Chapter 1
Definitions of Bibliography, and in particular of the variety called Analytical
A list of books is a list of books.
By ‘book’ I mean any artefact written, printed or created in
whatever fashion and in whatever medium with a purpose of communicating a text,
as distinct from an ‘archive record’ which is made and conserved in order to
show that some action has been performed. (The other fundamental function of
bibliography, the recovery of ‘information’ independently from the text through
which it is vehiculed, is more proper to the pure sciences and will not be
treated here.) If the books in the said list are united by some common external
factor, most usually the circumstance of being stored physically on the same
shelves in the same building, in a structure we call a library, the result is a
catalogue and does not concern us here; if, on the other hand, the books are
widely dispersed but have some internal factor in common, such as the same
author, or the same printer/publisher, or the same topic/theme, the list is
either a bibliography or has the makings of becoming one. Albeit often with
less synthesis, most elementary definitions of the difference between a
catalogue and a bibliography run along these lines.
Now a definition is a wholesome thing. Like the opening
credits to a film, it sets the scene and tells us what the theme music is going
to be like. As far as analytical bibliography as a form of scholarship is
concerned, its most penetrating and evocative definitions can be found in the
writings of Walter Wilson Greg (1875-1959) and in those of his American
counterpart, Fredson Bowers (1905-1991). As far as the former is concerned,
here is a vintage and oft quoted definition of [analytical] bibliography:
“Bibliography is the study of books as tangible objects. It examines the
materials of which they are made and the manner in which those materials are
put together. It traces their place and mode of origin, and the subsequent
adventures that have befallen them. It is not concerned with their contents in
a literary sense, but it is certainly concerned with the signs and symbols they
contain (apart from their significance) for the manner in which these marks are
written or impressed is a very relevant bibliographical fact. And, starting
from this fact, it is concerned with the relation of one book to another: the
question of which manuscript was copied from which, which individual copies of
printed books are to be grouped together as forming an edition, and what is the
relation of edition to edition. Bibliography, in short, deals with books as
more or less organic assemblages of sheets of paper, or vellum, or whatever
material they consist of, covered with certain conventional but not arbitrary
signs, and the relation of the signs in one book to those in another” (W.W. Greg, ‘The function of bibliography in
literary criticism illustrated in a study of the text of King Lear’,
Neophilologus, vol. 18 (1933). The very useful edition of his Collected papers,
edited by J.C. Maxwell (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1966), where this essay
is reprinted at pp. 267-297 [quote at p. 271], is unfortunately rare in
libraries outside the English-speaking world, so I follow a policy of including
a reference to the original place of publication of the articles cited).
Otherwise Greg’s thoughts on bibliography, its nature, its
functions and the methods with which it should be applied to the study of
textual transmission are best expressed in the following articles:
– ‘What is Bibliography?’, Transactions of the Bibliographical
Society, vol. 12 (1914), pp. 39-53, reprinted in Collected papers, pp. 75-88.
Basically an aiming shot that shows his thought taking form.
– ‘The present position of Bibliography’, The Library, vol.
11 (1930), pp. 241-262, reprinted in Collected papers, pp. 207-225. Contains
the statement that “bibliography is the study of books as material objects”.
– ‘Bibliography – An Apologia’, The Library, vol. 13 (1932),
pp. 113-143, reprinted in Collected papers, pp. 239-266. Easily the most
important of the three essays, with some memorable and oft quoted remarks, such
as: “Books are the material means by which literature is transmitted; therefore
bibliography, the study of books, is essentially the science of the
transmission of literary documents” (p. 115; p. 241), and: “I start then with
the postulate that what the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper
or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he
is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his”
(pp. 121-122; p. 247). A reading of this essay makes it clear that in Greg’s
view no false distinction can be allowed to exist between manuscripts and
printed books: his focus is entirely on the making of books, by whatever means,
as the essential fact in the transmission of literary documents. Nevertheless
his writings, especially for readers coming from different literary cultures,
are often applied to very minor English Renaissance texts and require a certain
familiarity with the bibliographical debate of the time.
