University of Virginia Library

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

Librarianship (renamed RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cul-
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

of the descriptive bibliographer) than those I identified in my analysis of
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

do. But it does underlie the considerable debate that has occurred in the
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.