Early American imprint bibliography and its stories: an introductory course in bibliographical civics.

The stories of the bibliographies that describe our country's early books are not only engaging but also helpful to remember as we use the bibliographies and plan for their successors. The stories behind Evans, Shaw-Shoemaker, Roorbach and Kelly, and the Bibliography of American Imprints explain their differences. Besides helping us measure our nation's bibliographical record, they also point to the need for study of the history of local printers, highlighted in the work of McMurtrie, detailed in the Tanselle Guide to the Study of United States Imprints, and filled with curious and useful stories of their own.

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Since its arrival in 1639 the printing press has been one of the proudest of our nation's possessions. It has supported the dialogue that has enriched our culture and defined our ideologies. To know it one needs to know where to find its evidence. The titles that cover the bibliographical record for our nation's early years (i.e., before the twentieth century) were once explained, however briefly and imperfectly, as part of a librarian's education; now they are seen as the responsibility of the student rather than the curriculum. Meanwhile, the bibliographies themselves--scattered, overlapping, and uncontrollable--have been proliferating and redefining themselves. This brief introductory course in "bibliographical civics" can thus serve as something of a review and updating of what Donald G. Davis, Jr., learned when he was a lad in library school.

Behind the sources lie their stories, an anthology of lore and legend, "institutional memory," as fascinating to recall as it is helpful to remember. Some of the stories are common knowledge, most of them are well known among specialists, a few may have been alluded to in library school lectures of yore, all tend over time to become hazy. On the surface the bibliographical citations give us the facts; beneath the surface lie the stories. Uncovering the facts and delving into the lore lead us to ask questions about the citation practices themselves: what is being specified and for whom? Library cataloging practices have vastly improved our bibliographical access, giving us riches that overwhelm us and obscure both the stories and the questions. The agenda of learning, however, becomes all the richer when the stories and the questions are remembered.

Coverage of the early years, from 1639 to 1801, is defined by the heroic saga of Charles Evans (1850-1935). (1) Edward G. Holley's biography needs to explain Evans's setting. (2) His story is that of a fiercely devoted lone wolf of a scholar but also of his patronage. Behind him stood not foundations but a community of librarians and scholars as committed to his project as he was. (The name of Clarence Brigham of the American Antiquarian Society stands out.) They provided Evans with facts, even occasional copies on informal loan, and enough funding to enable the Evans family to survive; after his death they completed his work. Read as a book (i.e., dipped into adventurously, with questions in mind subject to reformulation and with time to think), the American Bibliography becomes a historia litteraria that documents the spread of printing in colonial America and into the Federal era. Its annalistic arrangement makes this possible; for routine searching, its titles are usually more readily available online or in the Short-Title Evans. (3) Readers will admire Evans none the less for knowing what he found it necessary to exclude from his scope: German Americana (its bibliography has its own story, a kind of reverse lend-lease), (4) most newspapers, sheet music (most of it from after 1793), (5) and some of the ephemera.

A half-century later the Shaw-Shoemaker American Bibliography carried the chronology forward, so far to 1846. (6) To understand how it is different from Evans one needs to know its story. It involves the odd couple of the dynamic technocrat Ralph Shaw (1907-72) and the gentlemanly scholar Richard Shoemaker (1907-70), brought together at the new library school at Rutgers University. (Here, incidentally, I am told, most of the required courses had the word "bibliography" in their titles, but this is another story.) The set follows Evans's annalistic ordering of entries, but the differences are significant. Evans was a bibliographical hunter and gatherer; the Shaw-Shoemaker project could do bibliographical farming and manufacturing. Over the intervening half-century between the conception of Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker, library cataloging records, merged into union catalogs, had provided, if hardly an "information superhighway," at least a fairly well-mapped road system. Regional union catalogs had evolved into the National Union Catalog. More immediately important to Shaw and Shoemaker, the vast files assembled by Douglas C. McMurtrie (whose story must come later) were then fortuitously located in an army barracks just a few miles from Rutgers. (7) Evans's task was to find and describe; his successors' was to notice and transcribe; (8) considering the vastly larger output, the transcription practices needed to be worked out in great detail. This very assignment, one may suspect, was probably what caught…