CAMBRIDGE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

24 Norham Gardens, Oxford.

17th October, 1953.

Dear Mrs. Simpson,

I'm so glad to hear that you're taking on the job of revising the draft supplement to the DONNE bibliography. An inspection of this draft has rather frightened me, it is so grossly inefficient, but I've decided not to try to tidy it up before sending it on to you. My corrections would only be superficial and you would have to do it all over again. Don't constantly repeat the 'John' of 'John Donne' in titles, as the drafter has done, and observe the convention for date-references in CBEL, which is, e.g.

Maxwell, I.R. Donne's Library. TLS. II July 1935.

We include everything except unpublished theses, reviews and 'fictional recreations', and entries which really are trivial or marginal and in fact not contributions to Donne scholarship at all. The draft, by the way, is quite two years out of date, having been drawn from the annual 'Studies in Philology'; it does not even include your recent first volume of the sermons. We do include revised editions, and I have marked entered your own book on Donne's prose at the beginning of the list of books.

I'm sorry to say I'm not on the 'phone, but do write if you get into difficulties. And I do apologise for such a messy draft.