Notes on Recent Work in Descriptive Bibliography

Abstract

During a forty-year period, from 1966 through 2006, I published a series of essays covering every aspect of descriptive bibliography. Taken together, these essays form a comprehensive treatise on the subject. Although this consolidated work signifi cantly revises Fredson Bowers’s Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949) and stands on its own, I regard it not simply as a replacement for the Principles but as a companion piece to that book. After all, a classic can never be entirely superseded, and the Principles will always be worth reading for many specifi c passages and for the attitude it displays: every detail is a refl ection of the view that descriptive bibliography is a form of historical scholarship. No one can come away from the book without understanding that descriptive bibliography is not just a guide to the identifi cation of fi rst editions (though it serves that purpose) but is rather a history of the production and publication of the books taken up and thus a contribution to the broader annals of printing and publishing. Nevertheless, any work from as long ago as 1949 is likely to require some adjustments, and my essays provide a rethinking and redefi nition of some basic concepts, particularly ideal copy, issue, state, and format. I have also proposed a simpler and more logical system for noting inserted leaves in collation formulas and have offered more detailed suggestions for describing paper, type, non-letterpress material, and publishers’ bindings. Two matters barely commented on by Bowers are given extensive discussion in two of my essays: the incorporation of the results of bibliographical analysis (that is, analysis of typesetting and presswork) into a descriptive bibliography, and the considerations involved in the overall organization of a bibliography (along with the numbering of its entries and the recording of copies examined). I have tried throughout to express, more fully than he did, the rationale lying behind the inclusion of every element in a description and the manner of presenting such features. (My detailed criticisms of certain proposals, both by him and by others, are meant to illustrate these rationales in practice.)