A Companion to the History of the Book (6 page)

D. F. McKenzie famously advocated a movement from the conception of bibliography as the study of books as material objects to the history of the book in society, i.e., “to what their production, dissemination, and reception reveal about past human life and thought” (McKenzie 1992: 298). He urged that the study of all forms of symbolic communication should be seen not as a new and competing area of study, still less as a rejection of bibliography, but rather as a natural expansion of bibliography’s scope and function into a wider sphere. His central position was that, historically, the historiography of the book in Anglophone countries has been a development of Anglo-American bibliography. Even the most apparently straightforward bibliographical approach to books through the preparation of a checklist or catalogue is inherently historical and interpretive. As such, book historians cannot neglect, despite its contingency, the basic bibliographical foundation that affords the starting-point of their wide-ranging investigations.

Bibliographies supply an immediate overview of the world of books that is all the more commanding because it depends on the hands-on experience of countless copies of books. No one has done more to make the modern world aware of the significance of books than the bibliographers who have devoted their lives to studying them. It may be, as Peter Stallybrass (2004: 1351) protests, “one of the hidden scandals of the literary profession” that literary historians turn so infrequently to librarians: certainly the latter should be consulted more often. And it is worth noting that the sensibility toward books that the “history of the book” invokes in its more florid moments is not new. In 1830, Sir Henry Parnell wrote: “Books carry the productions of the human mind over the whole world, and may be truly called the raw materials of every kind of science and art, and of all social improvement” (Dagnall 1998: 347). These words remind us that without books there is no history, and without bibliography there is no history of books.

References and Further Reading

Adams, Thomas B. and Barker, Nicolas (1993) “A New Model for the Study of the Book.” In N.

Barker (ed.),
A Potencie of Life: Books in Society
, pp. 5–43. London: British Library.

Bowers, Fredson (1949)
The Principles of Bibliographical Description.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Carter, H. G. (1967) “Books in Fell Type Published by the University of Oxford from 1902 to 1927.” In Stanley A. Morison and H. G. Carter,
John Fell, the University Press, and the Fell Types . . .
, p. 253. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cordeaux, Edward H. and Merry, D. H. (1981)
A Bibliography of Printed Works relating to Oxfordshire . . .
, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Dagnall, H. (1998) “The Taxes on Knowledge: Excise Duty on Paper.”
The Library
, 6th ser., 20: 347–63.

Darnton, Robert (1982) “What is the History of Books?”
Daedalus
, 111: 65–83.

Ehrman, Albert and Pollard, H. G. (1965)
The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to
AD
1800 .
Cambridge: Printed for Presentation to Members of the Roxburghe Club.

Gaskell, Philip (1972)
A New Introduction to Bibliography.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Greg, W. W. (1955)
The Shake speare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History
. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

— (1957)
A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration
, vol. 3:
Collections, Appendix, Reference Lists
. London: Bibliographical Society.

— (1966)
Collected Papers
, ed. J. C. Maxwell. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Griffin, Robert J. (1999) “Authority and Authorship.”
New Literary History
, 30: 877–96.

Harner, James L. (2002)
Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies
, 4th edn. New York: Modern Language Association of America.

Hinman, Charlton (1963)
The Printing and Proofreading of the First Folio of Shakespeare
, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Howard-Hill, T. H. (1969–99)
Index to British Literary Bibliography
, 8 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

— (1992) “Enumerative and Descriptive Bibliography.” In Peter Davison (ed.),
The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-century Bibliography
, pp. 122–9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— (1998)
British Book Trade Dissertations to 1980
. Signal Mountain, TN: Summertown.

Isaac, Peter C. G. (1989)
A Tentative List of Bensley Printing
. Wylam: Allenholme.

Laurence, Dan H. (1983)
A Portrait of the Author as a Bibliography
. Washington: Library of Congress.

Lloyd, D. Myrrdin (1948) “Llfryddiaeth Gymraeg [Welsh Eighteenth-c entury Literature].”
Welsh Bibliographical Society Journal
, 6: 225–41.

McGann, Jerome J. (1983)
A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism .
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McKenzie, D. F. (1992) “History of the Book.” In Peter Davison (ed.),
The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-century Bibliography
, pp. 290–301. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McKerrow, Ronald B. (1994)
An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students
(with introduction by David McKitterick). Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies.

Mayo, Hope (2004) “The Bibliographical Society of America at 100: Past and Future.”
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 98: 425–48.

Pollard, A. W. and Redgrave, G. R. (1976–91)
A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640
, 2nd edn. London: Bibliographical Society.

Stallybrass, Peter (2004) “The Library and Material Texts .”
Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America
, 119: 1347–52.

Stokes, Roy (1969)
The Function of Bibliography
. London: André Deutsch.

Tanselle, G. Thomas (1971)
Guide to the Study of United States Imprints
, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

— (1981)
The History of Books as a Field of Study.
Chapel Hill: Hanes Foundation, Rare Book Collection, Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina.

— (1992a) “A Description of Descriptive Bibliography.”
Studies in Bibliography
, 45: 1–30.

— (1992b) “Issues in Bibliographical Studies since 1942 . ” In Peter Davison (ed.),
The Bo ok Encom-passed: Studies in Twentieth-century Bibliography
, pp. 24–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

West, Anthony James (2003)
The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book
, vol. II:
A New World wide Census of First Folios.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, W. P. (2003) “The History of the Book.”
Review
, 25: 211–29.

Wing, Donald (1972–88)
Short-title Catalogue of
Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales,
and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700
, 2nd edn. New York : Index Committee of the Modern Language Association of America.

2

What is Textual Scholarship?

David Greetham

The basic problem in producing an unambiguous and singular response to the question posed in the title of this chapter is that the phrase “textual scholarship” is itself not singular and, as we shall see, is full of ambiguities. Clearly, “textual scholarship” must in some way focus on a “text,” but that term can be particularly fraught and contentious. Similarly, “scholarship” may at first look fairly innocuous and straightforward: is it not just the serious, “scholarly” study of, and research into, a particular body of knowledge or information? Yes, it is certainly all of this; but, especially as it relates to “texts,” how is “scholarship” different from, or similar to, such possibly related activities as criticism, or interpretation, or editing, or commentary, or annotation?

That was a question addressed by A. E. Housman, lyrical poet and fierce textual polemicist. Reacting against what he saw as the over-reliance on positivist system and “scientific” philology, Housman significantly used the label “textual criticism” to emphasize the human, the critical, and the personal in the approach to texts.

Textual criticism is not a branch of mathematics, nor indeed an exact science at all. It deals with a matter not rigid and constant, like lines and numbers, but fluid and variable; namely the frailties and aberrations of the human mind, and of its insubordinate servants, the human fingers. It is therefore not susceptible of hard-and-fast rules. It would be much easier if it were; and that is why people try to pretend that it is, or at least behave as if they thought so. Of course you can have hard-and-fast rules if you like, but then you will have false rules, and they will lead you wrong; because their simplicity will render them inapplicable in problems which are not simple, but complicated by the play of personality. (Housman 1921: 132)

Housman’s promotion of the human over the scientific, and of the particular and aberrational over the general and the normative, was a necessary corrective to a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century desire for codification, system, and demonstrable proof. And what it suggested was that, in dealing with texts produced and transmitted by imperfect humanity, the critical and the evaluative attributes of the discerning scholar of texts were not just desirable but absolutely necessary. Information, historical research, and an intellectual familiarity with the bibliographical features of the text were all valuable assets in the scholarly armory of the reader/editor of ancient texts, but without a critical sensibility they would not yield a true understanding of the potential meaning of the text.

This emphasis on critical understanding and intervention may seem obvious enough in a contemporary culture that has thrust the reader (even perhaps more than the author) into the forefront of all negotiations with texts, but the lure of the scientific, the positivist, and the perfectly demonstrable has continued to exert a powerful attraction, not just on those charged with constructing texts but on publishers and consumers of literature (see Tanselle 1974, who takes a position similar to Housman in rejecting a correlation between scientific principle and critical judgment). The practices of some adherents of so-called “strict and pure” bibliography in the mid-twentieth century, who somehow felt that, given enough positive data, any textual problem could be solved, represent just one of many attempts to arrive at the surety that Housman derided. For example, during his hegemony as the arbiter of Anglo-American bibliography, Fredson Bowers often made some very doctrinaire statements about the role of scientific method, such as “I do not see how one can escape the conviction that the ‘scientific’ is basic in true descriptive bibliography” (Bowers 1949: 34n, quoted in Thorpe 1972: 64 – 5).

