A Companion to the History of the Book (4 page)

The book is a survivor. Over its more than five thousand years of history it has moved from one material form to another and spread to almost all cultures and climes. It has taken on roles and then relinquished them. It has recorded, informed, entertained, provoked, inspired, and outraged. In the past couple of centuries it has been threatened with extinction by the telegraph, by the cinema, by radio, by television, and by computers and the Internet. It rarely meets these challenges head on but, like the endlessly protean form that it is, it adapts and reconfigures and comes back in new forms offering new services. The computer may be the book’s latest challenger, but go into any bookshop and look at the rows of books devoted to getting the best out of your computer, or its software, or its peripherals. Go to any newsagent and count the number of magazines devoted to the use of that very electronic hardware that was supposed to replace the book. As virtually every book historian who has given a public lecture will attest, the question of whether or not the book as we know it has a future is almost always the first and most pressing question asked. Given the book’s adaptability and its ability to migrate from one material form to another, one might be inclined to be optimistic. However, whatever the future of the book may be, we hope that you, the reader, having perused this volume, will agree that the book has had quite a past.

References

Casson, Lionel (2001)
Libraries in the Ancient World.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1979)
The Printing Press as
an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Methods and Approaches

1

Why Bibliography Matters

T. H. Howard-Hill

Year by year millions of copies of books are published and distributed to all the countries of the world. Books are printed on paper, on vellum or parchment, on wood, and on metal: any surface capable of bearing ink can carry text. The common codex – a collection of leaves hinged at the left – is given paper covers, or none, or covers of cloth, pasteboard, plastic, leather, or even human skin. Books are disseminated to institutions, warehouses, bookshops, libraries, private collections, and households so that they are omnipresent: it is unusual for anyone to be far from books. Books are among the most widely dispersed artifacts in world culture, and the book is still the commonest form of transmitting information and knowledge.

It is primarily the task of bibliographers to deal with the flood of books that issues from the world’s presses. Bibliographers are the good housekeepers of the world of books. Even though most books declare their origin and auspices on the title page or its verso, bibliographers must determine a host of crucial details that many people would think transparently obvious. There are books with title pages in unexpected places and books without title pages at all. Many books do not have clear author statements. Many official publications, for instance, credit the contributions of so many committees, commissions, departments, and offices that it is difficult to decide which of them gives the books their authorness or authority. A significant portion of popular modern books such as novels are published pseudonymously; unless authors’ real names are discovered, such authors will be deprived of part of their work and their literary biographies will be inadequate. This is only one area in which potential obscurities in the identification of a book must be resolved.

In order to put books – or at least bibliographical records – in their right places, at the very least bibliographers must establish who wrote a book or at least assumed intellectual responsibility for its content; its title (if it is a translation, the title in the original language); the edition (whether the book has been published before and where the edition stands in relation to the title’s previous publishing history); the place of publication and the name of the publisher (that is, the issuing body); and the date of publication, possibly the most crucial datum of all, about which more will be said.

The process of putting books into their right places and of recording where they are is
bibliographical control.
Without such fundamental instruments of bibliographical control as bibliographies (lists of books) and catalogues (libraries’, booksellers’, publishers’), and their modern extensions into cyberspace, particularly as databases and OPACs (online publicly accessible catalogues), the complex modern literary culture that we take for granted would scarcely exist. Without these tools, which the Internet is making more widely and usefully accessible, the information explosion of the past decade or so could not have occurred. Modern students are more familiar with electronic databases (for instance, the MLA International Bibliography or the English Short Title Catalogue [ESTC]) than catalogues and bibliographies, but in most cases they depend on print. Historians of the book particularly should not neglect the printed works that lie behind the electronic records, or the artifacts that underlie the printed records.

Bibliographical control probably began when an individual or an institution had too many books to recall their titles or their position in the collection. To classify or even to arrange books on a shelf in alphabetical order of authors’ names or titles is a form of bibliographical control whether or not the arrangement is accompanied by a written list. However, early librarians found that it was not efficient to arrange all their books, ranging from huge elephant folios to miniature books like thumbnail Bibles, in a single sequence on the shelves. It was better to classify the books by size or form (as maps are in most large libraries). Alternative forms of classification could be considered, from which arose the considerable physical complexity of modern libraries, where catalogues must reveal not only which books are in the collection but where they might be found. Librarians are the foremost of the bibliographers who exert control over the multifarious products of the world’s presses.

