University of Virginia Library

1. Surveying what exists

One of the oldest aspirations of human minds has been to accumulate
knowledge, a goal at some points concomitant with attempts to identify all
the books that exist. Titles such as Konrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis
in 1545 may better represent goals than accomplishments, but the impulse
they reflect is manifested in grand ways in the production of various short-title
catalogues and national or international bibliographies. "All good
book history—including the most speculative and theoretical—begins with
sound bibliography," says Cathy Davidson, having such works in mind.[11] A
student of the history of the book might reasonably be expected to recognize
the foundational purposes and accomplishments of great projects like these
that enable one not only to see all the books of a given time or place together
but also to trace given books across time and space.

For insight into such catalogues, I propose Katherine Pantzer's article
"The Serpentine Progress of the STC Revision." By discussing some complexities
of everyday office life, Pantzer reveals the kinds of issues that the
authors of the STC had to grapple with, what the work contains, and how
it can be used. Her discussion of the search for the people behind the creation
of other books has the happy effect of showing the people behind the
creation of this one. Primary among their characteristics is a simultaneous
interest in books and people: to name dedicatees in books and to identify
specific copies when these vary (p. 300); "to track down printers where their
names do not appear" and to assign "particular sections of the text when
two or more printers were involved" (p. 299); or to state bibliographical
format with precision. "I think it interesting to see what information this
kind of format description reveals," she says, pointing out that specific
features of a quarto or octavo format can show things about the time or
place of a book's origin, its genre, and even political circumstances in which
it was born: "Some of the Marprelate and John Penry tracts of the late
1580s are probably in . . . [the format they are] because amount of type and
size of press were limited by the necessity of traveling light to keep ahead
of the authorities" (p. 298).

As a case study she offers her investigation of an unrecorded prose
broadside. Important elements of her method are to compare the item with
other forms of the same work; to consider it in the light of other works
whose printed forms have some of the same printer's ornaments, but in
different stages of deterioration; and to draw upon findings published by
widely scattered scholars who had not known the full implications of "piling
up unrelated data" (as their detractors might have said) but who as Pantzer
recognizes had placed their discoveries in the collective memory of the
world of printed material. She summarizes the outcome of her labyrinthine
research in a single word: "Confusion!" (p. 307). But in her modesty and
honesty she then provides a further model of how to think about these
things. Although she goes on to say, "I was not then and am not now able
to make any satisfying sense out of these demonstrable movements of
initials, cuts, and factotums," she goes on to make an important contribution.
Through the analysis of the physical evidence of the printed objects themselves,
she has demonstrated the exact whereabouts of these typographical
units at various times, thereby disclosing hitherto unrecognized connections
among objects four centuries ago. Moreover, she does have a theory about
what this all adds up to, namely, "an aspiring journeyman printer who was
buying worn-out stock to have something for starting out in business by
himself and who worked both for Mrs. Allde and for the Eliot's Court Press"
(p. 307). But, again admirably, she clearly distinguishes this speculation
from what she has been able to establish, and she welcomes work by other
scholars on the problem she has uncovered. (And, in a footnote added to
this passage in proof, she succeeds in identifying the person that her research
predicted.)

In showing how a great work like the STC is created, Pantzer automatically

points to what a work like this is. In a book history reader, her
essay might be complemented by the actual entries for the two dozen or so
items she cites here, as well as by relevant excerpts from the indexes to
printers and publishers and to their addresses, where one can see that the
book producers have not only names but also local habitations—ones, moreover,
that are in proximity to others. Further natural extensions could be
to works such as Peter Blayney's The Bookshops in Paul's Cross Churchyard
(1990) or to the online English Short Title Catalogue, with its remarkable
capacity for enhancing serendipity through electronic searching. On a still
broader plane, one could invoke Tanselle's essay "Some Statistics on American
Printing, 1764-1783"[12] as a model of how existing bibliographical reference
tools like the STC (or, in this case, Charles Evans's American Bibliography
[1903-34, 1955-59]) can be used for imaginative purposes beyond the
designs of their creators.