From Quentin (1926) to Greg (1927) to Maas (1927) to Hrubý (1965) and Dearing (1974), there have been frequent attempts to reassert a scientific security based on algebraic or statistical or systematic logical principles, or (more recently) on electronic retrieval and demonstration. Even a publisher’s desire to claim that an edition is “definitive” (with the implication that it somehow stands outside its cultural moment of production, and will never have to be done again) confirms this wish for the perfected, the complete, and the unassailable. I have claimed (Greetham 1999: 86) that this textual positivism “aimed for the same objective standards of demonstration appropriate to all the empirical sciences,” and Donald H. Reiman designates this period of apparent historical surety as a “brazen” age of editing “because of the too-sanguine hopes they, at least for a time, entertained about the results obtainable through systematic application of fixed principles to a wide variety of texts” (1984: 242).

However, this concentration on the determinate (and the determined), and the confidence in scientific logic over Housman’s “play of personality,” has lately fallen into disfavor both within academic circles and among the reading public at large. Even in “scholarly” journals, the response of literary critics to the retreat of textual scholars into small-scale certainties in the bibliographical features of texts has all too often been dismissive, if not downright hostile. In reviewing an edition of Pound for the
Times Literary Supplement
, C. H. Sisson (1979: 616) pronounced that “the prestige of fiddling with minute variants and bibliographical details should be low. It is, intellectually, the equivalent of what is done by clerks everywhere, labouring to pay wages and to feed computers. Such things hold the world together.” And Gerald Graff (1992: 354) has claimed that the “declining status of textual editing” (once “the staple of doctoral dissertations”) is symptomatic of a general decline in positivist and “detailed” scholarship.

While it would be difficult to contradict Graff’s analysis of the symptoms, I believe that he is mistaken in his prognosis that only by making “an alliance with theory” can textual scholars “reverse the downward fortunes of editing,” just as I believe that Paul de Man is wrong in characterizing Reuben Brower’s concentration on “the text itself” as a “return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces” (1986: 24). I have claimed (Greetham 1997: 10–11), following Housman, that it is a mischaracterization to regard the textual operations on a text (no matter how seemingly “minute”) as somehow “prehermeneutic” (i.e., “prior to . . . meaning”); for all such operations, from a decision to use old or modern spelling to the selection and evaluation of variants to the question of when and how to annotate (and for what sort of reader) are already deeply hermeneutic, already “critical” as well as “scholarly.”

The “critical” and the “scholarly” were brought together in the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS, founded 1979), a cross-disciplinary, extra-national, and theoretically inclined organization. We had art historians talking to musicologists talking to historians talking to epigraphers talking to literary theorists, in a very deliberate attempt to find common problems, questions, and even resolutions that would emphasize the community of “scholarship” as it related to “texts,” whatever their medium, ontology, or historical period. We were consciously confronting the tendency of specialists to stay within their self-defining limitations; and this promotion of boundary-crossing clearly made some people uncomfortable, while it illuminated the work of others (see Reiman 2006).

In his inaugural address as the first president of the STS, G. Thomas Tanselle noted that the term “textual
criticism
” has a very long tradition, principally associated with the study of biblical and classical texts. Tanselle quite properly recognized that the “criticism” element in the term “suggests the important role that individual judgment plays in the process of evaluating authority” (Tanselle 1984: 2), a role that unfortunately has not always been recognized, especially by those wishing to emphasize the “scientific” aspects of the field. Tanselle then declared that “[t]his Society has chosen the term ‘textual scholarship’ rather than ‘textual criticism’ not in any sense as a rejection of the latter term but only because the former is the more encompassing term. The great tradition of classical and biblical criticism forms but one branch of textual scholarship as a whole” (Tanselle 1984: 2). So “textual scholarship” inherits “textual criticism” but then enfolds it into a more comprehensive enterprise.

