A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, usually known simply as The Short-Title Catalogue or STC, and also as Pollard and Redgrave, is a bibliographical union catalogue of early printed books compiled originally by Alfred W. Pollard and Gilbert Richard Redgrave and published by The Bibliographical Society. The first edition bears the date 1926, although it was issued in January 1927. It was extensively revised in the second half of the twentieth century by William A. Jackson, Frederic Sutherland Ferguson, and, above all, Katharine F. Pantzer. The revised and enlarged second edition appeared in three volumes between 1976 and 1991.

The STC attempts to identify surviving editions and impressions, and in some cases issues, states and variants, of books and other typographically printed material produced in the British Isles and their colonies through 1640, together with books in English or another language of the British Isles printed abroad. Its first edition contained 26,143 numbered entries and recorded copies in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, and nearly 150 further institutional and private collections. The second edition greatly enlarged both the number of entries and the bibliographical information associated with them.

The numbers assigned to its entries (normally cited in forms such as "STC 15375") became standard identifiers for early English printed books. They continue to be used in rare-book catalogues, scholarly editions, English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) records and the collections underlying Early English Books Online (EEBO). The STC was continued chronologically by Donald Wing's catalogue of books for 1641–1700 and was eventually incorporated, corrected, and extended within the ESTC.

Background

Bullen's British Museum catalogue

The immediate predecessor of Pollard and Redgrave's STC was the three-volume Catalogue of Books in the Library of the British Museum Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of Books in English Printed Abroad, to the Year 1640, compiled by George Bullen with the assistance of G. W. Eccles and published by the trustees of the British Museum in 1884. Bullen, then keeper of the Department of Printed Books, established features later associated with the STC: an alphabetical arrangement principally by author, special treatment of anonymous and pseudonymous works, and entries for such corporate or conventional headings as Bibles and liturgies.

Its principal limitation was institutional. Bullen recorded the holdings of a single library rather than attempting a union catalogue of surviving copies throughout Britain and abroad, and it is in this respect above all that the printed short-title catalogues which followed departed from his model. During the following decades bibliographers repeatedly discussed the possibility of building upon Bullen's catalogue to produce a short-title handlist of all extant early English books that could be located.

The project also benefited from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bibliographical scholarship, notably Edward Arber's transcription of the registers of the Stationers' Company, as well as work on early printers, booksellers, and individual authors. The dependence of the STC upon Arber's Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 helped to shape both its bibliographical information and its terminal date.

The Bibliographical Society project

The proposal was revived at a meeting of the Bibliographical Society on 21 January 1918. Pollard, then secretary of the society, presented facts and figures showing that the bibliographical work published since Bullen's catalogue had made a comprehensive union handlist practicable. The vice-president in the chair was persuaded, and offered both to collaborate in the editing and to provide the funds needed to secure a minimum of paid assistance. This was Redgrave, who had served as president of the society from 1907.

The undertaking developed into a cooperative survey of major collections in Britain and the United States. The title page ultimately named Pollard and Redgrave as compilers "with the help of G. F. Barwick, Geo. Watson Cole, Ethel Fegan ... and others". George Watson Cole, associated with the Huntington Library, was among a much larger group of librarians, collectors, and bibliographers whose reports permitted the catalogue to extend beyond the holdings of the British Museum.

Pollard and Redgrave described their goal as a "short-title" handlist rather than a full descriptive bibliography. The essential object was identification and location: to distinguish one printing from another sufficiently well for a researcher to know what existed and where a copy might be consulted. Pollard's preface expressly described the work as a catalogue of books of which copies had been located, rather than a bibliography of books known or believed to have been produced, and warned users that its mixed sources made it a hazardous work to use without verification.

First edition

Publication

The completed first edition comprised xviii preliminary pages and 609 pages of catalogue entries. Its title page was dated 1926, the date by which it is conventionally cited, but the volume was actually published in January 1927. It was issued by the Bibliographical Society, with copies also distributed through the antiquarian bookselling firm Bernard Quaritch.

The first edition contained 26,143 numbered entries. It brought together holdings from four especially important collections (the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, and the Henry E. Huntington Library in California) and information from 149 further institutional and private collections. In this respect it transformed the model represented by Bullen's single-library catalogue into a large-scale union catalogue.

