crafts and private press movements: Emery Walker. Walker, a practical printer with much experience of graphic reproduction methods, has been neglected in the history of printing until quite recently; but both Peterson and Tidcombe pay him his due, although he was less involved in the Doves Bindery than in the Doves Press, of which he was a partner until 1908. He had declined a partnership in the Kelmscott Press but continued to act in close concert with Morris and was consulted continually. The other great influence on the design of Kelmscott books was Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the artist and one of Morris's oldest friends. Peterson devotes a fascinating chapter to their collaboration in the 1860s on an illustrated edition of *The Earthly Paradise*, the 'book that never was.' He amply demonstrates the initial development of design concepts which bore their full fruit many years later, and he provides a context for the Kelmscott Press that has been missing from previous studies.

Morris and Cobden-Sanderson, although they shared many of the same ideals and were friends, differed markedly in their notions of what constituted a 'beauti- ful book,' and the contrasts between Kelmscott and Doves books are considerable. Cobden-Sanderson disliked the heavy Kelmscott types and the use of illustration and decoration. Doves books are severely typographical although the Doves bind- ings on some of them are decoratively ornate. Morris had some appreciation for fine bindings but, apart from the pigskin *Chaucers*, chose to have Kelmscott books appear in plain vellum or cloth-backed blue boards; his ornateness was on the inside.

Both these books, as examples of specialized studies in the history of the book, are exemplary in different ways. Tidcombe provides, for the first time, basic descriptions and illustrations of an important series of bindings, and her two books on Cobden-Sanderson importantly differentiate between books designed and bound by him and those for which he only provided designs. They will be used as the definitive basis for further critical work. Peterson's book utilizes existing descriptive information and new evidence to provide the first over-all critical account of the Kelmscott Press (Halliday Sparling's 1924 book is almost entirely lacking in critical perspective). As such it will be a standard reference source for future studies. It seems unlikely that the fascination with the arts of the book as represented by modern fine printing and binding will diminish, and the profusion of books and articles (and e-mail messages) will likely continue as well.

RICHARD LANDON

*University of Toronto Library*

Pierre M. Conlon. *Le Siècle des lumières: bibliographie chronologique*. Vol. 6: 1748-52; vol. 7: 1753-6. Genève: Droz, 1988 and 1990. Histoire des Idées et Critique Littéraire, vols. 266 and 282. xxiv, 562 pp. and xxviii, 562 pp. Sfr. 85, 90.

If you were to listen to some supposed authorities, you might be led to believe
that the heroic age in bibliography is now dead. Major retrospective bibliographies – including, most notably, the *Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue* – now not only acknowledge the essential collaborative effort that has (notwithstanding the quite proper personal phrasing of title-page credits) always been a hallmark of the best work, but also rely on the abilities of the computer to search for and to manipulate large bodies of material. Pierre Conlon's great *Siècle des lumières* is cast in a heroic mould, and is very much to his particular credit. First, between 1970 and 1975, he provided his *Prélude au siècle des lumières en France: répertoire chronologique de 1680 à 1715*, in six volumes. Further, since 1983, he has been engaged on the *Siècle des lumières* itself, beginning in 1716: vol. 8, covering the years 1757-60, appeared in 1991. The two volumes principally under discussion here, for 1748-52 and 1753-6, appeared in 1988 and 1990. So far, he has thus produced fourteen volumes, of an average 550 pages each, describing in chronological order, year by year, the output of the French and French-language press, for more than three-quarters of the century in which the French language and French culture, in its widest sense, became of unprecedented importance in our civilization.

His purpose, succinctly expressed in the introduction to the first volume, is to provide 'une bibliographie de la première édition des ouvrages publié durant le siècle en question par des écrivains français,' In other words, his brief is both books (and pamplets) published in France (taking due account of the fluctuating international boundaries, considerably changed by treaties during this period), French books published in other countries, and books by French citizens published in other countries. In France itself, German, Breton, Provençal, and Italian all come into play, as well as Latin – this last much augmented by the addition of theses from the universities. Up to five locations of copies of the books are provided, always including if appropriate the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Library, while the rule of including references to the *National Union Catalog* of pre-1956 imprints offers potentially rather more copies.

Fundamentally, and most importantly, Conlon has examined or caused to be examined catalogues, bibliographies, and biographical dictionaries in search of his authors and titles. To these, crucially, he has linked a search in libraries throughout western Europe (he cites over 200 such libraries) and, more selectively, in North America: the obvious gap in this census, at least as we can now view it, is St Petersburg, while Polish and other Baltic libraries would probably yield yet further entries. Apart from authors (identified wherever possible) and titles, imprints, formats, and pagination are also supplied, though multi-volume works are reduced in the last respect simply to volume statements.

