The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-title Catalog Undertaken in Dalkey and Dublin, Ireland, 1986-2006 by Wayne K. Chapman ! Clemson University Digital Press Clemson, South Carolina © 2006 Clemson University ! Preface his catalog of bibliographic citations accounts for every publication identified as part of the TW. B. Yeats Library, which, since the death of Anne Yeats in 2001, has become a distinct part of the National Library of Ireland (NLI). In effect, the alphabetical list constitutes a census of the items that define the Yeats Library as a body, not counting publications that were sold or otherwise dispersed by the poet or his wife, George Yeats, in their lifetimes, or by members of their family up to 1971, when the late Glenn O’Malley made an inventory that became the foundation for Edward O’Shea’s A Descriptive Catalog of the W. B. Yeats Library, Volume 470 of the Garland Reference Library of the Humanities (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985). Although that volume is difficult to locate today beyond the libraries that acquired copies before the book went out of print, it was the decision of the NLI to maintain O’Shea’s alphabetical arrangement and numbering system instead of the subject order used by Yeats and his wife and as reconstructed in the shelving arrangements that Anne Yeats and Yeats scholars found convenient when the library occupied her study at “Avalon,” Dalkey, Co. Dublin.1 As I’ve said elsewhere, most of the books at that time, “save those of W. B. Yeats and oversized, multivolume sets such as the three Cambridge history series (ancient, medieval, and modern periods),” were “in one room although at no time when Yeats was alive did he have a ‘library’ as such. The books he owned were distributed throughout his various residences in Dublin. Anne Yeats shelved her library from floor to ceiling and arranged the collection by row (or column) according to subjects her father and mother used when filling available space about their homes with the volumes of a ‘working library’” (ibid.). There were 14 rows of shelves in Anne’s library, the first two (immediately around the left doorjamb going in) contained her mother’s books, which were generally not included in the O’Shea bibliography though many other books belonging to her were distributed about the library according to subject. O’Shea writes in his “Introduction” that the decision was his to depart from “the unique organization of Yeats’s library as Anne Yeats remember[ed] it was arranged in his lifetime and as it has been reconstituted by Glenn O’Malley according to broad subject categories: poetry; drama; religion and myth; history; classical literatures; fiction; philosophy; theosophy, magic, astrology; Irish materials; and art (including Blake)” (xv-xvi). The decision to depart from the Yeatses’ subject order and its many inconsistencies was probably the right one from the standpoint of the printed volume in the Garland Reference Library, given the introduction of a subject index and an “Index of Autographs (Including Owners, Presenters, and Annotators, but not WBY).” An index is not necessary for the present Short-title Catalog because the technology allows that the contents (in PDF and HTML) will be fully searchable in either form. O’Shea’s autograph index was more a service to the descriptions given to annotated items in his bibliography than to my work here, so the Short-title Catalog goes without such an index. His numbering system emulates the procedures of Allan Wade in A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats (3rd. edn., 1968), and, unfortunately, considering the system’s incapacity to account for lost as well as recovered items, it is still the O’Shea numbering system that the NLI uses to catalogue this collection. As the Report of the Council of Trustees of the National Library of Ireland 2002 states (pp. 56- 59), the Garland book describes only “for the main part” the contents of the Yeats Library. When unpacking the 82 crates that the NLI received in June 2002, “it became evident,” Assistant Keeper Gerard Long writes, “that the collection, as received, did not fully match the O’Shea catalogue; some items listed by O’Shea were not present, and, by way of compensation, some items were present which are not listed in the published catalogue.” Some of the compensating additions came about when the NLI incorporated the two rows of George Yeats’s personal copies that had been isolated in Anne Yeats’s library. In part of its online conspectus, the NLI rightly calls the entire acquisition “The Library of W. B. Yeats and George Yeats” (see below). Many of the other additions to YL (as O’Shea’s catalog is frequently abbreviated) are noted in my work for Yeats Annual, particularly “Additional Books in the Library, 1989, and Other