Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History (review)

This is really a liber amicorum, or tribute in print to the archbishop of the book in America, Terry Belanger, who has for many years now bravely defended the book against all enemies and promoted the importance of understanding bibliography and book history in the training of librarians — or, as they prefer these days to be called, information workers. For anyone involved in book history and bibliography — and there are at least some to be found like the lesser kestrel lurking here and there — it would seem to be exactly what is needed as a vitamin supplement to the regular dosage of information technology that dominates schools of librarianship everywhere. But the collection of short essays (few of the twenty-six exceed seven pages) is disappointing. The longest contribution is by the volume's editor Ann Hawkins, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas Tech (Lubbock), an institution with more students than Oxford and Cambridge combined. She is based, it would appear, at the Rare Books School at the University of Virginia, where Belanger, with the help of several librarians and active scholars, teaches book history. The Virginia website lists her as giving a course in 2007 with Daniel Traister on 'Teaching the History of the Book'. In every way, therefore, an ideal person to edit a book such as this. One must start, accordingly, with her opening sentences: 'I'd like to start by considering this volume's unwieldy title: teaching bibliography, textual criticism, and book history. I fumbled about for a shorter, hipper, sexier title, something pithy and smart. But in describing our field, I was thwarted by 'interdisciplinarity run riot' (to co-opt a phrase from Robert Darnton) — by history of books, history of the book, print culture, manuscript circulation, readers and reading, textuality, materiality, textual studies, textual editing, documentary editing, descriptive or analytical bibliography, authorship, etc. — in other words, by the diversity of terms practitioners use to describe their courses and course contents.'

Viewed from a historical perspective, all of the sub-species that worry Hawkins belong in that primary discipline never better defined than by De Bure: 'the history and description of books.' Attempting to develop new words and phrases to describe intellectual activities that have engaged scholars for centuries was best exposed by Milton in his line: 'New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.' Her introductory essay attempts what those of us who actually engage in bibliography have always understood: that of all man's creations the book is by far the most ambiguous, and because of the way books are created also the most elusive. A book is not in any way like a painting or a poem, notwithstanding the celebrated phrase ut pictura poesis. When one has attempted to describe as fully as possible a few hundred books printed between 1641 and 1660 one realizes that at every turn one is frustrated by deceit: by the author, by the printer, by the publisher, by the contradictory evidence of the surviving copies. In other words, a bibliographer would do well to study the sceptical attitudes of Miss Marple. My advice to students at University College was to trust half of what the eye reveals. This, of course, applies equally to a sister discipline: research methodology. Bibliographical evidence as increasingly harvested from online sources needs particular wariness, especially since electronic bibliography is so frequently a corrupt version of the source from which it was derived. This is a problem created by unskilled transfer of bibliographic data from typescript or print to machine-readable form, and can be seen in the 'converted' catalogues of many hundreds of rare book collections throughout the world. The problem created by the trashing of card catalogues in libraries is that an intelligent and detailed record of a book in the Houghton Library at Harvard (perhaps created by Hugh Amory) is now irrecoverable. I can find no recognition of this in any of the essays in this volume.

Martin Antonetti...