Marvin Spevack, ed. Isaac D'Israeli on Books: Pre-Victorian Essays on the History of Literature.

Gordon-Craig, C.

Marvin Spevack, ed. Isaac D'Israeli on Books: Pre-Victorian Essays on the History of Literature. London and New Castle, Del.: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2004. 304 pp.; $49.95 (US). ISBN 0712348298 (UK); 1584561319 (US).

Richard Wendorf. The Scholar-Librarian: Books, Libraries, and the Visual Arts. Boston, Mass., and New Castle, Del.: The Boston Athenaeum and Oak Knoll Press, 2005. 256 pp.; $ 34.95 (US). ISBN 1584561599.

Isaac D'Israeli and Richard Wendorf could not seem further apart in their attitudes to books, bibliography, and librarianship between the early 19th century and the modern period. D'Israeli, on the one hand, invites us to consider the distinctions between a bibliopole, bibliothecaire, bibliognoste, bibliographe, bibliophile, bibliotaphe, and a bibliomane ("an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained, and purse-heavy!"), while Bendorf suggests provocatively that university "librarians have now set themselves apart, with their own reward systems and with technological skills that many faculty members could not begin to comprehend."

Each, however, in offering a vivid distillation of his scholarly preoccupations, does convince us of the validity and relevance of books in our lives.

Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848), father of Benjamin Disraeli, was an only child who repudiated his family's expectations of a career in commerce for one in literature. Independently wealthy, he read voluminously, and gained lame "as a populariser of literary researches" (DNB 1908). This new anthology of D'Israeli's essays offers an extraordinary range of bookish subjects by "a man who really passed his life in his library" (prefatory memoir by Benjamin Disraeli). Taking a familiar, almost chatty style, D'Israeli draws us into his cabinet and expounds benignly in an endearing manner that is more confiding than didactic.

And what a scope D'Israeli displays! There are the familiar names--Prynne and Psalmanazar, Bodley and Cotton, Caxton and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--jostled by a crowd of the less familiar, in a breathtaking array of details faintly reminiscent of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The topics themselves are irresistibly intriguing: "Minute Writing;" " Secret History of Authors Who Have Ruined Their Publishers;" " Of Literary Filchers;" " The First Founder of a Public Library;" " Titles of Books;" "Dedications;" "Errata;" and so on.

Eminently quotable, Isaac D'Israeli on Books is a delightful cabinet of curiosities to browse at one's leisure; but while undoubtedly diverting, are these gems merely the antiquarian trifles of a dilettante dabbler? Even at the remove of nearly two centuries of more recent scholarship, D'Israeli's reflections provoke comparisons with modern attitudes to libraries and print culture: "Every book ... may be considered as a new experiment made by the human understanding." Beneath all the flourishes is D'Israeli's fundamental belief that "Bibliography will show what has been done, and suggest to our invention what is wanted."

The second collection of essays, Richard Wendorf's The Scholar-Librarian, is a useful contrast to D'Israeli. Wendorf, the distinguished Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, and formerly of Harvard's Houghton Library, presents us with ten pieces loosely linked in their representation of his own academic and professional interests.

There are two essays on Piranesi, perhaps of rather more appeal to specialists, evoking Wendorf's own fascination with printing, print making, and print collecting. His concern with art suffuses an article on Antonioni's film, Blow-up, in its perceptive insights into the role of the artist as interpreter. But it is Wendorf's abiding area, the 18th century (his Princeton dissertation was on the poet William Collins), that pervades the volume, and in five of the other essays he draws on his scholarship to develop critical avenues of approach in bibliography and textual studies.

"Manuscripts, Mazes and Pope's Essay on Man" considers not just problems in textual transmission, but the importance of authorial variants and emendations in the creative process. "The Making of Johnson's 'Life of Collins,'" reprinted from The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, assesses aspects of "Johnson as a biographer, as a proofreader, and as a reviser of his own work." Again Wendorf examines substantive variants, but moves into the nature of accidentals and the problems of copy text, and the essay raises larger questions on modern theories of textual editing.

"Robert Dodsley as Editor" introduces the topic of 18th-century capitalization, a subject that is extended in the two valuable essays concluding the volume, "The Secret Life of Type" and "Abandoning the Capital in Eighteenth-Century London." The first of these looks at the development of type faces, then changes in English typographical convention in the 18th century, which Wendorf connects with attempts at rationalizations of systems, and the use of type as a medium of cultural communication. Interestingly, Wendorf here considers Robert Bringhurst's view of "typography [as] 'an essential act of interpretation,'" and suggests that "typography is normally not itself interpretive or performative" though "decisions ... about the presentation of a given text often influence the process of interpretation."

"Abandoning the Capital" is a "'seedling' essay'" for a proposed "book on printing conventions in 18th-century London." In this Wendorf reviews some of the material we have seen earlier, but his combined perspectives are intellectually stimulating, as when he explains the problems in editing Collins's Persian Eclogues, and the theoretical complexities "of distinguishing between what is figurative and what is literal in his verse."

The sophisticated collection begins with two articles that should draw particular attention from librarians. "The Petrified Mouse" (yes, a dead mouse found in the stacks) advocates modern, forward-looking approaches in librarianship, including special collections libraries, and challenges traditional attitudes. The other, "The Scholar-Librarian," the title essay of the volume, is directed especially to senior administrators and insists on the need to encourage librarians to take advantage of professional development. Funding flexibility is recommended as an incentive to original creative work and scholarly research by library staff, and Wendorf proclaims that "Librarians deserve all the respect and support we can give them"--a sentiment with which surely D'Israeli would agree.

C. GORDON-CRAIG

University of Alberta