examining primary and secondary material, along with holograph lists of books and preliminary drafts of scattered paragraphs; (3) a partial first typescript, with extensive holograph revisions; (4) multiple copies of the final typescript, including the one annotated for use in delivering the lectures, which shows that the last illustration and the associated comments were added at a late stage (six of the small revisions made on that copy were actually incorporated into the typing of most of the other surviving copies—a situation reflecting the fact that the typing had been done on a magnetic-card typewriter and that small alterations could therefore be made without the need for retyping the unaltered text); (5) photocopies, occasionally annotated, of secondary material. As Ray's literary executor, I have all these papers in my possession at present. The slides that Ray used in the lectures, except for ten that are apparently lost (1.6, 1.9, 2.6, 2.12, 2.33, 3.13, 3.16, 4.40, 5.1, and 5.20 in the list of illustrations below), are now the property of the Pierpont Morgan Library, where Ray's entire collection of books, manuscripts, and art is housed. Ray's own comments on his sources appear in the lectures on pp. 20-21 and 89-90. In my introduction, I have incorporated, as section I, a slightly revised version of the biographical sketch that I originally wrote as part of the introduction to a collection of Ray's essays, Books as a Way of Life (New York: Grolier Club and Pierpont Morgan Library, 1988), a volume that includes a checklist of Ray's writings.
Treatment of text. I have followed the text of the final typescript as revised in Ray's hand for delivery, with two classes of exceptions. (1) I have not accepted those revisions clearly intended only for oral delivery, such as those aimed at speeding up the reading (deleting first names, shortening titles, omitting dates) and those with direct reference to the occasion (such as thanking the audience or noting his visit to the Bodleian, both of which I have quoted in the introduction above). (2) I have made some four dozen alterations of my own, only ten of which go beyond the correction of typographical errors or the adjustment of formal features for consistency:I have substituted "A year" for "Two years" at 23.28, "before these words were published" for "however" at 24.26 (in order to recognize the discrepancy between the date at the end of Clément-Janin's text and the printing dates of the two volumes as given in the colophons), "several" for "six main" at 25.15, "former" for "latter" at 32.27, "leaves" for "pages" at 59.25, "vignette" for "plate" at 63.25, "the last" for "these" at 79.11, and "fewer" for "less" at 22.26 and 84.10; and I have inserted "these" at 82.29. The documentation remains in the form Ray used, except that arabic numerals have replaced roman and some inconsistencies have been regularized—primarily his inconsistent citation of page numbers (sometimes in parentheses in the text and sometimes in footnotes that consisted solely of page numbers where no author or title reference was needed: all such page references are now in the text). The list of secondary works cited and the list of illustrations have been added; they do not exist in any form in Ray's papers.
Acknowledgments. Gordon Ray would have wanted to thank the Oxford officials who handled the arrangements for his visit (including Rosemary Schwerdt and J. P. W. Roper) and the staff members of libraries where he worked, including Julian Roberts (Bodleian), the late Kenneth A. Lohf (Columbia), the late Robert L. Nikirk (Grolier Club), Colta F. Ives and William Bond Walker (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Anna Lou Ashby, Paul Needham, and Charles Ryskamp (Morgan), Donald Anderle (New York Public Library), Michael T. Ryan (Stanford), and Ralph Franklin and Marjorie G. Wynne (Yale)—as well as Eleanor M. Garvey and Roger E. Stoddard, who arranged for a Harvard book to be deposited at the Grolier Club for his
My own thanks go, first of all, to the following institutions and individuals for permission to reproduce—on the website of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and (in several instances) in the present volume—the images made from material in their collections: Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Jean Ashton); Houghton Library, Harvard University (Hope Mayo); Pierpont Morgan Library (Charles E. Pierce, Jr.); New York Public Library (David Ferriero, H. George Fletcher, and Thomas Lisanti); and Stanford University Library (Roberto G. Trujillo and Sean Quimby). I also thank Dr. Jack Eisert for permission to reproduce four illustrations from books in his possession. For help with questions regarding permission or citation, I thank Eileen Sullivan (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Rebecca Warren Davidson (Princeton University Library), and Vincent Giroud and Ellen Cordes (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University—which, through the good offices of Vincent Giroud, provided newly scanned images to replace Ray's slides). (For the specific illustrations that come from each source, seethe index to the list of illustrations below; more detailed credit lines accompany each image on the website and each plate in this volume.) For generous assistance of various kinds, I wish to record my indebtedness to Anna Lou Ashby, John Bidwell, Justin Caldwell, Stephen C. Massey, Constance McPhee, Paul Needham, and J. Fernando Peña. Finally, I give particular thanks to four individuals at the University of Virginia who played major roles in helping this work reach publication:Matthew Gibson and Cindy Filer Speer of the Electronic Text Center, who oversaw the careful transfer of the slide images and captions to the Bibliographical Society's website; Elizabeth Lynch, assistant to the editor of Studies in Bibliography, who—in addition to her usual expert proofreading and checking—performed the tasks of matching each slide with its discussion in the text, verifying the vertical and horizontal orientation of each image on the website, locating further information about many of the books from which the slides were made, and writing a preliminary draft of the list of illustrations; and biography, who—in addition to her usual expert proofreading and checking—performed the tasks of matching each slide with its discussion in the text, verifying the vertical and horizontal orientation of each image on the website, locating further information about many of the books from which the slides were made, and writing a preliminary draft of the list of illustrations; and David L. Vander Meulen, editor of Studies in Bibliography, who gave his characteristically detailed and perceptive attention to this work.
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