Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 0521618525, 9780521618526

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Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 DAVID MCKITTERICK Fellow and Librarian Trinity College, Cambridge

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List of illustrations

Illustrations

25 Erasmus, Moriae encomium (Basel, 1676). [89] 26 Abraham Bosse, printing copperplates (1642). [91] 27-8 John Williams, Great Britains Salomon; a sermon preached at the funerall of the King, James (1625). [94-5] 29-30 Franciscus de Platea, Opus restitutionum, usurarum, excommunicationum (Paris, 1476/7). [ 103-4]

1 The Book of Job, marked up in a copy of the Bishops' Bible (1602). [page24]

31-2 Gregory I, Regula pastoralis (Cologne, not after 1471). [105-6] 33 Gregory I, Regula pastoralis (Cologne, not after 1471). [107]

2 Andrew Maunsell, The first part of the catalogue of English bookes (1595). [28]

34 Hieronymus Hornschuch, Orthotypographia (Leipzig, 1608). [116]

3 Thomas Smeton, Ad virulentum Archibaldi Hamiltomi Apostate

35 Michael Taylor, Tables of logarithms (1792). [125]

Dialogum (Edinburgh: John Ross, 1579). [39]

4-5 Missale ad usum Sarum (1500). [44-5] 6 Albrecht von Eyb, Margarita poetica, copied from the edition printed by Ulrich Han (Rome, 1475). [49] 7 An engraving, by the Master S, of the Baptism of Christ, integrated with a manuscript collection of private prayers (1530). [54] 8 A selection from the missal, perhaps written in Carinthia, with a hand-coloured woodcut of the Crucifixion bound in. [57] 9 Part of a sheet of woodcut devotional images designed to be cut up and pasted into books. [58]

36 Pietro Sarpi, Historiae Concilii Tridentine libri octo (1620). [142] 37 PasquilsPalinodia and his progresse (1619). [146]

38 Biblia sacra (Salamanca, 1584). [155] 39 Alberico Gentili, De legationibus (1585). [158] 40 Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI (Nuremberg, 1543). [164] 41 Frontispiece to the Universal Magazine, 1752. [174] 42 The interior of an eighteenth-century printing house. J. G. Ernesti, Die Yljol-eingerichteteBiichdriickerey (Nuremberg, 1733). [175]

10 An engraving of the Nativity inserted in a Utrecht breviary (Paris, 1514). [62]

43 Prosper Marchand, Histoire de l'origine et des premiers progrès de l'imprimerie (The Hague, 1740). [176]

11 A coloured and reworked engraving inserted into a manuscript book of private prayers. [65]

44 Speech by David Ricardo in the House of Commons, 24 May 1819. [218]

12-16 Livy, Historiae Romanae decades (Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1470), showing different printed and manuscript marginal decoration. [70-4] 17-19 Bartolommeo dalli Sonetti, Isolario (Venice: Guilelmus Anima Mia, Tridinensis?, c.1485). [75-7] 20 Hyginus, Poeticon astronomicon (Ferrara: Augustinus Carnerius, 1475). [78] 21 Hyginus, Poeticon astronomicon (Venice, 1482). [79] 22 Dante, Divina commedia (Florence, 1481). [83] 23-4 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae (Ghent, 1485). [85-6]

Illustrations are reproduced by courtesy of the following: the Curators of the University Libraries, University of Oxford, 1, 8, 9, 12, 15, 17, 38; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, 7, 10, 13, 16, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 43; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 11; Roger Gaskell Esq., 26; the President and Fellows, Magdalen College, Oxford, 30; the Warden and Fellows, New College, Oxford, 6, the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge, 2, 3, 4, 5, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 29, 35, 36, 39, 40, 44.

