Bibliography Series (Volumes 33-34) , 1710-1791, 1841, 1947-1993 and undated

Extent:
10 boxes
Scope and content:

The penultimate unit of the Bicentennial Edition is represented in the Bibliography Series. Aside from the Letters, this was the only other portion for which Frank Baker served as the original unit editor. Planned as Volumes 33-34 but left incomplete at his death, the Bibliography was only one instantiation of a topic on which he labored for several decades: documenting the publishing history of the editions of their writings that appeared in print during the lifetimes of John and Charles Wesley. Independently of his work on the WWEP, and yet also in preparation for it, Baker had already published A Union Catalogue of the Publications of John and Charles Wesley in 1966. Although this title and the work-in-progress he called "A Descriptive and Analytical Bibliography" may at first sound like two names for more or less the same thing, the latter is in fact a radically different work. The words "descriptive" and "analytical" in the title were not added lightly: each publication with a completed entry in the bibliography is taken up and considered in a full-length essay. Baker of course provides the expected bibliographic details for all editions to appear in Wesley's lifetime, derives the stemma or publishing genealogy of each work, and lists holdings around the world, just as in the Union Catalogue. But here he does far more. He also discusses each work's place in the Wesley canon, considers everything from how and why it came to be written and published, to its reception history, to the ways Wesley used and adapted it in successive printings over the years. In short, the drafts and typescripts collected here, though uncompleted, go well beyond "bibliography" or even "annotated bibliography" as those terms are generally conceived. They set out to describe in full a publishing phenomenon that spanned two-thirds of the 18th century: the life in print of a speaker, writer, editor, and abridger whose works appeared in more than four thousand editions in his own lifetime alone.

Arranged in four subseries: General Planning; Printers and Printing; Stemmata and Texts; and Typescripts. Because his work on the "Descriptive and Analytical Bibliography" required Baker to consult so many thousands of editions of works by John and Charles Wesley, this series has an extremely complex relationship not only with other series in the current collection but also with other collections at Duke. The outline provided below is not exhaustive in explicating these relationships, but does provide guidance about when to expect to find related materials at Duke, and where to search. Frank Baker was the original unit editor for Volumes 33 and 34, and authored almost all the original material in this series, the bulk of which dates to the 1970s and 1980s. Unit editors were Page Thomas and Richard P. Heitzenrater.

For a general overview of all the Frank Baker collections at Duke, see Related Materials in this inventory. To access all pertinent information at Duke on particular publications by JW, see also the following series/subseries and collections as applicable:

  • For initial bibliographic information on a particular title, see both the Stemmata and Texts Subseries and the Typescripts Subseries in the current series. In addition, further information can often be found in the Series/Subseries corresponding to the volume in which the title appeared (or is planned to appear). As an extreme but instructive example, all of the following materials can be found about the single sermon "Awake, Thou That Sleepest": a 23-page essay and stemma in the Typescripts Subseries below: an additional folder of notes and rough drafts in the Stemmata and Texts subseries; and more notes, including photocopies of over fifty editions from libraries around the world, in the Sermons Series,Stemmata Subseries.
  • In addition to the above, see also the Frank Baker Photocopies Collection (Divinity School) for other possible photocopies, transcriptions, and notes on stemma.
  • See the Frank Baker Microfilm Collection (Divinity School) for microfilm of manuscript and printed collections from around the world. For the provenance of these microfilm, including history of acquisition and correspondence with the archives involved, see the Frank Baker Papers, Libraries and Archives Series. (Rubenstein Library)
  • See the printed materials division of the Frank Baker Collection of Wesleyana and British Methodism (Rubenstein Library) for original editions Baker may have used in his research. These items may be searched in the online catalog.
  • Also see the Frank Baker Papers for more materials on any of the following topics: for the closely related work, A Union Catalogue of the Publications of John and Charles Wesley, see the Writings and Research Series, Union Catalogue Subseries; for topics listed in the Printers and Printing subseries below, see the unpublished essay "Printers' Flowers as Bibliographic Evidence in Eighteenth Century Britain" in the Writings and Research Series, Unpublished Writings Subseries; for indexes of Wesley's writings, including certain volumes of the Bicentennial Edition, see the Subject Files Series, Card Files Subseries.

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The copyright interests in this collection have not been transferred to Duke University. For more information, consult the copyright section of the Regulations and Procedures of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

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