A Companion to the History of the Book

Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose, Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405192781, 9781405127653
• eBook ISBN: 9781444356588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

A COMPANION TO THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK

A COMPANION TO
THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK

Edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

"As a stimulating overview of the multidimensional present state of the field, the Companion has no peer." Choice

"If you want to understand how cultures come into being, endure, and change, then you need to come to terms with the rich and often surprising history Of the book... Eliot and Rose have done a fine job. Their volume can be heartily recommended. "
Adrian Johns, Technology and Culture

From the early Sumerian clay tablet through to the emergence of the electronic text, this Companion provides a continuous and coherent account of the history of the book. A team of expert contributors draws on the latest research in order to offer a cogent, transcontinental narrative. Many of them use illustrative examples and case studies of well-known texts, conveying the excitement surrounding this rapidly developing field.

The Companion is organized around four distinct approaches to the history of the book. First, it introduces the variety of methods used by book historians and allied specialists, from the long-established discipline of bibliography to newer IT-based approaches. Next, it provides a broad chronological survey of the forms and content of texts. The third section situates the book in the context of text culture as a whole, while the final section addresses broader issues, such as literacy, copyright, and the future of the book.

Contributors to this volume:

Michael Albin, Martin Andrews, Rob Banham, Megan L Benton, Michelle P. Brown, Marie-Frangoise Cachin, Hortensia Calvo, Charles Chadwyck-Healey, M. T. Clanchy, Stephen Colclough, Patricia Crain, J. S. Edgren, Simon Eliot, John Feather, David Finkelstein, David Greetham, Robert A. Gross, Deana Heath, Lotte Hellinga, T. H. Howard-Hill, Peter Kornicki, Beth Luey, Paul Luna, Russell L. Martin Ill, Jean-Yves Mollier, Angus Phillips, Eleanor Robson, Cornelia Roemer, Jonathan Rose, Emile G. L Schrijver, David J. Shaw, Graham Shaw, Claire Squires, Rietje van Vliet, James Wald, Rowan Watson, Alexis Weedon, Adriaan van der Weel, Wayne A. Wiegand, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén.

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.

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 productio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Literature and Culture
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Methods and Approaches
• PART II: The History of the Material Text
• PART III: Beyond the Book
• PART IV: Issues
• Index