Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/192

 1 82 Reviezvs of Books ventory of 'irginian manuscripts preserved b_v the land-office, by the Virginia Historical Society, and at Washington. An ample index follows. It is obvious that the book presents a great mass of data useful to historical scholars, making available large treasures at Richmond whose magnitude and variety could heretofore be only matter of surmise. Nevertheless it lays itself open to severe criticism by great want of care and skill in arrangement. It is worth while to dwell somewhat upon its defects, if only because we seem to be at the beginning of a period of great activity in documentary publication by states and societies which hitherto have done little of such work. Why should men proceed as if there were in existence no good models for the printing of historical in- ventories, calendars, and collections of documents? The book before us, for instance, has no table of contents. It sacrifices all the help and guidance that running headlines can afford the reader, by presenting, from p. I to p. 658, only the useless if not misleading heading " Report of the State Librarian". In the first section, the individual journals of the Council and of the House of Delegates, each of which a prudent compiler would describe in one line with perfect sufficiency, are each given five or six lines by repetitious printing, wasting twenty pages out of twenty-five. Throughout this section each item, as if the copyist's cards had been sent to the printer unedited, begins with the word Vir- ginia in capitals, so that that name, repeated eight or nine hundred times as the catch-word, makes it exceedingly difficult to find the word which is really significant and should catch the eye. The list of tran- scripts, the main contents of the book, begins in the middle of a page (p. 118) without proper heading, and ends with as little ceremony as it begins. In it also there is a considerable waste of space. The Sains- bury abstracts, the main division (pp. 119-534), are listed in the order in which they are bound, which apparently is the casual order in which Mr. Sainsbury found or sent them, and which anyhow is far from chronological. Now aside from the obvious convenience and propriety of the chronological order, it saves much print, because one never needs to print the year-date except just before January i and, of course, in the running headlines. Also, a non-chronological arrangement prevents the discovery of duplicates between, c. g., Sainsbury and 'inder abstracts, and so wastes more print. After each abstract or transcript is printed in italics an abbreviated designation of its provenance in the Public Record Office, but nowhere are these terms of designation explained.