Descriptive Bibliography by G. Thomas Tanselle, and: A Sample Bibliographical Description with Commentary by Thomas Tanselle (review)

Both publications distributed by Oak Knoll Books, New Castle, Delaware.

‘Descriptive bibliography, by recording and analyzing the physical features of books, contributes directly to the process of reading and is thus a crucial cultural activity.’ The links thus expressed by Professor Tanselle in 1992, between form and meaning, have been long established, if not always perfectly understood. They were expressed somewhat summarily by McLuhan, and with more finesse in McKenzie’s much quoted (and much misquoted) ‘forms effect meaning’. That being the case, then a further question arises. Not just what can be seen, but also who was respon- sible for what, contributing in so essential a way to the process of reading: of what we extract from our reading, and how we understand it. In what exactly does this collaboration between author, manufacturer, and reader consist? Where is the common ground?

So far as the printed and manuscript word is concerned, it lies in the physical object: something that can be described in terms that are neither equivocal nor ambiguous: precise within chosen parameters.

While any description may (and should) be based on multiple copies of a given book, it cannot necessarily tell us more than sits before us on the table. Who was responsible for this appearance? It may be publisher, or printer, or in-house designer, or independent typographer. Beyond the text-block, what was the relationship between binder and publisher? How far did an author have a say in all this? How many decisions were the results of chance: what paper was to hand, what resources did the binder have? What type was available? How many decisions were made, and instructions issued, before work was commenced? Not least in impor- tance, how many decisions remained for the printers and binders who carried out the work? In all this, the contributions of individuals were as important as more general practices. In some sense, everyone contributes to meaning. Hence the signifi- cance of Tanselle’s book, and hence also some of the questions left for other occasions.

Tanselle’s previous collections of essays, mostly reprinting articles from Studies in Bibliography, will be familiar to many people. This new volume is different. It is highly focused, to the extent that it offers a manual in its own right: ‘a compre- hensive guide to descriptive bibliography’ in the opening words of the preface. Thus it falls in a tradition embraced most obviously by Bowers’s Principles of Bibliographic Description (1949 and later reprints with corrections) and parts of Gaskell’s New Introduction to Bibliography (1972, revised 1974). Tanselle refers constantly to both his predecessors—the first now seventy-odd years old. With so much work done since, the time is ripe for a fresh handbook. Yet it has been written over the course of forty or so years. It reprints articles printed between 1966 (‘Typography and Layout’) and 2006 (‘Dust-Jackets’), mostly in Studies in Bibliography but also in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America and in The Library. To each of the thirteen essays in which the volume is arranged Tanselle has added a postscript dated 2018, often very substantial, so as to bring more recent work to our attention and to comment on it.

While the general titles of most of the chapters might suggest their applicability to more than half a millennium of book production, in practice most attention is given to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beyond some obviously more com- mon features, such as formats and collational formulae, there is less on the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries; and there is little on what has been called the ‘third revolution of the book’, the application of computer techniques to manufacture and circulation. It...