Descriptive Bibliography

For this exercise, we were asked to write a descriptive bibliography of a book we own: a short text that analyzed the book’s physical characteristics to draw conclusions about its intended use, status, and history. For the assignment, I chose a copy of Middlemarch that was gifted to me by the English department at my high school. The book had several features that lent themselves well to an analysis of bibliographic code: in particular an inscription on the front endpapers, a long introduction, and a facsimile of the text’s original title page. Ultimately, I concluded that the book was designed to be valued, both literarily and aesthetically, by those who appreciate high literature, and that this was in fact how it had been used. 

Analyzing a textual object strictly through its bibliographic code also helped me better appreciate W.W. Greg’s notion of “quarantining” bibliography from an interpretation of the text itself. While I was initially skeptical of this idea as compared to analyzing how the bibliographic code of a text interacts with its meaning, the amount of information I gleaned from analyzing the object alone convinced me of the value in Greg’s idea. I still think there is much to be gained from analyzing the intersection between bibliographic code and text, but ignoring the linguistic content of the book in this assignment helped me more fully and objectively consider its material properties, an extremely worthwhile exercise in and of itself. 

You can view images of the text and the final assigment below: