What
mad pursuit?
Bibliographers are, I am convinced,
touched with madness. How else can one explain the persistent attempts throughout history
since the invention of printing to subordinate knowledge to some sort of accessible order?
Gesner (1545); Du Verdier (1585); Lipen (1679); Teissier (1686+); Georgi (1742+); De Bure
(1763+); Panzer (1793+); Ebert (1821+); Sabin (1868+); Evans (1903+); Palau y Dulcet
(1923+); Besterman (1939+): all laboured to achieve the impossible, but knowledge has
gradually become more tractable because of their efforts. Stevenson was right when he
said: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is
to labour.” Because the bibliographer never arrives: there is always another corner
in some library or archive in which an unknown piece of the jigsaw awaits discovery.
Sometimes the labour seems comic: as when Johannes Moller produced in 1697 his
extraordinary Homonymoscopia, which lists
writers whose first and last names were the same!
I suppose a precondition for becoming a
bibliographer is an interest in books; and that I can definitely trace to my sixth
birthday when my father gave me an edition of the works of Dickens: it began a life-long
habit of acquiring books and trying to
understand them. It took me many years to learn the awful truth that books are deceivers,
and surrender unwillingly the secrets of how they came to be what they are. In a sense,
every book, like every human being, has a history, and the bibliographer’s task is to
tease out that history. Like people, books are related to other books, some closely some
distantly, but no book stands alone. This is why bibliography concerns itself with
bringing together the members of a dispersed family (a diaspora of sorts), be they books
on medicine, playing cards, or books by authors who lived in Chalon-sur-Saône (Louis
Jacob de Saint Charles published such a bibliography in 1652: De claris scriptoribus Cabilonensibus printed at
Hamburg).
………
1958 found me at the new University of
New Brunswick, recruited to teach Old English, the history of the English language, and
several other courses in English Literature. Fredericton, in those days, was about as
boring and uninspiring a place as I had ever had the misfortune to live in, so it was not
long after my arrival there that I began busying myself with projects. The first was to
compile (for my students) a compendium of texts on the history of the language; the second
was a manual for teaching students how to compose Old English prose. The latter I sent to
Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie (then the doyen of Old
English studies at Columbia), and we subsequently exchanged letters written in OE! 1958
was also the year when I was asked to consider updating Kennedy’s renowned Bibliography published at Harvard in 1927. After a
winter’s research – such as was possible in Fredericton – I came to the
conclusion that what was needed was not a revision but a completely new work, compiled
according to bibliographical principles and based on a wide-ranging search of the research
libraries of the world. The summer of 1959 was spent in London and Oxford, and the list of
additions to Kennedy had begun to grow to the point where I was certain that my conviction
was right.
In 1960 I moved to London –
ostensibly to acquire a PhD, but in reality to get at all those libraries in Europe that
few British or American bibliographers had ever taken account of. I began by writing to
some 600 libraries in Scandinavia, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy and Spain.
The response was beyond dreams, and plans were laid for my first foray among the rare book
collections of Europe. The first tour, undertaken in 1961, lasted six weeks with a cruel
timetable which barely left time for eating and sleeping. But I managed, with the generous
help of hundreds of librarians, to cover the major (and many minor) libraries in Denmark,
Sweden, Holland, Germany and Switzerland. Thomas F. Dibdin (whose bibliographical whose
travels in Europe were documented in his Bibliographical,
Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour published in 1821) travelled through Europe in what
one might call style: I often had to sleep in my
VW Beetle, and meals consisted in market produce cooked on a Camping-Gaz burner, a couple
of non-stick pans, and a plentiful supply of Kleenex to clean up! Occasional stays in
small hotels (9/- a night) were necessary in order to have a bath and wash dirty clothing.
With very few exceptions I was accorded quite extraordinary privileges and was allowed to
work after closing time in numerous small libraries. One such was the old Staatsbibliothek
in Bamberg, where at about midnight I stumbled on Thomas Basson’s 1586 printing of
Gabriel Meurier’s Coniugations - still the only copy ever discovered. Even for
those libraries that could not allow after-hours work I was always permitted access to the
stacks, which is where discoveries are made. That, alas, is no longer possible since
librarians are understandably worried about security. But the loss to scholarship which
dependence on a library’s catalogue has effected is incalculable. Books do speak to those who understand them, and for
every discovery I have made over the years by consulting a catalogue there are ten which
only revealed themselves when I could handle them straight from the shelf. Of all the
libraries I worked in on the Continent during this period none could equal the riches I
found at Göttingen, and the systematic manner in which the books were shelf-marked meant
that everything I needed was in one location. At that time few English or American
bibliographers took the trouble to go there, believing that the only rare English book in
the collections was the Treveris printing of A, C,
mery talys (1526 – STC2 23664). Later that year I first met Bernhard Fabian,
whose prodigious labours on behalf of English Studies in Germany is now legendary, and
urged him to do something about Göttingen’s wonderful English collections. When the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) started in 1976 he was one of the
first to collaborate and the fruits of that are to be seen in the splendid catalogue he
produced in 1987-88.
