 | Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography |  |
EDITION, IMPRESSION, ISSUE, AND STATE
My discussion of the basic classificatory terms in descriptive bibliog-
raphy,
entitled "The Bibliographical Concepts of Issue and State," was
published in Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America, 69
(1975), 17–66.
I concentrated on issue and state because they have been frequently misun-
derstood and
less consistently employed than edition and impression, which
did not seem to require further definition beyond what was
generally
recognized. As explained in the first few pages, edition refers to all copies
resulting primarily (if not always entirely)
from a single job of typographi-
cal composition; and impression (or printing) denotes all copies of an
edition
printed in one continuous (even if multi-day) operation. (It might be
a
good idea for bibliographers to use "exemplars" instead of "copies," since
the
latter implies lack of variation.) But no such clear-cut distinction be-
tween issue and state had been (or has been even
yet) regularly accepted by
bibliographers, though the two refer to equally discrete
situations, which
can be simply stated: an issue is a group
of copies of an impression that
give evidence of forming a consciously planned
publishing unit, whereas
state refers to the kind of
correction that does not call attention to itself
as a marketing effort and that can
only categorize an individual part of a
book (such as a page or a binding), not a
book as a whole (since any given
book may contain mixed states).
This formulation was meant as a clarification of the essential distinc-
tion
between the two concepts that underlay Bowers's complex
definitions,
and it has received some degree of acceptance. The Library of
Congress
and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) adopted
my
approach for their rare-book cataloguing manual (see above, under
"Relation to
Library Cataloguing"), in which the headnote to the glossary
says that the
definitions of issue and state use my
wording. The ACRL also
commended my definitions in its Printing
and Publishing Evidence: Thesauri
for Use in Rare Book and Special Collections
Cataloguing (1986). Other parts of
the book world, however,
still do not employ these definitions consistently.
The introductions to
bibliographies continue to display a multiplicity of
variant definitions, and it is
common to find state used to refer to whole
copies of books.
Of course, almost any definition, if carefully worded, can
be usable, but confusion
is bound to arise when statements from bibliog-
raphies are cited without the
prefatory definitions.
The same kinds of variation in usage also occur in bibliographical
essays. Rolf E. Du Rietz, for example, in "Buyer's Emissions and
Ideal
Copies" (Text [Uppsala], 5.1 [1994],
2–38), argues that state must some-
times apply to an entire
book, as when a plate or leaf is inserted or deleted
"without any kind of
substitution or correction being directly involved"
(p. 10). But the presence or
absence of a plate or leaf may affect only
one point in a book, just as much as a
stop-press alteration or a cancel
does; and when, on occasion, it affects the whole
book, as an inserted
dedication might, it would produce an issue. The kind of
situation Du
Rietz postulates provides no reason for
blurring the sharp line between
issue and state. And Lotte Hellinga, in "Analytical Bibliography
and the
Study of Early Printed Books with a Case-Study of the Mainz Catholicon"
(Gutenberg-Jahrbuch,
1989, pp. 47–96), asserts that "'issue' always means
re-setting of a
substantial section of text" and that "the terms state,
im-
pression, issue, and edition … represent not only
a rising scale of quantity
of change, but also express an increasingly deliberate
involvement of the
printer" (p. 51). However useful these definitions may be for her
discus-
sion, they are not appropriate for general use.
Another nonstandard use of issue occurs as part of Stanley Boorman's
rethinking of the terms of classification in
his Ottaviano Petrucci (2006),
pp. 446–449. He
states, "A single issue comprises all the copies of a book
that were put on sale
under the same arrangements." By saying "a book"
(meaning a work) rather than "an
edition," he is able to make edition
subordinate to issue in some situations, as when later resettings with
the
same date "were intended to be sold under the same arrangements as
the
earlier." Those editions "were, therefore, part of the same issue." The
fact
that printing history and publishing history do not necessarily coincide
make issue (a publishing term) sometimes subordinate to edition (a printing
term) and sometimes not can only produce confusion. In this instance,
for example, "arrangements" is not a term that reflects physical evidence:
there is no way to tell from the books themselves whether or not the later
editions were "put on sale under the same arrangements." Bibliographical
classification, by definition, emerges from the evidence within the physi-
cal object being classified, and resetting of type must be taken as the most
fundamental level. If one has external evidence for linking two editions
as a publishing effort, one can make a statement to that effect; but issue
must be reserved for one kind of physical change within an edition. (How
extensive a portion of text needs to be reset in order to call the result a
different edition is, as Boorman recognizes, a separate question, and one
about which opinions may vary; but he unfortunately chooses to call an
individual reset sheet "a second impression of that part of the book.") As
for state, Boorman understands that "the concept of a single 'state' for a
whole book is meaningless," and he admirably explains the reason.
