A Note on the L.M. Montgomery Bibliography

At long last, I’ve finished reorganizing and updating my L.M. Montgomery bibliography of sources—at least for now.

Introduction: Order out of Chaos

I begin with two quotations from Jane of Lantern Hill to explain what’s been going on behind the scenes at L.M. Montgomery Online, specifically with my Montgomery bibliography.

She had always wanted to wash dishes . . . it must be such fun to make dirty plates clean. (111)

“That silver does need cleaning,” said Jane in rapture. What fun she would have cleaning it and washing up all those dainty and delicate dishes! (126)

When I think about domestic chores, “fun” and “rapture” aren’t the first words that come to mind. To me, cleaning my house is a lot like filing taxes, shovelling the driveway, or visiting the dentist. It needs to be done, so I do it.

Still, I can relate to these two moments in Jane in a less literal way. For me, formatting (or reformatting) a bibliography gives me the same kind of satisfaction that cleaning gives Jane. It’s a way for me to create order out of chaos. But in the case of an online bibliography of sources pertaining to L.M. Montgomery, it’s a puzzle that never ends. After all, new work appears and older work gets rediscovered all the time. But besides that, the way to format a bibliography isn’t as straightforward—or as fixed—as it seems.

Unlike a book, which must eventually go to press, it’s never too late to update, correct, or reorganize a website. Since I started compiling lists of Montgomery-related resources twenty-five years ago, I’ve continually adjusted how I’ve organized and formatted items whenever conventions changed or my preferences changed. (At one point, I switched from the MLA Handbook to the Chicago Manual of Style as my favoured citation method.) But through it all, my interest in new Montgomery-related materials (or materials that are new to me) shows no sign of slowing down.

Site Overhaul and Redesign

L.M. Montgomery Online launched in June 2014 as a reboot of an earlier site, L.M. Montgomery Research Group, which started in February 2007. Powered by WordPress since the beginning, this website has enabled me to connect with fellow Montgomery readers and researchers and to share materials with them. I published seventy blog posts throughout the centenary of Anne of Green Gables in 2008—there was so much news to share!

In many ways, this website acts as the online companion to my books. But I’ve always wanted to showcase as many contributions to L.M. Montgomery studies as possible, from scholarship and abridged editions to screen adaptations and artifacts. To do that, I created standalone pages for all authors, actors, periodicals, publishers, major books, and adaptations.

Like I said before, I enjoy maintaining bibliographies the way Jane Stuart enjoys washing dishes. But over time, the website became so cumbersome that I had difficulty keeping track of everything. It ballooned to more than 1,800 pages, so even making a backup became a problem.

In late 2022, I decided it was time to reorganize and redesign this website, especially the bibliography. My plans became more ambitious when I learned that version 6.4 of WordPress—known as “Shirley,” after jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn (1934–2005)—would drop in November 2023 and would include new possibilities for organizing and displaying information. I planned to relaunch the website in early 2024, at the start of the 150th anniversary of Montgomery’s birth.

Well, here it is the middle of August 2024. I’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s a lot more to do. Somehow, maintaining a website requires a lot more time than I estimate. Still, at long last, I’ve finished reorganizing my Montgomery bibliography—for now. Let me show you what I mean.

Chronology and Duplication

The earliest incarnations of my Montgomery bibliography listed items from oldest to newest. Because it seemed more logical to list screen credits from newest to oldest, as does the Internet Movie Database, at one point I switched all the print materials around so that they, too, would go from newest to oldest. Then I realized that reverse chronological order didn’t make sense for Montgomery’s own work, so that inconsistency remained.

In the early days, I maintained individual pages for every author, periodical, publisher, and year. (In hindsight, it might have taken me less time to learn how to code a searchable database that would sort items however a user wanted.) My willingness to make updates and corrections this many times started to flag when I added the four hundred reviews included or mentioned in volume 3 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader.

