College and Research Libraries


Review Articles 
Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in 

England, Scotland, Ireland, IV ales, and 
British America and of English Books 
Printed in other Countries, 1641-1700. 
Compiled by Donald Wing of the Yale 
University Library. In Three Volumes. 
Volume I I I , PI-Z28. Printed by Columbia 
University Press, New York, 1951, for The 
Index Society. $15 for members of the In-
dex Society, $20 for non-members. 
An American librarian who was in England 

in 1950-51 on a Guggenheim Fellowship to 
write the history of the contribution of British 
booksellers to the building of American li-
braries carried with him from bookseller to 
bookseller all over the island a large Glad-
stone bag packed with two bound volumes of 
Wing and one unbound in proof sheets. En-
tering a shop, he would call for all its 17th 
century material, and would then slowly and 
methodically check each against his vade 
mecum, ordering without further ado what-
ever he lacked. Such assiduous reliance 
opened the eyes of British book dealers to the 
possibility of Wing. They had known of the 
compilation before, in a kind of way; several 
of them owned the first two volumes, and 
there were others who had tried in vain to 
get copies. But not until the succession of 
packages began its 6000-mile westward trek 
did they realize that here was a M U S T with-
out which they could no longer do effective 
business. One enterprising dealer borrowed 
the third volume so that he might check over-
night the offerings in his next catalog against 
it, while others vowed that never thereafter 
could they afford to list a 17th century item 
without the words, "W491. In three U.S. 
Libraries only." This story might well stand 
as" the first chapter in some future work to be 
entitled, "The Contribution of American Li-
brarians to English Booksellers." 

Of the 22,000 items listed in this volume of 
Wing, there are at a rough guess, made from 
counting on a dozen pages only, about 10,000 
items which are recorded in three libraries 
only. That entry in a dealer's catalog is going 
to keep the prices boosted for a long time to 
come. It has already doubled if not tripled 
them. M r . Wing must have been the first to 
have been surprised that his locations should 
have become a booksellers' Bible. He meant 

them to be used by scholars, locating copies in 
this country in the East, Middle West, West 
and South. Some of the large university 
libraries, such as the University of California, 
of Minnesota and of Michigan, he did not ask 
to check against his list. There was no reason 
why he should. He simply was not intending 
to be exhaustive. Where Sabin gives four 
locations for Samuel Wakeman's Sound Re-
pentance, Wing gives but one. And yet any 
day we may expect to see this pamphlet in a 
catalog with the note "Yale has the only re-
corded copy in America." 

Yale, indeed, the symbol for which is a 
solitary "Y", seems to do rather better than 
that place at the other end of the New Haven 
line, the symbol for which is " M H . " And 
why shouldn't it? Had this catalog been the 
work of several scholars from as many uni-
versities, doubtless such little forgivable va-
garies as the including of location symbols 
for seven private libraries, four of them at 
Yale, would have been erased. A pity had 
that happened. Difficult as it is to impress a 
personality upon a catalog, Don Wing, by 
tricks like these, has succeeded in doing it. It 
was in no spirit of long-faced dourness that 
he began and single-handed carried through 
the enormous task of digging up titles, put-
ting them on slips, keeping the slips in order, 
running down authors' names. In England he 
traveled from library to library—he lists 40 
for London alone—emitting a grunt of joy 
with the discovery of every unknown title, and 
as the grunts became fewer, they became 
louder. It is not often that a dealer can note 
"Not in Wing." The completion of this work 
is a personal triumph, and Wing deserves the 
immortality conferred upon those whose names 
become nouns and verbs. "To wing it" now 
means to check against Wing. 

That many of the books and pamphlets 
listed were unimportant then and are now 
goes without saying. When there are only 22 
entries for as able a man as Rushworth, 21 
for the first Lord Shaftesbury, 28 for Sir 
William Temple, one can pardonably wonder 
at the worth of the 130 entries for Bishop 
Simon Patrick, who wrote in polemical the-
ology, scriptural exegesis, and edificatory lit-
erature. As a rule, churchmen were the most 
prolific of 17th century writers. William 

98 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



Sherlock, Dean of St. Paul's, scores 121 en-
tries; Bishop Jeremy Taylor, 138; and Bishop 
Edward Stillingfleet, 123. Yet the palm for 
the greatest number of entries goes to that 
unappeasable pamphleteer, William Prynne, 
with 344. William Penn, no unprolific writer 
himself, comes up with 153. 

