I had developed an interest in Jane Austen sometime in middle school—I first read Emma, which remains my least favorite JA novel, though that did not deter me from plunging headlong into Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion (all of which I distinctly enjoyed). During Christmas vacation my freshman year (December 2004/January 2005) I bought a copy of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deidre Le Faye. A bit of background: Jane Austen was a consummate letter writer, especially to her sister Cassandra. Jane Austen died in 1817, leaving her letters to her sister. Cassandra, being private and protective, censored some of the letters and destroyed others. The rest found their way into the possession of Lord Brabourne, (great?)-nephew to Cassandra. [Note: I think all of that information is more or less correct—it’s been three years since I’ve worked on this project.] In 1884, Brabourne edited the letters and had them published. Here’s where it gets interesting—in the intervening years between the Brabourne edition and the Le Faye edition, fourteen of the letters went missing (lost, if I remember correctly, during one of the World Wars). Thus the only surviving witness to these fourteen letters is Brabourne’s 1884 edition, which Le Faye printed in her edition.
This information intrigued me because I had come to learn from Professor Hailey about a device called a collator. A collator is a device that relies on certain optic tricks—smoke and mirrors minus the smoke—to compare two copies of an image. In our day and age we are under the (mistaken) belief that one copy of, say, Kaplan’s Guide to the GRE is just like any other copy of Kaplan’s Guide to the GRE. Though they may be highly similar, they are in fact two distinct and unique objects. This holds especially true for books printed before the advent of machine printing. Two copies of the first folio of Shakespeare may appear to be alike; however, they contain hundreds (if not thousands) of textual variation. One copy might read: “To be or not to be” and another copy might read “To be or no to be” (this is just an example, I have no idea if this is actually the case or not). The point is, however, that the two seemingly “same” copies contain variation between themselves, but you would never know this if you didn’t have a way to look at them. A collator provides this way. For my project I used a collator called Hailey’s Comet, designed by Professor Hailey. Collators come in all shapes and sizes, and some people are abnormally attached to their preferred collator. (The Hinman Collator, for instance, is a beast of a machine developed in the 1940s). Hailey’s Comet is really nothing more than two mirrors attached to cannibalized desk lamp stands. One takes two copies of whatever one is looking at and arranges things such that one eye is looking at a mirror directed toward one copy; the other eye is looking directly at the second copy. The brain, then, is receiving two different sets of images at the same time—one image from the mirrors pointed at Copy A and another image from eye looking at copy B. The brain, in its attempt to process this information, superimposes the images over each other. The result is a 3-D effect of sorts. The usefulness of a collator is that any variations between the two copies will appear to shift or wiggle strangely, making them immediately apparent.
I will digress here to make a small point: bibliography—the study of books as physical objects—is filled with sometimes complicated explanations of processes or objects that are, in fact, quite simple to grasp upon witnessing or seeing said process/object. Such is the collator. The Myth of Print Culture suggests crossing one’s eyes as a suitable method for achieving the same effect.
All of this lengthy explanation is to say that during the spring of my freshman year I bought a copy of Brabourne’s 1884 edition of Letters (using a student research grant from the Charles Center!) and proceeded to collate a copy against roughly twenty other copies in hopes of finding some sort of textual variation. I acquired those twenty other copies through interlibrary loan at Swem—how the ILL department must have loathed me. But the library was accommodating—they even provided me with my own book cart to haul around the twenty copies (each “copy” was two volumes, so there were some forty books involved).
Being somewhat naive about this process, I expected that with every page turn I would come across some previously unidentified variant that would change the way scholars thought about Jane Austen for years to come. I was due for a reality check: bibliography can hardly be described as glamorous. Despite my lack of ground-breaking results (I think I found a few changes in punctuation), the experience was instrumental in my growth as a researcher. Some things must be learned by simply doing them. Working on Letters taught me how to quickly and effectively use a collator (they can be pains), which would prove useful in the years to come. Moreover, my Letters project taught me about the library, research aids, and grant proposals. And it was through collating copies of Letters that I discovered the best summer job I’ve ever had: Rare Book School.
Which will be next post’s topic…