 | Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography |  |
RELATION TO LIBRARY CATALOGUING
I published "Descriptive Bibliography and Library Cataloguing" in
Studies in Bibliography, 30 (1977), 1–56; it was reprinted in my
Selected
Studies in Bibliography (1979), pp.
37–92. Also in 1977 I published a more
general discussion, which
includes some comments on cataloguing: "Bib-
liographers and the Library," Library Trends, 25 (1976–77), 745–762; re-
printed
in my Literature and Artifacts (1998), pp. 24–40. I
have treatedy
the question of the relation between references to physical books
and
references to verbal works much more extensively in "Enumerative
Bib-
liography and the Physical Book," in Scholarly Publishing in
Canada and
Canadian Bibliography (volume 15 of
Canadian Issues), ed. Paul Aubin et
al.
(1993), pp. 145–159, which is reprinted in my Literature and Artifacts (1998),
pp. 186–199. (This subject was
also briefly discussed by D. W. Krummel
in his guide to
preparing checklists, Bibliographies: Their Aims and
Methods
[1984]: see "The Physical and Intellectual Book," pp.
34–36.)
Since the time of my 1977 essay there has been a great deal of
discus
sion in the library world about the requirements for cataloguing
"rare
books," and in 1986 the Association of College and Research
Librar-
ies (ACRL) began publishing a journal called Rare Books
and Manuscripts
tural Heritage in 2000). Its contents naturally impinge from time to time
on matters taken up in my essay, and three articles can be singled out as
particularly relevant.
The first, by Laura Stalker and Jackie M.
Dooley, is "Descriptive
Cataloging and Rare Books" (7 [1992],
7–22), a careful historical ac-
count of the thinking involved in the various
revisions of the cataloguing
rules that had occurred in the preceding fifteen years.
(It also, in footnote
11, credits my essay with the change made in the title of the
rules for
special-collections cataloguers from "Bibliographic Description" to
"De-
scriptive Cataloging.") The second article is Michael
Winship's "'What
the Bibliographer Says to the Cataloger'" (7
[1992], 98–108)—part of
a special issue on "Descriptive Cataloging of
19th-Century Imprints for
Special Collections," ed. Stephen J.
Zietz. Winship sensibly points out the
overlappings among traditional
branches of bibliography and notes that
library cataloguers' work similarly bridges
these divisions; and he prop-
erly recognizes that the amount of detail in a
catalogue entry is not as
important a consideration as the quality of judgment
involved in deciding
what details are the most significant for a given class of
material. His aim,
like mine, is "to raise issues that may help to improve the
catalog as a tool
for research"; and he believes, as I do, that "our work, both as
catalogers
and as bibliographers, would be better if we were to talk to each
other
more." The third article I wish to note here is James P.
Ascher's "Pro-
gressing toward Bibliography; or: Organic Growth in the
Bibliographic
Record" (10 [2009], 95–110). As his title makes clear,
Ascher proposes a
process of "progressive description" (made feasible by the
computer), in
which records are continually enhanced as more information turns up,
or
certain physical features begin to attract greater interest, or the need
for
particular digital links becomes clearer. Implementation of this
promising
idea would allow "bibliographical awareness in cataloging" not to be
fro-
zen at the time of the initial record but to grow along with scholarship.
My 1977 essay, which includes a criticism of chapter 6 of the Anglo-
American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), appeared a year
before AACR was re-
vised and four years before a manual
specifically designed for special
collections, Bibliographic
Description of Rare Books (1981), was published un-
der the
supervision of the Office for Descriptive Cataloging Policy of the
Library of
Congress. A decade after that, the manual was revised (with
the collaboration of the
Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ACRL)
as Descriptive
Cataloging of Rare Books (1991), and a third edition appeared
in
2007 under the title Descriptive Cataloging of Rare
Materials (Books)—one
of a series of manuals for different classes of "rare
materials." Although
the 2007 manual poses somewhat fewer problems
(from the point of view
AACR, the same kind of confusion is still present.
