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The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 8.4 (2007) 387-397

STC Publication Statistics:
Some Caveats
Peter W. M. Blayney
Toronto

In 1992, when Maureen Bell and John Barnard first published their 'Provisional Count of STC Titles 1475–1640',1 they included a brief account of their sources and methods, and explained one of the reasons why those numbers were not in perfect accord with the actual number of entries in the revised Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 14751640 (STC). Since that date their statistics have been used in a number of studies, although those who have quoted them have not always paid proper attention to the accompanying comments. And when those same figures were appended a decade later to Volume iv of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, the necessary cautions were not reprinted with them.2 The Cambridge History will presumably remain a standard reference for many decades to come, so the statistics will doubtless be accepted by the unwary as both authoritative and accurate. But while those numbers can certainly be very useful if their limitations are recognized, it needs to be clearly understood that they neither derive directly from, nor precisely represent, the entries in the revised STC.

The question of book-trade productivity has long been of special interest to historians of mid-Tudor England, because of the marked difference between the reigns of Edward VI (1547–53) and Mary I (1553–58). During the 1980s such studies usually relied on the numbers presented by Patricia Took in her unpublished 1978 dissertation,3 but those were compiled from the original 1926 STC and only partly updated when the revised Volume II [End Page 387] was published in 1976. In the early 1990s Took's graphs were abandoned in favour of an unpublished early version of Bell and Barnard's numbers (December 1990), prepared before the index volume of STC appeared in 1991.4 But those figures, like their published successors of 1992, overstated the real totals. More recently, John N. King relied partly on the published Bell and Barnard statistics in 'The Book-Trade under Edward VI and Mary I', while offering some additional numbers of his own.5 I have therefore chosen the years 1547–58 as a particularly useful sample to correct.

In a footnote to his first statistical table King claims that Bell and Barnard's 1992 numbers are based 'on individual entries in STC and the "Chronological index" to it by Philip R. Rider', and most users likewise casually assume that to be the case.6 But as the compilers clearly announce in their second paragraph, the figures they published consist of 'a total count of STC titles derived from Rider's index' (p. 48, my italics), and closer inspection confirms that the index was their sole functional source. They depart from Rider only by omitting two classes of listing that they identify in the index (see below); otherwise, everything that Rider omits Bell and Barnard omit (principally the 324 subentries under 'Bookplates' at 3368.5, but there are also accidental omissions), and everywhere he duplicates, mistakenly adds, or misplaces an entry they follow suit.7 In their opening paragraph they report that their original unpublished figures were derived both from the draft chronological index to Volume ii that Rider circulated in 1978 and (necessarily, for entries in Volume i) from STC itself. But when the publication of the completed index volume allowed new statistics to replace their earlier results they made no secret of their reluctance to undertake any extensive reexamination of the STC entries themselves.

In their second paragraph Bell and Barnard concede 'that there is some duplication in the index'. Interestingly, in elaborating that claim they state first that Rider 'picks up dates in titles (sometimes different from imprint dates) and lists such items under both dates'. I have noticed very few examples in the index as published — although in the 1978...

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