University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD

My general introduction to descriptive bibliography, entitled "A Des-
cription of Descriptive Bibliography," was delivered as an Engelhard
Lecture on the Book at the Library of Congress on 13 September 1991. It
was published in 1992 both as a pamphlet in the Viewpoints Series of the
Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and as an article in Studies
in Bibliography (45: 1–30); and it was republished in 1998 in my Literature
and Artifacts (pp. 127–156). Four years before my lecture, David L. Vander
Meulen had delivered an impressive Engelhard Lecture, Where Angels Fear
to Tread: Descriptive Bibliography and Alexander Pope, which, like mine, pro-
vides a rationale for the activity of describing books, showing its role as
history and biography, and thus its place in humanistic scholarship. (In
2014 I pointed out the classic status of his lecture in an introduction to a
new edition of it.) Since the time of these two lectures, nothing compa-
rable has been published, and very few general accounts of any kind have
appeared. The most important is by Vander Meulen himself, "Thoughts
on the Future of Bibliographical Analysis" (Papers of the Bibliographical So-
ciety of Canada, 46 [2008], 17–33); although its emphasis is on analytical
bibliography, analysis and description are inextricable, since the former
must underlie the latter, and Vander Meulen's humanistic approach pro-
vides the best kind of grounding. (See also my Bibliographical Analysis: A
Historical Introduction, 2009.) My 2014 Winship lecture, A Bibliographer's
Creed, is not primarily about descriptive bibliography, but it includes a sec-
tion (number 14) that offers a concise statement of what makes descriptive
bibliography a genre of historical study and why it is a basic one.

David J. Supino's 2007 Breslauer Lecture (for the American Trust for
the British Library), Collecting Henry James: A Transatlantic Journey (2008),
complements Vander Meulen's Engelhard Lecture in being another ac-
count of the connections between collecting and descriptive bibliogra-
phy, by a person who sees that variants and non-firsts are essential to
the story that publishing history tells about an author's relation to the
reading public. Other collector-bibliographers have also written about
their experiences and made the same points. One of them, Jack W. C.
Hagstrom, in "Thoughts about Contemporary Author Bibliographies"
(Gazette of the Grolier Club, n.s., 50 [1999], 27–34), stresses the value of

publishers' archives and of obtaining information from authors while they
are alive. For similar reflections, see Steven E. Smith's "Roy Fuller: A Bib-
liographer's Thoughts on Collecting (or Vice Versa?)" (The Private Library,
4th ser., 5 [1992], 35–47); and B. C. Bloomfield's Brought to Book: Philip
Larkin and His Bibliographer (1995). All these accounts, though not compre-
hensive (or intended to be), do admirably convey a sense of what descrip-
tive bibliography is for and what goes into the making of a bibliography.
Another commendable essay, published the same year as my lecture, is
T. H. Howard-Hill's "Enumerative and Descriptive Bibliography," in The
Book Encompassed, ed. Peter Davison (1992), pp. 122–129; it provides a
reliable survey of some of the developments in the field in the second half
of the twentieth century. (In the same volume, my essay called "Issues in
Bibliographical Studies since 1942," pp. 24–36, covers similar ground in
its section on descriptive bibliography, pp. 25–29; this essay is reprinted
in my Essays in Bibliographical History [2013], pp. 53–67.)

I should perhaps mention that I commented on descriptive bibli-
ography in The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers (1993), pp. 40–48 and
134–137, and wrote an introduction to the 1994 printing of Bowers's
Principles of Bibliographical Description (reprinted in my Portraits and Reviews
[2015], pp. 325–333). B. J. McMullin also discussed the influence of the
Principles in "Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description" (Bibliographi-
cal Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 15 [1991], 53–59); and I
commented briefly on its historical place in "Bowers's Principles at Fifty"
(Studies in Bibliography, 52 [1999], 213–214). Anyone using the Principles
should be aware of the variants reported by Vander Meulen in "Revision
in Bibliographical Classics: 'McKerrow' and 'Bowers'" (Studies in Bibli-
ography, 52 [1999], 215–245). The relation of descriptive to enumerative
bibliography (touched on in note 52 of my lecture)—including the role
of description in the research for the great "short-title catalogue" projects
(culminating in the online English Short-Title Catalogue)—is discussed in de-
tail in my "Enumerative Bibliography and the Physical Book," published in Scholarly Publishing
in Canada and Canadian Bibliography (volume 15 of
Canadian Issues), ed. Paul Aubin et al. (1993), pp. 145–159, and reprinted
in my Literature and Artifacts (1998), pp. 186–199.

One might expect that the Oxford and Cambridge "companions" to
book history would offer dependable brief introductions to descriptive bib-
liography, but that is unfortunately not the case. The Oxford Companion to
the Book, ed. Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (2010), finds no
place in its two volumes for an essay on descriptive bibliography (though
there is one on textual criticism). Instead, the subject is treated only in
short scattered entries in its alphabetical section—entries that are often
of little use, as when issue is said to be "distinct from the basic form of the
ideal copy" and state to comprise "variants from the ideal copy not cov-

ered by issue." The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Leslie
Howsam (2015), does contain an essay by Suarez called "Book History
from Descriptive Bibliographies" (pp. 199–218); but despite its inclusion
of some good points, it turns out to be unsatisfactory. That a descrip-
tive bibliography tells the story of a literary career and provides a partial
history of publishing in the period it covers has been widely understood
since Michael Sadleir's bibliography of Trollope in 1928. This observa-
tion cannot be made too often, however, and Suarez effectively conveys
an enthusiasm for descriptive bibliographies and shows how they can be
a "highly addictive" genre for reading. It is regrettable, therefore, that
he begins with slighting comments on collation formulas as "weird" and
uncongenial to humanists who may have trouble with mathematics; and
he says he will not discuss such formulas in his essay. As a result, he leaves
out what is the heart of every description, the detailed report of a book's
physical structure. Although he recognizes how format relates to a book's
"expressive form," he misses the opportunity to draw out the textual and
production implications of collations of gatherings, especially when read
in conjunction with lists of contents and associated pagination. (See be-
low under "Collation.") Furthermore, Suarez's title, with its preposition
"from," is troubling in its suggestion that descriptive bibliographies are not
themselves book history but rather are a source for it. This idea permeates
the essay in repeated expressions such as "what descriptive bibliography
can do for book historians" (p. 201). When he speaks of "bibliographical
information turned into book-historical knowledge" (p. 204), he is depict-
ing descriptive bibliographies as repositories of facts ("information") that
can become "knowledge" in the narratives that book historians write. Yet
this view is at odds with his emphasis on how one can read bibliographies
as literary and publishing histories. His piece fails to make clear that de-
scriptive bibliographies, like all other historical writings, are not mere as-
semblages of data but are the shaped products of informed judgment.

Several manuals of bibliographical and textual study that include
short treatments of descriptive bibliography have done somewhat bet-
ter in explaining the field, but none is entirely satisfying. For example,
D. C. Greetham's chapter "Describing the Text: Descriptive Bibliogra-
phy" (pp. 153–168) in his Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1992, 1994) is
limited to title-page transcription, signature collation, pagination register,
and list of contents; and the discussion of format in the previous chapter
(pp. 119–132) is not always clear and includes diagrams that are some-
times useless (figure 18) or misleading (figures 24 and 27). Mark Bland's
A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (2010) gives intelligent atten-
tion to book structure but falters in dealing with attachments and non-
letterpress material in collation formulas (see "Collation" below). Betterl
than these two is the chapter on "Descriptive Bibliography" (pp. 36–56)

in the fourth (corrected) edition (2009) of William Proctor Williams and
Craig S. Abbott's An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (first
published in 1985), though its treatment of type, paper, and binding is
perfunctory. A fourth general manual, Neil Harris's Analytical Bibliography:
The Alternative Prospectus (2002, 2004, 2006; published only online in con-
nection with a course at the Institut d'Histoire du Livre at Lyon), deserves
mention here, despite its brief attention to descriptive bibliography (in
comments on Bowers's collation formulas), for its unusual insights, engag-
ingly presented.

It is a good sign that two recent books aimed at rare-book librarians
have given serious attention to descriptive bibliography. Steven K. Gal-
braith and Geoffrey D. Smith's Rare Book Librarianship: An Introduction and
Guide (2012) includes in its second chapter ("Rare Books as Texts and His-
torical Artifacts") a discussion of matters relevant to descriptive bibliogra-
phy (especially "Basic Descriptive Bibliography," pp. 76–96 of the online
version). But Sidney E. Berger's comprehensive Rare Books and Special Col-
lections (2014) gives far more instruction in descriptive bibliography, both
in chapter 4 ("The Physical Materials of the Collection," pp. 77–172),
which includes extensive discussions of paper, type, and binding, and
in chapter 9 ("Bibliography," pp. 249–296), which deals with format,
transcription, and collation, among other topics. His thorough treatment
(which surpasses the accounts in the manuals mentioned in the preceding
paragraph) deserves a wider audience than just rare-book librarians.

In my Engelhard Lecture, I commented on many examples of descrip-
tive bibliographies (and cited numerous others), and those references could
now of course be supplemented from the extensive work that has been ac-
complished since then. Pride of place in such a listing should probably go
to A Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Library:
BMC, Part XI: England (ed. Lotte Hellinga, 2007), the triumphant conclu
sion to the series that began publication under A. W. Pollard's direction
in 1908. Although it is a catalogue—describing a single collection—it de-
serves inclusion here for its masterly technique of bibliographical descrip-
tion, particularly notable for the use it makes of Paul Needham's analysis
of the paper of incunables. Another outstanding descriptive catalogue is A
Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the Bodleian Library
(by Alan Coates et al.; 6 vols., 2005), which is distinctive for its attention
to textual matters. One more excellent catalogue to be singled out is John
Meriton's Small Books for the Common Man (with Carlo Dumontet, 2010),
which provides detailed and illustrated descriptions of 761 eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century chapbooks in the National Art Library, London.
It is a model for dealing with ephemeral publications, supplemented with
an extensive account of the bibliographical practices employed (giving
careful thought to format and paper); it also offers a lengthy essay gener-

alizing about "book-making and book-trade patterns" on the basis of the
physical details in the descriptions (documented with sixteen tables).

A further major accomplishment is Stanley Boorman's Ottaviano
Petrucci: Catalogue Raisonné (2006), which includes a long discussion of bib-
liographical method. Mention should be made of four other large works,
impressive even though their entries are often not as fully descriptive as
one might wish (sometimes reflecting the large number of items to be ac-
commodated): David Hunter's Opera and Song Books Published in England,
1703–1726 (1997), Carol Fitzgerald's "The Rivers of America": A Descriptive
Bibliography (ed. Jean Fitzgerald, 2001), David N. Griffiths's The Bibliogra
phy of the Book of Common Prayer, 1549–1999 (2002), and Roger E. Stod-
dard's A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse
Printed from 1610 through 1820 (ed. David R. Whitesell, 2012). (For critical
comments on the Griffiths work, see B. J. McMullin's extensive review in
The Library, 7th ser., 6 [2005], 425–454.)

In author bibliography, five new landmarks for the pre-1850 period
are Jean S. Yolton's Locke (1998), William B. Todd and Ann Bowden's Sir
Walter Scott (1998), David Adams's Diderot (2000), J. D. Fleeman's Samuel
Johnson (ed. James McLaverty, 2000), and Mark L. Reed's Wordsworth
(2013). All these extraordinary works have successfully met the consider-
able challenges posed by those authors; among their varying excellences
is the significant attention paid to press figures. Yolton even provides, in
a few instances, tables showing the distribution of figures in outer and
inner formes (though it must also be noted that sometimes, for sizable
books with a great many figures, only generalizations, rather than full
records, are given). Impressive works inspire remarkable reviews, which
are themselves valuable contributions to the literature of the field. The
most notable examples are Paul Needham's of the Bodleian catalogue
in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 101 (2007), 359–409 (the
climax of his series of lengthy analyses of other incunable catalogues [80
(1986), 500–511 87 (1993) 93–105; 91 (1997), 539–555; 95 (2001) 173–
239]); B. J. McMullin's of the Todd-Bowden Scott in Bibliographical Society
of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 23 (1999), 78–106; and David L.
Vander Meulen's of the Fleeman Johnson in The Age of Johnson, 13 (2002),
389–435.

Anthony James West's project for describing all copies of the Shake-
speare First Folio, as finally carried out by Eric Rasmussen and five
assistants in The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (2012), is
essentially an exhaustive record of copy-specific information; it must be
accounted a greatly flawed landmark, despite the sound basis established
by West (see especially his piece in The Library, 6th ser., 21 [1999], 1–49),
because those to whom he entrusted the work were not up to the task (see
the devastating review by Ian Jackson in Papers of the Bibliographical Society

of America, 108 [2014], 243–254). The volume does not supersede West's
two-volume The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book (2001–03),
though it does contain many additional details. Another book that calls
attention to itself by its size and the importance of its subject is Ann Jor-
dan Laeuchli's A Bibliographical Catalog of William Blackstone (ed. James E.
Mooney, 2015). Although it serves by default as a bibliography of Black-
stone, it is not one; instead, as the title indicates, it is a catalogue—of
Yale's collection, supplemented with items from other collections. It lacks
many of the features expected in a bibliography, but on the level of a cata-
logue it is commendable (and includes collations of gatherings, though
generally without identification of formats).

Of the numerous descriptive bibliographies of later nineteenth- and
twentieth-century authors published since 1991, I wish first to cite six
dealing with major authors because they illustrate with particular force
what can emerge from the hands of serious collectors—who continue to
be, as they always have been, a major source of author bibliographies (as
indeed are some of those mentioned above, such as Reed). Two of these
six bibliographies are outstanding three-volume works: Kenneth Black-
well and Harry Ruja's Bertrand Russell (with the assistance of Bernd Froh-
mann, John G. Slater, and Sheila Turcon; 1994) and Ronald I. Cohen's
Churchill (2006). The other four, in single volumes, also treat extensive
bodies of work: Joel Myerson's Whitman (1993), Jack W. C. Hagstrom and
Bill Morgan's James Merrill (2009), David A. Richards's Kipling (2010), and
the 2014 revision of David Supino's Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue
of a Collection of Editions to 1921 (first published in 2006). All were writ-
ten by collectors, but the Russell shows the results of cooperative activity
in connection with an editorial project and archive (the Russell Archive
at McMaster University)—a "symbiotic" relationship, according to the
introduction to the bibliography. Of the five Russell bibliographers, one,
John G. Slater, formed the major Russell collection now at the Fisher
Library of the University of Toronto; the other four participated over
a quarter-century in filling out the other great collection, at McMaster
University. Both the Russell and the Churchill are notable for the depth
and intelligence of their coverage of every aspect of a vast oeuvre and are
especially rich in their contribution to publishing history and biography.
The level of understanding is indicated by this statement in the introduc-
tion to the Russell: "Compiling the formula, and examining it for irregu-
larities, can be informative of the final stages of a book's composition, in
both the authorial and book-making senses of the word" (p. xxxiii).

Kipling was also prolific, and the Richards bibliography uses an in-
serted CD for certain categories of material and for color illustrations.
The inconvenience of this arrangement is outweighed by the wealth of in
formation that apparently could not feasibly have been provided in print,

although the Russell and Churchill manage to do so. The thoroughness
of the Hagstrom-Morgan Merrill is shown by its inclusion of dust-jacket
blurbs written by Merrill, quotations from him in writings by others, and
a section of "Inscriptions in Books Recorded in Book Dealers' or Auction
Catalogues"; and Myerson's Whitman is notable for its handling of later
printings and its use of copyright records and deposit copies. Supino's
work, as its modest title indicates, claims only to be a catalogue of his
James collection; but the collection includes multiple copies, variants, and
non-first editions and impressions, and he has added to his descriptions
extensive accounts of printing and publishing history based on research
in the publishers' archives. In this instance, a descriptive catalogue of a
collection supersedes the previous bibliographies of its subject. Dealers,
as well as collectors, are in a privileged position for access to the copies
needed for a descriptive bibliography, and perhaps the most impressive
example of a recent bibliography written by a dealer is Jon Gilbert's Ian
Fleming (2012); it is a monumental book of 692 very large pages, providing
detailed treatment of later printings and publishing history, along with
many color illustrations of bindings and jackets.

Among the other post-1991 bibliographies worth singling out for par
ticular features are Wayne G. Hammond's Tolkien (with the assistance of
Douglas A. Anderson, 1993) and Pierre Coustillan's Gissing (2005), both of
which contain many narrative accounts. George Miller and Hugoe Mat-
thews's Richard Jefferies (1993) is noteworthy for its thorough treatment of
typography, layout, binding, and periodical contributions, its record of
copies with dated inscriptions, and its prefatory discussion of the scarcity
of some nineteenth-century editions—which includes a statement that
should be widely publicized: "Variation is the rule, not the exception,
in books of the nineteenth century and well beyond. … Sometimes it is
difficult to find two [copies] exactly alike in all respects." One noticeable
trend in recent years has been the increased attention to dust-jackets
(which some bibliographers formerly refused to treat at all). A few ex
amples (out of many), in addition to the bibliographies already cited, that
contain thorough jacket descriptions are Wayne G. Hammond's Arthur
Ransome (2000), Brian Hubber and Vivian Smith's Patrick White (2004),
and Jack De Bellis and Michael Broomfield's Updike (2007).

Of the major series of descriptive bibliographies—Soho, Pittsburgh,
and St. Paul's—the first publishes new titles only rarely; the second
ceased publication in 2002; and the third, St. Paul's, was purchased in
1997 by Oak Knoll Press, which is now the leading publisher of descrip-
tive bibliographies. Some of the Oak Knoll titles bear a joint imprint
with St. Paul's (as they had since 1991); some are advertised as being part
of the "Winchester Bibliographies of Twentieth Century Writers"; and
some have a joint imprint with the British Library. A few of Oak Knoll's

bibliographies constitute in effect a mini-series of their own, though not
designated as such, for they are uniform in having a large page size and
a CD inserted in a pocket at the back; examples are the Updike just men-
tioned, Steven Abbott's Gore Vidal (2009), George W. Crandell's Arthur
Miller (2011), and C. Edgar Grissom's Hemingway (2011). An unfortunate
characteristic of this "series," however, is that in most cases signature
collations are not included.

