Bibliography - Analytical Bibliography

Analytical Bibliography

This branch of the bibliographic discipline examines the material features of a textual artifact – such as type, ink, paper, imposition, format, impressions and states of a book – to essentially recreate the conditions of its production. Analytical bibliography often uses collateral evidence – such as general printing practices, trends in format, responses and non-responses to design, etc. – to scrutinize the historical conventions and influences underlying the physical appearance of a text. The bibliographer utilizes knowledge gained from the investigation of physical evidence in the form of a descriptive bibliography or textual bibliography. Descriptive bibliography is the close examination and cataloging of a text as a physical object, recording its size, format, binding, and so on, while textual bibliography (or textual criticism) identifies variations – and the aetiology of variations – in a text with a view to determining "the establishment of the most correct form of text (Bowers 498).