The Wayne State University Collection of Comedias Sueltas: A Descriptive Bibliography (review)

154BCom, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Summer 1 986) SULLIVAN, HOWARD A. and HENRY N. BERSHAS, comps. The Wayne State University Collection of Comedias Sueltas: A Descriptive Bibliography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984. Hardcover. 245 pp. $15.00. Benjamin B. Ashcom's A Descriptive Catalogue of the Spanish Comedias Sueltas in the Wayne State University Library and the Private Library of B.B. Ashcom (1965) was only the second in a series of indexes and catalogs devoted exclusively to sueltas that have appeared over the last 25 years. This original edition was a modest, paperbound«in-house» typescript publication. The individual entries were limited to title, author, and summary place, publisher and date information gleaned from the colophon. Pagination was described as numbered or unnumbered, and sueltas for which a collation was given was not done in accordance with accepted standards which then prevailed. For all its shortcomings this catalog was at the pioneering forefront of suelta studies from the bibliographic point of view, and Ashcom included valuable information on attributions in cases of disputed authorship. Unfortunately even at this early stage, Ashcom neglected to follow the example set by Molinaro's 1959 Bibliography of 'Comedias sueltas' in the University of Toronto Library in terms of including the first and last lines of the text. There was an attempt in successive catalogs: North Carolina (1965), Real Academia Española (1966), Cambridge (1977), Texas (1978), New York Public Library (1980-91) and London Library (1984) to transcribe all the elements required in a descriptive bibliography with more accuracy and in greater detail; in short, to follow more closely Fredson Bowers' precepts as admirably clarified by Edward Wilson specifically for comedias sueltas in his 1973 article *Comedias sueltas: a bibliographic problem.» Even Karl Gregg's 1984 Index to the Spanish Theater Collection in the London Library, which claims to be only an index not a full descriptive bibliography, succeeds in creating several useful back-of-the-book indexes. The fundamental lesson that the eight or nine available suelta catalogs have taught us over a quarter of a century is the level of detail necessary to differentiate one edition from another with some degree of certainty. Over a one hundred and fifty year period, sue/ras were printed in astounding quantities with a great deal of piracy and misleading imprints, so that one must never assume that two copies of the same title from the same publisher and Reviews155 with the same date are necessarily copies of the same edition. The very handsome volume under review, The Wayne State University Collection of 'Comedias Sueltas': A Descriptive Bibliography compiled by Howard A. Sullivan and Henry N. Bershas, is an updated edition of Ashcom's work, now including 450 additional titles «which did not meet [Ashcom's] strict chronological and dramatic criteria, and a few dozen items that did but which were acquired too late for inclusion.» Although the compilers, a librarian and a professor emeritus of Spanish, changed the original title, this work does not qualify as a descriptive bibliography —the compilers did not study and compare all existing copies of the sueltas in order to describe ideal copies. In attempting to create a union list of sueltas, they too confidently compared their titles with entries from the catalogs by Bainton, Boyer, McKnight and Molinaro and then they indicate that 'an appropriate citation is given when one of our titles matches one of theirs in all bibliographical elements.» Unfortunately three out of five of these catalogs do not include sufficient bibliographic information to make a positive identification of matching copies possible . Regrettably this catalog does not further suelta scholarship, but rather ignores the advances of the previous 19 years. The compilers acknowledge their debt to Boyer and Bainton who produced two of the finest catalogs, yet fail to follow their example. Instead of the «minor editorial changes» which they have made in the original Ashcom catalog , the following would have been far more useful: a full-scale revision of collation formulas, addition of first and last lines, full transcriptions of all colophons, inclusion of type measure, and creation of several additional indexes. Some of the basic practices of descriptive bibliography, such as enclosing unnumbered...