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5. The Role of Bibliography in Book History

How can scholars effectively traverse the intellectual divide between bibliography
and book history? What cargoes might be traded between these
territories to the benefit of both? In CHBB5 we have wrestled with questions
about the use and display of bibliographical information of various kinds,
as well as with larger concerns about the relationship between particular
observations and more far-reaching analysis. In any history that gestures
toward comprehensiveness, there is an inevitable tension between the communication
of knowledge and the limited provision of the information from
which it is derived. A still more important matter, however, is the role that
bibliography should play in book-historical research. In a thought-provoking
paper, T. H. Howard-Hill has asked, "What is the contribution of bibliography
to the history of the book?" His answer, in part, is that bibliography
enables "already historically-sensitive book historians to attend to the physiscal
object in history."[45] This understanding accords well with the 1980
"Statement on the History of the Book" in which leading book historians
situated bibliographical scholarship at the center of book-historical research.
"The attempt to understand the influence of changes in book production and
dissemination is particularly demanding," they observed. "In the first place,
one needs to know the basic facts of what was printed, by whom and for
whom," but beyond such fundamental investigations there is also a great
deal of exacting bibliographical work to be done, because "[d]etailed bibliographic
studies, dictionaries of printers, and inventories of both public
and private libraries are among the time-consuming and exacting and fundamental
studies that are needed."[46]

Assessing the current state of book history in The Journal of American

History, Joan Shelley Rubin remarks, "Bibliography remains important."[47]
David Hall offers a more personal testimony, "My education at the hands of
the bibliographers is ongoing."[48] Nevertheless, the relationship between
bibliography and book history is sometimes characterized by vexing ambiguities
and competing demands. Hall has recorded that at a scholarly meeting
he attended, "The most explicit disagreement concerned texts and their
transmittal: to what extent should historians undertake bibliographical research
before they can proceed in confidence? Meanwhile, it was suggested
that bibliographers put their skills to work answering questions of importance
to historians. . . . This exchange of expectations might not have
satisfied either party. . . ."[49]

One problem facing book-historical studies is that many scholars have
an inadequate grounding in bibliography. It seems reasonable to propose
that bibliographical literacy ought to be requisite to book history in the
way that all physicians—whether surgeons, research immunologists, or epidemiologists—have
studied human anatomy. Yet, it remains a disturbing
truth that most of us engaged in book-historical scholarship received no
bibliographical training as part of our graduate studies. The results when
historians of the book are, apparently, ignorant of bibliographical rudiments
can be memorably infelicitous. One celebrated scholar recently made
much ado about the reprinting of a poetic miscellany many years after its
first appearance, adducing from the title page strong evidence of the original
edition's aesthetic and commercial success. Regrettably, however, the "new
edition" was merely a reissue of sheets that had long been in storage. Such
elementary oversights not only bring down individual arguments, they also
potentially compromise the integrity and reputation of book historical research
as a mode of inquiry.

G. Thomas Tanselle, delivering a lecture on "The History of Books as
a Field of Study," observed that "The kind of work now labeled `histoire
du livre' [which Tanselle characterizes as "the study of the role of printed
books in society"] and the kind called `analytical bibliography' [that is, the
scholarly investigation of "the printing history of individual books"] may
be for the most part associated with different groups of people, but both will
be less fruitful than they might be if they develop as independent disciplines."[50]
A dialogue between these two areas of inquiry would contribute

to book history because the "connection between physical detail [bibliographical
signs] and intellectual content, between analytical bibliography
and textual meaning, has a logical bearing on the role of books in society"
(54, 53).

Tanselle is right to acknowledge that "both will be less fruitful," and so
it is helpful to emphasize that book history might also enrich analytical (and
other varieties of) bibliography as well, since the observation and analysis
of bibliographic codes are always interpretative acts. Like book history,
bibliography—whether descriptive, analytical, enumerative, historical, or
physical—is invariably a critical and critically-laden exercise in historical
interpretation. It is critical in the root-sense of the word: bibliography requires
the repeated exercise of informed judgment. Concomitantly, knowledge
about the production and transmission of individual works (or, in
McKenzie's and McGann's terms, of the particular texts of a work),[51] often
the fundamental stuff of bibliography, can be essential to the conduct of
intellectually rigorous book history. One of the primary lessons at the intersection
of bibliography and book history is that "intellectual content" might
not be so easily equated with "textual meaning" apart from all other bibliographic
codes in the text, because the book is a complex system of signifiers,
all of which contribute to the ways in which meaning is made.[52] In this regard,
the idea of the book as a volume (volumen), a capacious container of
many and varied codes, is particularly appealing.

The rigorous and creative application of bibliographical knowledge to
book-historical research is, in my view, the single most important desideratum
for book history today. It is difficult to imagine how a sociology of texts that
does not integrate the contributions of bibliography could make an important
and lasting contribution to book history.