The other great definer of bibliographical purposes, ways
and means in our time has been Fredson Bowers, professor of English at the
University of Charlottesville in Virginia and founder of the journal Studies in
Bibliography (1948). Any and every judgement on Bowers’ sometimes controversial
style has to take account of the fact that, not unlike F.R. Leavis in the
parallel field of English literary criticism, he represented a militant,
crusading form of bibliography that spared no quarter. His target was the
dilettante, amateurish fashion in which evidence relating to the physical
transmission of the text was marshalled and interpreted by scholars, most of
them employed in universities, in the years after the Second World War (his favourite
Aunt Sally, already singled out as a target by Greg, was the Shakespeare critic
John Dover Wilson). This militancy led to insistence on analysis as a
“bibliographical state of mind”, to be practised by properly trained adepts, as
he most famously states in the brief pamphlet The Bibliographical Way,
Lawrence, University of Kansas, 1959, reprinted in his Essays on Bibliography,
Text and Editing (Charlottesville, published for the Bibliographical Society of
Virginia by the University Press of Virgina, 1975, pp. 54-74).
Previous critics had already sought a terminology to define
and describe the different sorts of bibliography, above all in terms of the
different activities performed by bibliographers (Greg, for instance, regularly
speaks of “critical bibliography”). Bowers, however, is the first to offer a
cogent and workable organisation of the same in the essay entitled
‘Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies’, Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 46 (1952), pp. 186-208, reprinted in
his Essays (1975), pp. 37-53. In his view the following five-part structure
covers all the processes involved:
1) Enumerative (or Compilative) Bibliography is the simple construction of lists of books,
articles and other writings on a given theme or subject, either as an ancillary
document or as a hand list;
2) Historical Bibliography is research conducted into the
context in which the document is produced, involving archive work, biographical
studies and so on, where the evidence is external to the book itself (“... we
should include here all biographical and historical studies of printers,
papermakers, binders, typefounders, engravers, publishers, booksellers, and
anyone else in any way concerned with the materials and the production of the book
and its subsequent dissemination. Under the history of such I should also
include studies of costs and prices, methods of sale and distribution; studies
of the meaning of imprints, colophons, copyright entries, and of
advertisements; all aesthetic studies of printing and its materials as an art;
all studies of sizes of editions from the collateral evidence of publishers’
records or other external material; all investigation into the circumstances of
literary composition which have any relation to the physical form of the
literary work, the transmission of literary documents, and the relation of
authors to the commercial process of publciation. It is difficult to limit this
grouping narrowly, but let us say very much in general that it concerns itself
chiefly with the discovery and interpretation of external evidence” ( p. 40);
3) Analytical Bibliography is the “technical investigation
of the printing of specific books, or of general printing practise, based
exclusively on the books themselves, not ignoring, however, what helpful
correlation may be available with collateral evidence” (p. 191; p. 41), wherein
“what is important is that the impressed symbols which are letters and words
are treated in a physical and not in a literary way” (p. 192; p. 42);
which leads to two further, self-explanatory branches:
4) Descriptive Bibliography is the transformation of the
analysis into a report in which the bibliographer describes what has been found
(i.e. “There is some need to emphasize that descriptive bibliography which is
not based on analytical is pratically useless, for it is as important to
explain the reason for the peculiarities as it is to give the external facts
about them; and, truly, the external facts often cannot be properly described
until analytical bibliography has provided the reasons for their existence”, p.
194; p. 43);
5) Textual (or Critical) Bibliography is “the application of
the evidence of analytical bibliography, or at least of its pertinent methods,
to textual problems where meaning of some sort is involved and where it does
make a difference whether a book is printed in English or in Sanskrit” (pp.
194-195; p. 44).
Much the same statement, albeit written for a non-specialist
reader, can be found in his entry Bibliography in the 1960 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 3, pp. 539-543. Since the term ‘Textual
Bibliography’ has frequently been misunderstood, especially when later scholars
have sought to apply the Greg-Bowers canon to other modern languages, it should
be noted that in the latter’s definition it refers only to the application of
knowledge acquired through analysis of the making of the book to textual
decisions and choices (the common mistake is to confuse it with the activity
more properly denominated ‘Analytical bibliography’). In 1971 Bowers provided a
different, in many ways inferior, four-part definition of the varieties of
bibliographical activity, in which ‘Historical bibliography’ is omitted and the
order of the remaining four is given as “enumerative, descriptive, analytical,
and textual”; see ‘Four Faces of Bibliography’, Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of Canada, vol. 10 (1971), pp. 33-45, reprinted in his Essays (1975),
pp. 94-108. The same article contains a significant novelty in that the various
kinds of bibliography are now viewed in terms of a pyramidal or ascending
structure, with ‘Textual bibliography’ at the summit, confirming Bowers’ view
that the ultimate purpose of bibliography is the determination of how texts are
transmitted. What should be noted is Bowers’ evident inability to find a
satisfactory definition of what he had previously called ‘Historical
bibliography’, or all the relevant information garnered from sources external
to the artefact itself, since, in the exquisitely scientific terminology of
Swift’s Houynmhms, from a purely bibliographical viewpoint it is “the thing
that is not”. His sense of a conceptual incoherence therein brought his whole
structure to totter and led to the weak solution of omitting the troubling
item.