A few years later, when I added items appearing in A Name for Herself and A World of Songs, I finally concluded that this duplication was unsustainable. Some of these items (like Montgomery’s tract “What to Teach Your Son,” originally from her 1901 sketch “Half an Hour with Canadian Mothers”) had appeared in dozens of newspapers.

And so, I decided to eliminate pages for periodicals and publishers and to continue listing print materials by author and by category only. Shortly after the television series Anne with an “E” concluded its run on the CBC in late 2019, I eliminated all individual pages for screen personnel. Instead, I listed all actors on twenty-five pages (for each letter of the alphabet except X) and created one page for screenwriters and one for directors. While doing so, I reversed the order for screen credits from oldest to newest.

Then I decided it was time to tackle the bibliography.

Simplify, Then Expand

My overhaul of the bibliography involved several time-consuming components.

Longer but Fewer Pages

I finally decided to replicate the decision I’d made with actors. I moved the information on nearly 1,100 individual author pages to twenty-five new pages, one for each letter of the alphabet (except for X). This isn’t a perfect solution, since there are 255 authors whose surnames begin with M and only three whose surnames begin with Q or with U, but that’s fine. I also moved items around again so that they appeared from oldest to newest.

The longer pages for actors and for authors are divided into sections with a marker for each person’s name. So where a cross-reference to author Carole Gerson once linked to https://lmmonline.org/carole-gerson/, it now links to https://lmmonline.org/bibliography/authors-g/#carole-gerson. This makes for a longer URL, to be sure, but I find it far easier to maintain twenty-five pages than 1,100 pages.

I also concluded that maintaining standalone pages for major biographies, book-length extensions, and volumes of scholarship was no longer feasible. So I moved tables of contents for those books to corresponding category and author pages.

Organizing Old Files

As you can imagine, my work involves downloading files from a wide variety of sources, on top of buying books in print format. I try to organize my digital files so that I can keep track of what I have and where I can find it. Inevitably, though, my downloads folder becomes unmanageable, as do the ever-growing folders with names like “LMM Sort Out” and “LMM Various Sort Out.” And so, over the last few months I’ve made a concerted effort to go through the files on my hard drive—some of which were from two or three laptops ago—and put some order in them. I found lots of items I’d forgotten about as well as items I’d downloaded more than once.

Research in the Digital Age

When I started graduate studies twenty-five years ago, users searched for academic scholarship by consulting databases to which university libraries had subscribed. In the case of literary studies, the database in question was the MLA International Bibliography. Back then, a library’s search catalogue was limited to items that were physically in the library, either in print or in a format such as microfilm.

Times have changed since then, as have library catalogues. More and more print materials are now available in digital form, either because they were digitized or published that way to begin with, which also means they are text-searchable. Library catalogues now show results from databases they subscribe to as well as items found in other libraries. On top of that, I’ve found dozens of items on platforms such as Google Scholar and Research Gate that my library catalogue didn’t know about. These are all reasons why I’ve been able to add so many older items as well as so many new ones.

Digital Object Identifiers and Other Links

A digital object identifier, better known by the initialism DOI, consists of “a unique alphanumeric string . . . assigned to a publication or other unit of intellectual property” (Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, 978). Basically, a DOI redirects a user to the online location of a source. In the case of Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell’s L.M. Montgomery and War, the DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780773549821 takes users to https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780773549821/html. Even if an item moves from one platform or page to another, the DOI stays the same.

DOIs have become a fairly standard component of academic publishing, including for older work. Just a few days ago, I discovered that DOIs had recently been assigned to entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But the usefulness of DOIs has its limits. Most items of scholarship are behind a paywall, so users need to access those materials through the university library anyway. I rarely include web addresses in print because of how awkward they look when they don’t fit on one line. I also figure users will search for an item before they type out a long web address by hand.

Still, I decided during this revision to add DOIs and web addresses to the Montgomery bibliography because the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. This applies particularly to open-access journals or repositories, including one for all back issues of the journal Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse. Pages for items behind a paywall also contain details such as abstracts and links to similar works, which can still be useful to users.

