Three Great New Zealand Bibliographers Personal Reminiscences

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 39, 1 January 2006, Page 31

T. H. Howard-Hill

Three Great New Zealand Bibliographers Personal Reminiscences

Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou, katoa— Greetings. I am very pleased to be here.' In fact, at the age of 72, I am very glad to be anywhere. First, I must thank Lydia Wevers for putting me in touch with Margaret Calder; Margaret Calder for putting me in touch with Rachel Underwood, who invited me to dinner and put me in touch with Kate Fortune; Kate Fortune, who obliged me to find an appropriate if not thrilling title for this talk. I am particularly glad to be here because the Alexander Turnbull Library was the site of my first real professional job. After graduating from the National Library School in 1961 I spent about six months under the benign tutelage of Arthur Olsson, the head of cataloguing at the National Library Centre in Sydney Street, and then came to the Turnbull in the same capacity. How that occurred I cannot recall. I did not apply for the job nor was I interviewed for it: it just happened. In 1963—in August, I think—l went to Oxford to continue my studies. On the ship before it reached Naples I wrote my report on the re-cataloguing of the rare book collection which had occupied most of my time in the Library. That was my last connection with Turnbull—until now.

My purpose is not to regale you with tales of my life and studies—for which there is little time and less interest—but rather to talk about some aspects of the life and works of three men I have known personally and professionally for over fifty years. I could read off

a long list of New Zealand bibliographers and editors, starting with lan Gordon, the editor of John Galt, who was head of the English Department at Victoria University of Wellington throughout my time there, or Sydney Musgrove at Auckland University, who was the external examiner of my execrable MA thesis on ‘Pericles’, to Edmund King at Auckland, who has already published in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. To list their names would take up most of the time allotted for this talk. I have been asked many, many times why so many bibliographers and editors have been produced from a nation now of around four million people. To attempt to answer that question —at least for myself—was the goal of this paper, which draws on memoirs and correspondence from some prominent living New Zealand bibliographers. 2

The nexus of the line of bibliographical development I wish to discuss lies in the Methods and Techniques of Scholarship class taught at Auckland by Elizabeth Sheppard (palaeography) and a newly appointed lecturer, William James Cameron. In 1959, the year after his arrival in Auckland, Cameron founded his first teaching printing press. (In later years he set up other presses in McMaster University and the University of Western Ontario.) The press itself was ‘an 1863 Albion, formerly one of the Government Printer’s original presses, which was brought to Auckland from the Mount Crawford Prison in Wellington in a truck belonging to the touring New Zealand Players’. 3 From the press issued a series of bibliographical or textual pamphlets written by Cameron and the students in the class, amongst whom were the contemporaries Brian McMullin and Antony Hammond (both born in 1938). Hammond is named a ‘printer’ in one of the pamphlets. (McMullin later taught the bibliography class as a temporary junior lecturer when Cameron was on academic leave in Yale in 1961-62.) McMullin and Hammond, later described as

Cameron’s ‘disciples’, will be mentioned from time to time in supporting roles, but they are not the other bibliographers with whom I am concerned here. They are Keith Maslen (bom in 1926), who retired as Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Otago in 1991, and MacDonald Jackson (bom in 1938), who retired as Professor of English at the University of Auckland in 2004. Jackson, who had entered Auckland University College in 1956, did not take Cameron’s course although he set type for the Columbian press and taught the bibliography course in Cameron’s stead when Cameron went to McMaster University. However, Maslen was inspired by the Auckland press to set up his own press at Otago in 1961 with David Esplin, the Reference Librarian there. Maslen found in the Otago Museum an 1845 Albion press that appeared to have belonged to H. B. Graham in Dunedin, and set it up as the Press Room in a disused washhouse, but in 1965 it was renamed the Bibliography Room, located in the new University Library. Forty years later in 2005 it was renamed the Otakou press: the imprint of the first surviving piece of Otago printing bore the legend ‘H. B. Graham, printer, “Otakou News” Office, Dunedin.’ 4

The three men who supply my topic were all connected directly and indirectly through the teaching press established by Bill Cameron and, with others, influenced by him. Apart from the inspiration of the press, Keith Maslen does not own to much personal contact with Cameron whose work, however, on both sides of the Pacific he followed closely, reviewing many of Cameron’s bibliographical works for such journals as New Zealand Libraries. And Jackson’s work was so substantially different from Cameron’s that perhaps it is an exaggeration to press the point of influence in his case other than to say that Auckland was a hot-bed of bibliographical activity when Cameron, Jackson, McMullin, and Hammond were there. Notwithstanding, there is one name missing from the assertion of influence: it is mine. It is time to back up a little chronologically.

