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Monday, March 06, 2006
Judging a Book by Its Bibliography
Ever do this? I understand it’s kind of a joke about how you know you’ve arrived as a graduate student, etc., but it’s always seemed to me to be the logical way of reading a scholarly book. Generally speaking, you can reconstruct the argument of a book from its list of sources, however indifferently alphabetized they may be.
Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997) has a bibliography stretching from pp. 687-772. It’s divided into works before and after 1800. From the former you might learn that Arthur Dent wrote a volume called The plaine mans path-way to Heaven (London: 1601) and from the latter that “Sainte Anne est une sorcière” (J. Wirth, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 40 [1978]: 449-80). That’s just the tip of it, really. A book with this bibliography has to be good. You don’t even have to read it.
Notes are also a metapleasure, and the only argument in favor of endnotes is that it’s easier to read them all at once. (Quiz: Who wrote this--and remember that boiling oil will be poured into your ears if you cheat: “Carthage displayed there an important transitionary phase of civilization; but as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia?") I invite comments which address substantively the issue of notable bibliographies and bibliographic notes.
Comments
And by “always seemed to me” you mean “since November 2nd“ I take it.
You, of all, should know that one is not duchess a hundred yards from the carriage.
Re: metapleasure of footnotes
“pimply, bespectacled women [graduate students maybe?] smiling cruelly to themselves as they noted an error in somebody’s footnote;”
from: David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down
Jonathan --
Yes, I started reading that way in high school (junior high if you count my grandfather walking me through the endmatter of Hofstadter’s G.E.B.--as well as its MU recursion puzzles) and never looked back. Now, it’s true that you can miss some good stuff that way (or be suckered into the horrid), but in general I’ve found that the quality of an academic or quasi-academic book can be judged by reading its first ten pages and its bibliography--and the more I’m intrigued by the latter, the more often I find myself loving the book.
Of course, they’re not done as well as they used to be, necessarily. I love the old “analytic table of contents” and “descriptive bibliography"--both of which seem to have fallen far out of fashion.
Also: anyone here ever resort to fun-and-games with their bibliographies/indexes? I remember my grandfather showing me a surreptitious reference to one of his lovers, whom he’d added as a superfluous index entry to one of his books.
Mackinder. Or Hegel.
And what about their bibliographies do you find interesting, kmbjmjm?
Gibbon?
I occasionally photocopy the bibliography of a book and nothing else. Presumably this is when I’m interested in the topic but don’t especially like the book.
I’m with kmbmj on the mystery footnotes—it’s Hegel, right? Philosophy of History?
Ah, boiling oil in the ears.
It’s also fun to read the acknowledgements. I like knowing who the author knows, who do they thank, who do they hang with. They can often tell you quite a bit about what you are about to read.
Humanists who have looked over the hedge into the backyard of science will know that our papers almost never contain footnotes—journals specifically instruct authors not to use them in most cases—and in our papers the section at the end is usually “Literature Cited” rather than “Bibliography.”
Books in science (as opposed to papers) are a bit more flexible, although original research monographs still will usually have no footnotes, perhaps some endnotes, and “Lit. Cit.” rather than bibliography.
Broader and more synthetic works can approach humanistic practice a bit more. And if we reach back into history, we have examples to match any of yours. D’Arcy Thompson’s _On Growth and Form_ (1942) offers us, on the first page, footnotes in German, Italian, and Latin; on page two we add French; and not until page three do we get the first note in Greek. But then Thompson was a Classicist as much as a scientist, so I’m probably cheating.
This book, incidentally, has the best set of running heads in any volume I know. In the first chapter alone we have: “Of the final cause,” “Of evolution and entropy,” “Of natural philosophy,” and “Of life itself.”
