Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History

III.1. Book History and Book Histories: On the Making of Lists

III.1. Book History and Book Histories: On the Making of Lists The Princess thought that, of all sublunary things, knowledge was the best. She desired first to learn all sciences, and then proposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old and educating the young, she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age models of prudence and piety. —Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Conclusion Most of us have at some point been commissioned or required to compose a “Survey of Scholarship,” perhaps as a free-standing monograph, perhaps as an introduction to a scholarly article, or even in the opening meetings of a class. On the one hand, the allure is irresistible: that perfectly designed lecture or schema, making sudden sense of the conflicting, contradictory, and too often repetitive voices in a scholarly field. On the other hand, the very thought can lead to despair: there seems no way to accomplish this without giving a superficial and uncritical view of everything being surveyed. Even in a survey of such introductions (entitled “Introduction to Introductions,” and not intended in any way to be a critical evaluation of these introductions), I could not seem to single out the most important, significant, or basic works in the field, nor could I draw the obvious relations between them, despite my familiarity and comfort with the totalizing charts and displays that were quite the rage in the late 1970s. My own displays simply lacked conviction; Book History and Book Histories 131 they were like the editorial stemmata I discuss in Chapter 6, and they obscured and misrepresented more evidence than they revealed. The creation of a list (a “reading list”) is a familiar academic exercise: it is a traditional task assigned to dissertation students or to ambitious undergraduates , and as teachers and scholars, we often find ourselves doing the same thing. List-making gives us the illusion that we are working, and implies that academic work or scholarly work in general is incremental; it is just a matter of, say, marshalling the evidence to suggest or support whatever thesis we come up with, or in most cases doing these two things in reverse order. But for many of us, this comforting task, having been performed a few times, no longer functions as it once did. The once satisfying illusion seems to have lost its power, and the resultant list deteriorates into something else: not a coherent body of information, but rather a bunch of titles. Critical work A never quite balances or coordinates with critical work B. Critical work C doesn’t really fit either. Mastering the lists and the critical introductions to such lists, or even creating them—this does not provide a foundation for primary research in a field. It is just a way of passing tests. In my aborted introduction to introductions, I nonetheless began with just such a list. I would get my facts, as facts might be in this case, plainly before me, and with luck, they would speak to me. Among the obvious categories and entries were the following: The Annales School (Febvre/Martin, the Histoire de l’édition français) Abstract Cultural History (Eisenstein, Johns) Anglo-American Bibliography (Bowers, Greg, McKerrow) Textual-Critical History (McGann) Critiques of any of these (McKitterick) General Histories (McMurtrie, Dolphin 3) Relation to Computer Studies (Peter Robinson and the Chaucer Project) Printing History (Steinberg, Pettegree) Popular History (Smithsonian Book of Books) Encyclopedic Histories (Glossary of the Book; Carter, ABC of Book-Collecting) Such a list at least responds to the basic history of Anglo-American bibliography ; it suggests the close relation between editing and bibliography (Greg, 132 iii.1 McGann), the similar relationship between a dilettantish, belletristic look at books and the relation of bibliography to the book trade (Dolphin 3, even to some extent Carter’s ABC of Book-Collecting), the relationship between studies on bibliographical detail and larger cultural issues or history (Eisenstein, Johns, Pettegree). There are no studies in this list based exclusively on detail: press-variants, imposition procedures, type-manufacture, although many of them, of course, incorporate such detail into their discussions. Detail is generally treated, even in a basic study such as McKerrow’s Introduction, as in the service of something else, although when individual scholars study such detail and become obsessed with it, this is not necessarily the case. I thought that this problem...