After completing an MA in English at Canterbury in 1949, Keith Maslen spent a year at Victoria as a temporary junior lecturer, in his own words ‘eagerly taking the opportunity of sitting in on classes for Professor lan Gordon’s new paper, “Methods and techniques of scholarship’”, 5 before departing for Oxford to read for a B.Litt. in 1950. I missed him by a year, beginning my own university studies in 1951 at Victoria, then a huge educational establishment of around 1800 students of whom about six hundred were full-time. I believe that I met Bill Cameron when he was a section leader for first-year English. He was not a junior lecturer then because he did not take his MA until the following year, before he left to pursue doctoral studies at Reading University in England. At twenty-five years of age he was quite young but appeared most sophisticated to me (straight out of high school), energetic, and enormously enthusiastic about everything—his teaching at the moment, his research at the moment, and his future plans. I had started tramping in the Tararuas while still at Hutt Valley High School, and because Cameron was an equally avid tramper, we later made several excursions together.

Probably the most important influence Bill Cameron had on me originally was his relish for resolving bibliographical and textual problems. He talked endlessly about his current preoccupations—poetical miscellanies, Aphra Behn, Dryden, Milton, and Henry Hills the piratical printer—as if I had a reading background equal to his own; and he always assumed that whatever engaged his attention was equally interesting to anyone else he might talk to. Often, it was. However, the single most important benefit that I obtained from our friendship was an introduction to books, not merely as texts to be read for classes and English essays but as objects of value and interest in themselves, the original documentary forms of works that testified to the ages and cultures that produced them and were therefore worthy of study. If this sounds like the ‘History of the Book before McKenzie’, then it is: Don McKenzie did not invent the history of the book but rather popularised it. Cameron was a great user of the Turnbull and was elected to the committee of the Friends of the Turnbull Library in 1952. It was he who first led me, a callow student, to its use, and I quickly became familiar with its collection of early printed books. I remember a

somewhat revisionist third-year English essay on the development of the Pindaric ode that I wrote almost exclusively from Turnbull’s rare resources, not only for the excitement I felt when pulling likely looking eighteenth-century volumes directly from the shelves but also for my pleasure at receiving a rare A+ for the essay, probably the summit of my not totally glorious career at Victoria.

Despite his relatively brief time in Wellington after graduation, Cameron’s association with Turnbull was persistent and durable. Until he left for Canada in 1964 almost all of his publications were based on Turnbull’s collections: his first publication on the bibliography of Ned Ward which (like mine) was in Notes and Queries [1:5020] 6 and another on an ‘overlooked printing of Dryden’ [5:10382], both published in 1953, and particularly his bibliography of poetical miscellanies in the Turnbull, published modestly by the Library and the Department of English at Victoria in the same year [1:1997]. The compilation of this was preparation for his doctoral dissertation on ‘Tonson’s Miscellanies, 1684-1716’ at Reading from 1952 and following years. In the same year in Oxford, only a few miles from Reading, Keith Maslen—who, like Cameron, had been bom in 1926—published his first article, on the printers of Robinson Crusoe [5:9913], in The Library, the most prestigious Anglophone bibliographical journal. This was the beginning of a career devoted largely to the bibliographical description and analysis of eighteenthcentury books centred on the preparation of an edition of the ledgers of the great London printer, William Bowyer and his son William; more will be said about this later. Eventually in 1957 Maslen returned to Dunedin where he spent the rest of his career; and in 1958 Cameron became a lecturer, then senior lecturer, in the Department of English in Auckland where he remained for about six years. In 1960 his article on Henry Hills, the piratical eighteenth-century printer, was published in the Turnbull Library Record [4:4872], and in the same year the Library School published a pamphlet on John Dryden in New Zealand [1:579] that contained a list of pre-1700 books in the university library, the first of his many contributions to the bibliographical control of early books. (Incidentally, it would be interesting to learn more about Cameron’s association with the Library School in 1960-61 when I was working in the National Library Centre in a humble capacity while waiting to go to Library School. We saw a quite a lot of each other then, and resumed tramping, with Pamela Brand, his acolyte [see 1:549, 580] and later his wife.)

The bibliographical control of early books was a preoccupation throughout Cameron’s life. He not only pursued it in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, but also influenced others to ransack their libraries for early books to be listed in New Zealand Libraries and modest duplicated pamphlets (in New Zealand at least). Checklists were produced for various libraries by Cameron and Brand (1:580] and David Esplin [1:581] in 1960; Cameron [1:614], Howard-Hill [1:582], and C. W. Tolley [1:584] in 1961; Howard-Hill [1:585] in 1963, expanding a 1958 list of Turnbull holdings [1:578] from 20 leaves to 104 pages; 7 and L. R. Barker ]1:645]

in 1968. Citing these lists, in 1967 D. H. Parker proposed a short-title catalogue of pre-1700 printed books in New Zealand and suggested Turnbull naturally enough as the clearing house for the compilation [4:702]. Keith Maslen demurred, contending that the National Union Catalogue in Wellington was the best place for a record of New Zealand holdings of all books. 8 He mentioned the announcement of the preparation of the New Zealand short-title catalogue of English books being edited by David Esplin in 1962, 9 to which Turnbull had contributed catalogue entries as the rare book collection was re-catalogued, but Esplin left for North America later in the year taking the material with him, and that was the last of that. When the first fruits of the Early Imprints Project established in 1977 were published by Turnbull in 1995 10 it did not acknowledge the lists that had been compiled in the 1960 sor Cameron’s significant role in the bibliographical control of early English books in New Zealand.

