Inexhaustible Engines

Michael Holroyd

  • Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, Vols I and II by Dan Laurence
    Oxford, 1058 pp, £80.00, December 1983, ISBN 0 19 818179 5
  • Bernard Shaw. Vol. I: 1856-1907. by Margery Morgan
    Profile, 45 pp, £1.50, July 1982, ISBN 0 85383 518 7
  • The Art and Mind of Shaw: Essays in Criticism by A.M. Gibbs
    Macmillan, 224 pp, £20.00, October 1983, ISBN 0 333 28679 0

What is a bibliography? For Bernard Shaw it was a directory whose natural subscribers were to be found among librarians, biographers, critics and occasionally the authors themselves. He regarded its aim as the production of opus lists that would be useful to specialists. Such an attitude, his own bibliographer informs us, was appallingly inadequate, revealing ‘a man who had no understanding or respect for the responsibilities of scholarship’. To Dan Laurence, bibliography is something other. Where Shaw had observed only a harmless drudge, Mr Laurence sees ‘an exacting science’, a work that may be ‘treated artfully’, and the culmination (like an elevation to the peerage) of a lifetime’s achievement.

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