William Alexander Jackson

Background

Jackson was born on July 25, 1905, in Bellows Falls, Vermont, the son of Charles Wilfred Jackson, a Baptist clergyman, and of Alice Mary Fleming.

Education

Jackson graduated from South Pasadena High School in 1922. His next-door neighbor was Dr. George Watson Cole, the first head of the Huntington Library, who was then engaged in organizing and cataloging the library's collection preparatory to its opening. Cole introduced him to the Huntington collection and aided the first steps in his bibliographical education. Cole also advised Jackson to attend Williams College, where Alfred Clark Chapin had just placed his choice collection of some 12, 000 volumes, mainly in English literature. He entered Williams in 1923, graduating in 1927.

Career

Jackson soon was working up to eight hours a day in the Chapin Library, assisting its librarian, Lucy Eugenia Osborne, an important influence on him. He was thus able to earn his way through college while engaging in what was, for him, the most congenial of occupations. By the end of his freshman year, Jackson had devised a style and plan for the bibliographical catalog of the Chapin collection. He worked on it intensively through the summer of 1925. In 1926 his parents helped finance his first trip to Europe so that he could check his work against libraries there. In the same year A. W. Polland and G. R. Redgrave published A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England 1475-1640, the key to the books Jackson loved most and the bibliographical tool he was to spend the rest of his life revising and enlarging. He immediately began annotating his own interleaved copy of the S. T. C. , as it is familiarly known. Jackson's work on the Chapin catalog continued after his graduation in 1927. By November 1928 he had described the approximately 1, 500 early English books in the collection, and specimen pages had been set in type. After his marriage, Jackson first settled in Altadena, California, where he did more work at the Huntington Library, then moved to New Haven, Connecticut In 1930 financial difficulties caused Chapin to cancel further work on his catalog. It was never published. Jackson gave up his pursuit of a Ph. D. at Yale, which was prepared to accept the catalog as his dissertation. He went to work for Carl H. Pforzheimer, Sr. , in New York City, preparing a bibliographical catalog of Pforzheimer's magnificent library of English literature. Seven years of concentrated work, one of them in England, brought the Pforzheimer catalog to page proofs. It was not published until 1940, but long before then its scholarship, which Jackson made freely available, had established his reputation as the leading bibliographer of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1937 Keyes DeWitt Metcalf, director of the Harvard University Library, recruited Jackson as assistant college librarian and associate professor of bibliography. His responsibilities were to enlist support for the development of the research collections of the library, to teach, and to assist and encourage faculty use of the library. He succeeded brilliantly. Within three years plans were being drawn for the Houghton Library, the first modern building in the United States scientifically designed for the proper housing of rare books and manuscripts. Jackson pioneered in the collecting of American literary archives while pursuing other primary research materials, written and printed, with vigor and success. Use of the collection increased, and the courses he developed attracted many promising students. Meantime, Jackson's own scholarship did not flag. In 1957 he published his edition of Records of the Court of the Stationers' Company, 1602-1640. Amid a spate of articles on all phases of books and bibliography, he continued his revision of the S. T. C. Unfortunately he did not live to see its completion. The first portion of it to be printed did not appear until 1976, completed by his last assistant, Katharine F. Pantzer. Like the Pforzheimer catalog, it has a place among the standard works of bibliography. Jackson died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 18, 1964.

Achievements

• Jackson pioneered in the collecting of American literary archives. His work as librarian and in the many professional societies to which he belonged was a major force in shaping collection development and bibliographical research in England and America in the twentieth century.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Records of a Bibliographer : Selected Papers / Edited with an Introduction and Bibliography by William H. Bond
  • Records of a Bibliographer: Selected Papers of William Alexander Jackson

Personality

Tall, handsome, and assured, Jackson made a deep and lasting impression upon colleagues and acquaintances.

Connections

On August 28, 1929, Jackson married Dorothy Judd; they had one son.

Father:

Charles Wilfred Jackson

Mother:

Alice Mary Fleming

Spouse:

Dorothy Judd

Friend:

George Watson Cole

He was an American librarian and bibliographer.

References

• Records of a Bibliographer
• William Alexander Jackson 1905-1964