So great was his enthusiasm for this task that within a few months of moving to Auckland, he devoted two months in Australia in 1960-61 to the compilation of a short-title catalogue of British books, 1641-1700, held in Australian libraries [1:615], which was followed by two supplementary lists in the Australian Library Journal in 1962 and 1963 [1:616-17]. The catalogue contained an introduction ‘on the development of rare book collections and research facilities in Australian and New Zealand libraries’ (title page) in which he assessed the number of Wing items in New Zealand libraries and commented on the future of rare book collections in both countries. He advocated the formation of specialised collections of early books strongly connected to the research interests of the scholarly community, supported by national resources made available by inter-library co-operation, the University

Microfilm series, and the publication of lists of holdings. He suggested that the needs of a scholar in seventeenth-century humanities were ‘(1) adequate (though limited) local resources to begin a project and keep it going; (2) sufficient national resources to enable the major part of the work to be completed; and (3) sufficient opportunities to complete the work’ (p. xii) elsewhere. The assumption of most would-be scholars at the time was that New Zealand libraries had virtually nothing to offer the student of early English literature and history so that scholarship had to be pursued elsewhere. Cameron’s analysis of the role of New Zealand libraries in supporting English literary and historical scholarship was original in its time and influential. Finally, he made sensible recommendations for the collection development of particular libraries based on his analysis of the holdings of individual major authors. To my knowledge Cameron’s was the most comprehensive statement of a policy for New Zealand rare book collections made to that time, though how well it was received—if it was read at all—l have not learned.

Undoubtedly Cameron’s Australian catalogue was the basis for the invitation extended by the National Librarian of Australia to Cameron to compile, on the acquisition of the rich David Nichol Smith collection of early printed books and

newspapers, a catalogue of eighteenth-century English books in Australian libraries. In the end, because Cameron was already at McMaster University and could spare only two months for the work, he became the chief editor of the catalogue and much of the cataloguing was done by his collaborator, Diana Carroll of the National Library of Australia. Prudently, the scope of the two-volume 1966 catalogue was restricted to libraries of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) [l:643b]. With characteristic forcefulness Cameron included a survey and estimate of the number of volumes in Australian libraries outside the ACT. He personally checked every collection that had reported owning more than 250 eighteenth-century books and concluded that there were about 19,100 volumes beyond the 8389 in the ACT catalogue. The ACT holdings were extended to 10,824 volumes in a supplement compiled by Ivan Page in 1970 [l:643bc] but that seems to have been the end of it.

The Australian scholar Harold Love noted that Cameron was the first person to draw attention to the Targe accumulation of books of the hand-press era’ in Australian libraries, describing Cameron’s 1962 catalogue as ‘the essential tool for scholars of [his] own generation working here, not only for what it listed but also for the clues it provided as to where books outside the Wing period might be sought. Even more importantly, it was a rallying cry for what might be achieved in Australia’. 11 In this same period Cameron suggested the formation of an Australian and New Zealand bibliographical society and then moved on to Canada; the society (in which Brian McMullin was a considerable force) was not established until 1969.

It was in 1961, I believe, that Bill Cameron and I clashed over a principle that continued to be effective in all his bibliographical work. He maintained (in Brian McMullin’s words) that ‘the pursuit of completeness and exactness was not always appropriate, that an incomplete bibliography might still be useful and might indeed prompt others to work towards its completion’. 12 Contrarily, I argued with the confidence of someone who had not done anything that, because man is imperfect, any bibliography will be imperfect, even one for which the compiler strove diligently for completeness and exactness; if he did not, the catalogue would be much worse. He of course was arguing from the basis of experience (often in two months’ bursts of hectic bibliographical activity) and he was right in his terms. I, however, am not so confident as to publish incomplete work, and have followed another path. McMullin, who came to accept Cameron’s principle, nevertheless harboured a ‘residual suspicion [...] that by mere publication the imperfect may inhibit the more nearly perfect’. I agree an imperfect catalogue almost always inhibits the preparation of a better one, if only because funding agencies are averse to allotting money to tasks that they believe have been accomplished and from which no sufficiently substantial scholarly gain can be expected. But, as I have

shown, Cameron’s Australian catalogues were well received by those whom they were designed to serve.

Returning to the chronology of my narrative, it is still 1961 and I am esconced in the Turnbull looking out of the bay window that then faced the General Assembly buildings. Keith Maslen visited the Library and asked to meet me. We had an enjoyable conversation in the staff room in the basement, probably about what Esplin was doing with the catalogue slips we had been sending him. In later years I could not understand why a scholar of Maslen’s emerging stature would seek out someone who at that time had published merely two short notes in Notes and Queries [5:8819; 4:6713] about which he would scarcely have known. It turned out that he was doing a ‘Cameron’ in New Zealand, visiting libraries in the North Island likely to have eighteenth-century holdings, and he had heard about the new head cataloguer. He reported his library findings in New Zealand Libraries in 1962 [1:636]. That was my first but certainly not the last contact with Keith Maslen, for whom I have enormous respect as a man and a scholar.

