by Mark Warner (February 2025)
I think I’ve always been a list maker and I’ve always been a completist, and those two quirks have certainly helped in my latest venture in the world of books. I started making lists of authors’ works when I was reading over 100 books a year, and for favourite authors I often wanted to track down and read everything they had written. Later, when I realised that my occasional acquisitions of signed first editions had evolved into book collecting, I started to expand my author lists with more detail. The lists became spreadsheets and these evolved in their complexity until for some authors each title published had a detailed sheet noting such things as publication dates and various editions. However, the issue I faced was that while very many authors of the past have had detailed bibliographies published by scholars (I have my Purdy for Thomas Hardy, my Teerink for Jonathan Swift, etc.), for most contemporary writers the best that’s available is just a checklist of their works. So, how do you know whether there are gaps in your collection if there’s no bibliography to compare it with?
The other thing that bugged me (especially as I’ve worked in IT off and on since the late 1970s) is that although book collectors and booksellers have made great use of the internet in the past 25+ years, there are very few bibliographies available online. With a few exceptions everyone still relies on large (and often expensive) books written using arcane terminology and usually completely lacking in any images. As a result, if you want to determine whether you have the first or second state of a particular edition you have to decipher the bibliographic code, add a bit of luck and eyestrain, and hopefully figure out what you’ve got. In most cases a photo or two would solve the problem in seconds. But that brings me back to the first issue – what to do about all those authors who don’t have a detailed bibliography published?
I’m of the attitude that if something has irked me for long enough I’ll try and fix it myself. Having had a little experience in setting up websites I decided to have a go at putting a bibliography online. I thought Kazuo Ishiguro would be an easy one to start with as he’s published relatively few novels and only one short story collection since his debut novel in 1982. I think I have just about everything he’s published including UK and USA first editions, short stories published in magazines and collections, and articles written about him. My author spreadsheet was a great start, but I didn’t realise that my two-week leave over Christmas 2024 would be used up entirely documenting Ishiguro’s output, taking photos of everything and the sometimes painful business of formatting text and images for a website. My aim was a detailed, but easy to understand, descriptive bibliography of first, limited and special editions with photos of every relevant edition. In the end I got there and my first bibliography was online.
I promised myself a break, but I found that work (which I do from home) was very quiet in January, and the itch still needed scratching, so I began documenting Ian McEwan, as I have an extensive collection of his works. Ishiguro took two weeks, McEwan took a whole month, but I got there and the results are now online at www.bibliographies.online
I have a few more authors that I can work on over the coming months, but I’d also like to open an invitation for others to contribute. If you have a bibliography that is looking for a home I would be happy to host it. My preference is for bibliographies that are accompanied by plenty of photos that will assist collectors in identifying editions, states and variants, and the invitation is also open for anyone who can provide constructive feedback or updates to what is already online. I hope www.bibliographies.online can become a resource that is used by many book collectors around the world.
Mark Warner is a member of the Book Collectors’ Society of Australia. He lives in Tasmania.