1962 was taken up with my second foray,
which concentrated on British libraries, and included numerous country houses. Longleat
was probably my most fruitful source, and the Marquis did everything possible to make my
days there pleasant. I remember how baffled he was at my excitement when I discovered the
only known copy of Pierre Valence’s Introductions
(1528) – the book of which Lambeth Palace has a fragment (frequently referred to in
Dobson’s great work on pronunciation). Some years later I reproduced this in the
Scolar Press English Linguistics series. The
Newberry Library in Chicago awarded me a Fellowship that summer and, once I had catalogued
the Bonaparte Collection, gave me the freedom to travel around America. Of the many
librarians I met that year I particularly remember Edwin Wolf II – one of the great
librarians of this century – who presided over the Library Company of Philadelphia,
founded by Franklin. Edwin’s unrivalled knowledge of his own library’s
collections and others throughout America made that summer a memorable one, and wherever I
went his support proved invaluable. We became firm friends, and when I started the ESTC at the British Library in 1976 he
was one of the first to cooperate. I tried to teach him MARC cataloguing, but without much
success: Edwin always preferred pen and paper!
1963 was taken up with completing the
task of reading the General Catalogue of the
British Museum, scanning hundreds of periodicals for evidence of the publishing history of the texts with which I
was involved, and describing in detail the Museum’s vast collection of grammars and
dictionaries. That year I persuaded the Museum to acquire microfilms of rarities I had
discovered in other libraries, and users of my Bibliography
will be familiar with this. It was also the year in which I managed to complete most
of my dissertation on spelling reform before 1700.
The 1960s witnessed the last days of
traditional bibliography, before the onslaught of the electronic revolution. The North
Library was a hot-house of bibliographical endeavour: Bill Jackson revising Pollard &
Redgrave’s STC; Ted Besterman working on the
revision of his monumental World Bibliography of
Bibliographies; Ted Hodnett working on woodcut books printed before 1535; Blanche
Henrey compiling her definitive work on English botany and horticulture; Kathleen Coburn,
George Whalley and Bart Viner editing Coleridge; Jack Robson editing Mill; Carl Stratman
compiling his Bibliography of English printed
Tragedy 1565-1900; Walter Ong working on his Ramus Inventory; Eric Partridge ransacking the
collections for his dictionaries. We must have seemed a lunatic lot to the patient staff
who delivered and collected books by the thousand every day! Those days seem to belong to
another time which we shall never see again, for libraries everywhere have introduced
systems and practices which make such endeavours impossible. Of course, the French have
always suffered constraints, as anyone who has worked in the libraries of Paris knows only
too well. When I was working in Paris I always stayed with my aunt, Louise Depréaux,
librarian of the Fondation Thiers. She knew all the Paris librarians, but no amount of
personal influence could move the Bibliothèque Nationale to allow me more than twelve
books a day! So a typical day for me was to start at Rue Richelieu, then migrate to the
Arsenal, the Généviève, the Mazarine, the Sorbonne, Saint Denis, Versailles, and back
to the wonderful collection in my aunt’s apartment.
By the time I got the coveted PhD in
1964 it was time to move on, and I was fortunate in persuading the University of Leeds to
appoint me as Lecturer in English Language. Harold Orton was very supportive of my work
and I was able to visit the Museum at least once a week at minimal cost. By 1965 I felt
ready to publish Volume I, devoted to English grammars, and le grand projet was at last underway. It recorded
significantly more texts than were listed in Kennedy, and copies were located in some 400
libraries throughout the world. The files of data had now become a domestic embarrassment
and my wife banished me to a small garden house: with over 30,000 cards; six filing
cabinets of correspondence and photocopies; and one cabinet which housed the
transcriptions I had made since 1959.
