The best class I took in grad school was a course on bibliography. (Few English departments still offer courses in it, alas.) It was magnificent learning the in

The best class I took in grad school was a course on bibliography. (Few English departments still offer courses in it, alas.) It was magnificent learning the ins-and-outs of how books were manufactured and learning to reconstruct their processes of manufacture from the physical artifact. The show-and-tell each class from the rare-book librarians was a treat for exactly the reasons the author mentions in the article. It was also the one area of study in which I felt like I had done real work and produced something of value (however marginal) at the end of the day. Unfortunately, I lacked the punctilious and painstaking scholarly discipline to become a bibliographer. (Our professor had produced the standard bibliography of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, which required him to spend countless hours in numerous libraries with a checklist to identify minute textual variants in editions, a labor that demands a preternatural level of dedication and attention to detail.) However, I can still produce a correct bibliographical description if the situation calls for it—which, admittedly, it rarely does…