I’m with Jodi on compulsively reading acknowledgments pages. It’s often the only way to learn about scholarly genealogy. Plus, when you find a deftly written one, it speaks well not only of the work ahead, but also of that particular tradition. I particularly like Mark McGurl’s for The Novel Art:
[snip]
At Johns Hopkins, where this project began to take shape, Sharon Cameron taught me to try harder, Neil Hertz taught me to think big, Larzer Ziff taught me that it’s okay to make sense, Allen Grossman taught me that it would be nice to know everything, Jerome Christensen taught me to profess romanticism by other means, and Francis Ferguson taught me that there are limits to philosophical materialism. Michael Fried, to whom this book quietly owes a good deal, taught me to see what meets the eye more deeply. Unfailingly generous with his time and attention, Walter Benn Michaels taught me many things, including some ways to be wrong. I trust he will forgive me if, as seems likely, I have forgotten a few of them along the way.
I have a commonplace book full of titles that I one day want to read, all culled from bibiliographies. (I’s titled the Notebook of Things I Don’t Know About--a reference to a book I found cited in the bibliography of American Prometheus). I agree, too, with the acknowledgements. But for novels and non-scholarly (which tend to lack both), I rely a lot on dedications: “And for the Two Hundred, Against Despair”; “...in consideration of Love and Affection”; and, of course: “in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it is a joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.”
The best science put-down I’ve ever read (an old Usenet post by Robert Grumbine) is little more than an artfully presented list of citations.
Surely one of the reasons for the attraction of the Lord of the Rings, for a certain kind of kid, is that it has all those appendices on elvish languages and kinglists and other arcane middle-earth matters. I think for many of us it was the first book that had any scholarly apparatus and it was captivating for that reason, even if we subsequently grew up and decided Tolkien was all balls.
I generally check bibliographies, especially for books and articles I come to without a specific recommendation or purpose, that is, things I find through browsing in a bookstore or library. The bibliography gives me a quick read on where the piece is coming from.
My favourite footnote is the one near the beginning of Leavis’s Great Tradition where he describes Sterne as ‘Irish ...and a nasty trifler’. Ever since I read that I’ve aspired to become a nasty trifler myself. Being a regular trifler will simply not suffice for me, you understand.
A colleague and friend of mine once agreed to publish a book on Ford Madox Ford with a small academic press. This book was planned, and advertised in the press’s publicity material. Then the press went bankrupt, as sometimes happens to such organisations; and my friend didn’t proceed with the book (he’d hardly started writing it). Now, he says, he gets emails all the time from Ford scholars trying to track down copies of this phantom book, which has been copied direct from publisher’s-catalogue into a surprisingly large number of bibliographies; and perhaps from bibliography unto bibliography. I tell him he should rejoice: he gets a whole monograph for his CV and for the RAE without even having to write the damn thing. But he has scruples.
I’m glad Jodi brought up acknowledgements, since it allows me to link to the best acknowledgements ever:
Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself.
This is from an unlikely source, Olin Shivers’ Scsh Reference Manual. More here.
Hey I didn’t cheat. It could have been Mackinder. No ear scalding for me. What do I win?
Adam --
Now that’s a great footnote story! It’s also a nice reciprocal of sorts to the best academic put-down ever--Mark Kac’s “this monograph fills a much-needed gap in the literature.”
My guess was Hegel, too, but I’m not sure if he used footnotes. There was a book on footnotes—I remember seeing it at Barnes and Noble a few years ago—maybe I should have bought it.
I read the endnotes to Agamben’s Man Without Content before reading the body text. It was an interesting experiment that I may well repeat.
It was Hegel, but not in a footnote. I see how I could have been unclear on that point. The boiling oil in the ears also comes from the same book, his amused description of some insufficiently Historical society or another.
The Cambridge University Press published book Jane Austen on Screen has a Filmography in the back. The last movie on the list is “Northanger Abbey”, 2004, starring Anthony Hopkins, Anna Pacquin, Ioan Gruffudd, Kate Beckinsale & a few other luminaries.
There’s no such movie, sadly; the cast list originated as a group effort wishlist on an Austen fanfic bulletin board in the early 2000s, when we all thought Martin Amis was scripting an adaptation of Northanger Abbey for Miramax. Somehow the researcher who assembled the filmography managed to miss most of those details.
I was on an airplane once, reading an academic book in my field. The woman across the aisle was looking over, caught my eye and asked if she could take a look at it. She opened the book to the chapter titles, skimmed the acknowledgements and turned to the bibliography. I looked at her and asked “so, where did you go to graduate school?”.... yes, she had an MA in my field.