So the merest neophyte in book history studies is already the beneficiary of three or more thousand years of bibliographical activity: the discipline of bibliography has a long history and an extensive literature. Its essence is taxonomy (classification), which bibliography shares with such studies as botany, paleontology, and astronomy, and therefore depends on logical principles common to most sciences. Of this kind is
enumerative
(or systematic) bibliography,
analytical
(or critical) bibliography, and
descriptive
bibliography, to employ common distinctions (Stokes 1969). The greatest English bibliographer of the first part of the twentieth century enlarged the simple definition of bibliography to “the science of the transmission of literary documents” (Greg 1966: 241, see also 75–88, 207–25, 239–66). Therefore, often regarded as a further division of bibliography is
textual
bibliography, in which bibliographers or textual critics study the taxonomy of the texts that are transmitted through documents that may have a different taxonomy. Finally, there is
historical
bibliography, which in itself is basically not taxonomic. (This chapter and the illustrative examples it cites necessarily depend on my experience with British books and bibliography.)

Enumerative Bibliography

Bibliographers, particularly enumerative bibliographers – those who make lists or catalogues of books – consider books from several viewpoints. Titles can be selected for inclusion in a bibliography on the basis of their
period
of publication: hence the well-known printed short title catalogues of English books printed 1475–1640 (Pollard and Redgrave 1976–91) and 1641–1700 (Wing 1972–88) and lists of
incunables
(books printed before 1500). There are lists of books written or printed in particular
languages
(for instance, Lloyd 1948), or printed or published in particular
places
(Cordeaux and Merry 1981), or produced by particular
printers
or
publishers
or
binders
(Isaac 1989), or printed in particular
types
(Carter 1967), or – too common to require illustration – books written by individual
authors
or classes of authors like women or children. And, of course, innumerable bibliographies gather together records of books on particular
subjects
. Of paramount importance to historians of the book are the bibliographies that take bibliography and book history as their subjects. A principal example for English bibliography is Howard-Hill (1969–99); for American bibliography, Tanselle (1971). These bibliographies are readily approached through such general reference guides as Harner (2002).

All of these bibliographical attributes can exist in different combinations in a single bibliography. However, in every instance, the compilation of a list depends on the bibliographical (analytical) examination of copies of books. The longest bibliography starts with the first copy. Not even book historians appreciate the extent to which their work depends on the products of enumerative bibliography: that is, lists of books. Enumerative bibliographies and library catalogues are constructed from descriptions of copies of individual books that are taken to represent, more or less faithfully, individual works that contain distinct texts. Incorporating the products of analytical and descriptive bibliography, it is enumerative bibliography that provides the basic material for the history of books. If books incorporate the collective memory of humankind – that is, preserve what is worth preserving – then without enumerative bibliographies access to the record of civilization would be random: civilization itself would experience a kind of Alzheimer’s disease. Enumerative bibliographers and library cataloguers bind together the elements of civilization and society, providing access that magnifies the power of each element. The increasing sophistication of libraries and the development of bibliographical method exactly parallel the progress of civilization as we know it, not merely as a consequence but as an essential enabling factor. More narrowly, as book historians participate in the extension of knowledge, they build on foundations erected by bibliographers.

I will elaborate more specifically. Usually, bibliographical description for any purpose starts with a single copy of a document. (I will use “bibliographer” for “cataloguer” mostly hereafter.) Identification of the copy to hand is the first concern of the bibliographer. When the cataloguing is “original” (that is, when the bibliographer is not simply matching the copy to hand against a description written by someone else), identification may not be easy, particularly if the work itself was hitherto unknown to bibliographical history. Information sufficient to identify the work or book may be lacking or be false, or the bibliographer may not have the means to make a correct identification. To illustrate this, there are records of twenty-five Hookham and Company Circulating Library catalogues, scattered amongst eleven libraries in my database. For all but three of the catalogues, the dates are conjectural, in some instances pro forma. For instance, the Bodleian Library conjectures “[1829 ]” for a volume (Bodleian Library 2590 e.Lond.186.1) that consists of a catalogue that contains “Addenda 1821” and a separate 1829 supplement with its own pagination, register, and printer. The Bodleian cataloguer apparently dated the book 1829 as the year in which the three parts were issued together, but that obscures the fact that the volume was produced in three different years.

Further, the extent of anonymous and pseudonymous books in the early period is considerable and the bibliographer may have great difficulty in determining what the authority of such a book is (Griffin 1999). Many books lack much of the information that may allow a bibliographer readily to put them into their historical context exactly. Of 10,904 monographs recorded in my database in June 2002, 1,058 (roughly 10 percent) did not identify the author on the title page, 129 were pseudonymous, 1,407 were anonymous, 2,672 did not supply the place of publication, 2,587 did not give the name of the publisher or printer, 2,293 did not give the date of publication, and in 1,087 r e cords the date of publication is doubtful. Identifying such books is essentially an historical enterprise because the author of an anonymous or pseudonymous book can rarely be identified without recourse to
external
biographical or literary information. Sometimes also the bibliographer must interpret the text of the document, as in the case of
Proposals by the Drapers and Stationers, for the Raising and Improving the Woollen Manufacture, and Making of Paper in England
(1677), a broadside signed “H. 1000000”, that is, Henry Million (Wing 1972–83: no. P3715D).

A glance at the
National Union Catalog
(NUC), in which square brackets are employed to denote information not supplied by the title page, illustrates the extent to which the fundamental basis of authority in intellectual discourse is the creation of bibliographers operating within and on book culture. In an age in which accountability is a prevalent social concern, the bibliographer’s attribution of authority and therefore responsibility for the contents of books has larger than bibliographical relevance. In earlier times, when the press was often under state control, the consequences of a bibliographer’s attribution of responsibility for works were generally more serious. Bibliographers interpret the individual written responses to the common (human) condition and, by interpreting and classifying them, enable readers to participate fully in the world’s business. Further, a work may survive in only a few copies, but the record of its existence is disseminated in a multitude of bibliographical descriptions that may even sometimes be more numerous than the number of copies of the work originally printed: such dissemination enlarges immeasurably the work’s possible intellectual influence. Enumerative bibliographies amplify the effects of books in all communities.

A catalogue or bibliography is fundamentally a work of historical interpretation, as can be seen even more clearly when we consider the bibliographer’s paramount obligation to place a book in its correct place in history. Just as many early books are anonymous, so were many issued without a statement of the date of issue. A date may not have been perceived to be necessary at the time for purchasers, for the publishers knew when it was published and the readers knew when they read it as a contemporary document. This is particularly true of early library catalogues, in which modern book historians naturally have an interest. Very often catalogues of subscription and circulating libraries bear no dates: this should not be surprising. The recipient of such catalogues knew what year it was, and unreflectingly discarded them whenever an updated edition appeared.

This points to another interesting characteristic of undated literature. Some printed documents (sometimes called “ephemeral”) may be so fully dependent on their intellectual or social contexts that they may not even contain information that allows them to be placed chronologically with any precision or confidence. Apparently, readers were expected to insert the text into their existing knowledge of the circumstances and discourse surrounding the ostensible subject of the pamphlet. Nevertheless, bibliographers must accept the task of identification as at least a guide to scholars who might want to include the work in their intellectual investigations.

Analytical Bibliography

Analytical bibliography is predicated on the simple principle that even mechanized or repetitive tasks, especially if human beings are involved, are often performed incorrectly. For instance, compositors may misread authors’ handwriting and introduce errors into the text; in early works an ink ball can lift a type which may be replaced incorrectly; the work may be imperfectly imposed so that the sheets when folded show the pages of the text in the wrong reading order; or the binder might stamp an incorrect title on the binding. Whatever can go wrong will sooner or later go wrong, even in modern books. On the other hand, there are variations amongst copies of books that may be intentional; for instance, an issue of a title might be given a different colored binding, or be printed on large paper, or be trimmed to a different size. Any such physical variation raises the question of identity and requires resolution.