Reconsideration of Bibliographical Subcategories

Another time-consuming component of maintaining my Montgomery bibliography involves, well, me. I often change my mind about even more minute details than whether print items should be listed from oldest to newest or the reverse. Categories such as “journal articles” and “book chapters” do not require much head-scratching, but several grey areas remain.

For instance, “book-length studies” refers straightforwardly to academic books by a single author. “Book-length extensions” is not a standard bibliographical term, but I can’t think of anything better to encompass the wide range of trade books that aren’t biographies or abridged editions but that still add to the conversation about Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy. The distinction between “book-length studies” and “book-length extensions” is sometimes fuzzy, and some users may argue that academic textbooks belong under “reference items” instead.

The definition of “shorter extensions” may likewise not be self-evident, but I have chosen it for individual poems and short stories that extend or respond to Montgomery’s texts. I see it as a logical counterpart to “book-length extensions” and to “shorter works,” currently my favoured umbrella term for Montgomery’s poems, short stories, and miscellaneous pieces. (I once used “periodical pieces” as a catch-all category, but I changed my mind because not all of them appeared in periodicals.)

Montgomery Newsletters

As part of my attempt to make my Montgomery bibliography as comprehensive as possible, I wanted to include items in periodicals devoted to Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy. These include The Avonlea Traditions Chronicle (1990–1999), Kindred Spirits (1990–2005), and The Shining Scroll (1992–). I refer to these periodicals as “newsletters,” a somewhat imperfect term, and due to the large number of items that they publish, I decided to retain the individual pages for these titles rather than list them all under “magazine items.”

Part of the problem was that, despite my best efforts, my collection of Montgomery newsletters remained incomplete. Thanks to a very generous donation earlier this year from longtime Montgomery reader Lynda Leader, I was finally able to complete my lists of items appearing in The Avonlea Traditions Chronicle and Kindred Spirits. Thank you, Lynda!

Capitalization in Titles

A more complex (and arguably more banal) aspect of a bibliography involves what words to capitalize in the title of a work. Each style guide has its own conventions and every publisher or periodical has its own preferences, so there is no one “right” way to format titles.

This website and my books follow the conventions of The Chicago Manual of Style, whose recommendations for capitalization include the following: words such as nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs (including is), and adverbs should be capitalized, whereas articles (the, a, an), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, or, nor), and words such as to and as are lowercased. Any words used first or last in a title or a subtitle are almost always capitalized.

But then it gets more complicated.

Chicago recommends lowercasing prepositions—“words that provide information about such aspects as time, location, and duration” (Stilman, Grammatically Correct, 81). This seems unremarkable when it comes to prepositions such as in, of, on, to, and with. But what about prepositions such as about, against, around, between, notwithstanding, through, and towards, which sometimes are longer that the remaining words in a title? Should Francis W.P. Bolger’s 1974 book appear as The Years before “Anne” or The Years Before “Anne”? What about Jane Ledwell and Jean Mitchell’s Anne around the World or Sarah Polley’s Running towards the Danger? And what happens when prepositions are “used adverbially or adjectively,” as Chicago puts it, as in the examples Look Up, Turn Down, and The On Button (8.159)?

How much time can a person spend trying to figure this out to ensure consistency?

As it happens, a new edition of Chicago Manual of Style will be released in September. One change the editorial team announced a few months ago is that prepositions of five words or more should be capitalized. So I went ahead and adjusted my Montgomery bibliography accordingly.

Hyphenation in Titles

Another detail that can cause eye strain after a while involves hyphenated words in a title. In such cases, Chicago’s rule is that if the element preceding the hyphen isn‘t a complete word, the element following the hyphen is lowercased. This results in terms such as Auto-bibliography, Co-production, Mid-week, Non-discrimination, Post-secondary, Re-thinking, and Re-vision. It also means that the second element in Week-End, Cross-Cultural, and Meta-Readers is capitalized, since week is a complete word and cross and meta are “combining forms,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

And although Chicago doesn’t say anything specific about words that begin with a prefix in parentheses, a common occurrence in academic writing, I figured the same rule applies: (Re)constructions, (Re)inscriptions, (Re)locating, (Re)mapping, (Re)producing, and (Re)reading.

