Recent Books

Collecting the Imagination: The First Fifty Years of the Ransom Center. Ed. by Megan Barnard. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2007. XXV + 132 pp. $40. ISBN 978 0 292 71489 2.

When in 1957 the Thomas Streeter collection of Texana was sold to Yale, Harry Ransom realized that he had the wake-up call for his colleagues that he needed. No longer could they ignore the need for the University of Texas to invest in their library on the scale that the times demanded. The library already had some notable collections: the names of Wrenn and Stark are familiar the world over. But in the last years of the curatorship of Fannie Ratchford collecting had slowed. Opportunities to acquire libraries had been lost, and though this was by no means entirely Ratchford's fault, this book's opinion is brutally clear as much about her as about her curatorship: 'She was neither modern nor experimental in her social interactions' (p. 16). Under her successor Harry Ransom, all changed. The University was persuaded to find money, and with the acquisition in 1958 of the Hanley collection of modernist writers the library began on the road that has brought its greatest subsequent fame as one of the world's definitive collections of the twentieth century. Books and papers were bought sometimes literally by the bookstore, while the surge in activity had its effect on libraries in America and (more slowly) Europe alike. The twentieth-century papers of literary figures of the English-speaking world are rightly celebrated, but they are countered by others such as Carlton Lake's French collection, the Gernsheim photography collection, Gloria Swanson's film archive, the Pforzheimer English literature collection, and much more besides: the Pforzheimer Gutenberg Bible has naturally made the most noise. The library can also afford to note some that got away: the Louis Silver collection to Chicago, and the Stravinsky archive eventually to Basel. This book celebrates the collections and the buildings, along with the labours involved in making so much available now and for the future. As the present Director, Thomas F. Staley, makes clear in his preface, this is not least about the importance of original objects, or, as we must often now call them, artefacts.

David McKitterick
Cambridge

A Primer of Textual Geometry. By Vinton A. Dearing. Philadelphia: Xlibris. 2005. 282 pp. $21.99. ISBN 1 4134 8915 x.

This book is the most elaborate exposition on the subject of stemmatics to appear in a long while. Building on lifelong experience working in textual criticism and computer programming, and on two earlier books of classic allure, A Manual of Textual Analysis (1959) and Principles and Practice of Textual Analysis (1974), Dearing has attempted to write a comprehensive text book on the subject of textual variation that extends the Lachmannian tradition of stemmatics into whole new areas of understanding. In spite of its title, however, the Primer is not for the novice. The author's complex rules and axioms for creating stemmata that express not chronological descent but spatial relationships between witnesses have something in common with cladistics and phylogenetic analysis as it is used in textual criticism, though he is quick to distance himself from this practice. Underneath the geometrical rules that he establishes lies a desire to construct algorithms for a computer model that can generate stemmatic representations of different textual states automatically. The Primer contains a number of programs in Visual Basic that are said to do exactly this, but perhaps frustratingly the programs are printed in the book rather than provided in electronic format. Dearing finished the Primer not long before his death in April 2005 (if indeed it was wholly completed) and his widow prepared the book for private publication. It was clearly meant as the culmination of a life's work, but unfortunately the book falls short of this in various respects. The argument is at times too abstract and difficult to follow, and there is a shortage of concrete examples and demonstrations. The programs included will require a good few hours of keyboarding before they can be...