From APHA Newsletter 100–101 March/June 1991:

Through its publications, research fellowships, and programs, the Bibliographical Society of America has provided important support for scholarship related to printing history since its founding in 1904 and its incorporation in 1927. Although Ruth Mortimer, the president, was unable to attend the award ceremonies, her acceptance speech was read by Marie Korey, a past vice­president of APHA, presently secretary of the BSA.

Ms. Mortimer’s speech put the founding of the Society into an historical context, noting that other bibliographical societies were founded in Edinburgh, London, and Chicago in the 1890s. By 1904, the BSA was founded as a national organization so closely allied with the American Library Association that their annual meetings were scheduled to coincide. The present configuration of scheduling BSA meetings to coincide with those of APHA and the Grolier Club indicates the broadened membership of the organ­ization. “Within its current figure of 1,285 members are 629 institutions and an international roster of bibliographers by profession and inclination-scholar-librarians, professors and students, printing historians, editors, book collectors, booksellers, publishers.” Its scholarly journal, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, clearly defines the scope of the Society’s concern with books or manuscripts as physical objects demonstrating historical evidence for ”establishing a text or illuminating the history of book production, publication, distribution, or collecting, or for other purposes. Studies of the printing, publishing, and allied trades are also welcome.”

The Society’s commitment to the study of incunabula dates from as early as 1919, when it reprinted the Census of Fifteenth Century Books Owned in America, a work edited by George Parker Winship, first published in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library. Through the years, the Society has published related works, by Margaret Bingham Stillwell and Frederick R. Goff, and has recently begun to support the lncunable Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), the interna­tional computerized data base of incunabula holdings now being compiled at the British Library. In addition, major contributions to Gutenberg scholarship in the 1980s appeared in the Society’s Papers. BSA has also published monographs about individual publishing houses. Among those are The Cost of Books at Ticknor and Fields and Their Predecessors, 1832–58 ( 1949), Tauchnitz International Editions in English, 1841-1955: A Bibliographical History ( 1988), and The Bowyer Ledgers: The Printing Accounts of William Bowyer, Father and Son, forthcoming in 1991. A more detailed description of these activities will be found in the speech as it is published in Printing History. 

Anna Lou Ashby