Editing Versions

Université Bourgogne-Franche-Comté

Rare Book and Digital Humanities

M1 (2022–2024)

12 December 2022

Editing Versions: A synthesis of John Bryant’s commentary on descriptive bibliography

Amanda Hemmons

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Intro

Bryant has said himself that he isn’t a descriptive bibliographer. However, through the lens of his research and focus on editing Herman Melville’s works, it gives him an insight as to the necessity of bibliography as a discipline. Bryant discusses how Tanselle’s collections of essays on the topic covers the topics of descriptive bibliography’s science, arts, and technologies.

An aspect of descriptive bibliography that can make it difficult to parse is the fact that the textuality involved is both material and immaterial. That is to say, we “transform material words from page into images, actions, thoughts, arguments, discourse, all happening invisibly in the mind” (Bryant 71). From a physical artifact of a book or a page it becomes something intangible but no less real to the readers. But the transformation from material to immaterial doesn’t end there, because these material words are artifacts of the work that the authors and publishers have done that are also invisible to us now. Bryant brings up the question if knowing about the past creative processes impacts our current understanding of a text, and points out that we can’t know unless we start by listing and describing what we know in the traces of words, books, publishing, and culture — fundamentals of descriptive bibliography.

It seems clear to me that this quote sums up Bryant’s thesis statement, "In light of Tanselle’s book, I want to address the pull — the inevitability and critical necessity — of descriptive bibliography, as well as its connection to other intellectual concerns including the editing of versions of works and the dynamics of revision, and bibliography’s future growth in a digital world." (Bryant 71)

1. The Stigma of Mere

It is an unfortunate fact that descriptive bibliography (specifically the detailing of a text’s origins and evolution) is not much of a concern in most fields of literary interpretation. The focus has been, since the formation of the field of humanities as we know it, on the content of the text itself. In addition to the content, the social, political, and cultural context is also a concern.

Bryant laments that regardless of the recent changes in the fields of study, descriptive bibliography is still considered to be in the margins. Changes such as the New Criticism movement in the 1940s and 1950s — a concept of literary theory where the focus would be on the structure and meaning of the text and excluding author and reader bias — as well as New Historicism in the 1980s and 1990s — a focus on the cultural context and comes with an understanding that there is no unchanging truth. These new concepts, along with the growing importance of multiculturalism in the twentieth century, seem like descriptive bibliography would be a perfect fit for.

G. Thomas Tanselle’s book, Descriptive Bibliography, is a collection of thirteen essays. The oldest of which was written in 1966 and the most recent in 2006, though they each have a postscript with updated commentary from 2020. Bryant, in his description of Tanselle’s book, splits the essays into two sections; the first five act as openers, covering broad and theorized concepts (cataloging, ideal copy, and edition), and the last eight talk about the practicalities of descriptive bibliography (collation, paper, typography, presswork, binding, dust jackets). Bryant goes on to explain how the book is intended to be used as a resource in editing and bibliographic study, with an appendix that has a glossary, a sample descriptive bibliography, and a list of useful literature.

Per Tanselle, a descriptive bibliography is not just a history of a book but also something that contributes to “the broader annals of printing, publishing, and human culture” (Tanselle). In this context, Bryant takes “human culture” to mean many things. Not just research, scholarly editing, and book history, but also biography, genre studies, material culture, and literary interpretation. He goes on to add even “critical thinking in a democratic culture” (Bryant 73)

However, despite this sweeping inclusion of descriptive bibliography into such broad cultural and academic subjects, Bryant also argues that the field of descriptive bibliography is partially itself to blame for its marginalization. This is due to the discipline’s self-reference as being “merely” descriptive, as well as how it alienates outsiders with the hyper-abbreviated and difficult to understand collation formulas. As a newcomer to descriptive bibliography myself, I found the collation formulas at first glance to look like impenetrable foreign mathematics. Bryant says that such a collection of facts and formulas can make it seem as if descriptive bibliography is just another form of cataloging and only useful as supplementary data.

The history of descriptive bibliography is a recent one. Initially, the aim of descriptive bibliography was not about studying history but rather the pricing and merchandising of rarities. Biographers in the 1800s would make chronological lists to assist book collectors in distinguishing between certain prints and editions. Bryant here includes even a humorous aside that early practitioners included not only scholars but also frauds. Such as Thomas J. Wise, who concocted and stored supposedly-rare books of his own making, which he in turn described in bibliographical lists that he circulated to unsuspecting buyers. However, as scholarly editing, criticism, and the teaching of literature professionalized, so did descriptive bibliography and some biographers (more reliable than Thomas J. Wise, for sure) were able to establish reliable texts.

All change comes with its detractors. The practitioners of the “New Bibliography” had complaints that they “spoiled the fun for book collectors with their too-meticulous detail” (Bryant 74). Even today there are still those who consider descriptive bibliography to focus too much on inconsequential details. If not inconsequential, then difficult to understand with overly technical narratives and overly mathematical collation symbols. In contrast, Bryant points out that the past century’s changes in scholarly description, textual analysis, interpretation, and access mean that descriptive bibliography is increasingly more relevant, even if people don’t realize it.

2. Bibliography and Biography

As an editor and a scholar, Bryant is interested in the concept of revision in literary works. He uses his own focus of study– Herman Melville’s Typee– as an example of how descriptive bibliography is necessary for his analysis.

Bryant’s choice to study Melville seems in part due to the fact that not much had been done before. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts in their 1962 Billy Budd, Sailor, were the only ones to study Melville’s manuscripts up until Bryant. His focus on textual variation was made more difficult by the editorial practice of the time, who would bundle the substantive variants together in virtually unreadable lists. For example, the differences between the American Typee and the British Moby-Dick weren’t treated as the “kind of revelatory revisions that would give identity and hence validity to versions” (Bryant 75). That meant that the evidence Bryant was looking for, the revisions and versions of Melville’s texts that showed his fluid changes, was hidden out of sight in the back of the 1968 Northwestern-Newberry edition of Typee.

In 1983 there was a discovery of a three-chapter fragment of Herman Melville’s 1845 working draft of Typee, which sparked a new interest in the book. Bryant is unclear if he’s referring to general scholarly interest or his own here, but he goes on to describe how descriptive bibliography would become a useful tool for him in identifying the physical (and inferred!) versions of the work we collectively call Typee. He wanted to compare the newly found manuscript chapters to their corresponding texts; the 1st British edition, the 1st American edition, and the American Revised edition. All three of which had been published, not just within Melville’s lifetime but actually within six months of each other in 1846. Bryant doesn’t believe that Melville’s earlier version would show his final intentions as he progressed towards publication, but it would show evidence of his evolving intentions. Bryant is very excited about the ability to fully contextualize Typee further; but more importantly, he cares about the possibilities in broadening our notions in scholarly editing of fluid texts.

Bryant uses an example of his analysis by referring to a fragment of text in all versions of Typee/Moby-Dick, which flips between the usage of the word literally and liberally depending on the version. For instance, his own deciphering of Melville’s handwritten manuscript seemed to indicate liberally. Then both 1st editions in America and Britain used literally but reverted back to liberally in the American Revised edition. Bryant found that he couldn’t comprehend the revisions and main text without integrating both physical description as well as his own interpretive analysis. This is because, while it is very possible the changes are only due to a mis-read of the typesetter, which was later corrected, it is also potentially an example of Melville’s changing vision.

It is, as Bryant says, “physical evidence of a writer’s shifting intentions” which can also exemplify the “interpretive dimensions of the paradox of translation” (Bryant 77). Bryant’s emphasis here is on the usage of the phrase literally interpreted as being more respectful of the Polynesian language being spoken of in Typee as compared to the more condescending liberally interpreted. As a concept, it touches on the problematic core of translation itself, which, while not the topic at hand, is always a concern when trying to “balance linguistic exactitude and a necessary poetic license” (Bryant 76).

Tanselle reminds that when you consider the broader category of descriptive bibliography, analytical bibliography is included there. That’s a field that uses evidence like what Bryant found regarding Typee to identify versions, establish copy text, and even justify amendments made to critical editions. As much as the 1968 Northwestern-Newberry edition (NN) of Typee had the evidence Bryant needed for his research on the physician nature of textuality (the relevant notes at the back of the book written, in fact, by G. Thomas Tanselle), the American Revised edition he considers to be well-suited for analytical bibliography. For one thing, the AR edition wasn’t a brand new setting of type, it was actually the result of the original setup being broken up and reassembled. Edits were made ranging from individual words to sentences, paragraphs, and even pages. In the NN Typee, Tanselle makes the point that the locations of typos tended to cluster where those edits were made and errors occurred in the resetting process.

To harken back to Bryant’s study of Melville’s usage of liberally versus literally, Tanselle apparently found that there were no other edits made in that paragraph, which makes it most likely to be a change made at Melville’s request rather than a typo. It’s at this point that Bryant says he understood, in concrete terms, how descriptive bibliography was relevant to his analysis of textual evolutions, because his line of critical thinking had to be informed by the actual materiality of book-making. However, while the book data reveals that Melville’s liberal/literal change was likely intentional, it doesn’t explain why the author chose to make that change. Perhaps the change, or “oscillation” as Bryant calls it, is simply a correction of the 1st edition’s misprint. Bryant argues that it’s also possible that it could reflect Melville’s own oscillating opinion in “relation to Polynesia, culture, language, and translation” (Bryant 78). And while descriptive bibliographies aren’t seeking to be strictly biographical, they nonetheless connect the history of a book to the life of the writer. They “assemble, sequentialize, list, and annotate the data crucial to anyone seeking to craft a historical or biographical narrative” (Bryant 79) which, in broad terms, allows us to use the assembled data to synthesize the writer’s words, the cultural context, and our own interpretation of the text.

