ABSTRACT
As noted in the introduction, the term "bibliography" has become a rather slippery one of late, and its scope is by no means yet fixed. But most bibliographers agree that its central meaning must involve a study of the physical form of books, both manuscript and printed. Some bibliographers, particularly those practicing the "hard" bibliographies (analytical or descriptive, and so called because they deal with the material aspects of books, not necessarily because their technical vocabulary is inscrutable), would regard textual criticism and textual editing as merely an offshoot of bibliography so conceived. Others would exclude the study of mere enumerative bibliography from bibliography proper, since it seems to lack sufficient technical rigor. However, since there are several points (particularly in the study of early printed texts and manuscripts) at which the listing, the description, and the analysis of books have overlapped, and when a technical training in the enumerative bibliographer is not only desirable but necessary, it seems unwise to ignore enumerative bibliography entirely. Therefore, although this book will not in general be concerned with enumerative bibliography as a special field or with the work of such modern enumerative bibliographers as Theodore Besterman (even though his Early Printed Books: A Bibliography ofBibliographies does deal with the central subject matter of this chapter), this section of the coverage of textual scholarship will touch on enumeration as it relates to the history of the book as artifact or as tool for textual criticism and editing broadly construed. By the currently common extension of the term "enumerative bibliography," the raw mate-
rials for enumerative bibliographies of the book and manuscript will include publishers' catalogues, sales catalogues, the accession lists of certain libraries, and private book collections, but enumerative bibliography will not usually involve library science or cataloguing, except where the history of such disciplines bears on the growth of "bibliography" in the more technical sense.
