28
STEVEN MARCUS
its allied phenomena live and move and have their being. Ashbee's
indispensable virtues as a bibliographer, his tireless collection and
production of instances, his indefatigable energy of quotation, his
unbelievable scrupulosity of concrete detail all partake of the same
impulses which both actuate his interest in pornography and are
behind its creation. What Ashbee was able to do, then, was to take
his obsession, transfer it without significant change or loss of form
to a nearly related area, and put it to some further or secondary use.
The process is a familiar one, the results in this case were unique.
III
Ashbee's three volumes are at once a monument of personal
scholarship and a monument of his personal eccentricity. In point of
fact his eccentricity is so deep, radical, and unremitting that clinical
terms seem more appropriate than the neutral and, within the con–
text of English culture, virtually honorific ascriptions of oddity or
eccentricity or whimsy. The chief characteristic of his writing is its
pedantry. The long introductions to the separate volumes are largely
composed of long, endless, and more often than not pointless and
useless footnotes; there are in reality considerably more footnotes than
text in each of them. These footnotes are made up of a variety of
material, but the majority of them consist of quotations in an assort–
ment of European languages. The quotations sometimes concern
general bibliographical questions, sometimes general questions of
literature and morals, and sometimes nothing in general. That is to
say, the footnotes are there not because of their relevance to the text
above them; they are there because Ashbee wants them there without
regard to their content. These footnotes, as a consequence, take on
a symbolic meaning, as does the shape of Ashbee's page. The kind
of page which Ashbee continually seems to strive for, and which he
frequently manages to achieve, consists of a single line of text from
which there depends a page of footnote. Ashbee's persistence in this
effort is so pronounced that one is tempted to go beyond common
sense and see in it an unconscious iconography: beneath a very small
head there is attached a very large appendage. But since this append–
age principally contains the assertions of other men, Ashbee, em-