vii

cknowledgements

This book is a considerably expanded version of the Lyell lectures in Bibliography, delivered at the University of Oxford in May 2000. I am, first, grateful to the Electors to the Lyell Readership for providing me with the stimulus to organise the issues addressed in the following pages, and to my audience for their contributions in discussions before and after the lectures. In tackling so broad a subject, it is inevitable that one draws on experiences of many years. There is no substitute for handling books, and thus a ppreciating their physical properties, their differences, their materials, and their appearances. The ideas for this book in a sense germinated as a result of working with the late John Oates, who introduced me to some of the complexities of the earliest printed books. But the results of the bibliographical work of the late H. M. Adams, in Cambridge (England) and Ruth Mortimer in Cambridge (Massachusetts) will be equally apparent to the student of footnotes. It is an especial personal pleasure to acknowledge here the benefits conferred by Katharine F. Pantzer on everyone who deals with early printing in the British Isles, by her inspired revision of Pollard and Redgrave's Short-title catalogue of books down to 1640. Other ideas were reviewed and tested with the late Don McKenzie and Hugh Amory; it is this book's misfortune that it could not benefit from the discussions that were developing at the time of their untimely deaths. At various points, I have shamelessly sought help, and never been disappointed — even though many of those who are named here cannot have realised the purposes of my importunities. In alphabetical order, I am therefore glad to thank Judy Amory, Nicolas Barker, Peter Blayney, Karen Bowen, James Carley, Chris Coppens, Ton Croiset van Uchelen, Martin Davies, John and Clare Drury, Mary Kay Duggan, Conor Falry, Christine Ferdinand, Roland Folter, Paul Grinke, Craig Hartley, Lotte Hellinga, Jos Hermans, Ted Hofmann, Arnold Hunt, Dirk Imhof, Kristian Jensen, Mayke de Jong, the late Vivien Law, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Richard Linenthal, Andrew Macintosh, Ian Maclean, Linne Mooney, Paul Morgan, James Mosley, Paul and Ruth Needham, Will Noel, Adam Perkins, Nicholas Poole-Wilson, Dennis Rhodes, Nigel Roche, Richard and Mary Rouse, Margaret M. Smith, Nicholas Stogdon, Michael Wyman, Mary Beth Winn and, as always, the

Acknowledgements

innumerable booksellers who have tolerated my searches of their shelves, tables and stockrooms. To the libraries where I have worked on this book, I offer my warmest thanks, and in particular to the many fetchers and carriers of books between the stacks and the reading rooms. Most of the groundwork was carried out in Trinity College, Cambridge and in Cambridge University Library. These apart, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the St Bride Printing Library have all provided more than ordinary amounts of support, and I am grateful also to the staffs of Emmanuel College, Gonville and Caius College and St John's College at Cambridge, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, the Houghton, Law and Widener libraries at Harvard, and the Firestone Library at Princeton. I am indebted to the Lyell Fund for a grant towards the cost of obtaining and reproducing the illustrations. I have been greatly encouraged in this project by the help and example of Paul Needham, who has steered me through many difficulties and has read much of the book in an earlier form. The mistakes are, of course, my own. For daily succour of all kinds, both for the contents of this book and for more ordinary practicalities, I remain, as always, most thankful of all to my wife Rosamond.

Abbreviations

Adams

H. M. Adams, Catalogue of books printed on the continent of Europe, 1501-1600, in Cambridge libraries, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1967)

Armstrong, Renaissance miniature painters

Lilian Armstrong, Renaissance miniature painters and classical imagery; the Master of the Putti and his Venetian workshop (198 1)

BMC

Catalogue of books printed in the XVth century now in the British Museum (1908— ), reprinted 1963

Condello and de Gregorio, Scribi e colofoni

E. Condello and G. de Gregorio (eds.), Scribi e colofoni; le sottoscrizioni di copisti dalle origini all'avento della stampa (Spoleto, 1995)

Contemporaries of Erasmus

Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher (ed.), Contemporaries of Erasmus, 3 vols. (Toronto, 1985-7)

Darlow and Moule

T. H. Darlow and H. R Moule, Historical catalogue of the printed editions of Holy Scripture in the library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 2 vols. (1903)

Davies, Incunabula

Martin Davies (ed.), Incunabula; studies in fifteenth-century printed books presented to Lotte Hellinga (1999)

De Bujanda, Index des livres interdits

J. M. de Bujanda (ed.), Index des livres interdits, 10 vols. (Sherbrooke, 1985-96)

DNB

Dictionary of national biography

Dreyfus, Aspects

John Dreyfus, Aspects of French eighteenth century typography (Roxburghe Club, 1982)

DAVID MCKITTERICK

xii

List of abbreviations

Dutschke, Huntington

List of abbreviations

E. G. Duff, Fifteenth century English books; a bibliography (Bibliographical Soc., 1917)

Hindman, Printing

C. W. Dutschke, et al., Guide to medieval and renaissance manuscripts in the Huntington Library, 2 vols. (San Marino, 1989)

Sandra Hindman (ed,), Printing the written word: the social history of books, circa 1450-1520 (Ithaca, NY, 1991)

