A Companion to the History of the Book by Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose Read Free Book Online

able to read bibliographical literature with a modicum of understanding, and certainly be able to read bibliographical descriptions of books for the historical and cultural information they contain. Many recent bibliographies devoted to individual authors are essentially biographical (Laurence 1983), presenting descriptions of their works in chronological order of publication. They usually include documentary information about the gestation and composition of these works, the authors’ relations with publishers, their publishing history, and notices of textual variations. Such bibliographies go far beyond the provision of what has been traditionally considered “bibliographical” information into wider realms of culture, economics, and textual transmission and reception. In so doing, they underscore the importance of bibliography for the history of the book.
    Textual Bibliography
    The interest of literary students in the works of authors contributed to the growth of textual bibliography in the previous century. Textual bibliography (or textual analysis) is essentially the bibliographical study of text in relation to the material processes of its transmission. Editing is the application of the findings of textual analysis to the production of different kinds of editions for different kinds of readers, under the aegis of one or another theory of editing. Although “[t]he chief purpose of bibliography is to serve the production and distribution of correct texts” (Gaskell 1972: 1), not all bibliography is subordinated to text, and not all textual bibliography is promulgated in the form of editions. Later twentieth-century bibliotextual theory, as developed by Jerome McGann, treated a published text as the result of a collaboration between the author and all those (amanuenses, proof-correctors, editors, publishers) who had an opportunity to alter that text (McGann 1983). This trend was propelled by an egalitarian devaluation of authorial intentionality, combined with a growing interest in popular forms of literature and their dissemination amongst lower-income readerships, often in adaptations and abridgements. (For a fuller discussion of this approach to the book, see chapter 2.)
    Historical Bibliography
    Historical bibliography focuses on the physical processes that contribute to the production of books, such as copy-editing, composing, proofreading, printing, binding, and illustrating. Historical bibliographers have compiled biographical dictionaries of printers, booksellers, and publishers, as well as individual biographies of prominent members of the book trade. They have also produced studies of the history of type-founding, papermaking, composition, printing, binding, publishing, bookselling, and the personnel and organization of the book trade. The history of libraries and book-collecting, both personal and institutional, is also an interest shared by book historians and historical bibliographers.
    Book historians learn from historical bibliographers that the literary contents of a book at any time may have been modified for non-literary reasons. For instance, when Benjamin Franklin undertook to publish Samuel Richardson’s novel,
Pamela
, he was obliged to commit a large amount of his capital to purchase paper for it, usually the main cost of a book. Despite setting the text in small type in order to condense its three volumes into one, he used seventeen sheets of paper for each copy, instead of the up-to-four sheets normally required for his other publications. Later eighteenth-century American printers found that it was possible to compete with British imports only by abridging the novel: Franklin’s was the only full text among thirty-eight editions published in America in the century (Stallybrass 2004: 1348), where
Pamela
was usually read in shortened form.
    Bibliography and Modern Book History
    Now, after the naming of parts, we can consider more specifically how bibliographers support book history in