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.]

Henry Sweet Society, Bulletin, May, 1999.