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Io7 Books in Review / Cornptes rendusD.C. Greetham. Textual Scholarship:An Introduction.New York:Garland Publishing Inc., 1992. Garland Reference Library of theHumanities, vol. 1417. xx, 539, [I] PP-; $56.oo u.s. (cloth). IsmN0-8 IS3-oo5 -I.The force behind the 'purpose, strategy, and shape' of this comprehensiveintroductory survey, its author tells us, is '[a] belief in the disciplinaryinterrelatedness of all aspects of the study of the text of a book' (p. 2).Here asthroughout the book, Greetham addresses what he sees as a lack of commu-nication among various subdisciplines crowded under the broad (and broad-ening) aegis of textual scholarship. Furthermore, he demonstrates the genialsense of accommodation that separates him from the zealous combatants oneither side of the skirmish between textual scholars (theorists, really) andtheorists of 'texts' less rigidly considered. By resisting the parochialism of theone camp and the doctrinalism of the other, Greetham joins with scholarseager to apply post-structuralism's productive ambiguities but able to resistits tendency toward relativism or self-indulgence.Greetham has organized the book into 'anatural ... narrative - from gainingaccess to the text in its various forms, to discovering its bibliographicalcharacteristics and interpreting its surface features, to defining its trans-missional history' (p. 347). Although this description does not tell us as much,the book is also a digest of extant scholarship. Individual chapters consider,in order, enumerative and systematic bibliography, the bibliograph'y of manu-script books, the bibliography of printed books, descriptive bibliography,paleography, typography, textual bibliography, textual criticism, and schol-arly editing. The bias is finally and admittedly towards the editing of criticaleditions, but telos never subverts process, and Greetham is never inattentiveto those whose interests lie along the way or even somewhat beside it. Manychapters ~emphasize historical context more than some might wish, butGreetham typically excludes trivia and resists pedantry; only occasionally,asin the summary of Eugne Vinaver's theory ~of scribal copying (pp. 279-83),does his enthusiasm for his subject tempt him to test the patience of hisreader.The descriptions of bibliographic methods and processes are as good as anyI have read, and Greetham has the teacher's knack for anticipating andmeeting in his audience the need for examples and definitions. The firstappendix illustrates difficult casting off by reproducing sections of Shakes-peare's First Folio (I623); the second, frustratingly unannounced in the text,is a useful but sloppily organized catalogue of types of scholarly editionas. Anextensive enumerative bibliography includes many sources newly publishedor forthcoming; particularly useful to teachers whose students have diverseliterary interests will be the listing of scholarly editions in various worldliteratures (pp. 485-96). The bibliography is no t for show only: Greethamoften incorporates current material into his text, with worthwhile gains, forinstance, in the survey of scholarly resources written into the first chapter.

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Io8 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 3I /This section compares favourably to the analogous part of the current (fourth)edition of Richard Altick and John Fenstermaker's The Art of LiteraryResearch (1993, for 1992).

Greetham's liberal and inclusive view of the field, although unaffected, isalso good business, or potentially so at least. Interdisciplinarity sells andtheory-bashing doesn't; and Greetham, less ethereal than Jerome McGann butin a position to take advantage of the attention that McGann has called to thediscipline among younger scholars, is likely to be attractive to non-initiatesinterested in textual studies bu t suspicious of what must at times look likeits cultivated conservatism. Such readers, like the specialists whose isolationGreetham laments, stand to learn a great deal here about the attractions andthe difficulties of Greetham's subject.But Greetham is reluctant to acknowledge the breadth of this potentialaudience. He wishes to reach 'the budding textual scholar [who] is already anexpert in the specific field within which the texts are to be edited' (p. 5 .Thisis fair enough; and in my opinion the book could succeed splendidly as aprimer for scholars - relatively few, I would think - ready to move fromcritical writing to critical editing. One suspects, however, that Greetham (orGarland) has at least half an eye on the more lucrative market for graduateseminars inbibliography, textual studies, and (often) research methods, nowheld down by Philip Gaskell's A NewlIntroduction to Bibliography 9g72)andWilliam Proctor Williams and Craig S.Abbott's An Introductionto Biblio-graphical andTextual Studies (1989). Ipress the point not to fault Greethamfor failing to do something that he has perhaps not set out to do, but becausehis book comes close to besting the others in a contest in which he himselfseems uninterested, and because as a professor of bibliography I would haveliked author and publisher to have made the few adjustments necessary tohave wooed that market unblushingly. G reetham's book has less elegance -although no less charm - than Gaskell's; but it has still greater breadth andadds to Gaskell an interest in manuscripts, a fluency with the data generatedby twenty very busy years of scholarship, and an unflagging patience inexplaining the origins and the present status of significant questions in thecritical debate. Brevity is the strength as well as the weakness of Williamsand Abbott's excellent volume, bu t Greetham's warm and purposive anec-dotes and the leisurely pace and unerring clarity of his examples and expla-nations might tempt one from the telegraphic intensity and the occasionalobscurity of the shorter book. To have addressed more directly the broaderaudience, Greetham need only have backed off here and there on his verbiage;from their end, Garland might have taken a more responsible approach topricing and might have offered Greetham the use of an illustrator rather thanleaving (or allowing) him to plunder previously published studies forillustrations that do not always fit as neatly as they might or reproduce ascleanly as they should.A revised or a paperback edition could make this a popular and enduringbook. But it is already an impressive one, readable and worth reading, and afine source for information that any student of texts - rolls, incunabula,

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Io9 Books in Review / Comptes rendusprinted books, or even Foucault's apocryphal Nietzschean laundry-lists - isbetter for knowing.ALEXANDER PETTIT

Universityof North Texas

Sidney E. Berger. The Design of Bibliograpl2ies:Observations,Ref-erencesandExamples. London: Mansell, 1991. ix, [I], 198 pp.; 45(paper boards). IsmN 0-720I-2077-2.It is a curious, but obvious, fact that two books on a particular subject canconvey the same amount of information with an equal degree of clarity, style,and wit,. yet inevitably, one will be judged superior to the other. As readers,we bring a certain set of prejudices and assumptions when we read a book,and to that extent, reading involves discrimination and taste, and ultimately,some subjectivity. But the matter goes beyond that. How an author organizeshis or her information is crucial to understanding itself and to criticalappraisal. Furthermore, the physical design of a book can render it aestheti-cally pleasing or at the worst, unreadable or just plain ugly. Bibliographies,Sidney E.Berger rightly argues, are no exception to the general issues of thephysical and intellectual design of books. A great bibliography must no t onlydisplay learning and research, it must also be accessible, easy to use, andunobtrusively attractive.

Berger certainly has the qualifications to speak with authority on the designof bibliographies. As Head of Special Collections at the University of Califor-nia, Riverside, he has an academic background in bibliography, textualcriticism, and library science, and is currently the chair of the RBMS Exhibi-tion Catalogue Awards Committee (see his recent article, 'The Design andEvaluation of Exhibition Catalogs,' RareBooks e@ManuscriptsLibrarianship,7,no. I (1992): 45-60). He has taught courses in bibliography, the history ofthe book, and the book arts. His practical experience as proprietor of the DoePress and as a fine press printer is equally impressive. He also knows thedifficulties in getting bibliographiespublished. For example, in compilingMedieval English Drama:An Annotated Bibliographyof Recent Criticism(1990), he was requested by his publisher, Garland, to submit a typescript incamera-ready form. In an effort to keep costs down as much as possible,publishers of research tools have not always been overly concerned withquestions of design.The Design of Bibliographies consists of three major sections. The firstsection introduces the subject, and has chapters on the physical and intellec-tual aspects of designing bibliographies and on computers and desktop pub-lishing. In the second section Berger has provided an annotated checklist ofsome 274 works which he has consulted. The third section (appendix I) isperhaps the most interesting. Here one finds commentary with facsimiles ofpages from more than thirty-five diverse bibliographies. In additi.on, Berger