Short-title Catalogue Of Books Printed In England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, And British America And Of English Books Printed In Other Countries, 1641-1700
Donald Goddard Wing was an associate librarian and bibliographer at Yale University for more then 30 years. He also contributed articles to scholarly journals.
Background
Donald was born on August 18, 1904, in Athol, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Frank and Edith Wing. Even as a child he was interested in cataloging things, creating several detailed notebooks about movie actors of his time.
Education
Donald attended public schools of Massachusetts before entering Yale University. He studied at Yale University and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1926. He also attended Trinity College, Cambridge during 1926-27. He finished Harvard University with his Master of Arts in 1928. He got his Ph.D. from Yale in 1932.
Donald began working at the Yale library in 1928. In the process of moving early books to a new library building at Yale, Wing began to put together a catalogue of the books Yale possessed in 1742. In his research, he discovered that very little bibliographical information was available on books in English published from the 1640s to 1700. Taking on this challenge, Wing won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1935 to search British libraries for books published in this period. The story was told that he sailed with thirty-six shoeboxes full of bibliographical slips and returned with fifty-one boxes after searching libraries at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as collections in Scotland, France, and Holland.
Upon Wing’s return to Yale, each of the slips was painstakingly converted into typescript, and a prospectus for a catalogue appeared. Other libraries, hearing of his project, checked their collections, and a network of collectors and scholars interested in the mid-seventeenth century developed. In the pre-computer days when Wing was working on his project, he continued to file his bibliographical notation in rows of shoe boxes.
In his dual position as acquisitions librarian and bibliographer, Wing was in a special position to develop the library collection at Yale. He also attracted interest in books of the period and gained the respect of antiquarian book dealers. The historical period he chose was of particular interest to scholars, encompassing the English Civil War, the Cromwellian period, the Restoration, and the ascent of the American colonies.
The first volume of Wing’s STC was published in 1945; Volume II, in 1945; and Volume III, in 1951. The volumes were revised several times, the last, as of this writing, in 1994. As word spread about the comprehensive nature of the catalogue, scholars, booksellers, and librarians around the world flooded Wing with enough information to fill seventy drawers in a card catalogue. In 1967 he published his second work, A Gallery of Ghosts, in which he lists 5,000 titles he had found listed in bibliographies but had never seen. Titles subsequently located were included in a revised STC. Although Wing died before the later revisions were done, his work was continued by other dedicated scholars. William Baker in the Dictionary of Literary Biography called Wing’s compendious catalogue “the great work of enumerative bibliography by which Wing will be remembered.’’
In the summer of 1930 Wing married Pennsylvania native, Charlotte Farquhar, at Sharon Farm in Sandy Spring, Maryland. They honeymooned in Europe together, and then returned to the United States to start a family. Charlotte and Donald had two children together, one boy and one girl.