Early Canadian Printing: A Supplement to Marie Tremaine's ‘A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751–1800’ by Patricia Lockhart Fleming, Sandra Alston (review)

236 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 historiographical distance is a product of historical distance: he knew that he was capable of a greater degree of detachment from the civil war than, say, the Earl of Clarendon, whose own contemporary account Hume used. Phillips suggests that in preferring those historians who are able to recapture the >immediacy= of the past, a century or more of commentary has been unfair to those for whom distance and not proximity provided the most suitable perspective from which to invoke sentiment. Through a variety of different genres ranging from biography (held outside history proper in post-Baconian poetical nomenclature) to conjectural history and the history of manners, the historians of the eighteenth century managed to integrate the private, domestic, and emotional into their narratives, thereby, in a sense, inventing social history (but not always, as Trevelyan later had it, with the politics >left out=). At the same time, they blurred a wider perceived gap, that between the fictional and the true. This gap, and its denial, is familiar to any reader of Hayden White=s Metahistory and the postmodern historiography descended thence, but Phillips tackles the issue from an entirely different, and much less canonical, point of view. It is a perspective that gives little ground to the notion that the classic golden age of literary historiography began only with Michelet, Carlyle, or, on the fictional side, Sir Walter Scott. Society and Sentiment is a very important book, which deserves wide readership along both sides of the historico-literary frontier. It offers a valuable corrective to a variety of different historiographical dogmas, in particular to the two parallel streams that either fixate on the triumphalist victory of modern historical method or on the political doctrines explicit in certain key historians, on the one hand, or on the other (après White) produce a literary analysis of a few master texts that privileges their imaginative qualities. We learn a good deal about historical reading, as well as writing, and the book will reward anyone wishing to understand how we got from Clarendon not only to Scott and Macaulay, but also to Fanny Price=s younger sister. (D.R. WOOLF) Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Sandra Alston. Early Canadian Printing: A Supplement to Marie Tremaine=s >A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751B1800= University of Toronto Press 1999. xxiii, 630. $125.00 In 1952, the University of Toronto Press published Marie Tremaine=s A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751B1800. In this work, for which she began the research in 1935, she provided >full bibliographical descriptions= of 1,204 >books, pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, handbills, and some pictorial publications,= as well as 23 newspapers and 2 magazines, printed in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec/Upper and Lower Canada in the last half of the eighteenth century. In their introduction to Early Canadian Printing: A Supplement, Patricia Lockhart HUMANITIES 237 Fleming and Sandra Alston rightly call her Bibliography a >classic work= that >established a national standard for the interpretation and presentation of research in Canadian printing history.= Fifty years later, however, there are problems with this Bibliography. Collections have been reorganized, and items in them lost or moved to other repositories.There are inaccuracies in the bibliographical descriptions. New imprints have been found that Tremaine would have included had she known about them. >Book culture= today has broadened the definition of >imprints.= Early Canadian Printing deals with these inevitable lacunae in Tremaine=s work. Repeating her numbers in their descriptive bibliography, Fleming and Alston indicate when copies of items described by Tremaine have still not been located, record where copies that Tremaine had seen may now be found, and correct her transcriptions, particularly in her quasifacsimile descriptions of title-pages. By incorporating a sequence of letters (A, B, C, etc) after the numbers, they add over three hundred items that Tremaine missed or that fit with their definition of >imprints= as >all the products of the press, from books and official documents to job printing such as handbills, commercial notices, licenses for trade with the native peoples, shipping documents, and land grants.= They also add as appendices the >Brown/Neilson Shop Records,= >as complete a record as possible of...