In 1961-62 Cameron was appointed as a research assistant for a large editing project, Yale University’s edition of Poems on State Affairs; Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, published in seven volumes between 1963 and 1975. In ‘the wider scholarly field’, Harold Love wrote, Cameron’s ‘reputation will rest on his editing of’ volume 5, 1688-97, published in 1971. 13 He goes on, ‘it is impossible not to say that Bill’s volume was the outstanding one. Not only was he a far better editor and editorial theorist than all but one of his co-editors, but he approached his task with a special enthusiasm [...].’ His important discovery that ‘a widely scattered body of manuscript anthologies that survive [...] were the product of a single agency’ made an indelible contribution to the scholarship of late seventeenthcentury poetry and is undoubtedly his greatest single work. The article in which he announced his findings in 1963, ‘ ALate Seventeenth-Century Scriptorium’, remains a fundamental source for anyone like Love who works in the period. 14 It was not surprising then that he was invited to join the English Department at McMaster University as a full professor in 1964 and left the Australasian scene permanently, apart from a few visits to New Zealand for family reasons. We met occasionally and corresponded when I was at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory between 1963 and 1970 for he was increasingly enthusiastic about the new possibilities of computers being able to diminish the drudgery of enumerative bibliography and, of course, to facilitate bibliographical dissemination. I cannot say that I have clear memories of our meetings, which were quite few. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to complete at least in broad outline the Canadian career of this remarkable man.

While he was at McMaster Cameron was responsible for the acquisition of the library of Robert Addison (a bishop of the oldest Anglican church in Canada, St Mark’s, Niagara-on-the-Lake), of which he published a catalogue in 1967. 15 He had always been a collection builder and maintained collections of early printed books

for teaching purposes wherever he went but the Addison collection was the most important single acquisition he made. Unfortunately, by the terms of Addison’s will, it should not have left the diocese, and after Cameron’s death it was returned.

In 1964 the Ontario government established the province’s second School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, with Andrew Osborn, the author of the Osborn report on New Zealand library resources in 1960, as its first dean. 16 It is most likely that Osborn, who was associated with the Fisher Library in Sydney, had met Cameron while he was in Australia. Cameron became a visiting lecturer at SLIS shortly after his appointment to McMaster, commuting from Hamilton, until in 1968 he became Associate Dean, succeeding Osborn as dean in 1970 despite his not having a professional qualification in librarianship. He remained dean for fourteen years, extending the computer-based Hand Printed Book project on which he had reported with Brian McMullin in 1968 [4:1968] that was based on his bibliographical work in Australasian and Canadian libraries into the second phase in 1970 [7:1970]. 17 In the following years he issued pamphlets on the bibliographical control of familiar subjects, for example, A Perfectible Milton Bibliography [7:5236], and extended his scope to other eighteenth-century authors, drama, and Canadiana and Caribbeana in English. Most of these pamphlets were in two series of the Western Hemisphere Short Title Catalog project, enumerative bibliographies in one, checklists of library holdings in the other, including libraries in the Netherlands Antilles. The University

of Western Ontario library catalogue shows about 110 editions of these duplicated checklists, which are not widely held. He also found time to write an essay on the bibliographical control of the works published by Henry Hill for Don McKenzie’s Wai-te-Ata Studies in Literature [7:1664] in 1974, to contribute a 23-page review of Kathleen Coleridge’s bibliography of the Turnbull Milton collection [9:6559] to the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand—edited at that time by Brian McMullin, I believe—and to write a 32-page essay on ‘The Future of Dryden Bibliography’ for a festschrift co-edited by Antony Hammond [9:5496]. All these items contained thoughtful observations on the theory and practice of enumerative bibliography and/or bibliographical control, topics that were his lifetime concern. In 1975 he contributed ‘Short-Title Cataloging and Automated Bibliographical Control of pre-1800 Books’ to a conference sponsored by the Rare Books and Manuscripts section of the American Association of College and Research Libraries in San Francisco [7:412]; this was the same year that Keith Maslen wrote on ‘Seven years Editing the Bowyer Ledgers’. In 1976 Cameron contributed a paper similar to his previous to the British Library’s conference on ‘an English 18th-century short-title catalogue’ [7:412] from which what is now known as the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) emerged, but he failed to persuade ESTC to adopt his methods.

In 1984, at the urging of the higher administration, Cameron became the chairman of the newly formed Department of Modem Languages in order to concentrate on his teaching and research before retirement. ls Brian McMullin records that Cameron had ‘done much to assist in the development of librarianship in the Caribbean and Latin America’, and ‘he was already familiar with Spanish through listening to short-wave radio broadcasts from South America while still in New Zealand’, 19 so the appointment demonstrates again his considerable versatility. Characteristically, he started to apply his bibliographical talents to Spanish literature, writing to McMullin in 1987 that he intended to write a manual of bibliography to be applied to Spanish materials, ‘as there’s nothing like McKerrow or Bowers in Spanish and the publication practices of Spain in the 15th—18th centuries make many of the analytical techniques of the Greg-Bowers tradition irrelevant’. 20