And while descriptive bibliography is more archival than narratorial, it is still a genre of biographical and historical scholarship. It not only facilitates our ability to understand how individual events and cultural interventions might be integrated, but it also sets parameters for how history might be told at all.

3. Bibliography and Historicism

Descriptive bibliography is an inherently historicist discipline, because it’s part and parcel in the assembling of data for our histories of lives and works, as well as textual cultures. Bryant takes the time to describe in detail Tanselle’s concept of the Ideal Copy as well as the difficulty in the clear understanding of that term, but ultimately states that “no single copy of an edition can stand as a full representation of a published work or the printing process that generated it” (Bryant 80). Instead, bibliographers came up with the concept of a composite version of the text that registered all issues and states– i.e. the so-called “Ideal Copy.” The difficulty lies in how the historicist description can accurately capture the sequential, accidental, and intentional changes evolving through the printing process. Can it be done accurately as well as comprehensively? If it is both accurate and comprehensive, can it be precise? How do you even begin to structure the data?

These are all challenges that Bryant acknowledges descriptive bibliography must face in imagining a composite copy/generalized construct/abstraction that can accommodate all known differences discoverable from actual copies. In the age of print scholarship, it would have been too costly to describe each individual copy of the source text that was different. However, in this new digital era it becomes increasingly possible with usage of a digital database, though that doesn’t solve the problem of the labor involved in compiling the data for that Ideal Copy.

In a final note, Bryant mentions Tanselle’s alternatives to the potentially misleading term “Ideal Copy,” such as calling it a standard, generalized, hypothetical, or reconstructed copy. Ultimately, both Tanselle and Bryant stick to the original term, however.

4. Manuscripts, Sub-editions, Adaptations: Describing Versions

Bryant takes the time in this chapter to summarize Tanselle’s explanations about the difference between an edition, impression, issue, state, and a sub-edition. To summarize his own summary: an edition is the same as an impression and describes copies of a work that are derived from the impression of sheets pulled from a single setting of type; issues are part of that same type setting, but might feature new title pages or bindings with the intent to attract different markets; a state then describes the copies of an impression or issue that corrects imperfections at the line or page level.

The variations that can be found between an edition, issue, or state have varying impact depending on the scholar studying the text. Those working on history, biography, textual analysis, revision narrative, literary interpretation, or cultural study would find these things relevant. However, these kinds of variations are less important to literary and cultural critics who focus on ancillary book features, such as cover or page layout, paper, binding, publisher’s ads, an added introduction, or critical essays added to the back. Bryant isn’t of course saying that such ancillary features aren’t important, because they involve the way texts are designed, packaged and marketed and are therefore potentially very meaningful, but that the interpretively meaningful textual versions between editions and states should be considered just as important as the physical variants.

The good news is that there has been a growing awareness of variations and revisions in printed books, manuscripts, adaptations, and translations in recent years. And the value of descriptions in the study of versions becomes even more clear once you consider the bibliographic concept of sub-edition. Bryant describes three main categories to sub-editions: same typesetting with a different publisher, meaning the original publisher arranged for an impression from an original edition to be processed differently by someone else; a “revised” edition that has nex text added to the origins typesetting, such as a forward or an appendix; or when internal text is altered or removed entirely. Bryant goes on to give examples of these using Typee/Moby-Dick and how they branch off from the American and British publications respectively.

While physical versions are the proper subject of descriptive bibliography, there are oscillating revisions that require a broader scope of vision. For instance, more than just editions, state, and sub-editions, there are also inferred versions that only exist in fragments, or they might be remnants of stages in composition that no longer survive as a complete whole. Bryant is of the opinion that these layered fragments (in surviving texts or manuscripts), as well as the versions inferred from them, are just as important to have described as the more fully evident physical versions available in books. However, there are added complications when you consider the span of a writer’s career. Editors of famous writers of the past have all recognized the problems inherent in trying to describe the layered, interspersed, inferred versions. It’s clear that just one editorial solution isn’t likely to suit all textual conditions, but nonetheless, until we begin to describe these versions as separable textual identities, we will not fully comprehend their materiality. So says John Bryant.