Hindman and Farquhar,

Sandra Hindman and James Douglas Farquhar, Pen to press; illustrated manuscripts and printed books in the first century of printing (College Park, Md., 1977)

Pen to press

Eisenstein, Printing press

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979)

Erasmus, Works

Desiderius Erasmus, Collected works, in English, ed. R. J. Schoeck, et al. (Toronto, 1974—)

Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish

E W. H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700 (Amsterdam, 1949— )

Hollstein, German

H. W. Davies, Catalogue of a collection of early German books in the library of C. Fairfax Murray, 2 vols. (1913)

F. W. H. Hollstein, Hollstein s German engravings, etchings and woodcuts, 1400-1700 (Amsterdam, 1954—)

Hunt catalogue

Jane Quinby and Allan Stevenson, Catalogue of botanical books in the collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, 2 vols. in 3 (Pittsburgh, 1958-61)

IGI

Indice generale degli incunaboli delle biblioteche d'Italia, 6 vols. (Rome,

Fairfax Murray, German

Gaskell, New introduction

Philip Gaskell, A new introduction to bibliography (Oxford, 1972, repr. with corrections, 1974)

GJ

Gutenberg Jahrbuch

Goff

F. R. Goff, Incunabula in American libraries; a third census (New York, 1964), repr. from the annotated copy maintained by E R. Goff (Millwood, NY, 1973)

1943-81) ILC

Anne Goldgar, Impolite learning, conduct and community in the republic of letters, 1650-1750 (New Haven, 1995)

Gerard van Thienen and John Goldfinch (eds.), Incunabula printed in the Low Countries; a census (Nieuwkoop, 1999)

Johns, Nature of the book

Greetham, Textual scholarship

D. C. Greetham, Textual scholarship; an introduction, corrected reprint (New York, 1994)

Adrian Johns, The nature of the book; print and knowledge in the making (Chicago, 1998)

JPHS

Journal of the Printing Historical Society

GW

Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (Leipzig

Landau and Parshall, Renaissance print

David Landau and Peter Parshall, The renaissance print, 1470-1559 (New Haven, 1994)

Love, Scribal publication

Harold Love, Scribal publication in seventeenth-century England (Oxford, 1993); repr. as The culture and commerce of texts (Amherst, Mass., 1998)

Goldgar, Impolite learning

etc., 1925—) Hellinga, Copy and print

Wytze Gs. Hellinga, Copy and print in the Netherlands; an atlas of historical bibliography (Amsterdam, 1962)

Herbert

T. H. Darlow and H. F. Moule, Historical

catalogue of printed editions of the English Bible, 1525-1961, rev. A. S. Herbert (1968)

xiii

xi-11

List of abbreviations

List of abbreviations

McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, I

David McKitterick, A history of Cambridge University Press, 1, Printing and the book trade in Cambridge, 1534-1698 (Cambridge, 1992)

McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, II

David McKitterick, A history of Cambridge University Press, II, Scholarship and Commerce, 1698-1872 (Cambridge, 1998)

Mortimer, French

Ruth Mortimer, Harvard College Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Art; catalogue of books and manuscripts, I, French 16th century books, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)

Mortimer, Italian

Ruth Mortimer, Harvard College Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Art; catalogue of books and manuscripts, II, Italian 16th century books, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1974)

Richardson, Renaissance Italy

Brian Richardson, Printing, writers and readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1999)

Robinson, Dated and datable

Pamela Robinson, Catalogue of dated and datable manuscripts, c.737-1600, in Cambridge libraries, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1988)

Rosenthal, Manuscript annotations

Bernard M. Rosenthal, The Rosenthal collection of printed books with manuscript annotations (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library) (New Haven, 1997)

Schäfer Katalog

Manfred von Arnim, Katalog der Bibliothek Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt, I, Drucke, Manuskripte und Einbände des XV. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1984)

SB

Studies in Bibliography

Simpson, Proof-reading

Percy Simpson, Proof-reading in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Oxford, 1935)

SIC

A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland, and of English books printed abroad, 1475-1640, 2nd edn, revised by William A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and Katharine E Pantzer, with a chronological index by Philip R. Rider, 3 vols. (Bibliographical Soc., 1976-91)

Moxon, Mechanick exercises

Joseph Moxon, Mechanick exercises of the whole art of printing, ed. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1962)

Nichols, Literary Anecdotes

John Nichols, Literary anecdotes of the eighteenth century, 9 vols. (1812-16)