Bill Cameron died of a stroke while cooking bacon in his home on 18 April 1989, prematurely at the age of 64. He left one important durable work, the Poems on Affairs of State , but a host of other publications of varying ephemerality that testify to his life-long preoccupation with collection building and bibliographical control. However, the ‘wonderful collection of antiquarian books’ he had amassed at SLIS was sold ‘for a pittance in the 1990 s’ 21 as the SLIS moved from books and librarianship to computers and information studies. Cameron built scholars as well as collections. I had scarcely left New Zealand before Cameron was suggesting that McMullin succeed me at Turnbull. He was responsible for the substantial Canadian careers of Antony Hammond and McMullin, and, McMullin suggests, was instrumental in placing other people, for example, Peter Scott—best known here as the National Librarian of New Zealand—who went to McMaster University for an MA in English before going on to library school at Western Ontario." Brian McMullin concludes his obituary with these words: ‘Bill was a great allrounder: teacher, scholar, administrator. His memory will live on in the minds and achievements of those with whom he came in contact.’ 22 And now, one hopes, in your minds. He was an extraordinarily talented and energetic scholar who deserves to be remembered in the Library that fostered his early scholarship.

And now as the thread that connects these great bibliographers I can re-enter the picture. Having completed a doctoral dissertation on Ralph Crane, the early seventeenth-century scribe who transcribed a good part of the copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare and many other contemporary plays, I had resolved to continue my work where I could consult original sources. The obvious site was Oxford University where the Bodleian Library had many Crane materials and where Alice Walker, the greatest Shakespearian textual scholar of her day, was Reader in Textual Bibliography, a position later held by Don McKenzie. 24 She had been appointed mainly to edit the Oxford Shakespeare that had been begun many years previously by the great R. B. McKerrow, but the extent of her teaching obligations as well as her failing eyesight prevented her from making much progress. The year

after I arrived in Oxford was the Shakespeare Quatercentenary and the Clarendon Press announced the publication of the first volume of the series, Coriolanus. The edition was also a factor in the Clarendon Press’s adopting my proposal to publish for the first time ever computer-generated concordances to the original old-spelling editions of Shakespeare’s plays selected by Alice Walker as the copy-texts for her edition. (This idea was conceived in 1960 when I was filing cards into the National Union Catalogue in the National Library Centre, an occupation that provoked some of my better plans. Dan Davin, Assistant Secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press—who coincidentally was a prominent member of the New Zealand ‘Mafia’ in Oxford—was my sponsor and friend for many years, employing me to advise the Press on editions in my field and other scholarly projects.) Although the text of Coriolanus was so advanced that I was commissioned to check all its emendations against the text in the Worcester College copy of the First Folio, Alice Walker’s Coriolanus was never published, although her text was employed decades later in the Oxford Shakespeare edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor and others.

Mac Jackson was another of Alice Walker’s students and I first met him in Oxford, probably under her aegis. At this distance of time the clearest memory of him in Oxford I have is of our Sunday evening meetings (with Vince O’Sullivan and Richard Mulgan?) in the Turl Tavern —where occasionally Father ‘Frank’ McKay, the eventual biographer of J. K. Baxter, joined us from Cambridge—and adjournment to Merton College for more conversation and of course, beer. Jackson took his B.Litt. in 1963 and returned to Auckland where he progressed through the academic ranks before retiring in 2004 as Professor of English. He had developed an interest in the bibliographical and textual study of Renaissance dramatic texts centred on Shakespeare while still an undergraduate and MA student at Auckland. He writes:

My interest in textual studies had already been aroused by a compulsory section of the Stage 111 Shakespeare course in which John Reid introduced us to the textual problems of Hamlet. Then in the MA Shakespeare, John taught a section on the text of King Lear , Sydney Musgrove (‘Mus’) took us through the play, often commenting on textual cruxes [...], and Bill Cameron lectured on Romeo and Juliet , using the bad quarto to raise questions of staging. 25

It is clear that the short answer to the question why New Zealand produced so many editors and bibliographers is that they had been adequately trained and invigorated by their university teachers who were —generally—profoundly interested in the fundamental materials of literary studies, namely, original documents.

It will doubtless disappoint you—if you are not already disappointed—that I have no especially interesting personal reminiscences of Mac Jackson, although we met

quite often at professional conferences around the world and at least once in Auckland and I read his bibliotextual publications avidly. If they are lucky, scholars do not have lives that are interesting to anyone but themselves and their closest associates—their important life is in their scholarship and works—and outside the fraternity of scholars there can be little said about a career even as distinguished as Jackson’s save to outline his contributions to scholarship. They are so many I must be succinct.

Jackson is even more comprehensive in his abilities and interests than Cameron. Cameron wrote a book about New Zealand to explain his country to Canadians, 26 but Jackson has been continually engaged with New Zealand literature. His first published paper was an ‘essay on the poetry of A. R. D. Fairbum’ 27 whose selected poems he later edited for Victoria University Press (1995), and in 1966 he was the editor of the New Zealand issue of Poetry Australia. For several years he compiled the New Zealand section of the annual bibliography of commonwealth literature for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (1968-75) and wrote on New Zealand creative writing, 1955-77, in Thirteen Facets, 1978. He was co-editor with Vincent O’Sullivan of The Oxford Book of New Zealand Writing Since 1945 in 1983. There is much more, but his latest contribution to New Zealand literature is the foreword to Merimeri Penfold’s Maori translation of love sonnets by Shakespeare (2000), and an interview with the translator published in Shakespeare Quarterly the next year, which felicitously unites New Zealand literature with another preoccupation, the poetry of Shakespeare.

