Bibliography
A) What is bibliography?
Bibliographers “are the good housekeepers of the world of books.” “If books incorporate the collective memory of humankind … then without enumerative bibliography access to the record of civilization would be random” (Howard-Hill, Companion, 9 &11).
Bibliography is “the science of the transmission of literary documents” (W.W. Greg 1966:241) (Howard-Hill, Companion, 10).
“Enumerative bibliographers and library cataloguers bind together the elements of civilization and society, providing access that magnifies the power of each element” (Howard-Hill, Companion, 101).
B) The First Shakespeare Folio & the printing shop in the handpress period (1500-1800)
Bibliographers have made important contributions to textual criticism, especially in Shakespearean scholarship, by building inferences backward from the structure of a book to the process of its printing and hence to an original text, such as the missing Shakespeare manuscripts (Darnton, Reader, 19).
“By analysis of the physical copies, bibliographers have determined that the type of the 1619 quarto was set by the same compositor, a particularly slipshod workman whom they call Compositor B, who set nine other quartos of Shakespearean or pseudo-Shakespearean plays in the same year, using earlier editions as his copy. When he came upon a phrase that he considered deficient, he “improved” it. So that the 1619 version of those lines is pure Compositor B, and the text of the play as a whole (it has an average of one significant error in every 23 lines) is very impure Shakespeare” (R. Darnton, “The Importance of Being Bibliographical.” The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. Chap. 9. 132).
C) Bibliography & Meaning: McKenzie & Congreve
Sir Walter Greg, Shakespeare bibliographer, 1875-1959 famously stated that: “What the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his” (D.F. McKenzie, Reader, 35).
Greg “once remarked that it should make little difference to analytical studies whether a book were printed in Sanskrit or in English […] This approach functions “without any consideration whatever for the meaning of the words or for their correctness”” (Bowers, Reader, 29)
“Even the most apparently straightforward bibliographical approach to books through the preparation of a checklist or catalogue is inherently historical and interpretive” (Howard-Hill, Companion, 18).
[A] change in direction [led to] D. F. McKenzie’s celebrated statement[:] ‘The essential task of the bibliographer is to establish the facts of transmission for a particular text, and he will use all relevant evidence to determine the bibliographical truth.’” (Adams & Barker, Reader, 48).
Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. […] I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts (Darnton, The Case for Books 29).
“Meanings are not therefore inherent, but are constructed by successive interpretative acts by those who write, design, and print books, and by those who buy and read them.” (Intro to Book History, 12)
Even the “New Bibliographic” approach assumed that the production of a book happened in orderly fashion, “through rational, consistent patterns and means. In his article entitled “Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices” (1969), McKenzie demonstrated that the assumption that all was orderly and organized did not reflect the state of printing houses in the 17th and 18th centuries. “Printers of the Mind” “challenged the orthodox views of analytical bibliographers who had dominated textual bibliography throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, by demonstrating that the physical production of a text was very much dependent on the conditions in which it was produced.” (Intro to BH, 12).
D) The Evolution of bibliography
F. McKenzie famously advocated a movement from the conception of bibliography as the study of books as material objects to the history of the book in society, i.e., “to what their production, dissemination, and reception reveal about past human life and thought” (Howard-Hill, Companion, 18).McKenzie has shown that the bawdy, unruly Congreve of the early quarto editions settled down into the decorous neoclassicist of the Works of 1709 as a consequence of book design rather than bowdlerization” (Darnton, Reader, 21).
In 1999, Don McKenzie published Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, transforming stogy traditional bibliography into a much broader and inclusive discipline by demonstrating that the material form of texts crucially determines their meaning and reception.
McKenzie declares that bibliography must be the “discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of transmission, including their production and reception.” To this end, he broadens the definition of “text” to include all forms of texts; states that “forms affect meaning” and all bibliographers should recognize it; and justifies looking at the technical and social processes of their production and transmission (McKenzie, Reader, 37).
Conclusion: “The passage from the old bibliography to the new history of the book is not simple: it is accompanied by an abrupt change from a reductionist to a maximalist philosophy.” (Adams & Barker, Reader, 62).