Oates

J. C. T. Oates, A catalogue of the fifteenth-century printed books in the University Library, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1954)

PBSA

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

Philip, Bodleian Library

I. G. Philip, The Bodleian Library in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Oxford, 1983)

TCBS

Transactions of Cambridge Bibliographical Society

Voet, Golden compasses

M. L. Polain, Catalogue des livres imprimés au quinzième siècle des bibliothèques de Belgique, 5 vols. (Brussels, 1979)

Leon Voet, The golden compasses, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1969-72)

Wormald and Giles, Fitzwilliam

Francis Wormald and Phyllis M. Giles, A descriptive catalogue of the additional manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1982)

Polain (B)

Rhodes, Bookbindings

D. E. Rhodes (ed.), Bookbindings and other bibliophily; essays in honour ofAnthony Hobson (Verona, 1994)

All books are published in London, unless stated otherwise.

xv

I

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

In 1968, the late Harry Carter opened his Lyell lectures with words that have come to haunt a generation born since and for whom letterpress printing is a defunct technology. `Type is something you can pick up and hold in your hand.' As his next sentence went on to reveal, he had in mind bibliographers, and especially those bibliographers whose ingenuity led them to forget this fundamental and material fact. To many bibliographers, and thus to historians and literary scholars, type is an abstraction, that leaves its mark on paper but that has no other existence. It was perhaps no coincidence among the preoccupations of the late 1960s that D. E McKenzie's vigorously corrective paper on `Printers of the mind; some notes on bibliographical theories and printing-house practices' was published only a few months after Carter's lectures, though it had been first written several years previously.' It is appropriate also to recall some of the other developments in printing during the year 1968, a period when phototypesetting and computer applications seemed to offer the brightest future, and were certainly displacing metal at a speed whose pace was significantly increased by the activities of the Compugraphic Corporation. In that year, the VDU was first applied to correcting phototypesetting, and Her Majesty's Stationery Office was putting the finishing touches to computer typesetting for telephone directories. The first authoritative books to deal with automated composition were beginning to appear.2 Not just for bibliographers, the word `type' which Harry Carter understood in so tactile and corporeal a manner, was rapidly taking on a new two-dimensional meaning. These developments were pursued with an extraordinary concentration of effort, in a fiercely competitive environment. Yet photosetting, the basis of so much investment by printers at the time, and which seemed to offer the answer to so many needs, proved to be only a partial solution. Computer typesetting has brought a social as well as a technological revolution that for the first time has (for those who wish it) given authors direct control at their desks over the final printed appearance of their books. During the last two decades or so, we have become accustomed to speaking or writing of `printers' not as people, but as machines made of plastic, metal and other substances that sit on our desks: machines driven at least one

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

remove from ourselves via the computer, keyboard and screen that now form parts of our daily lives. In similar linguistic fashion, in the eighteenth century the Royal Observatory at Greenwich employed people who were referred to as computers. At the end of the nineteenth century, the people we now know as typists were referred to as typewriters. Such changes of usage come about almost by accident, but they have their roots in a mechanical assumption: that the printer or typewriter, human or otherwise, is an agent of reproduction, of reproducing our thoughts, words and images — usually but not always on paper. There is perhaps something a little foolhardy in attempting to tackle so potentially large a subject as what past generations have understood by printing; but I have been moved to do so for several reasons. First, it has become even more difficult today for many people to grasp what Harry Carter, a printer trained in letterpress, understood by instinct: that for almost four centuries the vast majority of books, periodicals, newspapers, advertisements and all kinds of other printed matter were printed by means of machines and equipment, metal and wood, controlled and made to work by hand, and that metal type was fundamental to most printing for well over five centuries.3 Second, the technology of which he spoke has now almost entirely disappeared, in a world where even the basic words in the vocabulary, `type, `printer; `print' or `screen' have quite different meanings today from those they held until the late twentieth century. Third, and a little more subtly, the dichotomy identified by Harry Carter, between type and its mark, compositor and bibliographer, has had a deeper effect on our understanding of the history of the printed word and image than even he may have appreciated. Modern bibliography and historical practice have tended constantly to project the values and judgements of the present back to the values and practices of the past. Much contemporary bibliographical practice (I plead indulgence for a term that now has to stretch into the last century but one) traces its history from a period on the threshold of the peak of letterpress printing: the application of the Monotype, Linotype and other sophisticated equipment to machine composition; the engineering triumphs of printing machines by Robert Hoe, Robert Miehle and others; and the application of photography to printing as a daily routine in blockmaking for illustration.' The process of technological change is, usually, easily monitored. It is less straightforward to comprehend new procedures, new technical possibilities, and new structures for the organisation of time, where processes have different paces relative to each other: education in all of these affects attitudes and

