INTERVIEWER

Has the way you think about the audience for your writing changed over your career?

ZACHARY LESSER

When I was writing my first book, I think the audience I had in mind was really my dissertation committee. It’s hard to imagine beyond that for a while after grad school, I think. I am interested in the challenge of translating the kind of work I do for a much broader audience, but I keep failing to actually do it. 

INTERVIEWER

The Pavier Quartos is a complex topic. You organised your project around three different types of evidence, each of which forms a chapter in your book: ‘ghost’ images; stab stitch holes; and imprint-tampering. How did you decide on the structure and organisation of this book?

ZACHARY LESSER

For a very long time I had no idea where it was going. Writing Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes was a totally different experience for me from my previous books, because it grew out of the research and from a series of talks. I must have given ten or fifteen talks over five years, all of which happened without a clear sense that this would ever be a book. Shaping a project through talks was interesting as a writing method and proved useful for me.

INTERVIEWER

Why is that?

ZACHARY LESSER

The talks I write tend to be conversational and narrative and I think the book reflects that. As I continued the research–which basically meant going to see as many copies of these things as possible–there was always a chance I’d find something that would require me to rethink everything. Meaning I had to revise the talk for the next time.

That process of being forced to revise my thinking became part of the book itself, and exposed a key question in the book: what are we seeing and what are we not seeing? What did the New Bibliographers miss through their own ideological presuppositions and what are we unable to see? So the theoretical reflections on the limits of bibliography in this book emerged from my process of rewriting through research.

I had no idea what I was going to do with the work. For a long time, I imagined it would be a long essay in The Library, because that’s where Greg’s essay was published. Then one day I had the most clichéd experience of being in the shower and the table of contents came to me, with the book organised by the different types of evidence. Not that I discovered them, but these are three kinds of bibliographic evidence that had not been used much, or even known about. The New Bibliographers seem not to have been aware of them at all.

INTERVIEWER

It sounds like writing this book was a different process from your previous books.

ZACHARY LESSER

None of my other books have come to me in the shower. My first book emerged out of a dissertation. That’s a ten-year process of thinking, intensive drafting and re-writing. Whereas for this book, I researched in libraries for about five years and wrote all these talks before I wrote anything for the book. Then I sat down and wrote the book in about two months. The process felt more like the way that a scientist writes up their data. I had all the material and wrote it one stretch, from start to finish, from page one to the end.

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‘I researched in libraries for about five years and wrote all these talks before I wrote anything for the book.’

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INTERVIEWER

The book gestated for five years as you gathered material and gave talks. Its publication seems like a compelling argument against the prevailing culture of academic haste and ‘publish or perish’. Is this a mode of scholarship that is threatened at the moment?

ZACHARY LESSER

Absolutely. I think bibliography in general is threatened as a result, because it typically requires a long time spent gathering evidence, slowly and patiently, before you see any ‘productivity’ out of it. If you look back at some of the landmark and truly monumental works of bibliography from the early twentieth century, it’s absurd to imagine them being written in today’s academic culture. I’ve got tenure, and I work at a wealthy university that enables this kind of research through funding, sabbaticals, and so on. Without those privileges, there’s no way I could have written this book.

INTERVIEWER

You wrote the whole book over two months of sabbatical. What was that writing process like?

ZACHARY LESSER

For the most part it was relatively smooth. There were moments of complexity and doubt, where I worried that it would fall apart, but they mostly happened earlier in the project, over the course of writing the talks. Much of the writing difficulty and the terror of the blank page had already happened. I always get anxious, every time I commit to giving a talk, that I simply won’t be able to write the thing and I’ll have to stand up there and confess that I have nothing to say. But since I’d been talking about this material for a few years, by the time I came to write the book I had become comfortable with the loose ends and frayed bits. And in fact those loose ends became part of the story that I wanted to tell.  

If you think of bibliography as a science or a form of detection, there’s a risk that you feel every piece of evidence has to fit perfectly. We tell students when they write an essay: always let in the material that doesn’t fit because it makes your writing more interesting. But you can’t help but be sucked into that mode with bibliography. Luckily my recursive talks on this project shook me out of that mode, because things often didn’t fit! And I hope the book reflects that.

INTERVIEWER

In the early material on the Pavier Quartos at the start of the twentieth century, figures like Greg, Neidig, and Pollard sometimes wrote with a kind of priestly authority, presenting the solution or the explanation.

By contrast, I was struck by how your book remained open to uncertainty. The book ends with a series of questions, for example. That appreciation of ambiguity seems in some ways closer to literary critical work than to bibliography. Could you say anything about the role of uncertainty in the discipline at the moment?

ZACHARY LESSER

I think part of this is the coming together of bibliography and book history, with the different interests and theoretical underpinnings of those adjacent fields. However, I do think that when you go back and read the original essays of the New Bibliographers, they are generally more nuanced than you remember. Then later other people pick up on certain points and those points become ossified.

Part of what prompted my ending with a series of questions was that I had the experience at Trinity College of looking at Edward Capell’s collection of Pavier Quartos in two volumes. This is the set of quartos that W. W. Greg knew best, because he was the librarian at Trinity College. And I saw that this collection contained a ghost of Woman Killed. Now, W. W. Greg is the greatest bibliographer in our field, or one candidate anyway. He made no mention of this ghost and I don’t think he saw it. There are lots of reasons for that. I don’t know what kind of lighting conditions he had at the Wren Library, for instance. But it’s also true that if you’re not looking for this ghost mark, it’s invisible. And even if Greg had seen it, he would I’m sure have felt that it had very little to do with the original publication.

If I’m seeing something that W. W. Greg did not see on these copies, it’s not because I’m a better bibliographer. It’s because I’m working in a totally different context. And if that’s the case, nothing that I say will be iron clad for someone else ten or twenty years in the future. Almost literally, some kinds of evidence are visible at moments and others are not. Marginalia, for example, is a huge area of scholarship now but it’s not something that Greg and Bowers were interested in because it couldn’t tell them anything about the author’s text. So my interest in uncertainty stemmed from this central question: how can our arguments cope with this problem of what we can and cannot know?

INTERVIEWER

There’s a delicate balance here between making arguments but at the same time making the work self-aware about its own limitations.

ZACHARY LESSER

Yes. And that balance is a disciplinary moment. We had twenty or thirty years of real critique of the New Bibliographers, which was I think a necessary critique. Now it feels to me that we’re at a moment where there’s more acknowledgement of the incredible work they did. We need to take up their tools and use them for new ends.

Part of my thinking comes out of the conclusion to my book on Hamlet because I think the same problems are at stake in editing. There was a lot of critique of the editing that came out of the New Bibliographic era and that critique gave us decades of unediting and versioning. What I argued in the conclusion to the Hamlet book is that unediting has gone as far as it can go. I think now we need a return to the belief that we can edit but also to combine that belief with fresh humility. We can’t just throw up our hands and say: all we can do is present the text as it appeared in its early edition. There were arguments in the nineties I remember that said: ‘we shouldn’t edit anything’, and ‘we should just use facsimiles’. And I think that just gives up on a whole area of scholarship–editing–that is an important form of literary criticism. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t write anything about King Lear anymore. So I think we need to find that middle ground that absorbs the critiques that emerged out of poststructuralist theory and carries those ideas forward into a new sense of what it means to be a bibliographer and an editor. 

INTERVIEWER

A related question is: what does it mean to read, at any particular historical moment? Any mode of editing