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2. Describing, and learning from, physical details

Even though the creators of short-title catalogues report only selected
details of the books they identify, the range of their investigation often
approaches that of descriptive bibliographers, who aim to give a full account
of the forms in which a work has appeared. My second proposal is for excerpts
from a descriptive bibliography, specifically Michael Sadleir's 1928
volume on Anthony Trollope. Although Sadleir had collectors very much
on his mind as he prepared this book, his vision was much wider. It indeed
presages the views that inform Fredson Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical
Description two decades later and for which Bowers was criticized by those
who thought such accounts should serve only the single purposes that were
of special interest to themselves.[13] The opening words of Sadleir's bibliography
challenge those who look to such research as merely a guide to bibliographical
points: "At the very outset of this book," he writes in his
Preface,

I wish to emphasize the general as opposed to the particular element in its potential
usefulness. Bibliography can be extended beyond a mere descriptive analysis of the
works of any one writer or period; it can be made to illustrate, not only the evolution
of book-building, but also the history of book-handling and the effect of a gradually

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perfected book-craft on the aims and achievements of authorship. Consequently, if I
claim for this bibliography of Anthony Trollope that it is not only a reference work
for collectors of that particular author but also a commentary on the book and
publishing crafts of mid-Victorian England, I am claiming no extreme of attainment
for my own book, but rather that it seeks to exploit the several possibilities
of its theme and relates its individual subject to the general conditions of his time.
(p. ix)

Besides looking at an expansion of these points in the rest of Sadleir's
Preface, one might turn to a representative entry in Part One, say that for
Rachel Ray, and then the parallel section in Part Two, where he considers
in further detail the implications of what he has reported in the first section,
partly by combining those particulars with information gleaned from sources
beyond the books themselves. For Rachel Ray, he offers an explanation for
the scarcity of "first edition" copies by interrelating the number of copies
stipulated in the publishing contract, the binding variants he has identified,
the similarities on the title pages of different so-called "editions," the condition
of surviving copies of the latest printing, various features of advertisements,
and a short-lived burst of intense competition in 1863 among
publishers of novels.

The category of descriptive bibliography is a good instance of the potential
for interchangeability that I have mentioned. I recommend Sadleir
in part because the date of the views he advocates is significantly earlier than
some people believe such approaches to have existed. But the principles
themselves might be readily shown in other scholarship, as in Patricia
Lockhart Fleming and Sandra Alston's Early Canadian Printing (1999), their
supplement to Marie Tremaine's A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints,
1751-1800 (1952). In their Introduction they point out that

A series of indexes then guides readers in various systematic ways to part of
what has been established in the descriptions themselves, thereby also providing
hints of still further ways of mining the bibliography.