Mitchell's West Indian Bibliography has been a labour of love. In its earlier stages I sometimes saw its compiler walking around with stacks of computer-generated paper the full significance of which I did not guess, and I wrote him off as a somewhat nutty collector of printed works. I still suspect that things began that way. But here we have an immensely valuable product for which all who work or play with West Indian non-fiction will be deeply grateful, even the academics who might wish in some respects it were yet larger. There is no equivalent publication which is less than twenty years out of date, and none at all which is still in print. Within its own frame of reference this comprehensive bibliography will provide help to users as well as collectors of books which in the case of the more modern items could only be obtained other wise through the exhausting search of multiple library catalogues and publication lists. It will fill the needs of the collector admirably, and the inclusion of the separate publication details of successive editions, sometimes even printings, is an invaluable aid to those who wish to assess second hand items or to trace the history of works of special interest. Another special virtue of Mitchell's West Indian Bibliography is the inclusion of works of continental or even global scope which have some West Indian content, with an annotation to that effect.
In asking an historian, rather than a bibliographer, a librarian or a book collector, to write a foreword for a book which he proclaims is aimed at collectors and second hand dealers, Don Mitchell was taking a calculated risk. The criteria by which he determined which items to include in his bibliography are carefully designed to exclude not only articles in journals and periodicals, he collector's objection to which is easily understood, but also mimeographed items however important or useful. These are significant areas of material which the working historian would expect to find in his chosen bibliography. The exclusion of the later category indeed prompts the reflection that we are sometimes too much driven by the advance of technology for the mimeographed item of two decades ago would today almost certainly be produce by methods which would preclude its exclusion on similar grounds of informalit. But I must set aside the fact that I would like to find in this compilation writing which by design are not there. Don Mitchell did not set out to meet my needs or interests but those of other people with rather different objectives. And if I think of his production as a catalogue rather than a bibliography in the accustomed sense, I no longer acquire expectations which are not fulfilled and I am then left with its many strengths.
Moreover, there are a number of interesting ways in which this work will repay general perusal by people not specifically seeking to satisfy a professional or bibliophilic need. One can hardly fail to notice the extraordinary variety of places in which books on West Indian topics have been published. Apart from the obvious metropolitan centres and the islands themselves, the list includes a spectacular scatter of lesser cities and towns in the United States and Britain. And if the publication of West Indian material in Calcutta, Lisbon, and Berne is only mildly surprising, Sydney, Malta, Limburg and Berlin are probably good for a pause. Who would have imagined that the Johannesburg of apartheid would have published a book about Jamaica? Or that Papeete and Buenos Aires would also produce West Indian material? The very large number of items emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while not unfamiliar, is also striking: once upon a time the Caribbean was a region of global importance and was noticed accordingly. This bibliography is a tribute to it.
KO Laurence
Emeritus Professor of History
University of the West Indies
St. Augustine