W. W. Greg was the foremost British textual theorist and enumerative bibliographer of the first half of the twentieth century. Reviewing Greg's Collected Papers for The Library (June 1968), James G. McManaway wrote:

To Greg, more than anyone else, we owe our knowledge of Elizabethan dramatic manuscripts, how they were written, how they were put into production, and printed. Modern textual study and analytical bibliography cannot be thought of apart from his contribution to theory and practice.

Together with R. B. McKerrow and A. W. Pollard, Greg pioneered the "new bibliography" that revolutionized textual criticism and ordered the editing of texts. As one of the leading figures of the Bibliographical Society and adviser to its journal, The Library, as well as through his more than two hundred reviews, Greg profoundly influenced the world of bibliography and textual criticism. Though Greg regarded enumerative bibliography as only one aspect of the...