One prolific bibliographer, Joel Myerson, has explicitly
rejected my
approach to issue in favor of Bowers's. In "Some Comments on the Bib-
liographical Concept of 'Issue'"
(South Central Review, 5.1 [Spring
1988],
8–16), he takes up four "troublesome" kinds of situations, all
of which can
in fact be easily handled under my definitions. His first class of
examples
involves publishers' casings (bindings) and wrappers: copies of a
single
impression put on sale simultaneously in cloth and wrappers, or
published
with different series designations or publishers' names on the
casings,
or released with either British or American prices on the wrappers,
or
made available with different styles (not simply colors) of binding, such
as
cloth, half-calf, or full leather. The fact that there are no changes to
the sheets
in any of these instances should not give one pause (as it does
Myerson) because all the differences clearly identify copies that belong
to
separate marketing units. Myerson's second class of
examples deals with
dust-jackets. He cites instances where only a jacket or a box
shows that
the copies so housed are part of a series; but such indications are no
dif-
ferent from those on casings. In connection with a paste-over cancel of
a
publisher's name on a jacket, Myerson says, "The label
on the jacket spine
represents as clear a decision to issue
the book by another publisher as
would be changing the stamping on the casing or
cancelling the title page,
but do we really want to call this an issue of the book?"
Why not? His
third category concerns special-paper copies, and he is correct to
point
out that sometimes such copies constitute an impression, not an issue.
But
the fact that at other times they can be issues (as when the trimming
of some copies
creates two leaf sizes) is not altered. His final category is
and marketed as such, it is hard to see how they could be regarded as
anything other than an issue (in contrast to the copies that are signed for
particular bookstores or publication parties).
Myerson feels that his examples show how some publication
practices
"put a strain on any definition of issue." Every
classification scheme natu-
rally has to deal with borderline cases, but they do not
"strain" it; rather,
the classification facilitates a course of thinking that makes
the particular
situation stand out clearly. Myerson
prefers Bowers's approach because,
"by restricting issue to the sheets of a book," he "requires other evidences
of
marketing decisions …to be verbally described rather than definition-
ally
categorized." Yet Myerson recognizes that my system also
"allows …
descriptive or explanatory notes." Indeed, I have always maintained
(and
not only in this essay) that bibliographers should never hesitate to
add
discursive explanations in order to make a situation clear, which after
all
is the goal. In the end it hardly matters whether one labels a book
"first
impression, second issue" or "first impression, binding B," for
example,
as long as the significance of either one is explained. Since Myerson un-
derstands that "casings and dust jackets must be
considered as part of
the marketing process," it is odd that he favors an approach
"restricting
issue to the sheets of a book" simply because
it "requires" an attached ac-
count of the other parts of a book that provide
evidence about marketing.
(Four years earlier he had held a different view, allowing
casings to deter-
mine issues, in a review in Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America, 78
[1984], 48.) He is thus
sacrificing the coherence of the concept of issue to
a
presumed advantage in presentation; but any label may at times benefit
from an
explanation, and the label itself should encompass the whole
range of relevant
possibilities. (Matthew J. Bruccoli, in his
"Editorial"
for the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook
1996
[1997], pp. 285–286,
also fails to think
through the concept when he asserts that issue cannot
relate
to bindings because "bindings have no connection with text" and
claims that the
"description of a book and its dust jacket are independent
of each other.")
In 1991, B. J. McMullin (in "Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical De-
scription," Bibliographical
Society of Australia and New
Zealand Bulletin, 15:
53–59) argued that issue, which in the Principles seems to be largely
re-
stricted to reissue, should be expanded to include distinct "planned
units"
that were published simultaneously, such as copies with different
booksell-
ers' imprints or copies printed on different qualities of paper
(sometimes
labeled with printed paper-quality marks on the first pages of
gatherings).
(He also referred in passing to states being
formed by "corrections.") This
recognition of simultaneous issues coincides with a
point I had made in
my 1975 essay (though I explicitly enlarged the
concept to cover publish-
came independently to the same conclusions confirms the suitability of
the definitions I have proposed and continue to advocate. Some years
later McMullin reinforced his view when he studied the phenomenon of
books in colonial series being converted (or converted back) to domestic
issues: he advocated a fuller description of the paper, leaf dimensions, and
bindings of such books as an aid to identification when there are no ver-
bal changes ("Domestic—Colonial—Domestic," Biblionews and Australian
Notes & Queries, 361/362 [March/June 2009], 29–37).
The implications of my definitions for the arrangement (and thus the
entry
numbering) of a bibliography, as well as for the uses of the impor-
tant concept of
subedition (and its relation to geography), all of which
are
taken up in section IV of the 1975 essay, were further discussed in
1984
in my essay on "Arrangement" (see below). In that later
discussion, I also
explained why I think the concept of subedition is preferable to that of plat-
ing
(proposed by James L. W. West III) as a classification between
edition
and impression. And the
brief treatment of ideal copy in 1975, which
serves
its purpose in that context (but which does not explore the problems
pres-
ent in Bowers's handling of the concept), was
greatly expanded five years
later in my essay on that subject (see above). In the
end, despite various
complications that may arise in certain instances, it is
important to keep in
mind the essential simplicity and distinctness of the concepts
underlying
the four basic terms of classification.
| Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography | |