A Companion to the History of the Book (5 page)

The bibliographer’s next task after identifying the book is to ascertain if it is perfect; that is, if it embodies the proper intentions of all the agents in its production correctly. Some errors are obvious; some will only be detected from comparison of many copies of the same title, often by optical collation of the text. When the Hinman Collator (developed to compare copies of the Shakespeare First Folio) was applied to the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the result was “the discovery of ‘a variant state or concealed impression’ . . . for every one of the first English editions collated” (Howard-Hill 1992: 124). From analysis of variations in copies in relation to their understanding of the physical processes that made the book, bibliographers move toward writing a description of the book based on the concept of the “ideal copy,” that is, the intended form of the book against which particular copies can be measured. (Hence such notes on copies of books in catalogues as “Lacks leaf [A4]”. )

Analytical bibliography of the material object is fundamentally historical. To understand the production of the book at a certain period in history, employing the characteristic means of production of the age within the social practices that influenced both labor and capital, involves bibliographers’ knowledge of those processes and social conditions and the ability to apply them to the material object at hand. Not all bibliographical analyses may lead to formal descriptions of books, but as an historical science analytical bibliography needs no further object.

Descriptive Bibliography

Descriptive bibliography, which Tanselle (1992a: 25) characterized as “history, as a genre of historical writing,” seeks to establish a description of the book beyond the simplest level used in basic enumerative bibliographies in relation to various levels of potential use. Its primary function is “to present all the evidence about a book which can be determined by analytical bibliography applied to a material object” (Bowers 1949: 34). Descriptive bibliographies differ from enumerative “in respect of the quantity and kind of detail which is included” (Stokes 1969: 96). To illustrate this point, Stokes compares the one-line entry for the Shakespeare First Folio in the
New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature
, adequate for its simple purpose; the twelve- (now nine-) line entry with additional bibliographical information in Pollard and Redgrave (1976–91: no. 22273); the more detailed four-page description in Greg’s
A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration
(1957: 1109 –12); and the 468 pages of his
The Shakespeare First Folio : Its Bibliographical and Textual History
(1955). Now, following Hinman’s magisterial analysis of copies of the Folio in the Folger Shakespeare Library (1963), Anthony James West (2003) has been able to extend the description of the Folio to details of the surviving copies, in a volume of 438 pages. These last works show how strenuous analytical and descriptive bibliography may be, especially when, as in the preparation of a descriptive bibliography of the works of a prolific author, a bibliographer must travel widely to obtain access to multiple copies of the author’s work. This and the formal requirements of bibliographical description (Bowers 1949), elaborated in recent years by Tanselle (see Howard-Hill 1992: 129), render the preparation of a descriptive bibliography a most demanding scholarly task.

Historians of the book do not always need to be able to undertake bibliographical analysis or description themselves: they may have other concerns. However, they should be able to read bibliographical literature with a modicum of understanding, and certainly be able to read bibliographical descriptions of books for the historical and cultural information they contain. Many recent bibliographies devoted to individual authors are essentially biographical (Laurence 1983), presenting descriptions of their works in chronological order of publication. They usually include documentary information about the gestation and composition of these works, the authors’ relations with publishers, their publishing history, and notices of textual variations. Such bibliographies go far beyond the provision of what has been traditionally considered “bibliographical” information into wider realms of culture, economics, and textual transmission and reception. In so doing, they underscore the importance of bibliography for the history of the book.

Textual Bibliography

The interest of literary students in the works of authors contributed to the growth of textual bibliography in the previous century. Textual bibliography (or textual analysis) is essentially the bibliographical study of text in relation to the material processes of its transmission. Editing is the application of the findings of textual analysis to the production of different kinds of editions for different kinds of readers, under the aegis of one or another theory of editing. Although “[t]he chief purpose of bibliography is to serve the production and distribution of correct texts” (Gaskell 1972: 1), not all bibliography is subordinated to text, and not all textual bibliography is promulgated in the form of editions. Later twentieth-century bibliotextual theory, as developed by Jerome McGann, treated a published text as the result of a collaboration between the author and all those (amanuenses, proof-correctors, editors, publishers) who had an opportunity to alter that text (McGann 1983). This trend was propelled by an egalitarian devaluation of authorial intentionality, combined with a growing interest in popular forms of literature and their dissemination amongst lower-income readerships, often in adaptations and abridgements. (For a fuller discussion of this approach to the book, see chapter 2.)

Historical Bibliography

Historical bibliography focuses on the physical processes that contribute to the production of books, such as copy-editing, composing, proofreading, printing, binding, and illustrating. Historical bibliographers have compiled biographical dictionaries of printers, booksellers, and publishers, as well as individual biographies of prominent members of the book trade. They have also produced studies of the history of type-founding, papermaking, composition, printing, binding, publishing, bookselling, and the personnel and organization of the book trade. The history of libraries and book-collecting, both personal and institutional, is also an interest shared by book historians and historical bibliographers.

Book historians learn from historical bibliographers that the literary contents of a book at any time may have been modified for non-literary reasons. For instance, when Benjamin Franklin undertook to publish Samuel Richardson’s novel,
Pamela
, he was obliged to commit a large amount of his capital to purchase paper for it, usually the main cost of a book. Despite setting the text in small type in order to condense its three volumes into one, he used seventeen sheets of paper for each copy, instead of the up-to-four sheets normally required for his other publications. Later eighteenth-century American printers found that it was possible to compete with British imports only by abridging the novel: Franklin’s was the only full text among thirty-eight editions published in America in the century (Stallybrass 2004: 1348), where
Pamela
was usually read in shortened form.

Bibliography and Modern Book History

Now, after the naming of parts, we can consider more specifically how bibliographers support book history in exploring authorship, reading, and publishing. The benefit to book historians of familiarity with bibliographical scholarship is incontestable; its neglect, as the president of the Bibliographical Society of America illustrated in her annual address (Mayo 2004: 15), can be debilitating. Historical bibliography makes a definitive contribution to book history through the history of libraries. Analytical bibliography plays its part by defining the contents of libraries or collections, which necessarily must be identified before any library history can be written. For the study of early British or American libraries, for example, book historians and bibliographers both use a variety of manuscript materials: diaries, minutes of library societies, and lists of books in national and county archives; advertisements and references to libraries in newspapers, histories, and memoirs; and, of course, the surviving printed catalogues, regulations, and transactions of libraries. And bibliographers are essential for overcoming the two main problems for the study of libraries: chronology and access.

Chronology (needless to say) is crucial to history. But even when one narrows attention from the comprehensive history of libraries to simply the history of their catalogues (bearing in mind that to a great extent their catalogues
are
their histories) chronological problems are rife. Bibliographers discover that many library catalogues consist of an initial edition to which was added any number of additional lists, appendices, or supplements. These may have concurrent page numbers, extending the pagination of the original catalogue. Sometimes the register of gatherings will be continuous, or the supplement may begin at signature A or B. Sometimes the supplement will start a new register but continue the pagination – or the converse. The supplements or appendices may have title pages or merely caption- or head-titles. A printer’s colophon may give an indication of the place of publication, but dates in colophons are quite rare. Most catalogues survive only in single or a very few copies, widely dispersed, making it difficult for bibliographers to determine by comparison of copies whether to catalogue a volume as a single bibliographical item or many separately datable items. Most often, they will not be able to determine whether a particular volume was reissued with the supplements or whether they were bound-in subsequently.

The style of the book entries in early library catalogues designed for general use is remarkably succinct, often merely an abbreviated name and truncated title. Dates are usually not given for monographs, but they may appear when the library lists its holdings of a serial such as the
Annual Register
or
Gentleman’s Magazine
. In the absence of any explicit dating, bibliographers must attempt to locate each item in history themselves. They follow the rough working principle that supplementary catalogues usually appear in chronological order, after the initial dated or datable catalogue that establishes the base date for the supplements. The appendices can be dated from entries that bear dates in the catalogue (for example, “
Annual Register.
1794”) or from entries that appear to relate to recently published novels that are datable from other bibliographical sources, such as the British Library catalogue (BLC). In the first instance, bibliographers do not know whether
un
dated items later than the noted dated items occur in the catalogue. In the second, they cannot be sure that the items that they have selected to look up in BLC or NUC truly provide a
terminus ad quem
for the publication of the catalogue: had bibliographers selected different entries to check in bibliographies or catalogues, they might have reached different conclusions about the conjectural date of publication. Eventually, any such dates that bibliographers assign to undated catalogues, without unimpeachable external evidence, are merely more- or less-informed guesses, indicated in modern catalogues and bibliographical databases by the use of square brackets and/or question marks with the date.

It is clear that the chroniclers of these library catalogues are themselves creating a history of the book. The history of libraries in Britain and America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depends to a substantial extent on the interplay of the datable information supplied by the document and the bibliographer’s knowledge of the existing historical literature related to the works being catalogued. Insofar as the historicity of the book is concerned, therefore, bibliographers make a crucial and indispensable contribution.

Access to this material is another matter. The United Kingdom deposit libraries, notably the British and Bodleian libraries and the National Library of Scotland, may possess no more than a fraction of the catalogues of provincial libraries: calculations made from my records suggest about 30 percent. Many catalogues can be found only in the libraries or archives of the regions where they originated, but even such well-documented extant libraries as the Leeds Library or the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Literary and Philosophical Society do not hold complete runs of their own catalogues. Often access to these catalogues cannot be sought in such tools as the ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue), NSTC (
Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue
), COPAC (the University Research Libraries’ Catalogue), UK Public Libraries on the Web, or OBI (OPACs in Britain and Ireland) that give access to British public libraries and their OPACs, simply because many small libraries do not have home pages on the Internet, and many more do not have OPACs. Also, most OPACs are not retrospective and do not include older material.

There are other aspects of bibliographical description vital to historians of the book. The localization of the products of presses and publishers is almost as important as authority and dating to book historians: if they are to understand the conditions and character of local book trades correctly, they must have the information that bibliographers have made available in printed catalogues and bibliographies (with indexes) or in on-line databases like the ESTC, which can facilitate searches by places of origin and the names of the makers and distributors of books. The ESTC, which is available online, “assisted, if it did not actually encourage, the transformation of bibliographical studies to Book History” (Williams 2003: 219).

However, as essential as short title catalogues are to constructing a full understanding of the place of books in society, they do not provide all the information that might have been expected from them. In particular, efforts to write the histories of local book production or of individual members of the book trade are frustrated by the variability of information supplied in catalogues. It is difficult to reconstruct the publishing activities of stationers whose names in imprints or colophons have been omitted by modern bibliographers to save space in databases. Also, the omission in the STCs of a record of printers’ colophons as well as publisher’s imprints similarly affects the possibility of understanding the relationship between publishers and the country printers who often worked for them, and fails to provide a direct way of identifying printers’ output. The recognition that existing enumerative bibliographical resources do not supply the whole range of information that book historians require in order fully to sociologize “the book” points to the contribution that other forms of descriptive or even analytical bibliography may make to the history of the book.