The Rhinehart Collection an Annotated Bibliography

The Rhinehart Collection An Annotated Bibliography M. John Higby The Rhinehart Collection i Bill and Maureen Rhinehart in their library at home. ii The Rhinehart Collection An Annotated Bibliography M. John Higby Carol Grotnes Belk Library Appalachian State University Boone, North Carolina 2007 iii International Standard Book Number: 0-000-00000-0 Library of Congress Catalog Number: 0-00000 Carol Grotnes Belk Library, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina 28608 © 2007 by Appalachian State University. All rights reserved. First Edition published 2007 – 500 softcover, 50 hardcover, 2 presentation Designed and typeset by Ed Gaither, Office of Printing and Publications. The text face and ornaments are Adobe Caslon, a revival by designer Carol Twombly of typefaces created by English printer William Caslon in the 18th century. The decorative initials are Zallman Caps. The paper is Carnival Smooth from Smart Papers. It is of archival quality, acid-free and pH neutral. Photography by Mike Rominger, University Photographer. Printed in the United States of America iv Preliminaries refatory remarks are usually found in a Preface. I have chosen to use the less common word as a means to stimulate curiosity and thus im- P prove the chances that the Preliminaries will be read. These remarks are frequently skimmed if not entirely skipped, but since the heart of all that follows is an annotated bibliography, and since in such a document it is important to devise an orderly system for the benefit of the reader, it seems appropriate to begin with a brief explanation of the system. There is, of course, some commentary preceding the bibliography, but this can be read without the need for any explanatory apparatus. Similarly, the glossary which follows the commentary will take care of itself. Each item in the bibliography of the Rhinehart Collection is in four parts. The first of these is a Library of Congress call number, which appears not on the spine of the book in question but on a slip of acid-free paper inserted within, thus avoid- ing the blemish that is necessary on the spine of books, most of them cloth-bound trade publications, in the general collection of Belk Library. A simple bibliographical entry forms the second part of each item. This is given in more or less traditional form, resembling but not quite identical to the method prescribed in the Chicago Manual of Style. There are three basic elements in this form: author, title, and facts of publication. I have chosen to create a fourth element, placed between the title and facts of publication, wherein all critical textual considerations—an editor, translator, first or later edition, number of volumes, and the like—are noted as discrete things, separated from each other by a full stop (period). The third part of each item in the Rhinehart Collection is a bibliographical description, not as that term is understood by readers of Fredson Bowers, but rather as it might be used by a literate bookseller. In other words, the book at hand is described as an artifact. Many of these books are quite handsomely bound, sometimes in full leather, other times in leather and marbled boards. A few books have been machine-cased, but even most of these appear to have been more carefully assembled than sometimes happens. In instances that seem to indicate clearly that the book was made in the hand press period, printed on sheets of laid paper, the format is given (folio, quarto, octavo, etc.). Book dealers will oftentimes use these terms to describe machine-assembled books if they appear to be the right size, but in this bibliography only those books that appear truly folio, or quarto, or octavo volumes are called such. All marbling, not only of the boards but of end papers and edges, is noted, as are gilt edges and uncut edges. If leather bindings appear to have been tooled, that is noted. Occasionally the reader may be puzzled by a term used v in the bibliographical description, but such terms may be found (it is hoped) in the glossary following the annotations. A few descriptions include a bracketed Wing number (in two cases a Pollard and Redgrave number), indicating an item held also in the microform collection held on the ground floor of Belk Library. All illustrated texts are noted as such. Bibliographies are supposed to be carefully systematic and consistent, which has created something of a problem with the final element of the bibliographical description, provenance and the particular association that sometimes seems clear. Provenance, former ownership of a book, is often within the book itself, indicated by a book plate or an autograph. Where these appear, association of a particular book with a particular person is an easy, mechanical matter and is noted as a part of the bibliographical description. On a few occasions, discovery of these things has led to further research that has produced a small story, and these have been reserved for the annotations themselves, which has resulted in the inconsistency one tries to avoid. In short, provenance is usually indicated in the bibliographical description, but when there appears to be a story too good not to be told, it is reserved for the annotations. The fourth part of each bibliographical item is the annotation, in some ways the heart of the matter. Preparing these annotations has often given considerable pleasure, but there have been moments of uncertainty. For example, the Rhinehart Collection, more than anything else, addresses British history, and readers within the Appalachian State community will know that I am not a trained historian. Who am I to give historians who look at this bibliography a thumb-nail lecture on Henry Buckle or Thomas Babington Macaulay? To do so, it seems to me, would be both pretentious and presumptuous. If obvious things are left out of the annotations, the explanation may be reduced to ignorance or oversight, but sometimes I have avoided certain matters so that it will be seen (perhaps) that I know my place. Bibliographical annotations are more important today than they would have been before the nineteenth century, when the full title of a work often served as what we now find in annotations. To illustrate, let us consider the full title of Bo- swell’s Life of Johnson: The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L. D. Comprehending An Account of His Studies And NumerousWorks in Chronological Order; A Series of His Epistolary Correspodence and Conversations with Many Eminent Persons; and Various Original Pieces of His Composition Never Before Published: The Whole Exhibiting a View of Literature and vi Literary Men in Great Britain, for Near Half a Century During Which He Flourished. If this is more elaborate than some titles of its period, it is still not atypical and helps us understand why the important bibliographical work of A.W. Pollard and G.A. Redgrave was called The Short – Title Catalogue. Scholars will understand why I have given space in so many annotations to the inclusion or omission of an index or table of contents and to such matters as footnotes, marginal glosses, and appendices. Others may be put off by the regular ap- pearance of such dull matters, so that a bit of explanation is in order. Let us suppose a diligent scholar who, from the beginning of graduate school to the end of a long life of reading and writing, teaching and research, is able to read, on average, one hundred books a year. In a career of fifty years that person would read five thousand books, less than one per cent of the holdings of Belk Library. Members of an academic community will know, however, that quite a few scholars look into more than five thousand books in the course of a long career. The explanation is that books are not always read in their entirety, and this explains the importance of a detailed table of contents or full index which, if it is well done, obvi- ates the need of reading the whole book. What is needed can be found quickly and efficiently. Of course this opens the risk of quoting something out of context, but careful scholars know how to minimize that risk. As for other apparatus, footnotes and the like, such things are often a good indication of the care that was taken in preparing the book to begin with. When I began this project I was advised by Hal Keiner, a colleague within the Belk Library, to “let the books talk to you.” It was good advice. What I had in mind as I began has been considerably modified by what the books have said to me, along with many other things taken from the Dictionary of National Biography and similar resources reliably in place in Belk Library. On the basis of my engagement with the Rhinehart Collection and the resource materials I have used over several months, I have tried to annotate in a way that will at least occasionally be anecdotal, that will make a story of the books, the people who wrote them, who are in them, and at least some of those who collected them before they came into the possession of Bill and Maureen Rhinehart and now Appalachian State University. In this regard some books have proven more interesting than others. Bibliographical egalitarianism perhaps does not form an element of the democratic ideal. One or two things that might be considered irregularities should be noted. First, with no wish to exercise an American democratic insolence, I still make as little as I can of titles in the bibliographical entry.

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