being now almost ten years since the publication of *To Know Ourselves*. That there are rich resources in Great Britain for the study of Canadian history, literature, and society will also surprise no one, and it is useful to have the summary descriptions of the British Library collections provided by Daniel P. Waley, Helen Wallis, Geoffrey Hamilton, Lawrence Le R. Dethan, and Stephen P. Green. From the British point of view the specialized study of Canada must ultimately seem just that – a specialization attractive to only a small number of scholars. (Dr. Ged Martin remarks on how difficult it is to persuade graduate students to enter the field.)

From the bibliographical point of view the most valuable part of this book is the last third, in which several large-scale bibliographical projects are described. Most germane of all to the general topic at hand are the reports of Professors O'Neill and Ettlinger on their work on the copyright deposits at the British Museum during the period from 1895-1924, when one of the three copies which Canadian publishers had by law to deposit with the government was sent to London. The cavalier destruction of one of the Canadian sets and the loss by fire of part of the second set has made the discovery of the British copies a major bibliographical find. Richard Landon's very brief report on resources in the United Kingdom for the study of Canadian publishing history merely lights for a moment on a subject which, it seems to me, is a vast one worthy of in-depth research by bibliographers and scholars of the Canadian book-trade.

*Canadian Studies* presents a tremendously useful overview of its subject, in terms both of what work is in progress and what work might be done with the wealth of material in Britain that is still largely unexplored. It is apparent from Guy Sylvestre's concluding remarks that the conference was fruitful in concrete ways as well, as various cooperative projects were undertaken and mooted. We can be grateful to the British Library for publishing the proceedings of this important conference, and hope that some of the opportunities for future scholarly endeavour noted by its participants will be followed up by researchers in Canada and Great Britain alike.

BRUCE WHITEMAN

(Bruce Whiteman is Research Collections Librarian at McMaster University Library in Hamilton, Ontario.)

*Catalogue collectif des impressions québécoises 1764-1820.* [Par] Milada Vlach et Yolande Buono. Quebec: Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 1984. xxiii, 251, 195 p., broché, $40.00 ISBN 2-551-88919-0

This union catalogue is a cooperative effort of twelve libraries in the province of Quebec, under the direction of the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, to provide a complete inventory of Quebec imprints from 1764 to 1820. The libraries involved in the project are: Montreal Public Library, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, Concordia University, McGill University, McGill University Law Library, Université de Montréal, Université du Québec at Montreal, at Chicoutimi, and at Trois-Rivières, Université Laval, Séminaire de Québec, and Université de Sherbrooke. Included and described in the catalogue are documents produced by the printing press, that is, books, pamphlets, government documents, annual reports, broadsides, and
ephemera. Magazines and newspapers are excluded, as are printed forms, except
those which include the name of the printer. In all, 1115 imprints are described.

The catalogue is divided into three sections. The first, bibliographical entries, is a
mixture of catalogue and bibliography. The second section has eight indexes which
give access by title, names, subjects, genres, place of publication, printers (including
booksellers), date of printing, and provenance. The third section gives all the holdings
of the participating institutions by reference number, a separate list of unique titles
held by participating institutions by reference number, and a short list of illustrated
works.

The effort that has gone into this catalogue is demonstrated by the careful atten-
tion to detail. Each record contains a main entry, adequate title transcription to iden-
tify the item uniquely, imprint, and collation statements. Historical and bibliograph-
ical notes include signatures and statements of signing, notes on paper, and explana-
tions of printer and imprint data attribution. Copy-specific information in a census of
copies compares paper and bindings.

The major reservation I have with this work is with neither the content nor the
quality, both of which deserve high praise, but rather with the form chosen to docu-
ment the material. Bibliographical works of this nature and scope demand the use of
computer technology, but present-day cataloguing systems in libraries are based on
rigid MARC formats and AACR2, which even when expanded by the Library of
Congress' *Bibliographic Description of Rare Books*, as in this work, are not particu-
larly amenable to the problems of rare-book bibliographical description. Because the
rules prescribe that the cataloguing record remain as brief as possible, and fuller
explanations be given in notes, the reader must sometimes examine three or four
separate parts of in the body of the record for full information, as, for example, when
searching for the full collation statement. It would have been useful if the editors had
given a short explanation of the major conventions of AACR2 and ISBD(A) for those
readers who are not librarians. In particular, a note on choice and form of name, re-
arrangement of the title-page for the cataloguing records, and MARC punctuation is
called for.