Problems,” Part II of the illustrated piece “Notes on the Yeats Library, 1904 and 1989.”2 Without systematically looking, Anne Yeats and I recovered 20 titles not listed in YL and probably missed by O’Malley in his 1971 inventory. Anne and I were not counting her mother’s books in rows 1-2. There were “also various Bibles, missals, and apocrypha” as well as (in Anne’s words) “the hospital shelf,” which carried partial and damaged works and ephemera, as well as a small a shelf over the entry way with an association with childhood—an old copy of A Day in a Child’s Life, illustrated by Kate Greenway, for example. It took some time to determine that this book, like two others reported as “Other Problems,” was actually in YL but misattributed, necessitating some movement of YL items in relation to the NLI materials in this collation. Hence, the 2,492 entries in YL have now received a long overdue, systematic review and reconciliation with the NLI’s inventory of the Yeats family’s latest gift. In make-shift fashion, the NLI assigned call numbers beyond those in YL (starting with the number 3001) to “Books in the Yeats Library [published during Yeats’s lifetime] but not in the O’Shea Catalog.” Some 86 such entries were introduced in this way, and they are listed below as NLI 3001-3075, with letters annexed to numbers to indicate duplicates. The same procedure has been followed in re- numbering only those items confirmed in the NLI collections since the acquisition of 2002. If an item is missing, it has received an “x” in place of a number. The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-title Catalog is thus intended to help scholars determine what materials they may need to see without having to locate a copy of YL. My collation incorporates notes on relevant addenda, errata, and missing items, as well as inserts and other associated matter. In the future, the NLI may scan and link YL to their website, solving the problem of its unavailability but not the problem of collating it against the Yeats Library’s actual stock. To illustrate the problem, one might cite an extensive set of photocopies made after 1972 by Roger Nyle Parisious and Anne Yeats, who put her parents’ library in order. Classified today as “Manuscript Material from the Library of W. B. Yeats and George Yeats / Photocopies of annotations, markings, bookmarks etc. made in publications; catalogues and lists; prints” (MSS 40,568-40,597 / Accession No. 6194), these back-up copies are valuable to fill in some of the gaps. Referred to in the Catalog below, in a separate set of brackets after the YL number (if applicable), I have given the manuscript and folder number thus: “NLI 40,568/17” (for example)--followed by the number of sheets in the folder and the envelope number. As a frequent user of the library before it came to the National Library, I will say that bookmarks laid into some of the books are not by Yeats.3 Still, that caveat aside, it is good to have available all of those photocopies. Certainly of service to one laboring at descriptive bibliography, the Short- title Catalog was created as a necessary first step toward a longer work in progress on Yeats’s annotations, with the approval of the W. B. Yeats Estate, Michael Yeats and A. P. Watt Ltd. Incorporating notes on the photocopied materials and their extent seems appropriate for the present online aid. Parallel matter not specifically noted here, although reflected in the asterisks (“*”) that O’Shea placed beside some of his numbers, is the card catalogue that someone (neither Yeats nor his wife) compiled in the 1920s in anticipation of moving or traveling.4 The books listed in the card file that are also listed in YL get the asterisk. Out of the 1,159 entries, O’Shea reported 521 missing (the NLI gives the number as “some 300”) and published the list of AWOL items shortly after the appearance of YL.5 Incorporating all of George Yeats’s books with the collection into one Yeats library seems to have been one way to amend the early bookkeeping on its contents at that time. Apart from good luck, there are few means of learning where the other missing books from that era have gone. O’Shea writes: “Anne Yeats speculates that whole cartons of books may have been lost in frequent removals. Other items were lent out by the poet, a largesse that Mrs Yeats discouraged but apparently never stopped completely” (ibid., p. 279). Looking for patterns in the list of books O’Shea did not find by comparing O’Malley’s foundational list against the 1920s card file, O’Shea concluded that “certain kinds of books may have been intentionally ‘weeded out’”: such as popular novels (in spite of Yeats’s penchant for detective and cowboy fiction, as his daughter has reported), occult writings, and “faded enthusiasms” such as Wordsworth, Katharine Tynan Hinkson, and G.