IAN GADD (ed.), The History of the Book in the West: 1455-1700.

Abstract

THERE was a time when analytical bibliographers and textual editors were seen as being much like Dr Johnson's definition of lexicographers: the harmless drudges of literary studies. In fact these bibliographical drudges, who practised what F. P. Wilson dubbed the ‘New Bibliography’, were anything but harmless. Starting at the beginning of the twentieth century and working primarily in the period of English literary history covered by the book under review, they gradually demonstrated to all who would see that the existing view of what the documents of English literature were and how they came to be was faulty. These scholars were confronted with an analytical bibliography which existed almost exclusively to service the rare book/best copy market and textual editing which can charitably be described as impressionistic. By careful and ever more systematic examination of early printed books they produced such foundational works as W. W. Greg's Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (1939–59) and Fredson Bowers’ Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949), and the careful critical editing of literary works, starting with R. B. McKerrow's edition of Nashe (1904–10) through Bowers’ editions of Dekker (1953–61) and Beaumont and Fletcher (1966–96), As the blurb on the final volume of the latter edition puts it, these are ‘critical old-spelling texts of the plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, in which the texts are established on modern bibliographical principles.’ Of course some of the New Bibliographers fell victim to the hubris which comes with a new and successful school of study and produced rods which would be used on their own backs seventy-five years in the future (e.g. A. W. Pollard's ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos and Fredson Bowers' statement that texts were obscured by a veil of print).