So far, no indexes of either authors or titles have appeared, and it is thus not always easy to see how complete or otherwise, even within the terms outlined above, this trawl has proved to be. But it is clear that there are numerous omissions. The Kress catalogue of books in the history of economics at Harvard offers both further titles and further locations for books otherwise registered only by a single copy. The Ralph Leigh collection at Cambridge University Library, centred on but by no means limited to Rousseau, will add more once it is catalogued. But
it can hardly be expected that even so ambitiously conceived a project as the present one will be comprehensive: it is well to remember that the nearest equivalent for the English-speaking world, the ESTC, is still not complete in its much revised new edition, even with a much larger budget and much larger staff spread over two continents and beyond. At many points, moreover, Conlon adds titles that have not, so far, appeared in the ESTC. Meanwhile, periodical publications are mostly excluded out of policy: they can be searched for in Jean Sgard's authoritative recent *Dictionnaire des Journaux, 1600-1789* (Paris: Universitas; Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991). Rather oddly, almanacs are included by Conlon, though they seem under-represented if one compares them with the advertisements from Duchesne in the 1750s.

While the bounds of this bibliography are well set out, and the entries are constructed with a high degree of accuracy according to their conventions, there remain fundamental questions that seem to have much less clear answers. Some relate to the entries themselves. Anonymous works, or those without obvious authors, are difficult to discover in the absence of title references. Martin's catalogues appear either under title or (a stray?) under Martin. In 1753, biblical texts appear under *Biblia*, *Nouveau Testament*, and *Veteris testamenti* – a slavish application of principle that does not help the reader. It is inevitable, given the many contributors, that the conventions of pagination seem to have been applied irregularly. But illustrations are particularly poorly treated, and most are not indicated at all: for a period when the engraved illustration was at its peak, this is something more than an unfortunate slip. As in the ESTC, collation statements are not given. Imprints are so abbreviated by a series of conventions that they are in danger of ambiguity: to reduce an imprint to 'Amsterdam et Paris, Jombart' is simply to set a trap for the unwary majority of those who will use these volumes. As for false imprints, without which the French eighteenth-century book trade would look very different, it is as if they not only caused no bibliographical difficulty or question: they are not even drawn attention to by as simple a device as inverted commas. For this, the ESTC is infinitely superior, more alert, and (it would seem) better informed.

But if the bibliographical conception is limited in its application, there remain more general doubts concerning the intellectual foundations of this project that has so much to offer in other ways. However practical in offering clear boundaries, its linguistic and cultural isolationism is a handicap to an understanding of the international characteristics of the enlightenment. Here, in particular, international collaboration between the national libraries offers to be fruitful. And however much one may sympathize with Conlon's determination to record only the first editions of works, and his anxiety that to attempt to include later editions or reprints would have made his self-imposed task impossible, the result is to give a completely false portrait of French publishing in the eighteenth century: false not only in that it becomes quite impossible to tell what was, and what was not, popular in the sense that revised editions or reprints were called for, but false also in that there is no attempt whatever to record piracies or other disguised editions. *Le Siècle des lumières* has assembled a vast amount of information, and it
will be turned to with relief by many in search of much that is elusive. But as a
tool for serious analysis of the French eighteenth century, *caveat lector*.

DAVID MCKITTERICK

*Trinity College, Cambridge*

David L. Vander Meulen. *Pope's Dunciad of 1728: A History and Facsimile. Charlottesville and London: For the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and the New York Public Library by the University Press of Virginia, 1991*. xviii, 174 pp.; $40.00 u.s. (cloth). ISBN 0-8139-1268-7.

Lola L. Szladits begins her foreword to *Pope's Dunciad of 1728* with the highly pertinent observation that although the work is, in Mack's words, 'much sought after by collectors and all but impossible to obtain,' it has nevertheless 'been accessible only to specialists' (p. ix). This irony is underlined by Vander Meulen himself, who surveys the sorry history of several self-styled editions of the 1728 text, noting that even the Twickenham editor prints the 1729 Variorum as his 'A' version of the poem and leaves the reader to 'recover the approximate form of the 1728 poem by stripping away the footnotes and inserting the earlier textual readings that [the editor] identifies' (p. 27). 'Approximate,' moreover, is the operative word since the Twickenham editor still ignores some verbal variants as well as all 'the differences ... in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and italics (what W.W. Greg called "accidentals")' (p. 27), but which David Foxon has taught us to realise were, for Pope, anything but.

Vander Meulen's first aim therefore is 'to present the text and typography of the earliest edition in a form as close to the original as photofacsimile will allow' (p. xii). In his pursuit of this aim Vander Meulen has been, with one qualification, triumphantly successful, and although he is careful to call attention to 'features that cannot be determined from the photographs, especially passages written in other than the dark brown or black ink used for most of the volume' (p. 61), the quality of the reproduction is outstanding and the caveat is hardly necessary. Among the annotations on the title-page two shades of ink and one of pencil are clearly distinguishable and on the outside of the back wrapper (even the original wrappers are reproduced) the 'offset marking "N 2" ' described on p. 41 may be seen and confirmed.

My one qualification stems from a compromise required by Vander Meulen's second aim which is to reproduce not just any copy of the first edition, but that 'copy of the large-paper issue now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library' (pp. xii-xiii) which contains the very extensive 'collations that Pope's friend Jonathan Richardson, Jr., made of the 1728 text and a manuscript draft of the poem' (p. xiii). So extensive are these transcribed collations that they often swamp the printed text (the five hundred-odd words added to the five originally printed on the half-title are merely an extreme case), thus sacrificing something to the *feel* of the layout of the original which Vander Meulen, again following