Some of the post-1991 bibliographies in the major series are the
following:

SOHO: Neil Brennan and A. R. Redway's Graham Greene (1992) and William S. Peterson's Betjeman (2006);

PITTSBURGH : Joseph R. McElrath, Jr.'s
Frank Norris (1992), George W. Crandell's
Tennessee Williams (1995), Rodger L. Tarr's Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1996), Richard J.
Schrader's Mencken (1998), and Matthew J. Bruccoli and Park Bucker's Joseph Heller
(2002), plus Myerson's Whitman, already cited;

ST. PAUL'S and OAK KNOLL: Leila Luedeking and Michael Edmonds's Leonard
Woolf (1992), Sylvia Harlow's W. H. Davies (1993), George P. Lilley's Anthony Powell
(1993), Robert Cross and Michael Perkin's Elspeth Huxley (1996), John J. Walsdorf's
Julian Symons (1996), Gillian Fenwick's Orwell (1998), John Windle and Karma Pip-
pin's Dibdin (1999), Donald D. Eddy's Richard Hurd (1999), Robert Cross and Ann
Ravenscroft Hulme's Vita Sackville-West (1999), Peter J. Mitham's Robert Service (2000),
M. Clark Chambers's Kay Boyle (2002), William Baker and John C. Ross's George Eliot
(2002) and Pinter (2005), Philip W. Errington's Masefield (2004), Eugene LeMire's
William Morris (2006), William Baker and Gerald N. Wachs's Stoppard (2010), Maura
Ives's Christina Rossetti (2011), Jack W. C. Hagstrom and Joshua S. Odell's Thom Gunn
(vol. 2, 2013), and Michael Broomfield's Robinson Jeffers (2013), plus several already
mentioned (those on Hemingway, Kipling, Merrill, Miller, Ransome, Tolkien, Up-
dike, Vidal, and White).

A few other worthy bibliographies, not in these series, are Bill Morgan's
Allen Ginsberg (1995), Steven E. Smith's
Roy Fuller (1996), Walter Smith's Elizabeth Gaskell (1998), Carl Spadoni's Stephen Leacock (1998), Robert W.
Mattila's George Sterling (2004), Rand Brandes and Michael J. Durkan's
Seamus Heaney (2008), Catherine M. Parisian's Frances Burney's "Cecilia"
(2012), and Carl Spadoni and Judith Skelton Grant's Robertson Davies
(2014), with its extensive production details.

All these post-1991 titles obviously constitute only a selective record,
intended to supplement the one in my 1991 Engelhard Lecture (primarily
in notes 33–47 and related text). A few fuller, though more specialized,
accounts have appeared. For earlier work, I referred in my lecture to my
1968 survey of descriptive bibliographies of American authors (note 41)
and my 1975 one on eighteenth-century books (note 37)—both reprinted
since then in my Essays in Bibliographical History (2013), pp. 137–160 and

283–302. A more recent survey was provided by Rodger L. Tarr in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1995 (1996), pp. 220–234. Entitled
"Primary Bibliography: A Retrospective," it assesses eight series (including
Soho, Pittsburgh, and St. Paul's, along with some that offer only enumera-
tion, not description) and provides convenient lists of titles in each series.
In the 2002 revision of my Introduction to Bibliography, I included a selective
list of some 125 descriptive bibliographies published between 1908 and
2002 (section 4C, pp. 176–179)—as well as a list of writings about descrip-
tive bibliography (4B, pp. 168–175). The most extensive listings (as I noted
in 1992) appear in my Guide to the Study of United States Imprints (1971) and
T. H. Howard-Hill's Index to British Literary Bibliography (1969–2009).

I have held any reference to Paul Needham's Galileo Makes a Book
(2011) until my concluding comment because it serves as a model of what
descriptive and analytical bibliography at the highest level can accom-
plish. It is a book-length account of a single edition, Galileo's Sidereus
Nuncius of 1610. Besides an exemplary physical description, accompanied
by notes on eighty-three examined copies, it provides a detailed narrative
of the composition of the work and the production of the book, using (and
carefully explaining) the relevant techniques of bibliographical analysis. It
demonstrates not only how analysis and description are intertwined but
also how the two together contribute to intellectual history.