I ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN PRODUCTION NOTE University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Large-scale Digitization Project, 2007. Current Trends in Bibliography ROY B. STOKES, I,sue EdU", • April, 1959 Library Trends A Publication of the University of Illinois Library School Managing Editor LiBRARY TRENDS, a quarterly journal of librarian­ ship, provides a medium for evaluative recapitula. HAROLD LANCOUR tion of current thought and practice, searching for those ideas and procedures which hold the greatest potentialities for the future. Each issue is concerned with one aspect of Ii· Editorial Assistant brarianship. Each is planned with the assistance JANET PHILLIPS of an invited advisory editor. All articles are by invitation. Suggestions for future bsues are wel­ comed and should be sent to the Managing Editor. Published four times a year, in July, October, Public<Uions Board JanulUY. and April. Office of Publication: Univer­ sity of I1lillOis Library School, Urbana, Illinois. ROBERT B. DOWNS Entered as second-class matter June 25, 1952, at THELMA EATON the Post Office at Urbana. Illinois, under the act of August 24, 1912. Copyright 1959 by the University WILLIAM V. JACKSON of Illinois. All rights reserved. Subscription price is $5.00 a year. Individual FRANCES B. JENKINS issues are priced at $2.00. Address orders to Sub­ HAROLD LANCOUR scription Department, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois. Editorial corTespoooence should ARNOLD H. TROTlER be sent to LIBRARY TRENDS, University of LUCIEN W. WHITE Illinois Library School, Urbana, Illinois. Library Trends VOLUME 7 • NUMBER 4 APRIL, 1959 Current Trends in Bibliography ROY B. S TO KE S, Issue Editor CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE: Introduction 495 FREDSON BOWERS. •• 497 The Function of Bibliography W. H. BOND ••• 511 Manuscripts and the Library JULIAN ROBERTS. • 517 Printed Books to 1640 D. G. NEILL. • 537 Printed Books, 1640-1800 WALTER E. HOUGHTON. •••••• 554 British Periodicals of the Victorian Age: Bibliographies and Indexes MATTHEW J. BRUCCOLI • 566 Twentieth Century Books DAVID FOXON •••• 574 Modern Aids to Bibliographical Research ROY STOKES ••• 582 The Teaching of Bibliography Index 595 This Page Intentionally Left Blank Introduction MANY WRITERS have pointed out the imprecise definition of the term bibliography as it is used currently. It is not the purpose of this issue to provide a new definition, although Fredson Bowers in his discussion of the functions of bibliography attempts to clarify the distinctions between the various forms of bibliography. Instead, for the record and as an assistance to the reader, a brief summary of several available definitions compiled from a number of the sources mentioned throughout this issue is provided below. It should be remembered that originally the term bibliographer referred to a person who wrote or copied a book or manuscript. This meaning of the term now, except in the most general sense, is no longer used. Bibliography refers to books, whether in printed or writ­ ten form, as physical and intellectual entities. In fact, much of the confusion in the use of the term stems from its application to a book as both a physical and an intellectual entity. Therefore, most writers in the field are inclined to draw their major differentiation between these two. The table which follows is so divided: 1. Study of the Book itself as a Physical Entity, a material object: Textual Bibliography Study and comparison of texts and their transmission through PURPOSE: Analytical editions and printings accurate, precise or Historical Bibliography identification and Critical Placing and dating of description Bibliography individual books Descriptive Bibliography Identification of the "ideal copy" and all its variants II. Study of the Book as an Intellectual Entity: PURPOSE: } Enumerative assembling of information or about individual books Systematic tCOffipil.tiOO of "" of boob into a logical and useful Bibliography arrangement ) [495 ] Library Trends The several articles in this issue of Library Trends which follow cover in varying degree all of these aspects of bibliography. They serve to establish the present state of bibliographic method as well as of bibliographical production. They also suggest the directions or developments for bibliographical activity in the immediate future. It may be of interest to our readers to note that this issue of Library Trends comes closer than ever before to our ideal of a non-national approach to a problem of librarianship. The bibliographic science, it is evident, knows no national boundaries; bibliography with its students and scholars is found in any and every literate society. Even at that, and an indication of the difficulty of attaining the ideal, the present issue draws heavily upon English language materials, to the exclusion of other languages, for its examples and references. General References Percy Freer. Bibliography and Modern Book Production: notes and sources for student librarians, printers, booksellers, stationers, book-collectors. Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1954. 345p. Louise Noele Malcles. La Bibliographie. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1956. Edwin Eliott Willoughby. The Uses of Bibliography to the Students of Litera­ ture and History. Hamden, Conn., Shoe String Press, 1957. 105p. H.L. [496 ] The Function of Bibliography FREDSON BOWERS LIBRARIANS ARE COMMON USERS of enumerative bibliographies and check lists, but they are not so likely to take full advantage of descriptive bibliographies and of the more detailed and accurate information that these contain. The reason for this neglect is perhaps threefold: (1) many librarians have little or no acquaint­ ance with analytical bibliography and thus do not understand the revolution that this method has caused in the techniques of differentiat­ ing, arranging, and describing books; (2) wanting this knowledge, they do not comprehend the relatively simple technical language in which descriptive bibliography (based on analytical) is written, and so do not try to cope with the valuable information offered in such works; (3) the result is to lead librarians to treat scholarly descriptive bibliographies as if they were only more diffusely written check lists and thus to ignore their full potential value in the normal identification and cataloging process by which books are prepared for scholarly users. Since many scholars, these days, require more information about the characteristics and status of books they are working with than librarians may always have the training to provide, an increasingly serious split is developing between the very two groups that should be most closely joined in mutual concerns. Any divergence of interests here is' wrong. Moreover, the practical effects may have serious con­ sequences because of the non-bibliographical scholar's dependence upon the librarian to catalog books correctly and to provide the final authoritative word on the significance of the variant forms of books used as primary research sources, such as editions, issues, impressions. When the librarian's catalog entries conceal information, or provide positive misinformation, serious harm may follow. The question of the librarian's understanding of modern analytical bibliography and its purposes goes much farther than catalog entries Mr. Bowers is Professor of English, University of Virginia. [497] FREDSON BOWERS (important as it is that these should be full and accurate). Knowledge­ able purchase of books and the building of collections, as well as knowledgeable preservation of books by retaining apparently similar copies or commonly disregarded variant forms, are all involved. Over and above these practical considerations, however, one may appeal to the anomaly that is created by indifference to a modem scholarly dis­ cipline that treats the very source of a librarian's vocation: the book and its contents. This paper, then, attempts a rapid survey of the relation of analytical bibliography, and its derivative, descriptive bibliography, to librarians serving the general literary as well as the more specialized textual scholar. Analytical bibliography concentrates on the examination of books as tangible objects in order to recover the details of the physical process of their manufacture. At its most general, this form of bibliography attempts to discover the principles of the production process as these may be determined from a close study of the exact details of the meth­ ods of printing in various periods. At its more particular, analytical bibliography attempts to apply this general knowledge to an analysis of the specific effects of the printing process on the physical characteris­ tics of any given book considered as part of an edition, and of any of this edition's variant copies that compose impressions, issues, or states. The evidence utilized is circumstantial and physical, and the method, it may be said, is inductive. Although in some respects analytical bibliography is at the root of all other forms, even of the historical and the enumerative branches, it provides in a more important manner the foundation for descriptive and for textual bibliography, both of particular concern to the librarian and to the scholar or critic. A book cannot be described correctly (except by accident) unless the method of its printing has first been determined by analysis. Moreover, the determination of the true primary (or substantive) editions of a text, and then of the details of the transmission