The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison (review)

This splendid volume is the culmination of a proposal first put forward in 1996 to honor the life and work of Ian Willison. As its expansive title suggests, this is “not an omnium-gatherum festschrift of the run-of-the-mill kind” (vii). Rather, there is a decided diversity of subjects that speaks to the breadth of Willison’s life’s work as well as to the esteem in which he is clearly held by scholars, librarians, and, most fittingly, friends. The honoree himself drew up a “catalogue of desiderata,” and the essays and studies that fill out the structure of the volume range widely on the history of books, libraries, and scholarships—in other words, on the central preoccupations of his career (vii). Appropriately, the first of the writings focuses on the man himself. And in a wonderfully informal introduction David McKitterick spells out precisely what Willison’s duties were at the British Museum, both as superintendent of the North Library and as head of antiquarian collections, namely, “to look after the readers and books, and to pursue a scholarly project” (2). Unquestionably, the man excelled at both. Reading through the bibliography provided by Dennis E. Rhodes, it is clear that, although his doctoral interest in George Orwell never abated, Willison’s conception of a history of the book in a larger (and, in a 1995 article, worldwide) context informed not only his storied career but also the thirteen essays and studies that follow.

Each of the next three articles is concerned with “lives” of a different sort. “Making Books, Making Genres” is the subject of J. Paul Hunter’s revisiting of this most prestigious form of literary criticism. In a similar manner to the writings of Gérard Genette he takes as his focus the “brief lives” of early-modern title pages, where “the sense that a text is going to be of a particular sort affects the way the actual text is perceived, described, and read, even when the initial expectations are thwarted or revised” (20). “The most Blasphemous Book that ever was Publish’d” is a captivating article by Michael F. Suarez, S.J., on Thomas Woolston’s controversial six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour (1727–29). At issue is precisely what about this thought-provoking satire made it so curiously attractive to the reading public (Voltaire borrowed much from it) and yet so dangerous in the eyes of both church and state (49). Lives of two collectors and one endlessly revising poet are the subjects of the next two articles. In the first article Richard Landon discusses the collecting practices of Thomas Grenville and Lord Amherst and relates the fates of both men and their libraries in an entertaining narrative with more than a touch of pathos. In the end, Grenville’s collection was returned to the public with its arrival at the British Museum, while Amherst’s was dispersed in order to save the pecuniary honor of his family. In the second article Warwick Gould paints a vivid portrait of William Butler Yeats’s “well-known textual restlessness” (96). Intriguingly, what is gleaned from reading the myriad palimpsestic revisions of Yeats’s poetry has as much to say about the instability in Yeats’s own life (and the bibliographer’s role in uncovering it) as it does about textual instability.

The history of the book in a more general sense is the subject of the next four articles, which offer invaluable insights into the more mundane but critical aspects of scholarship. Peter Davison begins by charting the many “impediments to scholarship” in a subject dear to Willison’s heart: the difficulties publishing the first nine volumes of a twenty-volume set, “the ‘books’ of George Orwell” (120). And though he very much insists to the contrary, Davison cuts something of a Job figure as he recounts “seventeen years of...