In the wider context of the study of English literature few would challenge the substantial value of his contributions to the study of such Renaissance authors as Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, and the more important contemporaries of Shakespeare: Anthony Munday, Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, Thomas Heywood, John Marston (whose selected plays he edited with Michael Neill for Cambridge in 1986), and George Peele. Articles such as ‘The printer of the First Quarto of Astophil and Stella ’ (1978) or ‘Compositorial Practices in The Revenger’s Tragedy’ (1981) are essentially bibliographical, but essays such as ‘Compositor C and the First Folio Text of Much Ado about Nothing' or ‘Printer’s Copy for the First Folio of the Text of Othello: The Evidence of Misreadings’ (1987) ally bibliographical understanding of the practices of early modern English printing offices to appraisal of their effects on texts. Of course, Jackson has published many papers that propose emendations of texts; they most often have a bibliographical or (increasingly) linguistic basis, unavoidably. For seven years he wrote the ‘Editions and Textual Studies’ section of the ‘The Year’s Contributions to Shakespearian Study’ in Shakespeare Survey, providing informed and judicious assessments of the best work in the field—or sometimes the worst. Shakespeare afforded the backbone of his studies throughout his publishing career, especially the sonnets, King Lear , and Pericles, to the study of which he has made significant contributions.

However, his most distinctive contribution and probably that which will be most durable given the vagaries of critical fashion are his attribution studies, particularly his development of techniques that have enabled him to produce definitive statistics on a sound statistical basis. One notices in his list of publications ‘Suggestions for a Controlled Experiment to Test Precognition in Dreams’ in The Journal of the American Society for Physical Research (1967) and ‘Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Date of Birth: A Southern Hemisphere Study’ in the Journal of Psychology (1979)—with which I will readily admit I am not familiar—and, more to the point, perhaps, ‘A Statistical Study of the Phaistos Disc’ in Kaidmos: Zeitschrift fur vorund frii-griechische Epigrafik (1999) and ‘Structural Parallelism on the Phaistos Disc: A Statistical Analysis’ in the same journal in 2001: he writes privately that these last two are the studies of which he is most proud. 28

Most early modern English plays were written collaboratively and published anonymously or with incorrect attributions. Scholars need to know with surety who wrote what (sometimes quite small passages of text are embedded in a work by a different playwright) as a proper basis for critical or linguistic assessments. Librarians also need this information in order to keep their catalogues up to date. Jackson’s first substantial monograph of this kind was Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare in 1979, but he has continued it since in such studies as ‘The Additions to The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. Shakespeare or Middleton?’ (1990), ‘George Wilkins and the First Two Acts of Pericles : New Evidence from Function Words’ (1991), and ‘Late Webster and his Collaborators: How Many Playwrights Wrote A Cure for a CuckoldT (2001).

Having established his comprehensive knowledge of the bibliographical and textual complexities of early modern drama, Jackson was appointed with John Jowett as initial Associate Editor of the Middleton edition generally edited by Gary Taylor for the Oxford University Press, due to be published early in 2007. Besides sharing in the co-ordination and general editing of the work of over sixty contributors, he has edited The Revenger’s Tragedy and written the chapter on ‘Early Modern Authorship: Canons and Chronologies’ for a companion volume of supplementary specialised studies. Remarkably, when his Auckland contemporary Antony Hammond became terminally ill after the completion of the first volume of the Cambridge edition of the plays of John Webster (1995), Jackson was brought in to complete the edition with David Gunby and David Carnegie. 29 Even more remarkably, all the editors of the Webster edition are or were New Zealanders. Jackson’s involvement in these two important editions is a telling index of his standing in the field to which he has contributed so much over more than forty-five years: he continues to do so. His stature was fittingly recognised by the publication of a festschrift in his honour in the year of his retirement. 30

Like Jackson, Keith Maslen had a long tenure at his institution, interrupted only for fairly short periods for consulting or study abroad. His interest in the

bibliography of eighteenth-century English books expanded chronologically in later years to embrace nineteenth-century New Zealand literature and printing, distinctive contributions being the entry for the stationer, printer, and publisher Henry Aitken Wise in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in 1990 and his participation in Book & Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa, edited with Penny Griffith and Ross Harvey in 1997. However, his concentration on bibliography is more intense than that of both Cameron and Jackson and excludes their involvement with editing: he is the most accomplished ‘pure’ bibliographer of the three scholars I selected to talk about.