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

expectations in authors, manufacturers and readers alike. Inevitably, as past

everyday practice comes to require conscious study, so its own rationale slips gradually away. The purpose of historical bibliography is to recover and interpret past practice. As happens in many other fields of research, its considerable success in measuring materiality has not always kept pace with discovering not just purpose and meaning, but also the inconsequential and incidental vitality that distinguishes human activity. At a time when we also face changes in what we mean bybooks, and therefore find ourselves challenged for better definitions, the following chapters are designed to enquire into a few of the assumptions by which we have lived for the past five hundred and more years. They question, from several points of view, what Paul Eggert has referred to as `the illusion that imaginative activity gives rise in almost every case to a stable textual product,' and by considering what is meant by printing they seek to extend this argument into new territories. So as to bring some order into so large a question, I have selected a number of different but related issues. Some of these have been aired before, in greater detail and often bypeople with more knowledge than I can bring here. Others will be less familiar. But by assembling such a group of questions I hope to show how assumptions about the apparent authority of print, the reality of its creation, and the combination of conservatism with a creative training in readers, may be questioned, in order that we may better understand the expectations that have underlain a principal means of communication. Accordingly, I shall be exploring the relationship between manuscript and print as it emerged in the creation and management of knowledge and ideas during roughly the first 350 years after the invention in the west of printing from movable types; some aspects of the relationship between print and manuscript in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a period in which `A _ frequently find less a revolution than an accommodation; the ways in which printing, ars artium conservatri, was not so much compromised as extended and even partly defined by the employment of older techniques having their roots in the manuscript tradition; some — but by no means all — of the ways in which printing was seen not so much as an end as a beginning in the presentation of texts; some of the ways in which printing, seemingly so final and therefore authoritative a statement, was liable to readjustment between printer and reader; the ways in which readers are themselves expected to take a part in the process of typographical creation, and something of the extent to which the lapse of time impinges on the purposes of printing, publication and reading. In each of these differently

3

4

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

angled views, brief and impressionistic though their treatment has to be, we shall discover how the concept, as well as the act, of printing is not necessarily one of fixity, of textual rest or (still less) of stability, but actually implies a process liable and subject to change as a result both of its own mechanisms and of the assumptions and expectations of those who exploit its technological possibilities to greater or lesser extent. While we speak today, using radical and dramatic vocabulary, of a printing revolution, it was apparent from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, and perhaps especially to the generations born after about 1470, that innovations in printing were gradual: that both in its technical achievements and in its social (including religious and political) consequences it was not invariably appropriate to speak of rapid transformation. Just as the wooden printing press itself was gradually adapted and improved, illustration techniques were applied to books with more or less success (the process was by no means one of uniform advance), typefounding was an evolving technology, whose processes and organisation were adapted to an international market of printers and readers, so, too, the effects of letterpress printing were felt differently by different parts of the community. The Fifth Lateran Council, in the second decade of the sixteenth century, is now often remembered for its attempts to control printing. But the choice of words of the decree Super impressione librorum reveals not only an acknowledgement of the power of the press for good (the spread of scholarly study) as well as for ill. It also explicitly addresses this sense of progressive technological as well as social change. Ars imprimendi libros temporibus potissimum nostris divino favente numine, inventa seu aucta et perpolita.' `The skill of book-printing has been invented, or rather improved and perfected, with God's assistance, particularly in our time.'6 Chronologically, most of my discussion will fall before the introduction of machine-printing in the nineteenth century. There is another volume to be written on the industrialised book, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and with one important exception in chapter 8 I shall have relatively little to say about this period. I wish to concentrate very largely on issues of stability, as they were conceived and as they were in practice, and as the concept was exploited, between the mid-fifteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. This period has become defined mainlyby reference to the wooden hand press, or common press, even though it was, in fact, one replete with complexities of technological and material kinds in no way reflected by this quite unrepresentative flag of intellectual convenience.' As for the closing date of the era with which this book is concerned, this is itself only approximate, in that a combination of developments in the printing and