For example, in the chapter on "Physical Description Area" (pp. 101–
118), the
first rule for recording "Extent" suggests that the emphasis will be
on "physical
description" by focusing on the length of the physical book
rather than that of the
verbal work: the rule is to "account for every leaf
… including leaves of text,
leaves of plates, and blank leaves"; and the
leaves are to be reported by giving
"the last numbered page or leaf of
each numbered sequence" in the same style of
numbering as that used in
the book itself, with a bracketed arabic total for
unnumbered pages, as in
"iii, [1], 88, [2] p." One immediately wonders why this
degree of specific-
ity is needed if the aim is simply to show "extent"—especially
since the
system does not fully concentrate on the practice of the book, as
shown
not only in this simple example (is p. 1 numbered?) but also in
several
other rules, such as this one: "If it is not practical to record all the
se-
quences (e.g., if they are exceedingly numerous)," then one may "Record
the
total number of pages or leaves followed by 'in various pagings' or 'in
various
foliations.'" The treatment of blank leaves raises a fundamental
problem: "include
in the count blank leaves at the beginning of the first
gathering or at the end of
the final gathering when they are present in
a copy in hand or known to be present
in other copies." Aside from the
practical question of how often a cataloguer can be
expected to undertake
the bibliographical research involved in learning about "other
copies,"
there is a basic theoretical question: should not a catalogue entry
always
refer to the "copy in hand"? In the section on "Size and format,"
preci-
sion in physical description is again not the focus. One example:
"when
the height of the publication differs by 3 centimeters or more from
the
height of the binding, specify both." And the brief paragraph on
"biblio-
graphical format" says to record it for hand-press books "whenever
the
format can be determined" (and speaks incorrectly of "quarto and
octavo
sheets"). There is no reason to extend this discussion: enough has
been
said to show that the standard approach to "descriptive" cataloguing
in
libraries remains internally inconsistent and, for the details selected
for
reporting, at odds with the expectations of descriptive bibliography.
Shortly after my 1977 piece appeared, I received a letter from a Texas
librarian complaining that I had not given cataloguers
sufficient credit for
dealing with the physical book. But one of her own statements
illustrates
the problem I was concerned with: "a monograph cataloger catalogs
from
a single copy of a book, but the card in the catalog stands for any
num-
ber of copies which may be on the shelf." This kind of wavering between
the
physical object and the verbal work is what I was criticizing, not the
fact that
cataloguers focus on fewer physical details than bibliographers
library-cataloguing world over whether the emphasis should be on the
work or the "item"—a debate that seems unnecessary to bibliographers,
for whom the subject of an entry must obviously be a physical item,
since only through physical items can verbal works and their variants be
apprehended. After the Texas librarian's imprecision, it is a pleasure to
note Paul Needham's careful distinctions among work, edition, and copy in
"Copy Description in Incunable Catalogues," Papers of the Bibliographi-
cal Society of America, 95 (2001), 173–239 (especially "General Remarks,"
pp. 203–238).
This is the place to mention a recent extensive study of "fingerprint-
ing," since
in footnote 86 I described and criticized that practice—which,
like institutional
library cataloguing, involves the concise reporting of a
few selected features of an
examined copy. The idea is that a record of
the letters (in words of the text) that
appear in specified positions can
serve as a first step in distinguishing one
edition from another. But obvi-
ously such fingerprints are not very precise
indicators, for they cannot
identify impressions, line-for-line resettings, or
resettings of any pages
(or indeed any lines) not sampled. Only a full
bibliographical analysis of
multiple copies could result in a shorthand notation
that might reliably
distinguish editions (and reveal impressions) in cases where the
title-page
details are insufficient. Nevertheless, the idea has had a long history,
and
Neil Harris has now provided a thorough historical
account and assess-
ment of it: "Tribal Lays and the History of the Fingerprint," in
Many into
One: Problems and Opportunities in Creating Shared
Catalogues of Older Books,
ed. David J. Shaw
(2006), pp. 21–72 (the essay was reprinted in 2007
as a
pamphlet with two pages of errata). A variety of fingerprinting—
noting the first
words on the second leaf recto—is described by James
Willoughby in "The Secundo Folio and Its
Uses, Medieval and Modern"
(The Library, 7th ser., 12
[2011], 237–258).
Finally, I wish to note two recent articles, addressed to library cata-
loguers,
that will be heartily applauded by bibliographers: Carlo Dumony-
tet's
"Nineteenth-Century Bookcloth Grain Classification and the Special
Collections
Cataloguer" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 104
[2010], 105–112), which holds
that "the description of bookcloth grains
ideally ought to become a standard and
integral part of catalogue rec-
ords" (p. 106) and makes suggestions accordingly
(see further below, under
"Patterns" in "Publishers' Bindings"); and Paola Puglisi's "'The Day Has
Not Yet Come …': Book-Jackets in
Library Catalogs" (Cataloging & Clas-
sification
Quarterly, 53.3 [2015], 1–14), which proclaims "the necessity
for
access to the information about a single book's book-jacket directly
from
the library catalog." It is to be hoped that these articles reflect a
trend.
| Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography | |