The Dark Side of Bibliography

 

Bibliographies are bad for bibliophiles!

I've taken a few days over the "holidays" to rest from the barrage of meetings and emails and general busy-ness of my life in Ethical.  "Rest," in this case, came in the form of work on the Bibliography of Ethical Culture, a project that has been ongoing for at least the past 4 years.  My working draft is a messy 90 pages long now, since I tend to slap in items that are unformatted as I find them, expecting to get back to them later.  "Later" is sometimes slower than I might wish.  

In any case, I chose the route of creating an inventory of the Adler Study at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  That's a fairly mindless task (and, so, restful) that involves entering data in the correct bibliographic format (CMOS, of course) over and over again.  But there are also the tasks of decrypting the old-style fonts (Fraktur is a definite challenge), adding the correct diacritical marks (alt code is not a handy as one might wish, and umlauts are definitely slippery), and locating the publication date.  Some texts publish that date on the title page, except that that date may be the date when it was printed and not the date of copyright.  Some texts can confuse edition with the number of the printing (is it the second edition or the second printing?).  

Such questions that arise in documenting individual texts require some additional research.  If the book is available, that means flipping the page and looking at the verso.  Unfortunately, I did not always have that.  Indeed, I was working from photographs of title page and verso, and, sometimes, the image of the verso had not been taken or included.  The next resource in such cases was Google.  Indeed, I would estimate that at least half of the time spent in documenting the books in the Adler Study meant searching the internet for additional information about the text.  Some searches were simply for translation.  My German is rusty.  French and Latin are not in my toolbox.  It was helpful to have Google translate the text so that I could confirm whether I was documenting the volume number or the edition; the author or the editor.  

Googling became especially helpful when my source did not include a date of original publication or copyright.  Many of the older works that are in the Adler Study have been digitized by Google or Microsoft (and others) and are available in various online repositories.  Time after time, I went to the Internet Library (archive.org) or Hathi Trust to see the books that I was trying to document from the photograph of a title page.  Sometimes, the books themselves were less helpful than the meta data provided by these repositories, which would indicate their best deduction regarding the original date of publication.  Those dates are now entered in brackets in the Bibliography, to show that they are based on secondary evidence rather than the book itself.  Putting it mildly, early publishing was not always set up to suit 21st Century ideas about the necessary data for documentation.  

These sorts of "problems" were actually adventures for a bibliophile.  I greatly enjoyed seeing the old style fonts, the excessive titles included before we had dustcovers with multiple blurbs, and interesting shifts of publishing houses over the decades and centuries of their existence.  

The dark side of bibliography, however, appears when the task is to identify authors who are listed only with their initials and a last name.  Occasionally there are not even the initials.  The author of Hume is given as "Professor Huxley."  Which one?  (Thomas Henry, of course, but you had to know that or look it up.)  Another contribution to the dark side is determining what the book is actually about.  This can mean checking out the table of contents, but oftentimes it means reading an interesting looking chapter.  Then, of course, there are the references to other books and articles which might be related, but are still interesting looking, and there goes another hour or two.

Still, it's not the time that is of concern.  We have become, over the past many decades, too invested in the notion of efficiency.  We invented clocks and are now ruled by them.  The artificial divisions of the days, despite what the sun and the earth's orbit around it tell us, have become taskmasters, telling us when to arise and work and when (maybe) to rest.  They do not tell us the hours of leisure and learning and companionship with the ideas of the past, the thoughts of the future, and, all too often, the enjoyment of the present.  The time spent in documenting the Adler Study was well spent as a service to others who will follow this trail of breadcrumbs with new questions, seeking new answers, but it was also delightful. 

The dark side is actually the sad fact that documenting these books means that I also need to add them to my library.  The image above shows some of many bookcases in my home.  The picture shows a good day, when the books have been organized and neatened for "picture day," but many of the shelves are now untidy, with books removed for reference or reading.  Other books are stacked around on tables.  And, sadly, on chairs, too.  There's a small pile on the floor beside my desk of the most recently referenced.  The whole house, in fact, is evidence that I don't need to add any more books, and yet . . . this most recent round of "resting" with the Bibliography has led to that most undesired of results:  I have ordered more books.  Three times in the past three days I have been overcome by the need to see, touch, read, own a book.  So I ended up ordering eight new additions to my overcrowded and overflowing bookcases. 

Addict that I am, I am so not sorry.  Indeed, I can hardly wait.  City States of the Swahili Coast.  Gods of the Upper Air.  Enlightenment Now.  How did I get to these particular books from the work on Felix Adler's study, filled with so many works of the 19th and early 20th century?  Hellifiknow!  But it was definitely fun.  And restful. Very restful.