There are some minor inconsistencies. The occasional record contains full con-
tents notes, some mention part of the contents, most contain none. The treatment of
serials and notation of blank pages varies. I would have also liked to have seen a list of
abbreviations in the introduction. In a work of this size and scope these are minor
considerations. This is a work of great importance. The editors have estimated that
they have described 90 percent of all printed material, exclusive of magazines and
journals, produced in the province in this period. The deficiencies of main-entry
arrangement are more than compensated for by the provision of eight separate
indexes. A section of statistical data offers the researcher useful insight into Quebec
printing for the period and illustrates the strength of computer-produced bibliogra-
phies from an on-line data base.

Because the catalogue itself is confined to twelve institutions, some imprints
mentioned in the introduction had to be left out. The editors have expressed a wish
that a supplement can include those other imprints. It is to be hoped that the supple-
ment could include out-of-province institutions, such as my own, which hold
imprints not described in this catalogue. The strengths of this work and the fact that a collective effort of this magnitude could have been accomplished in the short span of three years reflect the dedication of the editors – Milada Vlach and Yolande Buono.

SANDRA ALSTON

*(Sandra Alston is a librarian in the Canadian History Department, Metropolitan Toronto Library. She is responsible for pre-Confederation books and periodicals in the Baldwin Room.)*

*Collected Poems of Raymond Souster: Bibliography*. [By] Bruce Whiteman. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1984. 240 p., cloth, $35.00 ISBN 0-88750-528-7

If a bibliography is judged by its comprehensiveness and accuracy, then Bruce Whiteman's descriptive bibliography of Raymond Souster is a first-rate piece of work. A great deal of effort has obviously gone into the preparation of this volume, and the results are a splendid example of what can and should be done in the field of Canadian literary scholarship.

The first section of the bibliography is devoted to Souster's separately published books, pamphlets, and broadsides. The descriptions include quasi-facsimile transcription of the title page, collation, pagination, a brief description of binding and dust jacket, measurement of over-all size (in millimetres), date of publication, price, number of copies printed, contents, notes on publication history, and a list of reviews. In some cases, the publication information was not made available to Whiteman, but in general he has done an admirable job in prying the facts out of secretive Canadian publishers.

A check of a dozen of the thirty-nine titles described by Whiteman turned up only one error. The title of A28, given as *Charge-Up*, should be *Change-Up*. The error is corrected in the quasi-facsimile transcription. My copy of A20, *As Is*, bears an inscription from the poet dated October 21, 1967, some time in advance of the publication date of 9 November given by Whiteman. This, of course, does not mean that the book was *officially* published before the latter date. Similarly, the dust-jacket of my copy of A23, *So Far So Good*, bears the publication date 15 September 1969, two weeks after the date given by Whiteman. Again, this discrepancy is most likely due to the publisher's miscalculation rather than the bibliographer's.

One regrets the absence of title-page photographs when considering the slightly misleading transcriptions of A20, A21, and A27. In the first case, the slashes normally used by the bibliographer to indicate line endings are actually printed on the title-page of this book, though the reader cannot tell this from Whiteman's transcription. In the case of A27, *The Colour of the Times & Ten Elephants on Yonge Street*, the two titles are printed side-by-side, but this fact cannot be appreciated without the aid of a photograph. It's an unfortunate reality of Canadian publishing that the limited market for this sort of book guarantees that a state-of-the-art format such as that of the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography would be prohibitively expensive to use in this country.

The rest of the bibliography consists of sections devoted to books edited by Souster, separately published poems and prose, translations, tapes and records,