Bibliophilia and Descriptive Bibliography: the Case of Yeats’s Books

Warwick Gould’s “Bibliophilia and Descriptive Bibliography: the Case of Yeats’s Books” with evidence of Yeats’s inscriptions and ownership of his rarest books in its Appendices argues that connoisseurship enhances readership as well as creating value. In the coming era of “Virtual Reading Rooms” for research libraries, collectors, and the antiquarian book trade, Yeats’s books as the symbolical embodiment of his endlessly revised texts, will be examined more often in online form. As access to digital representation of rare editions widens, students will have even more need to understand the materiality of the book. Copy-specific provenance data-bases will be an essential tool of online bibliography if we are to understand the motives of collectors with which Yeats himself remained baffled.