Twenty years ago I think I should have signed, in the most
unquestioning of manners, the dotted line at the bottom of Bowers’ 1952
statement and expounded it as gospel truth. Today I believe very little of it
or, rather, I believe it to be extrinsic to the nature of bibliography itself.
It is certainly true that the uncertainties of Bowers are those of the
discipline as a whole, not only because nobody has found a convincing way of
reconciling bibliography to history of the book, but also because true
analytical bibliography has remained an art form practised by very few scholars
and this fact has led others to conclude that it is a waste of time. The
five-part structure nevertheless confirms Bowers’ personality as a formidable
organiser of bibliographical research and I believe it provides an excellent
guide as to how bibliographers ought to go about their chosen business. They
begin by gathering together all the information relative to their chosen theme
(enumerative bibliography); they explore the historical, social and economic
context in which the work or works that interest them were produced (historical
bibliography); they study the physical books in order to obtain information
about their making (analytical bibliography); if the project warrants, they
draw up a report on those same physical features (descriptive bibliography);
and, again if the project warrants, they analyse the significance of their
discoveries for the transmission of the text and the constitution of a critical
version (textual bibliography). My personal conviction, however, is that all
bibliography is simultaneously enumerative, historical and analytical, though I
agree that descriptive and textual, being applicative rather than pure, need to
be considered as being somehow different.
Let me try and explain better. In the history of any and
every ‘book’, three essential phases can be distinguished. The first is as a “work”, when it is sold by a publisher, through bookshops or directly, to a public of readers or of libraries, and is perused for its intellectual, informative, narrative or creative contents. From this point of view the ease with which the book can be obtained and the familiarity of the reader with its nature as a contemporary artefact mean that little consideration is paid to the object itself. In bibliographical terms its immaterial, abstract form dominates with respect to its physical nature. This phase ends, more or less, when the said ‘book’ is no longer available through a conventional commercial circuit (excepting the antiquarian or used book trade), either because the print-run, in the case of a typographical document, has been sold out and perhaps replaced by later editions, or because there is no longer
a consistent interest for the title on the part of the book-purchasing public. The second phase, which can considerably overlap with the first, occurs when the book is utilised as a “text” for documentary purposes, either because somebody wants to understand the form of expression it represents, or because it conserves a particular version of a work. This same phase is mainly library based, since the “book” can only be obtained through the second-hand market with difficulty and expense; on the other hand, except for special cases such
as first editions of important titles, the libraries do not impose onerous restrictions on the use of the book in this particular fashion. It can be said therefore that its immaterial and material aspects are essentially in equilibrium. The third and final phase is when the book is considered as an “artefact”. Such artefacts,
when they survive, are usually rare and sometimes in poor condition. Where we have accurate information about original print-runs, we usually discover that
only a very small percentage of the copies fabricated at the time are still
extant (for most incunabula, for instance, the survival rate is less than 1%).
The library function is absolutely dominant, since these artefacts, on account
of their age and rarity are considered precious, while relatively few scholars
have the means to purchase them, even if they were available on the market. In
practical terms these books are not ‘read’, since the work concerned is usually
available in a more recent edition (in terms of my definition I consider that
collation of the text of the original artefact by a critic does not constitute
‘reading’).
