Letters to the Editor--September 1982

In the May 1982 Newsletter, p. 9, I was happy to see Joel Myerson\u27s notice of my system for transcribing manuscripts (Studies in Bibliography 29 [1976]: 212-264). I should like to add a few comments on what I take to be the peculiar virtues of this system as against the so-called genetic-text system using various symbols, not all of which are agreed upon by editors and which strain a lay reader\u27s memory if my own difficulty in reading such texts is any guide

The Bibliographical Way

34 p. ; 23 cm

The Function of Bibliography

published or submitted for publicatio

Textual& Literary Criticism

ix;186 hal;18 c

The Education of Editors

Ever since the pre-meeting of this organization that I attended in Lawrence, Kansas, the association of historian-editors and of literature-editors has seemed to me to be an auspicious one. Each of our sides has a chance to discuss its own special disciplinary problems in a necessary and useful manner, but always with the consciousness that we are also talking to a similarly oriented group, though in another field. However, in addition, I note that some programming has deliberately fostered what it may be pompous to call cross-fertilization but what at least offers the opportunity to survey the one discipline\u27s general theories, as well as its particular problems of methodology, by comment from the other side. This programming must serve as my excuse for speaking today. No one could be more ignorant than I of the inner workings of the large scale historical projects in which the interest of the historians of this organization concentrates. Yet as the editor of the complete works of some six authors in four different centuries, several of which run to ten or more closely packed volumes, I have acquired some notions about the function of literary and philosophical editing in the graduate training of our universities; and I hope that this background qualifies me to take a more outside view of Messrs. Prince and Burke\u27s two most cogent papers than might have been obtained by using an historian-commentator who could have been too close to the trees. In this case, only the forest looms to my near-sighted vision

Textual and Literary Criticism /

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 25 Nov 2014)