The Anatomy of Bibliography - Illinois

4. (Apr. 9, 10)
the ways in which the practices of bibliography have been explained
structurally and historically.
Each of the major specialties discussed in Chapters III, IV, V, and VI sees
itself as the central focus of all bibliography: the others are peripheral. 4 Each
has developed and flourished through its own canonical practices. This book
proposes instead that there is totality to bibliography that subsumes its
specialties. Its canon is the sum of the canons of its specialties. My goal is to
suggest the interrelationships. I have attempted to do this with a lambent
brevity that I hope may be seen as provocative rather than superficial.
Bones and muscles allow bodies to move, flesh and blood bring them to life.
The bones and muscle in this anatomy book are the overarching arguments of
the main text, which outlines the functions of bibliography. The flesh and
blood are the digressions and citations. I hope the digressions may work a bit
like the repertory of anecdotes a lecturer uses in hopes of questions from the
class; brief asides and hints on dissertations for someone to pursue someday. It
is out of them, in all their discursive abundance, that bibliographical practice
emerges. As for the citations, in all their profusion, I see them as a bibliographer
would: all citations are superficial until one reads what they are citing.
In Burton’s day, anatomy was a very different subject. Literature was too.
Burton’s Anatomy would have been far less perceptive if he had read Henry
Gray’s Human Anatomy, or used footnotes. Nor would Jackson have been as
delightful if it were not so clearly a parody of Burton. My choice of a title owes
much to Terry Belanger, who on reading an earlier draft of this book (and with
his legendary devastating candor) described it as “Shandean.” Sterne’s debt in
Tristram Shandy to Burton may lie behind my title, but I am neither Burton,
Sterne, nor Jackson, and my perspectives rather different.
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4 Neil Harris comments thus: “most extant definitions of bibliography have been produced by the
simple device of having bibliographers sit in front of a mirror” and describe themselves. (See the
syllabus for his course, “Introduction à la bibliographic matérielle,” syllabus, 2004, on the website of
the Institut d’histoire du livre in Lyons.) He continues by quoting A. E. Housman: “everybody has
his favourite study, and he is therefore disposed to lay down, as the aim of learning in general, the aim
which his favourite study seems specially fitted to achieve, and the recognition of which as the aim of
learning in general would increase the popularity of that study and the importance of those who
profess it.”
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