I thought I would join
Alsitair by indicating something of what I said last Wednesday, as well as what
evolved from that as Peter, Paul and I discussed the various responses later in
the week. One thing I will say from the start is that I'm fully sympahetic to
Alistair's critique of the institutional impediments that shape employment
and funding, as well as the discursive structure of the discipline
more generally. At one level, one might simply respond that it is our ethical
responsibility (as I think it has been our practice) to overcome such
difficulties and ensure that the bibliographical disciplines are understood as
being central to all historically based scholarship, of which literature is only
a part. A 'traditional' historian who does not think they need
bibliographical skills to understand the records before them will unquestionably
make significant errors in historical reconstruction simply because they will
fail to understand when the difference between text and document.
In fact, one might turn Foucault's
Archaeology of Knowledge back on him and point out that bibliography exists in
what he called the fold in the discourse; and that rather than aporia, one
is left with bibliography as the discipline that describes the material
history of discourse as recorded in artefacts and documents: its shifts,
ruptures, and reformations. Where Foucault questioned the possibility of
recovering the linguistic formations underlying such knowledge, one might answer
that bibliography enables precisely that by focussing on the history of the
artefacts in their creation, transmission, and use.
Which brings me to the caveat that I
expressed on Wednesday. One thing that rather peturbed me was a tendency to use
bibliography to mean enumerative and analytical bibliogrpahy, and book history
to mean historical bibliography, thus reducing bibliography to a set of
descriptive tools. Yet, and yet, as Don McKenzie reminded all in his critique of
Greg at the start of the Panizzi Lectures 'all bibliography is historical
bibliography'.
The question I put to the group was
this: 'to what extent is book history different to historical bibliography?'
(as, for, instance, practiced by McKenzie, and indeed most contributors to The
Library for the last hundred years). I have an uneasy feeling that book history
is simply (in a sense McKenzie welcomed) a more palatable name for something
that otherwise sounds rigorous and daunting. After all, McKenzie (like Greg in
1914) would have bibliography 'catholic'. Alas, in practice, I'm inclined
to agree with Jim, Warwick, and Germaine that that practice has not been as
rigorous as it ought, and that what book history is, to the extent it differs
from historical bibliography, is simply the latter without the archival
detail or methodological and historical rigour. The new 'Book History' has been,
all too often and despite its name, ahistorical and synthetic.
I'd like to go one step further. and
suggest that the very success of 'Book History' leaves it at risk of being dead
on its feet: the old agenda of national histories has been largely fulfilled, or
will be in England as soon as a few more volumes of the Cambridge project appear
(note how efficient those working in 1400-1700 were); whilst work on the history
of libraries seems to me to be largely fragmented and lacking a broader
narrative. My biggest concern, however, is the extent to which the full richness
of the archives remains significantly obscured. At one level this is a
descriptive problem, in part created by institutional and funding inertia
around cataloguing, where too few staff are available to create the detailed
king of searchable records where not only author, title and subject, but
marginalia, provenance, other scribal information (price, dates, and so
on), and bindings are searchable fields: in this regard, some
institutions are more fortunate than others.
At another level, we need to realise
the limitations of our documentation of the archive at a higher level. The STC,
for instance, did not include the Vatican (at all), and its reference
to European, Australian, New Zealand, and South African holdings
was cursory (several 'last known at auction' items, for instance, are in
the Turnbull). I know the ESTC is supposed to address this, but a database is
only as good as the information it has access to. India, for
instance, remains terra incognita to all but a few western scholars, as
does the National Library of Russia (the 40000 1501-1600 European books are
searchable on line (in Russian), but the much larger 1601-1726 holdings are
still only accessible via card catalogue). What of Argentina and Chile, where a
great many Welsh and Scottish families emigrated in the nineteenth century? I
remember a decade ago the Independent travel section writing about Patagonia and
there being a house/museum in the back blocks with 15000 books from the
fifteenth to nineteenth centuries: on which database is this recorded, and what
is the history of this collection? Will ESTC include all pre-1800 English books
in this collection? And what of British ownership of continental imprints, both
in this case and more generally? When might we see an integrated
pre-1834 European Short Title Catalogue with all desirable fully
searchable fields? Never?
The point I am ultimately making
here is that 'Book History' may well be a useful term for institutional funding
and support, despite the caveats expressed by Alistair. I welcome its
latent generative financial power. Potentially, as well, it has a very
large agenda, but we also need to recognise the extent of our ignorance and, as
importantly, the need to bring bibliographical skills and resources to bear if
we are going to turn a good intention into a discipline of substance. At the end
of the day, my view of historical bibliography is catholic enough that
I can accept 'Book History' as a euphemism for what we have been doing for a
very long time now; what we need to do is assert the primacy of the analytical
and historical methods, and of archival detail, in order to be able to ask new
questions in new ways: it is there, and not in and of itself, that the
engagement with theory and cultural studies takes place.
Kind regards,
Mark