The Bibliographic Study of Modern Authors, including Their Juvenilia
	As discussed in connection with the collecting of modern authors, including their juvenilia, the taste for moderns was a noticeably new development of late nineteenth-century book collecting; and the rise in collecting, editing, and reprinting modern authors’ juvenilia and youthful writing formed a part of that development. However, as stressed by Sadleir, “Development of Bibliographical Study,” the new collecting lacked the bibliographical sophistication of studying these books’ “significance as books of a period.” That is, whereas the late-century collector was concerned at most to establish what constituted a perfect copy (and possibly arrived even at that minimal description incompetently), bibliography in Sadleir’s and others’ terms of the 1930s–40s demanded “to know also what were the changing processes, trade customs, methods of distribution and book-buyers’ tastes which made [these books] what they are,” and, further, how this production might be woven “into the lives of their authors, producing as it were a garment of biography with a texture of bibliography” (147). While the rhetoric of this narrative about the professionalization of bibliography should itself be opened to question, Sadleir recognizes that the new collecting in the late nineteenth century was informed by significant bibliographic research, starting as early as the late 1860s. For this edition, it is significant what interest these pioneering bibliographers showed in modern authors’ youthful works, and why they were interested.
	Perhaps the most pioneering bibliographer of modern authors, and one who made a specialty of editing juvenilia, was Richard Herne Shepherd, who produced bibliographies of Dickens (1880), Thackeray (1881), Carlyle (1881), Swinburne (1887), Tennyson (1896), and Coleridge (1900). He started in 1878 with the Bibliography of Ruskin (5 eds., 1878–81), which effectively headed the stream of modern author bibliographies that poured almost annually between the 1870s and the First World War from his research and others’ (Sadleir, “Development of Bibliographical Study” 148–49). In Ruskin studies, that stream brought two more Ruskin bibliographies shortly following Shepherd’s (Axon, “Bibliographical Biography” [1879], and a checklist by the American, William Sloane Kennedy, attached to one of his Ruskin anthologies??? [1885]). Ruskin bibliography was then settled for a time by Thomas J. Wise and James P. Smart with Wise and Smart, Complete Bibliography of . . . Ruskin (1889–93; see), and then more authoritatively by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn with the Library Edition—the bibliographies in each of the individual volumes and in the Bibliography volume (1912?).
	Among the earlier bibliographers, Shepherd was “honestly and industriously” ambitious “to produce as exhaustive a check list as possible” (Sadleir, “Development of Bibliographical Study” 149). The industry was indeed remarkable, if one puts oneself in mind of Ruskin studies prior to the Library Edition—prior even to Ruskin’s autobiographical writing, which alerted collectors to possible rarities. In the Bibliography of Ruskin, some entries describing the early publications are annotated with quotations from Ruskin identifying his authorship, but these quotations cannot have been easy to unearth, let alone the early publications themselves. For example, no. 1 in the Bibliography—the two 1834 essays published in The Magazine of Natural History, “Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine,” and “Facts and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc”—is glossed by a remark from the so-called Instructions in Use of the Rudimentary Series for the Drawing Schools at Oxford (1872): “Mr. Loudon was the first literary patron who sent words of mine to be actually set up in print, in his Magazine of Natural History, when I was sixteen” (see Works 21:243n). Not only was the remark obscure, printed as a footnote in the Instructions; the pamphlet itself had never been issued for sale, having been printed solely for students at the Oxford Drawing Schools.
	Similarly, no. 5 in the Bibliography, the 1834 The Poetry of Architecture, is annotated with a nugget from Ruskin’s 1878 essay on William Henry Harrison, “My First Editor: An Autobiographical Reminiscence”: “the series of essays written about this time for the Architectural Magazine, under the signature of Kata Phusin, contain sentences nearly as well put together as any I have done since” (see Works 34:97). While Ruskin’s essay on Harrison became familiar to Ruskin readers when reprinted in 1885 in On the Old Road, in 1878 Shepherd could have found it only in its original place of publication—as a preface to W. H. Harrison, “Reminiscences,” published in the Dublin University Magazine for May–? 1878.
	One wonders whether Harrison’s essay served as an impetus for bibliographers’ busy activity after 1878. Shepherd’s preface to the Bibliography of Ruskin, published the same year in the first???? edition, suggests that he had been working for years: “the materials . . . have taken many years . . . and much anxious labour” to collect and arrange; and that “no entry . . . [was] made at second-hand” but “always with the actual book, pamphlet, magazine, or journal” at hand (4th ed., p. vii). The statement might, however, apply to the collectors, whose help Shepherd acknowledges in supplying him with materials. This long list of collectors, whatever the immediate impetus in compiling the bibliography, suggests that the audience for Ruskin bibliography was fairly substantial, at least among a circle of collectors. The list acknowledges the help of librarians and of the publisher, George Allen, as one would expect; others on the list must have been collectors and enthusiasts.
	An interest in juvenilia and youthful writing in particular arose in part from the new zeal for collecting modern authors as comprehensively as possible (see collecting of modern authors, including their juvenilia). This comprehensive collecting interest was spurred as well by modern author societies. W. E. A. Axon produced his brief 1879 bibliography (Axon, “Bibliographical Biography”) for the Manchester Literary Club. . . . 
	The interest in juvenilia and youthful writing cannot be ascribed solely to collecting, however, for modern author societies show extensive inquiry into the subject, even apart from the relatively select group of modern writers who typically formed the subject of these societies. The interest is shown in individual bibliographers, too, like Shepherd and Axon, suggesting that they were not merely supporting the others’ taste as collectors and society members in their research (see Richard Herne Shepherd and W. E. A. Axon). 

	For Carter, such thorough bibliography was a laudable development, providing “a target of completeness at which previously desultory collectors would be encouraged to aim”; again, however, Carter the professional is suspicious of describing “the most trifling pamphlet . . . as carefully and as impressively as its author’s masterpiece,” and he sees an opening for the later forgeries (23?, 28). Certainly, Shepherd relished the chase for minutiae, as witnessed by his extraordinary keenness in ferreting out early Ruskin for the bibliography, or by his triumphant find of Charles Lamb’s lost Poetry for Children (Shepherd, “Discovery”).
	... Writing of the paradox of the childless siblings, Charles and Mary Lamb, as writers for children, Shepherd...
Although exonerated by later scholars from the charge of forgery that Wise attempted to shift onto him, Shepherd, an intriguingly ambiguous personality, appears an early key figure in the intersection of Ruskin bibliography, editing and collecting modern authors, and the interest in childhood and juvenilia.