On paper, R. Carter Hailey’s scholarship is exceptional. A leading expert on papermaking and early modern printing, Mr. Hailey just spent a year as a research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, studying the paper stocks used in early editions of Shakespeare. He probably knows more than any other person alive about the physical aspects of the First Folio. Among other accomplishments, he has been able to settle a longstanding debate and attach a firm date, 1625, to the publication of the Fourth Quarto of Hamlet.
The scholarly world is supposed to be a haven for expertise that the wider world overlooks. But so far, Mr. Hailey hasn’t found a permanent job in academe, relying on year-to-year appointments and fellowships to support his work. His experience raises the question of whether bibliography, which a generation or two ago was a staple of graduate work in literature, is now judged too specialized or old-fashioned to be rewarded with tenure and promotion.
At places like Texas Tech University, faculty members are keeping bibliography alive by integrating it into the day-to-day business of their classrooms. Other institutions, notably Florida State University, have redefined the discipline in a way that attempts to make it a pillar of a 21st-century literary education.
A layperson is likely to hear “bibliography” and think of a reading list. What Mr. Carter and other scholarly bibliographers do is far more complicated than making lists. It involves analyzing a text as physical object—the paper it’s printed on, its binding, typography, and so on—as well as how it was handled, sold, and read.
“I describe it as the archaeology of the book,” Mr. Hailey says of his particular specialty, analytic bibliography. “Just as an archaeologist looks at physical objects and at material culture to see what can be determined about the people who made use of it, an analytical bibliographer does the same thing with printed books—looking at physical characteristics to see what we can learn about the structure of the book, how it might have been used, how it was printed, even how it was distributed in some cases.”
Mr. Hailey’s work requires painstaking attention to detail. He has spent a great deal of time documenting tiny variations in watermarks, for instance, and measuring the distance between so-called chain marks left on sheets of paper by the wires of Renaissance papermaking molds. He calls this approach the “mugshot-and-fingerprint method, with the mugshot being the watermark and the fingerprint being the chain marks.”
That may sound like esoteric, maddeningly detailed work. Maybe so, but it has practical implications for literary studies.
“The most important thing I’ve been able to do is establish that it is possible to date uncertainly dated modern books based on paper stock, given enough data,” Mr. Hailey says. His findings about Hamlet appeared in the fall 2007 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly.
Mr. Hailey acquired his taste for bibliography in the early 1990s at the University of Virginia, where he did his graduate work. He wrote his dissertation on the medieval English tale Piers Plowman, using bibliographic analyses to figure out which manuscripts were used in different editions prepared by a Renaissance editor, Robert Crowley.
Mr. Hailey has spent the past five years as a research associate affiliated with the English department at the College of William & Mary, but that arrangement is coming to an end. He has a fellowship from the Bibliographical Society in Britain to do research there this summer on early modern theatrical manuscripts—actors’ playbooks, for instance—and will return to the Folger in the fall for another spell of research.
“Even though I didn’t have a tenure-track job, I kept doing research, I kept publishing,” Mr. Hailey says. “I love the regular academic life that has so far been denied me of research, publication, and teaching. I like all aspects of it, and I deeply, deeply miss teaching.”
Although he has taught medieval and early-modern literature, including Marlowe and Shakespeare, at the college level, he has found it tough to convince potential employers that he has more to offer than just a profound knowledge of paper stocks.
“I think part of the problem, job-wise, is people think, ‘Oh, this is all he can do.’ And of course it’s not,” Mr. Hailey says. “The problem is convincing people. I don’t go in and talk about watermarks all day, every day. I can go in there and explicate a sonnet.”
Theory and Practice
David L. Vander Meulen, a professor of English at Virginia and the editor of the journal Studies in Bibliography, taught Mr. Hailey at UVa and knows his work well. Uncertain dates for some of Shakespeare’s plays “have long been sources of controversy and puzzlement,” Mr. Vander Meulen says. “So for the history of Shakespeare and our understanding of Shakespeare, those kinds of findings are important.”
Many factors influence hiring decisions, but Mr. Hailey may in part be a victim of shifting emphases in English departments over the past two decades. Mr. Vander Meulen points to the pressure on departments to expand their offerings without expanding their teaching staffs. Departments look more kindly on, say, a period specialist with bibliographic skills than they do on a bibliographer who can also teach literature.
“What’s encompassed by English studies gets wider as we speak, and to have all those interests represented in a department becomes more and more difficult to accomplish,” Mr. Vander Meulen says.
Virginia has long been a mecca for the study of bibliography. The Rare Book School brings scholars, librarians, graduate students, rare-book dealers, and others to the campus for intensive courses on many aspects of book history and production.
The school has a new director, Michael F. Suarez, who succeeded the longtime director, Terry Belanger, last year. According to Mr. Suarez, what is now the senior generation of literary scholars came of age professionally at a time when graduate students in the field—certainly those who went to elite programs like those at Columbia, Yale, and Stanford—routinely received bibliographic training as part of their early graduate work. Those years produced influential textual critics and bibliographers such as G. Thomas Tanselle, who went on to help train Mr. Vander Meulen and others.
It would be a mistake to call that a golden age of bibliography, Mr. Suarez says, because in many cases bibliographic training “was seen merely as the handmaiden of textual editing or scholarly editing.” Still, the presence of bibliography in the curriculum meant that rising scholars had some grounding in those skills.