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

ssociated industries took time to become established as ordinary practice. The iron hand press survived in commercial use until the second half of the twentieth century, in the shape of Albions, Columbians and a host of other n ineteenth-century iron presses, all worked manually and at not vastly greater speed than the old wooden or common press. The focus in this book is deliberately on western Europe, rather than just on Britain, though — particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — I shall have more to say on what will for most readers be the mare familiar ground of this country. I have chosen to cast so wide a net in order to bring evidence to bear on questions that, whether they were acknowledged or not, were of common import. The obvious disadvantage of such a dispersed approach is that it risks too much abbreviation. But against that, and far outweighing it, is the advantage of reminding ourselves of the commonwealth of print, whether expressed in terms of authorship, manufacture, distribution or readership. The international nature of the book obliges us to take sG-h an approach. Although there were sundry differences in practice between various parts of Europe in this period, there was also much that was held in common. Workmen took their skills from country to country (Germany to Italy and France in the fifteenth century; France and the Rhine valley to England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Netherlands to England in the seventeenth century; France to the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example). Type-founding and paper-making were international businesses. From the 1450s onwards, printed books were international objects of merchandise, and therefore of reading. My examples have intentionally been drawn from a range of different kinds of literature — scientific, historical, geographical, musical and pictorial — as well as what we conventionally call literature itself. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, the bibliographical study of books and other printed documents, of texts and of images, has to do with the manipulation of alpha-numeric signs or of pictures as they are applied by compositors, printers, proof-readers and others in a host of different environments. Secondly, those signs will be used bythe same compositors, pressmen and others involved in the recreation and reproduction of texts: not just for `literary' texts — poems, plays, novels etc. — but also for whatever other forms of writing and images require to be set or printed. Thirdly, I believe that by seeking to understand the purposes of illustration, and the artistic and technical conventions, opportunities and restrictions of illustrative reproduction, we may also reconcile in a more satisfactory way our understanding of different forms of print. a

5

6

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

In purposely embracing many forms of literature, and seeking a common goal, it will be seen that I part company, in some respects, with those who prefer to restrict themselves to what are generally, and often inhospitably, referred to as literary works. In his essay already referred to, for example, Paul Eggert restricted himself to `literary works' remarking that they `usually consist of multiple, often competing, texts;s even though the same might be said for other forms as well. Jerome J. McGann in his discussion of `The rationale of hypertext; limited his treatment more precisely still

to be observed in some generations, that we may identify by historical or critical criteria. But the principles survive these changes; indeed, the means and process of their survival help us to establish their nature. In all this, we shall be exploring the interaction between the everyday realities and compromises of human experience and the possibilities of mechanical reproduction. Thereby, we shall be facing some of the same issues that challenge us with each computer-based reworking of the relationship between author, meaning and reading.

The poet's view of text is necessarily very different. To the imagination the materialities of text (oral, written, printed, electronic) are incarnational not vehicular forms. But for the scientist and scholar, the media of expression are primarily conceptual utilities, means rather than ends, to the degree that an expressive form hinders the conceptual goal (whether it be theoretical or practical), to that extent one will seek to evade or supersede it — perhaps even, in critical times, to develop new intellectual devices.9

In these contexts, it is also necessary to consider how bibliographical understanding must be sought not exclusively in the material, social and other economic conditions of manufacture and commerce —what we may call the traditional skills of historical and textual bibliography— but also something of how it is affected by the course of time. With some notable exceptions, this extra dimension, of time, is underestimated or ignored by many who have written about the creation of a book in the printing house. D. E McKenzie and Peter Blayney have both demonstrated, the one from surviving documentary records and the other from a detailed typographical examination of books for whose timetable of production the evidence is otherwise somewhat thin, how crucial is the relationship of one taskto another, and therefore how much we need to understand the relative durations of chronological processes." McKenzie's work appeared as long ago as 1966; yet it is still possible to find uncritical and incautious assumptions about the often messy reality of running a printing house. The printing of a book may take a few weeks, or it may take many years. The first volume of Roger Long's Astronomy, announced in 1730 and printed privately in Cambridge, was published in 1742; but the second, in train for much of the remainder of his life, was not completed until 1785 — fifteen years after his death." This is by no means a phenomenon unfamiliar to the twentieth century. It took twenty years to print Strickland Gibson's edition of the old statutes of the University of Oxford, published in 1931.13 I have, however, a different chronological sequence in mind. Perceptions of books change with time; and with them there change also our ways of using and looking at books. I think not only of bibliophile fashions, on which there is a large if often somewhat uncritical literature. Rather, I wish to draw attention to how the trade in, and manufacture of, new books may be influenced by the past; how books may change their status even before they are sold for the first time (and have not yet survived long enough to be accorded the attentions of collectors, antiquaries and

