More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

This 1957 text was the first thorough account of the serial publication of books in the eighteenth century. Professor Wiles shows how, first by serialization in newspapers and then by releasing instalments of a work in progress in small packets of sheets stitched in blue paper and delivered regularly to subscribers, English publishers made new and old books available to a great number of readers. It had not previously been realized how extensive the practice was. As a method of publishing it had important effects: because books could be sent out in instalments the high price of books sold was no longer a bar to the spread of literacy and useful knowledge. After explaining the growth of this method from the last years of the seventeenth century until 1750, Professor Wiles gives important chapters to related questions, such as the state of the law of copyright.

Marie Tremaine's bibliography was first published by UTP in 1951 and is a cornerstone of bibliography and book history studies in Canada.