With capitalization and titles, my Montgomery bibliography tended to replicate whatever individual sources did. But that led to a lot of inconsistency and second-guessing, so in this last update I opted for internal consistency whenever possible.

“Just a Few More Hours”

I’m explaining all this to give you a sense of why this work can be so unbelievably time-consuming—not to mention why I now have so much grey in my beard. But the amount of time required for these changes is perhaps less surprising when you consider the sheer number of items in this Montgomery bibliography.

The Montgomery Bibliography at a Glance

As of today, the bibliography consists of 7,206 items contributed by 1,939 authors (as well as innumerable unsigned items), listed here by category.

Books by L.M. Montgomery

Category	Number of Items
1. Books by L.M. Montgomery	24
2. Reviews of Books by L.M. Montgomery: 1908–1921	604
3. Reviews of Books by L.M. Montgomery: 1923–1939	360
4. Posthumous Books by L.M. Montgomery	37
5. Reviews of Posthumous Books by L.M. Montgomery	243
6. French-Language Translations	40
7. Critical Editions	9
8. Abridged Editions	60
Subtotal	1,377

Book-Length Works

Category	Number of Items
1. Book-Length Studies	98
2. Collections of Essays	19
3. Critical Anthologies	3
4. Book-Length Extensions	159
5. Book-Length Biographies	28
6. Special Journal Issues and Collections	11
7. Dissertations/Theses	150
Subtotal	468

Shorter Works

Category	Number of Items
1. Book Chapters	489
2. Journal Articles	387
3. Shorter Extensions	22
4. Paratexts	269
5. Reference Items	93
6. Profiles/Interviews	73
7. Magazine Items: 1908–1937	218
8. Magazine Items: 1942–	90
9. Newspaper Items: 1890–1940	334
10. Newspaper Items: 1942–	258
11. Additional Reviews	391
Subtotal	2,624

Newsletter Items by Periodical

Category	Number of Items
1. The Avonlea Traditions Chronicle	642
2. Cordially Yours	185
3. Kindred Spirits	1,349
4. The Road to L.M. Montgomery	151
5. The Shining Scroll	391
Subtotal	2,718

Totals

Category	Number of Items
Books by L.M. Montgomery	1,377
Book-Length Works	468
Shorter Works	2,624
Newsletter Items	2,718
Latest Items (forthcoming)	19
Subtotal	7,206

Coming Up Next

The release of the eighteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style next month will no doubt lead to further adjustments to my Montgomery bibliography. It appears, for instance, that Chicago will follow the MLA Handbook and the APA Publication Manual in longer requiring that writers list the locations of book publishers. (I appear to be more resistant to change as I grow older, so we’ll see how long it takes me to go along with that.) And no doubt it is only a matter of time before the new item appears or I come across another file on my hard drive.

But for now, my Montgomery bibliography is as complete and as up-to-date as I can make it. This means I can now focus on other things, such as writing about some of these items instead of simply listing them. Doing so will allow me to engage again with fellow readers on Facebook and Instagram.

If you’d like to receive occasional newsletters from this website via email, please fill out the subscription form at the bottom of this page. If you subscribed prior to June 2024, please subscribe again to make sure your contact information is up to date. And if you have questions or suggestions about any aspect of L.M. Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy, please contact me.

Bibliography

The Chicago Manual of Style. 17th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

The Chicago Manual of Style. 18th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in 2024.

Montgomery, L.M. Jane of Lantern Hill. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1937.

Stilman, Anne. Grammatically Correct: The Essential Guide to Spelling, Style, Usage, Grammar, and Punctuation. 2nd ed. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2010.