The RSVP Checklist & Me: A Personal History

I don't know precisely how the RSVP bibliographical checklist came to be, although Don Vann seems to have played the central role. He was its first editor and, assisted by Kenneth Mews, he produced the first ones. Early on, he invited others to join him in the annual gathering, and I volunteered. In addition to me, there were Basil Crapster, Elizabeth Daniels, Hans de Groot, Merrill Distad, Anne Humpherys, Margaret Lourie, and Myrna Lundquist. Our work, covering 1973, appeared in the December 1974 issue. I'm pleased to say that I've stuck with the checklist: I eventually edited it, and continue, in retirement, to contribute to it.

That I was able to sustain even this much scholarly activity during some exceedingly difficult times at Mansfield University in the late 1970s I owe to an administrator who told me, years after he had retired, that he had saved my job; to a fine reference staff at the MU library; and to the hospitality of libraries and librarians at Cornell and Penn State.

I am also grateful to Pennsylvania and New York highway crews, for wintertime driving on rural roads in northern Pennsylvania and upstate New York can be pretty thrilling. Years ago on one trip to Cornell on behalf of the checklist, my car broke down near Ithaca on a freshly plowed state highway. Fortunately, it slid to rest quietly in a ditch against a snowbank and across the road from a radiator repair shop occupied by a large hound and an agreeable mechanic. The hound, whose scars betrayed a lifetime of hunting, slobbered on me in welcome. His owner rescued my notecards and, by the next morning had me on my way.

In 1978, Hans de Groot and I co-edited the checklist for 1977; after that, I did it alone through 1985. Desktop computers were not common, if they existed at all, and so receiving copy from contributors and, later, preparing the final copy of the checklist was far more time-consuming than it is now. These days assignments go out by e-mail, and contributors return their copy by e-mail attachment—all neatly typed and presentable. But during the time of which I write, such was not the case.

During each of my years as editor of the checklist, I mailed lists of journals to be covered by the stalwart volunteers who participated in the annual gathering. They conducted their search and sent to me 3 × 5 cards displaying the relevant information. Then I checked them and compiled the results and the indexes, typed the final copy on my Smith Corona portable and mailed it by an agreed-upon deadline to the editors of VPR. Fortunately, the contributors were careful and usually timely.

Most of the 3 × 5 cards I received were handwritten. Although the contributors attended to their penmanship, occasionally I was unable to read parts of the entries and had to double and triple check them myself in order to be as nearly accurate as possible. Because I had to type the final draft on a typewriter, I had fundamentally two choices: I could type entries as they came in and paste or tape them together alphabetically, creating sloppy, ungainly sheets, or I could wait until all the submissions had appeared and type the whole bibliography then. Of course, I couldn't begin compiling the indexes until after I had numbered each of the entries and prepared the final draft of the checklist.

Usually I waited until all the slips had been returned and then numbered the entries, typed the final copy of the checklist, and compiled and typed the indexes. Producing the checklist in that manner created cleaner copy and, I opined, would be less bother for the editors of the journal.

I no longer recall which year produced the most strain in meeting the deadline. But it was probably the year I spent Christmas Eve at the dining room table, hammering out the checklist on my Smith-Corona while my daughter-in-law helped me proofread the final copy. However, that year was an exception. Normally everything...