5. Adaptation and the Challenges of the Digital

In the final section of Bryant’s commentary and discussion regarding Tanselle’s Descriptive Bibliography, he talks more about the practical aspect of that field of bibliography and how it impacts his editing. There are three major types of revision, according to him, which are authorial, editorial, and adaptive. Adaptive revision may be the most complex, as it includes translations, abridgements, illustrated and kids editions, anthologized texts, adaptations for other media, appropriations, quotations, and even memes. Adaptive revision is essentially the embodiment of an interpretation, and Bryant is of the opinion that, since adaptation studies assume equivalent textual and aesthetic status to screenplay and original, it’s all the more reason to have descriptive bibliography include both kinds of versions. This would also allow that field’s discipline of description to provide some kind of standard regarding adaptive revision.

Since descriptive bibliography has only recently (in comparison to other humanities) shifted from an aspect of merchandising into the scholarly realm, it’s in the position of having to catch up to textual studies, fluid-text editing, and adaptation studies. But our interpretations of the different versions of a text including adaptations won’t be able to gain evidentiary validity unless descriptive bibliographies are created that embrace all interpretations of the text as well as the original. The example Bryant brings up is the common mistake where people confuse the film’s ending of Moby-Dick with that of the novel. The key thing to note here is that it’s not that people get it wrong, but that Moby-Dick in its many incarnations is an international cultural phenomenon. This makes it all the more important to study it and compare the films – “episode, scene, speech, shot, symbol” as Bryant says (87) – side by side to the novel’s textual originals.

Bryant (and Tanselle before him) does acknowledge that there are practical limits to descriptive bibliography. By broadening the scope of the bibliographer’s vision, the task grows more exhaustive as well as more expensive if you’re creating more pages to be printed. It’s not just a case of whether or not to add a film adaptation to the list. Take poetry, for example. To properly convey the sense of a poem, it isn’t enough to list its material appearance but also to describe its actual placement in the context of the entire issue in which it appears. Altogether, a comprehensive bibliographic description is labor intensive and can take up many pages. Tanselle, in his 2020 postscript on “Arrangement,” calls for an abbreviated format, however, while that might cut down on the page count, it doesn’t decrease the bibliographer’s workload. Not to mention abbreviations would make such a description even more inaccessible and confusing to a newcomer to the field.

When it comes to, not only minimizing the page count, but also solving the problem of how to display the bibliographic data in a way that provides for the different scholarly and pedagogical desires of different users, digital technologies are the answer. The power of a database allows for the information to be sorted in multiple ways, allowing those who want to focus on arranging a descriptive bibliography by separate structural forms (like periodicals, collections, edition, etc) to do so while also allowing for the option to arrange the versions in chronological sequence by publication. Bryant provides a real-life example of the University of Chicago’s database service that enables users to query any number of arrangements needed by the user. Admittedly, this doesn’t make the labor of a bibliographer any easier, but it does make the work more accessible and comprehensive. Digital versions could also show a graphic illustration of what a collation formula represents, which should take some of the intimidation factor out of the scary formulas. Bryant points out that Tanselle, despite not considering digital scholarly editing to be his purview, is supportive of it. Tanselle underscores the important utility of having digital websites that can give us representations of an edition’s paper, typography, binding, even the endpaper designs and dust jackets.

While some people might fear that the digital age could spell the end of physical books, Bryant doesn’t believe that’s the case and I’m inclined to agree with him. Even with scholarship it can be useful to start digitally, bringing students into a digital workspace to study book history, printing, and publishing no matter where they are in the world, followed by a return to the library for “tactile and sharper visual involvement with books themselves” (Bryant 90). He also points out that books and digital websites can be gateways to each other if strategically arranged. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael laments that he will never complete his own attempt at a scholarly text without “Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience” (Bryant 88). Today, those four qualities along with the strategic application of digital technology will only enhance and deepen our procedures in historical description.

Bryant wraps up his commentary by reiterating how Tanselle’s Digital Bibliography is a great piece of scholarly work that will be a lasting resource for scholars, critics, and students, and defines a historicist way of thinking. “It clarifies and updates a critical vocabulary that lays a solid foundation for book history, textual studies, revision analysis, and the various approaches to scholarly editing, and it suggests pathways to future digital development” (Bryant 90)

Conclusion

Bryant clearly has a good understanding of Tanselle’s book as well as an appreciation for the field of descriptive bibliography, even if he himself is not a bibliographer. However, his analysis seems to be muddled by his inability to complete a thought in the same paragraph he began it. The final suppositions to his reasoning are regularly found about three paragraphs later. In addition, he acknowledges the heavy workload of an attentive bibliographer and has no suggestions for minimizing it, while in the same breath wants to add to the labor by insisting that all forms of adaptation should be included in a descriptive bibliography. I don’t necessarily believe that he’s wrong, but it does seem to be a cheeky suggestion coming from someone who has no intention of doing the work himself.

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