Being an age of civil war and its aftermath, 
thousands of pamphlets appeared anony-
mously. The anonymous pamphleteer, how-
ever, displayed a singular lack of originality 
in his titles. There are 107 entries beginning 
with "Short," "A Short Way," "A Short Re-
lation," "A Short Cut"; there were 53 "Sea-
sonables," 131 "Reasons," 111 "Stranges," 
and no less than 806 beginning with the word 
"True." These were the key words. 

Seldom does any book deserve the too much 
abused description of "indispensable." Wing 
does deserve it. All scholars of 17th century 
England, and all the librarians who serve 
them, have already recognized what it means 
to have easily and accurately available a list 
of all books and pamphlets printed in the 
period, and their dependence on Wing will 
grow in the years to come. If the Index 
Society never sponsors another "index," it will 
have justified its formation by the publication 
of Wing.—Stanley Pargellis, The Newberry 
Library. 

Studies in Bibliography 
Studies in Bibliography. Papers of the Biblio-

graphical Society of the University of Vir-
ginia. Edited by Fredson Bowers. Vol. 4, 
i95I/52, Charlottesville. ($6.00, free to 
members.) 
A wondrous sight, familiar to many librar-

ians, is that of mortification being publicly 
performed en masse by the initiates of a bibli-
ographical society. I refer to the custom of 
their meetings at which on fidget-hard chairs 
or soporific seats the membership is expected 
to assimilate audially papers which are visual 
in their appeal. The Bibliographical Society 
(London) and its American counterpart are 
confirmed practitioners of this traditional rite, 
and I am rather certain that if one were to 
suggest to their officers that meetings should 
be devoted entirely to visual representation of 
bibliographical topics—exhibits, slides, etc.— 
the heretic would be quickly water-marked 
and sent down river. 

Five years ago a hopeful augury was the 
founding of a new bibliographical society at 
the University of Virginia, and although one 
of its founding high priests, Professor Fredson 
Bowers, personifies the apotheosis of Scientific 
Bibliography, humanistic amelioration was 
furnished by his co-founding fellow Virgin-
ians, John Cook Wyllie, Jack Dalton and 
Linton Massey. 

The papers gathered into print in Volume 
4 are a nice blend of historical and statistical 
bibliography and of British, Continental and 
American topics. Shakespeare is the subject 
of four contributions; the moderns include 
Sherwood Anderson and T . S. Eliot. Useful 
feature is a "Selective Checklist of Biblio-
graphical Scholarship" compiled by Hirsch 
and Heaney. Issuance of a bound annual 
volume has advantages over quarterly papers, 
such as those published by the Bibliographical 
Society of America, which are awkward to 
use in parts and increasingly costly to bind. 

Publication of these studies is but one of 
the activities of this lively Virginia group. 
They also sponsor a student book collectors' 
contest, and a contest for the best printing in 
Virginia. The Society richly deserves the 
world-wide interest it has elicited.—Lawrence 
Clark Powell, University of California Li-
brary, Los Angeles. 

Library Trends 
Library Trends, Volume I, Number 1, July 

1952. University of Illinois Library School, 
Urbana, Illinois. Quarterly. $5.00 per 
year. 
Library Trends is the new quarterly of the 

University of Illinois Library School. It is 
the outcome of a four-year study of the avail-
able library literature by the school's faculty 
and marks its decision that there was a place 
for a new professional journal—a journal 
which would "present in each issue a synthesis 
and evaluation of a single topic relating to 
librarianship . . . review and evaluate current 
practice and current thinking in librarianship 
. . . [and] be even more concerned with the 
probable future of such current developments 
in librarianship." 

"Current Trends in College and University 
Libraries" is the subject of the first number 
(July, 1952). In a brief introduction, the 
editor of this issue, Robert B. Downs, sum-

JANUARY, 1953 99