By 1975, the year in which the British
Library asked me to organize ESTC, the files had almost doubled,
filling two rooms in a building in Ilkley. While progress had been satisfactory up to that
point I knew that accepting the challenge of ESTC would seriously affect my ability to
keep up with my intended publishing schedule. In fact, between 1975 and 1997 I was only
able to publish the two parts of Volume XII devoted to the Romance languages. On the other
hand directing the world-wide ESTC gave me splendid opportunities to
visit libraries and hundreds of important items came to light as records were sent in to
the project from participating institutions. It also provided the opportunity to engage in
a foray of exceptional importance: the examination of every manuscript volume in the
British Library (60,000+) in order to discover uncatalogued printed items – until
recently archivists seldom noted printed items bound up in manuscripts. Thus it was that I
found in Additional MS 26604 the only known (and probably the earliest) printed example of
Gujarati characters. It is a single sheet (watermarked 1797) with the title: A Table shewing, in the six lines from left to right
at the top, the form of the characters, pronunciation, and power, of the Guzzerat alphabet
– ESTC t149645. This item will be included in Volume XIV.
From 1990 I was Director of the School
of Library, Archive & Information Studies at University College London, from which I
retired in September 1998. Then, and only then, could I return to the work which had been
an important part of my life for so many years, even the years when I seemed to have
neglected it. But the gathering of information, if not its inclusion in a printed volume,
has gone on continuously. My interleaved volumes contain many hundreds of additions and
corrections, and it is my intention to include all these in a supplementary volume when
the series is complete.
One of the most rewarding outcomes of the Bibliography
has been the renewed interest in historical studies of English which it has done something
to stimulate, and I have received letters over the years from many young researchers who
have found it useful, and who have been able to add information I did not know about; and
it seems to have spurred others to attempt to bring under bibliographical control texts
printed after 1800 – witness the listing of nineteenth century English grammars
compiled by Manfred Görlach at Cologne, soon to be published. And one has only to look at
the contents of Historiographia Linguistica
since 1974, not to mention other more recent journals in this field, to see that
historical studies of language are alive and well.
I have nearly completed my further researches on Volume XIV, which covers all the languages not so far dealt with: Irish, Gaelic, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, the languages of the Indian sub-continent, Chinese, Amerindian, and a further hundred-odd languages for which I have found glossaries in travel books. It will, I think, come as a surprise to some that so much of this fugitive material remains unexamined. It will be one of the largest volumes in the series and will be illustrated with over 200 facsimiles. It should be ready for the printer by late summer this year. The Volumes I dread are XV and XVI which cover Greek and Latin: the number of items for Latin is so large that I have had to divide the two volumes at 1650. Will we ever, I sometimes wonder, know how many times Lily’s grammar was really reprinted? If the evidence for English spelling books is any guide, I suspect that 50% of all the Lilys have vanished without trace!
While there are good reasons for being optimistic about the future of bibliography in the electronic age, there will be losses as well as gains. ESTC could never have been undertaken other than with the use of computers, and large-scale bibliographical projects benefit users because there is no waiting for the publisher, or the bibliographer who clings to his offspring until it is mature and near-perfect. On the other hand, when I consult library catalogues available via Telnet or the Web, I am often appalled at the wretched quality of the records I find. ESTC started de novo, and every item was described from the originals according to a clearly established set of rules and guidelines. The subsidiary project at the American Antiquarian Society to re-catalogue early American books was based on even stricter rules. But that, alas, is not the case for much of what ESTC now includes, and this has resulted in thousands of errors, faulty locations and inconsistencies which I doubt will ever be corrected. More seriously, perhaps, is the prevailing policy amongst librarians to depend entirely on their automated catalogues, most of which are simply the result of hasty conversions from card to computer. In other words, bibliographical shopping is increasingly like supermarket shopping: if you can find it you can buy it! Coupled with the growing tendency to severely restrict access to the stacks – even by staff! – the bibliographer’s task in the next millenium is going to be an unenviable one!
Research libraries have always been nurseries for scholarship, and their traditional hospitality to the researcher needing large quantities of books has made it possible for substantial bibliographical projects to be both conceived and carried out: that hospitality is daily diminishing as financial pressures inexorably call for reduced services. Some kinds of research can be satisfied by a daily quota of ten books, but others can not. I, for one, count myself extremely fortunate to have embarked on this mad pursuit when I did …
And though it be vnperfect, as I know not what first Booke either
of Dictionarie, or Herball, or such like was perfect at the first or second edition, yet
he that helpeth me to put in one Booke that I haue not seene, I hope that I shall shew him
ten that he neuer heard of.
[Andrew Maunsell, The First
Part of the Catalogue, 1595.]