There is a long-standing, oft-uttered and widely-held
credence that analytical bibliography only deals with printed artefacts of the
hand-press era. This credence is false and is tantamount to claiming that
literary criticism only deals with the writings of an author when the said
author is dead. Another equally useless and artificial distinction is the
parallel belief that the principles underlying the study of medieval
manuscripts, incunabula and successive products of the hand-press period, the
publications of mechanised typesetting and printing, or the CD-Roms and DVDs of
our own age, somehow differ in the necessity for analysis and description. But
it is all one discipline. It is all bibliography, though it is reasonable to
say that the knowledge and experience necessary to understand complex
artefacts, widely dispersed in modern collections, often endowed with an
extensive secondary literature, are acquired only over the space of a lifetime
and therefore it is too much to ask a specialist in medieval codicology to
interpret the intricacies of quadrichrome printing and electronic lettersetting
in our own day and age. Specialisation is acceptable therefore, as long as it
is recognised that, bibliographically speaking, the age, provenance and method of
fabrication of an object have no determinant significance.
If we return to the tripartite distinction between “works”,
“texts” and “artefacts” posited here, the inherent weakness, or perhaps
underlying prejudice, of Bowers’ definition becomes somewhat clearer. It is
obvious that the artefacts are primarily the older books, those which are no
longer commonly considered as works or texts. The watershed previous to which
most books nowadays are considered artefacts falls nowadays towards the end of
the Eighteenth century: in this piece I certainly cite some editions of the
same century as “texts” (see Fertel in § 2 and the numerous references to the
Encyclopédie), but accompany the same with a complaint about the lack of a
proper modern critical version. There is therefore a minimal element of
practical truth in the observation that analytical bibliography has so far
directed most of its energies and attention to, and achieved its most
significant results with, artefacts produced on the handpress. But this general
perception, however true, has to be modified by the deeper understanding that
in due course all books, or at least those few that survive, will come to be
viewed and conserved as artefacts. A teasing, contradictory and salutary
example, however, of a contemporary publication, the three ‘issues’, termed
‘editions’ by the publisher, of Rino Pensato’s Corso di bibliografia (1987,
1989, 1995), studied as a physical artefact, in which much of the irony stems
from the fact that it is a ‘work’ that seeks to define bibliography, is
provided by Carlo Maria Simonetti, ‘Cataloghi storici: note e osservazioni
bibliografiche’, Il bibliotecario, vol. 15, n. 2 (1998), pp. 29-40.
From our point of view, the principal weakness of Bowers’
definition of three (or five) sorts of bibliography becomes his failure to see
that information about “works” is also a form of the same. What we might call
‘Current’ or ‘Ongoing’ bibliography is available through publishers’ and
booksellers’ catalogues, including publicity, through reviews in newspapers and
journals, and sometimes even through library catalogues. Periodicals that
dedicate part of their space to reviews and overviews of critical production in
their sphere are, among other things, bibliographies. In the pure and applied sciences
very sophisticated forms of bibliographical analysis, which usually go under
the name of documentation, acquire and make available with immediacy
information extracted from periodical literature, since in these fields
research has a short shelf-life and within a matter of years, sometimes months,
belongs to yesterday’s science. Lists in which the presentation of writings or
the contents of writings on a determined subject have a more ordered form and,
especially in the humanities, reach backwards in time obviously form part of
enumerative bibliography. Though there is necessarily an overlap between
“works” on the one hand and “artefacts” on the other, from this point of view
the said writings are listed primarily as “texts”, with emphasis not only on their
contents but also on how to find them (i.e. the bibliographical details
identifying the book or article are usually cited in considerable detail with
the assumption that they will be sought through libraries).
But when all is said and done, the differences are merely
nuances, since the decision to consider a book as a “work”, a “text” or an
“artefact” lies exclusively in the eye of the beholder. In other words, and
this is the point that interests us, all written, printed or otherwise created
artefacts, whenever and wherever made, can become objects of bibliographical
analysis. Returning now to Bowers’ difficulty in defining ‘Historical
bibliography’, like Solomon, we propose cutting the baby in half, but only in
theory, in order to understand the distinction between information extrinsic to
the artefact obtained through historical research and that intrinsic to the
object acquired through analysis. But in practical terms any attempt to exclude
extrinsic information would prove messy, if not murderous, since in proper
research all relevant information is called into play. It is however necessary
to add that in 99% of instances the only reliable source of evidence about how
the artefact was made is the artefact itself, while in the 1% of cases in which
relevant external information about the same is discovered, for example in the
form of printing or publishing archives, the documentary source all too often
proves incomplete, ambiguous, or misleading.
Analytical bibliography therefore is the science of how to
obtain blood from a stone, or how to extract from an physical artefact every
gram of information about the way it was made.
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