Printed with permission of Laura Wulf, Harvard News Office,
Harvard University

Katharine F. Pantzer
Elected an Honorary Member of the
Bibliographical Society of America

At its January 1998 meeting, the BSA Council elected Katharine F. Pantzer, formerly of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, to honorary membership in the Society.
     If one looks at the catalogue of the British Library on the Web, one will see that Dr. Pantzer is credited with three works: the three volumes (listed separately) of the Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640. She has, of course, written more than this. Indeed, she can be a doughty fighter in print. But it is for these three volumes that she is admired and will always be honored — not just by the Bibliographical Society of America but by all who come into contact with British culture between the late fifteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries. The letters "STC" now trip off the tongue of historians and literary scholars alike with a frequency that was unheard of two or three decades ago. This is due in part to a revolution that has allocated the history of the book, with all the ramifications that this entails for many disciplines, a central place in historical studies. But it is due also to a new-found delight in the existence of a body of basic bibliographical information — reliable, comprehensive, disciplined in its presentation, well indexed, presented with an even-handedness that knows no literary, theological, historical or other canon, whose purposes are to list what has been printed, and to establish the names of those responsible for their manufacture and publication.
     Kitzi Pantzer joined the late William A. Jackson in his work on the revision of Pollard and Redgrave's work of 1926 in September 1962, when he had reached letter L of the alphabet. Two years later, Jackson died, and she succeeded to the task of working with one or two assis-

tants, in the hope of completing the task by about 1970. With only a modest extension to that program, the first volume of the revision to appear was published in June 1976, printed letterpress by Oxford University Press. It covered the second part of the alphabet for the simple reason that this was the part with which she was most familiar. Volume One appeared ten years later, in April 1987. Then there was a shorter pause, and in 1991 was published what is in many ways the most remarkable part of all, the third volume containing not only Philip Rider's essential chronological index, but also Kitzi's own detailed survey of the printing and publishing trade (mostly, of course, in London) down to 1640.This volume is testimony to the detailed bibliographical notes that had been kept in the course of the revision of the main portion. It is also testimony to historical skills of a high order, while the map of the City of London that accompanies this third part is a masterpiece of its kind, in itself a major contribution to the history of the City.
     The entries in the STC repay alert reading, after careful study of the introduction. Individually, they may be unravelled to discover far more than just edition statements and locations. They will give hints about production, about peculiarities of the book trade, and about individuals —people, not only books. There is even the odd joke: the misprinted heading for the voluminous sermonizer, and as voluminously collected, Henry Smith, minister, was deliberately and harmlessly steered through proof correction so that it would on one page read "monster" in the final text. There are not many other misprints. To share the process of revision with Kitzi, in correspondence week by week, was to share a voyage of discovery, frequently exciting, sometimes (for the slower parts of the work) to be relieved by some unexpected variation. A privileged few periodically received an informal newsletter or some other illustrated greeting. Behind it all lurked questions that still remain to be answered, and to which she contributed so much. It was thanks to her that we began to understand the extent to which printers' imprints were not wholly to be relied on, and how deeply embedded in ordinary trade habits was the practice of shared printing. Other scholars have taken this further, and others again will take it further still. It was her alert eye, not only to decorative initials (here she relied much on the earlier work of Jackson and of F. S. Ferguson) but also to peculiarities of imposition and of paper sizes, that helped open our own.

     I mentioned earlier her appearance on the Web. Although she flirted for a while with computers in the 1960s, and turned to them again when they had caught up with her needs, Kitzi's main tools of trade were the microfilm reader, the photocopier, and, of course, the typewriter — the last dating from a time when to many of her less mechanized English correspondents it seemed a rather modern innovation. In the course of publication, the Press at Oxford discarded its letterpress machinery, leading to a major crisis in the STC's production, and then ended printing altogether. Were the STC to be revised today, it would no doubt rely on different editorial technologies; but it is very doubtful that it would be any better, for the simple reason that any work depends on the capacity of its guiding hand. Thanks to bibliographical understanding of an exceptional order and an extraordinary capacity for dedicated hard work, Kitzi Pantzer has provided us all with resources that will easily outlast our generation. In honoring her, the Bibliographical Society of America speaks for the world.

DAVID MCKITTERICK