The STC rapidly became a standard tool for scholarship on late medieval and early modern Britain. Frank C. Francis, introducing the 1946 reprint, described it as one of the most significant books ever published for the study of English literature to 1640. The numerical identifiers proved particularly influential because they allowed scholars, librarians, booksellers, and collectors to refer unambiguously to a particular bibliographical entry without repeating a long title or description. The convention survived successive revisions of the work.

Pollard reviewed the unfinished business created by publication in "Future Work on the Short-Title Catalogue of English Books, 1475–1640", published in The Library in 1928. The article recognised a characteristic that would remain fundamental to the STC's history: a catalogue of surviving early books could never be final, because unidentified copies, new editions, and revised attributions would continue to emerge.

Scope

Despite the convenient phrase "English books", the scope of the STC was defined by a combination of place, language, date, and method of production. As summarised by Prof. Ian Gadd, a work qualified if it was printed before 1641; if at least part of it was printed from type rather than by another process such as engraving; and if it was printed either in the British Isles or their colonies or, if printed elsewhere, in English or another British language. Certain special categories, including liturgical printing intended for English or Scottish use, also fell within its scope.

This produced significant exclusions. Large quantities of Continental books in Latin or other foreign languages that were imported, owned, and read in Britain do not appear merely because they circulated there; Gadd notes in particular the absence of the very large numbers of foreign-printed Latin books brought into England from the fifteenth century onwards. The contents of the STC therefore cannot be read as a full representation of Britain's print culture before 1641. Nor does absence from the STC establish that a book never existed. Editions can disappear without surviving copies, while works unknown to the editors have continued to be discovered.

The catalogue was concerned primarily with editions and impressions rather than individual copies as bibliographical objects, although issues, states and variants could sometimes receive separate treatment where they were significant or distinguishable. Entries generally supplied an author or main heading, an abbreviated title, bibliographical format, imprint information, date, references where relevant to the Stationers' Register, and symbols indicating libraries in which copies had been located. Space was limited: an entry listed up to ten holding repositories in Britain and up to ten in North America. Notes could include readings such as catchwords, line endings and spelling variations that allowed users to distinguish closely related printings, together with observations on type and, in some cases, collation formulae.

Why 1475 and 1640?

The chronological limits in the title became conventional even after scholarship altered their literal accuracy. The beginning date reflected the dating traditionally assigned to William Caxton's translation of Raoul Lefèvre's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in English. Subsequent scholarship normally dates its printing to about 1473–1474, and the revised STC is in practice normally described as covering material from 1473 while retaining "1475" in its historic title.

The terminal date, 1640, was more consequential. It coincided with the end of the period covered by Arber's transcription of the Stationers' Register, and preceded the great expansion and destabilisation of the press associated with the political crises of the 1640s and the English Civil War. Before that period the government had exercised reasonably effective control over the output of the press, with the incidental effect of limiting the number of items printed. The breakdown of that system accompanied an enormous increase in printed pamphlets, newsbooks, and other material. More than 14,000 monographs were produced during the 1640s alone, compared with roughly 35,000 monographic and serial entries in the whole of the STC. The scale of post-1640 printing therefore required a separate bibliographical undertaking.

Reprints and supplementary finding aids

Demand for the STC soon exceeded the availability of the original printing. In 1946 the Bibliographical Society produced a photographic or lithographic reprint, in order to forestall an unauthorised American reprint. Further British reprints followed in 1948 and 1950. A photographic reprint was made for the Bibliographical Society by Gregg Press in 1963, and another by Scolar Press in 1969.

Because the STC's compact arrangement did not provide every form of access researchers wanted, a number of complementary indexes and location lists appeared. Paul G. Morrison's Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave A Short-title Catalogue was published by the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia in 1950. William Warner Bishop's second edition of A Checklist of American Copies of "Short-Title Catalogue" Books, also published in 1950, augmented information on holdings in the United States.

David Ramage's 1958 A Finding-list of English Books to 1640 in Libraries in the British Isles similarly used STC numbers to identify copies outside the national libraries and the major Oxford and Cambridge collections. A. F. Allison and V. F. Goldsmith later supplied title access with Titles of English Books (and of Foreign Books Printed in England), whose first volume, covering 1475–1640, appeared in 1976.

Rather than construct independent systems of reference, these supplementary catalogues keyed their contents to Pollard and Redgrave's numbers.

The second edition