Within the field of eighteenth-century English bibliography his foremost occupation and greatest achievement was to edit the Bowyer ledgers, a subject that needs some elaboration for a largely non-bibliographical audience. The William Bowyers, father (1663-1737) and son (1699-1777), were major London printers in the eighteenth century. The paper stock ledger that recorded details of the works they printed was the subject of a lecture by Herbert Davis, Keith Maslen’s thesis supervisor in Oxford, in 1951, and so began a bibliographical odyssey that was not completed until forty years later/" In December 1963 it was announced that three other Bowyer ledgers were found in the library of the Grolier Club in New York. It must have been shortly after this that John Brett-Smith, head of Oxford University Press New York and a member of the Grolier Club Council, asked me during a visit to Oxford whether I thought that Maslen was competent to edit the Grolier ledgers. My response, having seen (I can’t recall where) some of Keith’s working papers, was that I was entirely convinced of his scholarly competence but considered that ultimately quite a lot of editing would be required to get his papers into good order for publication. Whatever justification I had, in retrospect my remarks were startlingly prescient. Working on the understanding that the Bibliographical Society, London, was to publish his work, in 1981 Maslen decided that ‘he had taken the work as far as I could’, but found that he lacked a publisher. Eventually in 1986, after what must have been an extremely anxious interval, the Bibliographical Society of America undertook publication and commissioned John Lancaster, then co-editor of its Papers and a member of its Publications Committee, to get the ledgers into publishable form. The work that Lancaster did over the following five years justified his being named on the title-page of The Bowyer Ledgers: The Printing Accounts of William Bowyer and Son, Reproduced on Microfiche, with a Checklist of Bowyer Printing 1660-1777, a Commentary, Indices, and Appendices, a joint publication of the bibliographical societies in 1991. I know of five extant eighteenth-century printers’ ledgers besides those of the Bowyers. 33 Three of them have been edited by New Zealanders, the other two being Don McKenzie’s The Cambridge University Press 1696-1712 (1966), and his and John Ross’s A Ledger of Charles Ackers (1968). Of these I judge the bibliographical importance and achievement of Maslen’s edition superior.

The introductory printed volume occupies 616 pages; there are 70 microfilm fiche of the ledgers. It is a large and complex work, best described in the editor’s own words:

The ledgers kept [...] between 1710 and 1777, offer a vast store of new information, indeed, new classes of information, about authorship, book production and distribution in eighteenth-century London, centre of the British book trade.

The extent of this resource may be very briefly indicated by a few round figures. The ledgers record the printing of well over five thousand works, great and small, produced over a period of some seventy years. Their authors, famous or forgotten, a few revealed for the first time, total more than a thousand. The number of clients who commissioned these works, whether booksellers, institutions, or private gentlemen, including authors, exceeds five hundred. Persons named as taking delivery of printed copies amount to over fifteen hundred. During the 1730 s alone about two hundred workmen, journeyman compositors and pressmen, apprentices, correctors, warehouse staff, and ‘flies’ were required to print, store and despatch the thousand or so works known to have been produced during this decade. 34

In short, the ledgers record a substantial part of the London book trade, which was then still inadequately documented. The Bowyer Ledgers is, as a reviewer concluded in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, ‘a magnificent achievement’. 35

Maslen’s work on eighteenth-century printing—which had expanded to include the works of the novelist-printer Samuel Richardson—was recognised by a conference in his honour at Monash University in August/September 1990, and 1993 brought forth An Index of Civilisation: Studies of Printing and Publishing History in Honour of Keith Maslen with essays by several distinguished bibliographers of eighteenth-century works. In his introduction, Wallace Kirsop remarked that ‘Keith’s friends cannot help being disappointed, and even astonished, that his eminence as a scholar was not rewarded as it should have been by the University of Otago’ (p. vi). Like prophets —as Wallace Kirsop himself knows too wellbibliographers are without honours in their own country, a deficiency that I hope this talk goes some way to redress. Oxford University did rather better, though: it awarded Keith, already an Oxford M.Litt. and a Cambridge MA, a D.Litt. in 1994: in literature this is the University’s highest award.

Turnbull Library Record 39 (2006), 31-46

References 1 A talk to The Friends of the Turnbull Library, National Library Auditorium, 3 August 2006. 2 Nicola Frean (Special Materials Librarian, Victoria University of Wellington) answered my initial enquiry about W. J. Cameron’s biography and started me off fruitfully; I thank her. Keith Maslen, Brian J. McMullin, and Mac Jackson provided personal material to extend the printed resources recorded here, and Carl Spadoni (William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library) and Richard E. Morton (Professor of English Emeritus, McMaster University) provided information about Cameron and Antony J. Hammond; I am indebted to them all. In the end I had more material than I could possible use for a forty-five-minute talk. A biography of Cameron—or at the least a bibliography of all his works—would be a worthy project, while there are people who can still remember him personally.

3 Brian J. McMullin, ‘William J. Cameron, 1926-1989’, Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 14, no. 1 (1990 [February 1991]), 15-20 (p. 16). 4 Keith Maslen, ‘From Bibliography Room to Otakou Press: A celebration held in the De Beer Gallery, Central Library, University of Otago, on Tuesday 6 December 2005’, in The Black Art, Handprinting in the Bibliography Room, 1961-2005', Exhibition List [Dunedin]: Special Collections, University of Otago Library, [2006], p. 2. 5 Keith Maslen, ‘The Bowyer Ledgers: Retrospect and Prospect’, in An Index of Civilisation: Studies of Printing and Publishing History in Honour of Keith Maslen, ed. by Douglas R. Harvey, Wallace Kirsop, and Brian J. McMullin (Clayton, Victoria: Centre for Bibliographic and Textual Studies, Monash University, 1993), p. 1.