Mr. Suarez echoes an observation that has become something of a standard narrative in bibliographic circles: that the rise of literary theory helped displace bibliography from graduate-level research courses.
“I have nothing against theory,” he says. “It does enrich our critical thinking about texts. The tragedy, if you will, is that in embracing theory, we seem to have abandoned praxis"—studying what books’ physical selves teach us.
“We sometimes wrongly believe that literacy means knowing how to read and interpret these linguistic codes in the books,” Mr. Suarez says. “Meaning resides in the materiality of books as well.” The identity of a book’s publisher, for example, tells you something culturally or historically important, just as the name of the author does.
That full range of meanings is not emphasized enough now, he thinks. “Not only is the teaching of the relationship between materiality and meanings virtually absent from graduate education in the U.S., but we have this nascent field of book history often practiced by graduates of English departments and history departments who have no formal training in bibliography.”
Being a book historian without really understanding the physical nature of books, Mr. Suarez says, “is in my mind very much like the rather absurd idea of being a physician without ever having studied anatomy.”
Sneaking Into the Classroom
Ann R. Hawkins is doing her part to make sure that the material side of book history remains on the teaching agenda. An associate professor of bibliography in the English department at Texas Tech, Ms. Hawkins recalls that Mr. Belanger joked at a conference a few years ago that she was the only person he knew with that title.
“The narrative has been for quite a while, and true to many people’s experience, that bibliographic work is not valued,” she says.
In her experience, though, it really depends on the institution, and keeping bibliography alive in a curriculum often comes down to whether individual faculty members incorporate it into their classes. Ms. Hawkins thinks that the academic outlook for bibliography has improved as the vogue for theory has died down and interest in material history has picked up.
For one thing, bibliography has turned out to be an excellent antidote to what she calls “explication ennui” in students. It’s a way to get them to grapple with texts in ways that don’t involve coming up with half-baked analyses of symbolism and meaning.
“Students just get so tired of doing the same intellectual task over and over again,” Ms. Hawkins says. She recalls teaching Byron’s satiric poem “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” to a class of undergraduates; she asked each of them to annotate 50 lines, which allowed them to engage with the poem as a scholarly bibliographer or editor would. “I have never had a group of students love that poem more,” she says. “All of a sudden they’re getting the jokes.”
At Texas Tech, bibliography is simply woven into what the English department does. Ms. Hawkins helped create an informal book-history emphasis that draws on the skills and interests of 14 faculty members, including several who focus on scholarly editing.
“What book history does, particularly for students, is make them aware of how suspicious and changeable text can be, and that’s really good,” she says. That applies to texts being produced today as much as it does to anything from the early modern period. So having bibliographic skills becomes part of students’ arsenal for life. “I hope it helps them think more critically about all the texts that surround them and who’s producing those texts and the agendas of those texts.”
Texts, Tech, and Tattoos
Texas Tech’s approach to bibliographic training—embed it in a variety of courses and tap its pedagogical appeal—is one way to keep it vital in literary studies. A more radical approach is taking shape at Florida State, where a three-year-old program called the History of Text Technologies, or HOTT, thinks of bibliography as a way to study texts as part of human culture from its earliest, pre-literate days into the digital age.
It’s all part of “reconceptualizing the book,” according to Gary Taylor, a professor of English, who is the program’s director. “We don’t just limit ourselves to the printed book,” he explains. “We look at a series of transformations by which text is incarnated and transmitted.” The book is one of several technologies that carry text forward.
Students in the program deal with oral culture and tattoos as well as with early-modern materials from the university’s special collections and with digital texts being created today. “We’re trying to redefine what used to be called bibliography as the understanding of the importance of the materials out of which culture is made, that make culture possible,” Mr. Taylor says. So Mr. Hailey’s watermarks and chain marks can take their place in a spectrum of text technologies that includes body art, oral epics, mass-printed books, and born-digital works.
The approach also transcends internal divisions that have characterized the field, Mr. Taylor says: the divide between manuscripts and printed books, for instance, or between national book-history traditions. Technologies tend to move across borders; for instance, the printing press was invented in Germany but quickly became an international technology.
Emphasizing how technologies are used to create and pass texts on adds a certain unity and forward-looking emphasis to the program. That helps counter the negative image of bibliography “as a kind of very old-fashioned, nerdy kind of thing,” Mr. Taylor says.
HOTT came into being thanks to a Florida State competition for new ideas for interdisciplinary programs. The proposal, put together by Mr. Taylor and several colleagues, was the only humanities project to make it to the winning round, he says. The money allowed the hiring of seven people, five of them tenured.
The program will graduate its first Ph.D. sometime in the next academic year, says Mr. Taylor. At the undergraduate level, he says, it’s the fastest-growing track in the department.
“An English major for the 21st century was the way we were thinking of it,” he says.
As for Mr. Hailey, Mr. Taylor calls it “an appalling situation” that such “an amazing scholar” has not yet found a permanent academic perch. The History of Text Technologies program has only so much room, and the faculty already includes a paper expert who is also a digital humanist. “We are an alternative to a trend,” Mr. Taylor says, “and in an ideal world we would [also] have hired Carter.”
