REVIEWS. Reviewed by Keith Maslen

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1 REVIEWS David L. Vander Meulen, ed., Studies in Bibliography, vol. 58 ( [2010]). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. vi pp. ISBN (hardcover). US$ Reviewed by Keith Maslen Scribes and compositors, book-jackets and their makers, collectors, editors oldfashioned and new-fangled, the mix in this latest almost annual from Virginia is good and true to the brand. Richard Bucci in Mind and Textual Matter begins by chiding postmodern opponents of the traditional author-centred approach to editing for their extravagant rhetoric. He ends in a more conciliatory manner by arguing that the gap between the editorial treatments usual for authorially intended texts and those proposed for social, collaborative, or performing texts is not as wide or sharply marked as some have claimed. All editors, especially of modern texts where the evidence can be considerable, should understand how authorial intentions can be shared and/or reshaped over time, and therefore adopt a sharper historical focus. This extension of arguments advanced by Bucci in Studies in Bibliography vol. 56 should benefit especially younger readers not brought up on the writings of Greg, Bowers and company. Paul Werstine and Stephen Orgel in particular are blamed for having misrepresented key ideas of W. W. Greg perhaps the finest analytic mind of his time. Orgel s misuse of the term authority is singled out: cf. the authority of the published text was that of the publisher (quoted p. 7). Bucci also challenges the preference shown by Orgel and others for modernising the spelling and punctuation of Elizabethan texts, thus denying readers not only the authorially intended text, but also the social one. On the positive side high praise is given to G. Thomas Tanselle not only for his efforts to reconcile conflicting schools of textual theory, as in his Textual Criticism since Greg (2005), but for his joint editorship of Melville s Typee. Other salutary examples are offered, some from the critical editions of Mark Twain in which Bucci himself is heavily involved. Another approach to the same vexed issue of textual authority is supplied by John Ivor Carlson in Scribal Intentions in Medieval Romance. Should deliberate textual changes made by early copyists be treated as unfortunate contaminations of an original, or rather as reflecting subsequent reader responses to that text? Focussing on a miscellany containing metrical romances prepared by and for the gentleman copyist Robert Thornton, Carlson sensibly takes the more inclusive view, while admitting the difficulties of reading a copyist s mind. The Thornton Script & Print 35:2 (2011) BSANZ [ISSN ]

2 116 Script & Print case yields unusually well to analysis, but Carlson s conclusion that Thornton may have consciously crafted the vernacular romances in his miscellanies for spoken delivery is offered as tentative (p. 65). In Compositor B s Speech-Prefixes in the First Folio of Shakespeare and the Question of Copy for 2 Henry IV S. W. Reid revisits a long unsolved case that has never quite grown cold. Was the Folio version of this play directly based on the Quarto of 1600 or on some literary manuscript of indeterminate character? Famous textual detectives of the past Greg, Alice Walker and others could not agree. Would a study of the habits of Jaggard s typesetter known only as B help? In particular, following a suggestion made by R. B. McKerrow in 1935, might B s variable preferences in setting speech-prefixes indicate the nature of his printer s copy? Bowers, Trevor Howard-Hill, and Reid himself long sought answers. Now in this posthumously published piece Reid argues in great detail that the longer and the full speech-prefixes frequent in B s pages of 2 Henry IV by and large exhibit the influence of the forms in the 1600 Quarto. It is a tempting thought, for we know that printers generally prefer to set from printed copy if they can get it! Whether this evidence has sufficient weight to bring down the scale on this side remains to be seen; the devil is in the interpretation. More than two score Renaissance English plays exist in texts so corrupt as to rule out the likelihood of their having been produced by an unbroken chain of copying by eye. These so-called bad quartos in Shakespeare s case those notoriously denounced in the preface to the First Folio as stolne or surreptitious have long been explained as involving some kind of memorial transmission, the use of some rudimentary system of shorthand having been ruled out by George I. Duthie in Now, Gerald E. Downs, in Memorial Transmission, Shorthand, and John of Bordeaux, taking the admittedly somewhat exceptional case of the play by Robert Greene, challenges Duthie and his supporters. Weighing a wide range of evidence, Downs concludes that this play is an example of a remarkably well done stenographic report of a stage performance (p. 132). Such theatrical reporting should therefore be reinvestigated in the case of other bad quartos. I have long argued that London printers knew what they were doing, both masters and men, and that by the late seventeenth-century, if not well before, trade practices were well on the way to being standardised. The guild system operated by the Company of Stationers, the requirements of a long apprenticeship, the notorious mobility of journeymen and the prevalence of shared printing all speak for a degree of uniformity. So too held D. F. McKenzie, even though in chiding Hinman and others for speculating on the habits of this or that compositor he may have overstated the variables (see my An Early London Printing House at Work, 1993, p. 136). The three sets of printing-house rules that have come down to us also bear witness in their alikeness to the existence of uniform trade customs and printing-house practices. This line of argument is now strengthened by Alan