6 In order to avoid repetition of often long titles, I supply brief references in this form to volumes of my Index to British Literary Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-99). However, as the catalogue of the University of Western Ontario and Te Puna reveal, there are many monographs by Cameron that did not fall within the scope of the Index, and, so far as I can tell, there is no list of his non-bibliographical contributions to periodicals. 7 I did not notice until recently that this checklist was most favourably reviewed by Don McKenzie in New Zealand Libraries, 28, no. 8 (September 1965), 38-41. 8 New Zealand Libraries, 30, no. 6 (December 1967), 242-43. 9 New Zealand Libraries, 25, no. 2 (July 1962), 165. 10 Early Imprints in New Zealand Libraries: A Finding List of Books Printed before 1801 Held in Libraries in the Wellington Region (Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library, 1995). The only other outcome of the Early Imprints Project (EIP) I have found on the Internet is Early Imprints Project Queensland: A Union List, by Christine Tilley (South Brisbane, Queensland: State Library of Queensland, 1993), 4 microfiches. Useful information about EIP and its genesis is supplied by Brian J. McMullin, ‘The Australia and New Zealand Early Imprints Project: The Background’, Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 6, no. 4 (1982), 163-73. 11 Harold Love, ‘The “Cameron” Scriptorium Revisited’, in An Index of Civilisation (see note 5),

pp. 79-87 (p. 79). 12 McMullin, Bulletin, 14 (1990), 15-20 (see note 3) (p. 17). 13 Love, in An Index of Civilisation (see note 5), p. 80. 14 W. J. Cameron, ‘A Late Seventeenth-Century Scriptorium’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 7 (1963), 25-52. 15 William J. Cameron and George McKnight, Robert Addison’s Library: A Short-Title Catalogue of the Books Brought to Upper Canada in 1792 by the First Missionary Sent out to the Niagara Frontier by the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel (Hamilton, Ontario: printed at McMaster University for the Synod of the Diocese of Niagara, 1967).

16 Andrew D. Osborn, New Zealand Library Resources: Report of a Survey Made for the New Zealand Library Association [...] (Wellington: New Zealand Library Association, 1960). 17 Phase 111 on improving the National Union Catalog was published in 1974; phase IV on the French-Canadian contribution to the Western Hemisphere Short-Title Catalog, in 1980. 18 John Fracasso, Coordinator Computing Services, University of Western Ontario, private communication, 20 June 2006. 19 McMullin, Bulletin, 14 (1990), 15-20 (p. 19). 20 McMullin, Bulletin, 14 (1990), 15-20 (p. 19). 21 Carl Spadoni, Special Collections Librarian, McMaster University, private communication, 3 April 2006. 22 Brian McMullin, private communication, c. May 2006, p. [2]. 23 McMullin, Bulletin, 14(1990), 15-20 (p. 20). 24 See my life of Alice Walker in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Vol. 56, pp. 812-13.

25 M. P. Jackson, private communication, 7 February 2006, p. [l]. 26 William J. Cameron, New Zealand. (Modem Nations in Historical Perspective.) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, [1965]). 27 The following bibliographical information is taken from Brian Boyd, comp., ‘MacDonald P. Jackson: Bibliography’, in Words that Count: Essays on Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, ed. by Brian Boyd (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 274-80. 28 Jackson, private communication, 21 June 2006. 29 The second volume of The Works of John Webster: An Old-Spelling Critical Edition, ed. by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald P. Jackson, was published in 2003. 30 Words that Count (see note 27). 31 Maslen’s bibliography to 1993 is accessible in Douglas R. Harvey, Wallace Kirsop, and Brian J. McMullin, eds, An Index of Civilisation (see note 5), pp. vii-xii. I have used a more recent vita that he supplied.

32 These and following details are drawn from Maslen’s The Bowyer Ledgers: The Printing Accounts of William Bowyer Father and Son, with a Checklist of Bowyer Printing 1699-1777, a Commentary, Indexes, and Appendixes, ed. by Keith Maslen and John Lancaster (New York: Bibliographical Society of America; London: The Bibliographical Society, (1991) p. 2; and ‘The Bowyer Ledgers: Their Historical Importance’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 82 (June 1988), 139-49. 33 The early ledgers of the London printer and publisher William Strahan (1715-85) have been analysed by Patricia Hernlund in two articles in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1967 and 1969 but not edited. I am not knowledgeable about the status of the Woodfall ledgers, which appear to have escaped the attention of modem scholars. See P., P. T. [Dilke Charles W.] Woodfall’s ledger, 1734-1747. (Notes and queries respecting Pope and his writings.) Notes and Queries series 1, 11, no. 292 (June 1855), 418-20; The ledger of Henry Woodfall, jun., 1737 1748. Notes and Queries series 1,12, no. 308 (September 1855), 217-19. 34 Maslen, The Bowyer Ledgers, pp. 1-2. 35 Calhoun Winton, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 85 (September 1991), 30911.