Obituary: Don McKenzie, Bibliographer

1 Obituary Don McKenzie, Bibliographer The death of D o n McKenzie in Oxford on 22 March 1999 ended a career which had revolutionized the study of 'bibliography' in the sense established by the [U. K.] Bibliographical Society. In the 1950s, when he first entered the field, the Society and its journal The Library occupied themselves almost exclusively with printing history and the close analysis of 'ideal copies' of historical editions. So far as their work had a grander goal it was that of facilitating the editing of early modern authors, especially Shakespeare. As late as 1972 Philip Gaskell still felt able to claim: 'bibliography's overriding responsibility must be to determine a text in its most accurate form'. The governing premise was that disciplined study of printing technology and its products would assist editors to work back from imperfect editions to the lost manuscript copy. The major development of the mid-century, encouraged from the U.S.A. by Fredson Bowers, was the use of the fine detail of typography to reconstruct the physical processes of a book's manufacture. While this scientistic approach proved inspirational for a n e w generation of scholarly editors (especially when its methods were transferred to the better documented nineteenth century), it rested to a greater extent than was then acknowledged on speculation. McKenzie's response was to return to the shop floor via its o w n meagre surviving records. From the Stationers' Hall archives he constructed the invaluable three volumes of Stationers' Company Apprentices (1961, 1974, 1978). But his most important work, which overturned several assumptions of the Bowers school, was the two ample volumes of The Cambridge University Press 1696-1712: A 1 A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1972), p. 1 2 Obituary Bibliographical Study (1966), based on his Cambridge PhD thesi time i t appeared, the N e w Bibliographers on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply enamoured of compositor analysis, a technique famously applied by Charlton Hinman in The Printing and Proofreading ofthe Fi Folio of Shakespeare (1963). Work of this kind had proved a a useful adjunct to editorial decision-making, but had also engendred a whole host of dubious assumptions about the timetabling of composition in regard to presswork and other printing-shop activities. Moreover, its rules of thumb for distinguishing compositors were wholly textderived . In the detailed records of the Cambridge University Press at the turn of the eighteenth century McKenzie found evidence of actual industry practice. Accounts of payments included exact specifications of which compositors and pressmen had worked on which sheets on which days. The picture turned out to be a very different one from what had been imagined. Journeymen printers did not work modern 'industrial' hours, but accepted piecework as they felt inclined or as i t became available. They were likely to be employed on two or more books simultaneously, along with jobbing work, rather than one consecutively. Moreover, a number of the typographical signs routinely used by textual bibliographers as markers for particular compositors or presses bore no relation to the actual distribution of work within the University shop. That these Cambridge practices were not a provincial peculiarity was confirmed by A Ledger of Charles Ackers, edited by McKenzie in 1968 with John Ross, and Keith Maslen's many decades of work on the Bowyer Ledgers. The results of McKenzie's investigation were assembled, prior to his publication of the Cambridge evidence, in the paper 'Printers of the Mind' which appeared in Studies in Bibliography in 1969 after havi been read before Bowers at the University of Virginia in 1963 and, in a later version, at the f i r s t Nichol-Smith seminar in Canberra in August 1966. In this, one of the classic scholarly papers of the twentieth century, 2 The Bowyer Ledgers, ed. K. I. D. Maslen and J. Lancaster (London and Ne York, 1991). 3 'Printers ofthe Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and PrintingHouse Practices', Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969), 1-60. The title may hav been suggested by D. H. Lawrence's much-quoted 'sex in the head' Obituary 3 one encounters the radical nominalism which was to make...