Dane 2012

Dane, Joseph A. What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books. University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Print.

• 4 Bibliography is associated with what is now called book history, itself a conglomerate of fields of study and interest. Book collecting, librarianship, printing history, editorial history, literary history and criticism -- all, in certain contexts, can be imagined as legitimate parts of bibliography since all are embodied in physical books. Most scholars would consider studies within these fields bibliographical to the extend that they focus primarily on material books rather than on the texts within those books, the distribution of those books, their social impact, or the history of reading practices.
  • compare to McKenzie 1986's similarly inclusive definition
• I look at a material book: it is evidence of all kinds of things, all kinds of histories.
• 5 Physical books constitute evidence, and material evidence is not something that should merely support our grander abstract notions and narratives (Fred is a murderer, and my job as an investigator is to find the evidence to convict him); evidence is something that challenges those narratives (maybe Fred, murderous though he is thought to be, didn't commit this murder; maybe there was no murder at all).
• The basic method of bibliography is simple and could be summed up as follows: the organization of readily perceived details of material books and a common-sense explanation of anomalies related to them. One of the greatest and most influential of late C19 bibliographers, Henry Bradshaw, stated that methodology directly: "arrange your facts rigorously and get them plainly before you, and let them speak for themselves, which is what they will always do."
• 8 [Book vs book-copy] The word or term book, in this context, is a technical term; the word book refers to some abstract concept that allows us to speak of a number of book-copies as a unit, as essentially identical. The book known as "The Shakespeare First Folio of 1623" includes all extand two hundred plus copies of that book as well as the hundreds we assume to have vanished.
  • this falls into Platonist Anglo-American idealism: "book" as an abstract concept is a useful heuristic, like "historical period," but can lead to lazy thinking (see McGann 1991)
• 150: The fact that so many of the early books we encounter in libraries are not in their original bindings has produced among most bibliographical scholars a habit of mind that considers bindings and books two separate things. Bibliographical books are thought to transcend their bindings. I can still, in accord with standard bibliographical thinking, take any book on my shelves, rip its binding off, and have it rebound without changing its bibliographical identity. If we look at early English plays in a library such as the Huntington Library or the Clark Library, with a focused interest only in their earliest distribution and form, we soon learn to disregard bindings altogether: the copies are nearly all in elegant, expensive bindings from the nineteenth century, creating a common genre and form these books may not have possessed in the seventeenth century. The morocco-bound quarto volumes shown in figure 8.3 from the Clark Library reflect nineteenth-century English aesthetics and the importance early English drama had for nineteenth-century collectors and their American counterparts of the twentieth century. But these bindings tell us little about institutions surrounding English drama in the seventeenth century.