Studying printed books as physical objects can reveal not only how books were produced, but also how their design and layout features emerged and came to convey meanings. This concise and accessible introduction to analytical bibliography in its historical context explains in clear, non-specialist language how to find and analyze clues about a book's manufacture and how to examine the significance of a book's design. Written by one of the most eminent bibliographical and textual scholars working today, the book is both a practical guide to bibliographical research and a history of bibliography as a developing field of study. For all who use books, this is an ideal starting point for learning how to read the object along with the words.

Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction

Reference

Tanselle, G. Thomas

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Cambridge University Press

Studying printed books as physical objects can reveal not only how books were produced, but also how their design and layout features emerged and came to convey meanings. This concise and accessible introduction to analytical bibliography in its historical context explains in clear, non-specialist language how to find and analyze clues about a book's manufacture and how to examine the significance of a book's design. Written by one of the most eminent bibliographical and textual scholars working today, the book is both a practical guide to bibliographical research and a history of bibliography as a developing field of study. For all who use books, this is an ideal starting point for learning how to read the object along with the words.

This book provides a basic guide to the study of the printed matter which has been produced in the United States. No comprehensive attempt has been made to record the great bulk of research in this field. Recognizing the need for an up-to-date guide to such investigations, G. Thomas Tanselle has compiled a listing of the principal material dealing with printing and publishing in this country.
In his Introduction, Tanselle surveys the research which has attempted to trace the history of printing and publishing in America from its inception to the present and explains how this material can be utilized effectively.
In nine carefully arranged categories he covers bibliographies of imprints of particular localities; bibliographies of works in particular genres; listings of all editions and printings of works by individual writers; copyright records; catalogues of auction houses, book dealers, exhibitions, institutional libraries, and private collections; retrospective book-trade directories; studies of individual printers and publishers; general studies of printing and publishing; and checklists of secondary material.
From the mass of material, an appendix selects 250 titles. Although the work is arranged so that the reader may easily locate relevant sections, a comprehensive index provides further aid in finding individual items.
“A successful checklist,” writes the author, “is not merely a work to be consulted for information but also a nucleus around which additional information can be gathered in a meaningful way; it provides a framework into which the community of workers in a field can place further references in an organized fashion.”
Guide to the Study of United States Imprints is a reference tool designed to serve both as a guide to research and as a practical manual for use in identifying, cataloguing, and recording printed matter. It will be of enormous value to scholars in American literature, history, and bibliography, to librarians, typographers, and bibliophiles, and to antiquarian book dealers and book collectors.

Guide to the Study of United States Imprints: Volumes 1 and 2 (Belknap Press)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

Melville's long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos of almost 18,000 lines, about a naïve American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville's friend Hawthorne. Based on the only edition published during Melville's lifetime, this scholarly edition adopts thirty-nine corrections from a copy marked by Melville and incorporates 154 emendations by the present editors, an also includes a section of related documents and extensive discussions.This scholarly edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

Clarel : A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (The Writings of Herman Melville, Vol. 12)

Parker, Hershel

Harrison, Hayford

MacDougall, Alma A.

Northwestern University Press

Textual criticism—the traditional term for the task of evaluating the authority of the words and punctuation of a text—is often considered an undertaking preliminary to literary criticism: many people believe that the job of textual critics is to provide reliable texts for literary critics to analyze. G. Thomas Tanselle argues, on the contrary, that the two activities cannot be separated.
The textual critic, in choosing among textual variants and correcting what appear to be textual errors, inevitably exercises critical judgment and reflects a particular point of view toward the nature of literature. And the literary critic, in interpreting the meaning of a work or passage, needs to be (though rarely is) critical of the makeup of every text of it, including those produced by scholarly editors.

A Rationale of Textual Criticism

University of Pennsylvania Press

Textual Criticism Since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950-1985

Univ of Virginia Pr

Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing

A Description of Descriptive Bibliography (The Center for the Book Viewpoint Series)

Library of Congress

First edition. Fifteen essays exploring the interconnections between verbal works and the physical objects primarily manuscripts and printed books that transmit them. Divided into five groups with such chapters as "Libraries, Museums, and Reading," "The Latest Forms of Book-Burning," "A Description of Descriptive Bibliography," "Books, Canons, and the Nature of Dispute," and "Printing History and Other History." xvii, 355 pages. cloth.. 8vo..

Literature and Artifacts

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Bibliographical Society of the univ

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