Finally, Tanselle pointed to the
necessity
for this newly defined enterprise by sadly noting that scholars in different fields not only do not “have much knowledge of one another’s editorial rationale” but,

[w]hat is worse, they may even think there is no reason why they should, assuming that the materials and objectives to be so different that there is no significant overlapping between the two fields. This attitude results from a failure to think through the basic questions that textual work involves and from a tendency simply to follow procedures that seem to be well established within a given field. (Tanselle 1984: 2)

So textual scholarship begins (in its current formulation) in potential conflict; it begins in challenging the definitions of fields; it begins in a cooption of a related area of critical discourse; it begins in interrogating the validity of disciplinary and period (and even genre) self-portraits. In other words, it begins as a series of questions, and thus it may be perfectly appropriate that my consideration of the term itself should be as a question. And because the scholarship of “texts” (still contained within the ambiguity of quotation marks) in a sense begs the question of what is a “text,” the interrogative may be the appropriate mode for another reason. I take my cue for “text” from Gerald Graff’s having found (1987: 257, 258) that the proper or most productive
position
for “theory” is in the interstices, the boundaries, and the margins of discourse: “The pedagogical implication of dialogics seems to be that the unit of study should cease to be the isolated text (or author) and become the virtual space or cultural conversation that the text presupposes . . . How do we institutionalize the conflict of interpretations and overviews?” For just as “theory” is best located in this medial position of conflict, so “text” is a weaving, a net work, a tapestry; in other words, a
textile
, as its etymology displays.

But while this “woven” sense of text is historically quite accurate – and is certainly the one that has been adopted by poststructuralists from Barthes (1977) onwards – there is another, competing sense that has become familiar (and enters the language at roughly the same time as the “textile” meaning). From the Latin
textus
, often, perhaps usually, referring to the validity and definitiveness of the biblical text, we have also come to look on “text” as something fixed, something carrying the weight of authority: “the
text
for today’s sermon is. ...” And so we have scholarship devoted to a strange mixture of the immutable and the ever-changing, the fixed and the indeterminate. It is this pull between two opposing conditions of
textuality
(the concept and state of a text) that textual scholarship confronts, and has done for many centuries, without yet showing any sign of the resolution of this conflict.

What is a text, then? In 1991, I determinedly offered a broad definition:

While literary texts (or, at least, texts composed of words) are the most familiar objects of textual scholarship, the textual scholar may study any means of textual communication – a painting, a sculpture, a novel, a poem, a film, a symphony, a gesture. All these media have meaning or form, and it is in part the textual scholar’s aim to preserve (or, if necessary, to re-create) this meaning or form in the face of the laws of physical decay. (Greetham 1991: 103 – 4)

Of course, that was then, and we are now in a new century and perhaps a new dispensation. As far as the range of media is concerned, I now think that the 1991 list is, if anything, too constrained, for its genres are all (more or less) the “conventional” ones for textual study. But in the interim, the edges of textual scholarship (charted in the STS conferences and in journals like
Text
) have become more expansive. One obvious area of new practice and theory has been the proliferation of texts and criticism of electronic media (a definition that strains the edges of the “book”; see Chernaik et al. 1996). This is too large a topic to be covered here, but several discussions of the new medium have been particularly challenging: Heim (1993, 1998); Turkle (1995); Finneran (1996); Landow (1997); Levinson (1997); Masten et al. (1997); Sutherland (1997); Levy (2001). As a parallel movement, there have been a number of recent collections that interrogate the basic concepts of text and scholarship, usually with a pronounced interdisciplinary range: Shillingsburg (1997); Gurr and Hardman (1999); Loizeaux and Fraistat (2002); Dane (2003); Modiano et al. (2004). The major issue would seem to be whether the shift from the printed book to hypertext is of a different order from previous shifts in medium (for example, from manuscript to print, from roll to codex, from oral transmission to the written word). Duguid (1996) claims that what he derisively calls the “liberation technology” of some enthusiasts for electronic media is overstated. For a more measured view of the epistemological changes brought about by hypertextual reconfiguration of “the book,” see McGann (1997).

The extension of that 1991 list of genres can be shown in some illuminating recent research in such nontraditional fields as the design and implementation of the Olmstead “gr e en s wa rd ” plan for CentralPark, the cultural meaning and impact of the British and US composition of early Beatles albums, or the graphical and design variants in Edison’s technological plans. At the 2005 STS conference, it was even suggested that textual scholars ought to move beyond the merely human, and (for example) begin to study phrasal and intonational variants in birdsong, just as D. F. McKenzie (1986) had earlier claimed that a textualized topography in Maori culture was a significant object of study. Perhaps “communication” (bibliographical, environmental, geographical, biological) still holds as a central concern, at least as far as the receiver of the communication is concerned.