10
A Note on Bibliography
Peter Hunt
In 1975, Brian Alderson, in a paper presented before The Bibliographical Society, made
the following observations:
Although in the past this Society has enjoyed one or two addresses on detailed
aspects of children’s books...there has been little attempt...to put forward a
rationale of the bibliographer’s role in the study of books for this large section of
the reading public... Now while I do not wish to suggest that a more professional
grasp of bibliographical skills will itself enable the study of children’s books to gain
greater maturity, there can be no doubt that scientific bibliography is able to play
as important a role in supporting the very varied activity that is taking place among
children’s books as it does in the field of literary studies elsewhere... I Implicit in all
that I have been saying so far is the contention that, at the nuts-and-bolts level,
there is much elementary bibliographical work still to be done.
Alderson 1977:203Twenty years later, in a review in the Children’s Books History Society Newsletter of what
he dismissed as ‘sub-critical ego-trips’ which characterise ‘much professorial or assistant
professorial writing’, he lamented, ‘Oh dear, so much bibliographical groundwork to be
done, and all we get is floss’ (Alderson 1995:17).
The impression that little has been achieved in the bibliography of children’s literature
in twenty years is undoubtedly false, although the fact that comparatively little has been
achieved in the context of other aspects of critical and practical activity surrounding
children’s books is undoubtedly true. However, this is a characteristic of all literary
studies, as John Harwood pointed out in his swingeing attack on the literary-theoretical/
critical establishment, Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation:
Few in the field of literary studies question the value of good biography, or a
scholarly edition of a writer’s works, letters, manuscripts or diaries. We are not
constantly assailed by warnings that the demise of editing or bibliography will bring
about the end of civilisation as we know it. In contrast, doubts about the value of
theory and interpretation are endemic in the profession, and it is these activities
which are characteristically satirised by sceptical outsiders. Despite the efforts of
some theorists to problematise them, the ‘service industries’ seem remarkably
crisis-free. In the mid-1980s, theorists were talking about a ‘return to history’ as if