3 Reviews 117 D. Boehm s excellent short study of the known but hitherto unexamined and unpublished chapel rules collected by John Bagford, tentatively assigned to the late seventeenth / early eighteenth centuries. Bagford s ORDERS To be Observed in this PRINTING-HOUSE are significant precisely for their similarity to the rules of Joseph Moxon (1683), Samuel Richardson (1734), and the younger Bowyer in the late 1750s. No printing-house can be linked to these Bagford Rules, but they would best serve the needs only of a substantial business with several compositors, at least two apprentices and several pressmen cf. the youngest Prentice of this [Press] Room. By comparison for much of the 1730s the Bowyers, father and son, had only two apprentices at a time. Michael Winship, in The Tragedy of the Book Industry? Bookstores and Book Distribution in the United States to 1950, laments that too little attention has been given by historians of the American book to the mechanisms of distribution, and sets about filling the gap by listing and commenting on hitherto overlooked contemporary directories of the trade. Seventy-one titles for the period are described. The first dated 1854 perhaps failed to reach publication, for no copy has been found. To Orville A. Roorbach of New York passes that distinction, for his List of Booksellers in the United States and Canada is dated The problem with such publication has to do with the criteria chosen for inclusion of businesses, a topic debated by rival publishers, even though the stated aim was to record retail outlets whose major dealing was in books and stationery, thus excluding news vendors. (I met this difficulty in 2001 when compiling a list of early New Zealand sellers of music, and relying largely on the comprehensive business and personal regional and national directories that flourished a century ago. These commonly did not distinguish the different branches of the trade.) Winship s useful pioneer list should encourage closer attention to this vital link in the chain of transmission from author to reader. Christian Y. Dupont, a former librarian himself, comments in Collecting Dante from Tuscany: The Formation of the Fiske Dante Collection at Cornell University that book collecting, bibliography and librarianship go hand in hand (p. 209). The story fascinates for its details of the individual players and their collaboration. Daniel Willard Fiske ( ) played all three parts and many more besides, for he was Cornell s first professor of northern languages and a master chess player. Henry James, however, who stayed at Fiske s fine Tuscan villa, considered him an absolutely colourless little personage. Among others to be thanked for the creation of one of the two premier Dante collections in the US are Jennie McGraw, Fiske s wife who died of tuberculosis soon after their marriage, enriching her husband and eventually Cornell, George William Harris, Fiske s friend who succeeded him as Cornell Librarian, and Theodore Koch, employed in 1895 by Fiske and Harris to catalogue the rapidly growing collection. By a

4 118 Script & Print nice touch Koch had acquired his taste for Dante studies at Harvard, where there was already a remarkable Dante collection. Dupont, however, speculates that Fiske, a long-time and expert collector of Petrarch and of Icelandic material, was driven, not especially to rival Harvard, but rather by a growing sense of Dante s importance to European and hence New World literature. In Book-Jackets of the 1890s G. Thomas Tanselle follows up his list of dustjackets the terms seem interchangeable before 1891 published in Studies in Bibliography vol. 56. Then he offered 380 examples. This new list from 1891 through 1900 has 1,156 entries, an unknown proportion of those that might have been issued, but an impressively large sample for characterising the whole. Tanselle once again prefaces his discussion of the decade in question with concerns about modern tendencies to switch jackets, silently or not, and so tamper with the historical evidence. The monetary temptation is great. Tanselle notes a recent example where a jacketed copy of The Great Gatsby fetched fifty times the price of an unjacketed copy. Buyers should look harder at all jacketed secondhand books. I wonder even at the propriety of collecting and dealing in jackets as separates. Tanselle notes a website operated by Mark Godburn specialising in early dust-jackets, and on his site I am glad to see pictures of books and jackets together. (Once, being told that university librarians were thinking of discarding the jackets from all new purchases, I threatened to collect all discards and sell them back when wiser counsels prevailed. The proposal was dropped. I hope those days are past.) I have a lot of time for lists such as Tanselle s and Winship s: they are useful things on which to build. Attempts here and in recent volumes of Studies in Bibliography, notably by Bucci and Tanselle, aimed at keeping editorial theorists and practitioners on the right path even by widening the boundaries of best practice are likewise very acceptable. I notice, however, that the words digital, electronic and software are to be found only in the Notes on Contributors. Here is my New Year s Wish for volume 59 Music Entries at Stationers Hall , compiled by Michael Kassler from the lists prepared for William Hawes, D. W. Krummel and Alan Tyson and from other sources. Aldershot: Ashgate, xxviii, 738 pp. ISBN US$144.95/UK Reviewed by Shef Rogers Although the publishing histories of the works of many major composers have been brought under reasonable control, details of publishing networks and dates 1 This review was written in 2006 but never published. Script & Print apologises to the author and the publisher for the inordinate delay Ed.

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