I find it difficult to divorce discussion of the poet's understanding of the materialities of text from those of other authors. Indeed there are, and have been, many poets from the Greek Bucolic poets onwards, who have exploited visual forms as a part of their meanings.i0 Among current critical preoccupations, one might cite Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. Yet other authors work likewise, in their division of text into chapters or paragraphs, or in the care they take over their illustrations, or in the way that they dispose their subject-matter between the larger type of primary parts and the smaller types of footnotes or sidenotes, or in their anxiety at their choices of publisher or in their opinions as to the prices of their books. All these are in some sense `incarnational' in that they directly affect the birth of the book for the reader, and hence markets for anticipated sales, and (finally) the reader's response. Moreover, and despite a vocal minority, for whom the visual impact of poetry is as important as its alphabet-based content, there is little in most contemporary commercially published poetry to suggest that poets retain a distinctive `incarnational' influence over the finer points of typography, paper, format or binding. Although I have drawn most examples from about three-and-a-half centuries, the disciplines of historical bibliography have a general bearing on the western history of reading that command an influence permeating — not merely affecting — the whole of that subject. We may perceive examples in detail; but their general lessons have also to be observed. As will be seen in the later parts of this book, there are differences in direction and in priorities

7

8

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order,

1450- 1830

second-hand-book sellers); and the extent to which a reader may or may not notice decisions made by the printer or bookseller even when they result in an object whose appearance may diverge from the everyday of his or her time. I am also concerned with some of the ways in which a more comprehensive bibliographical understanding of illustration, its methods and its applications, may enhance our understanding of what we mean by stability. Literature on the history of illustration is noticeable for its general failure to engage with bibliographical issues as they affect books;14 and on the other hand the bibliographical study of books still has to engage with the related but different strategies of pictorial or figurative reproduction. In such matters we maybegin to understand better how the printed book— quite apart from the manuscript — may be said to be unstable. Though it is indissolubly bound up with questions of manufacture and production, I shall have little to say in the following on what we might term the instability of place. The ways in which we read and interpret books depend on the circumstances of reading (in a library, at a desk, out loud, etc.) as well as where we read, or even where we obtained what we now hold. We expect a variety of attitudes to the same book in different places, as well as by different people. In this, we face the enigma of how much it can be assumed that the same book will be treated or understood in common. This maverick quality, an essentialpart ofthe definition ofaprintedbook, familiar to critical theory in literature and art alike, challenges assumptions that books possess a uniformity not just of content, but even of interpretation." In assessing the changing ways in which authors, printers, publishers and readers have related one to the other in the course of the period between the mid-fifteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, it is a help to establish some broad headings for our questions. The period may be broken down in summary fashion as follows. (a) Fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries: wonder at printing, and in particular at its speed of production and its ability to produce multiple copies of apparently the same text; a period of innovation, experiment and compromise. (b) Mid-sixteenth to seventeenth centuries: a period of anxiety: at inaccuracy in the printed book, and at the apparently unstemmable increase in the numbers of publications, with their tendency for ill as well as for religious or scholarly good. (c) Eighteenth century: widespread antiquarian interest in the history of printing, particularly in the fifteenth century, coupled with increasing technological interest and experiment, these two apparently disjunct strands of interest finding common ground in printers' grammars; the same complicated relationship

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

between history and method also apparent in illustration. (d) Early nineteenth century: driven by cost (not least the rates of pay for compositors) and by a new awareness in an industrialised world of the relationship between production and increased demand and consumption, a revived interest in speed, in the technical possibilities of new inventions and in their social and interpretative implications. tnlbile, obviously, there are many people, and many other strands in the tale, that do not conform to this pattern, and it neglects some major issues such as the relationships — modern or historicised — of printing and politics (as diverse as Milton, L'Estrange and Atkyns, to take examples of just one generation in mid-seventeenth century England16 ), the overall framework does suggest how bibliographical analysis maybe made to discern a shift of still more fundamental importance in the history of authorship and reading. By approaching the history of the book, and the creation of literature of all kinds, in this way, and by emphasising the always transient and unstable nature of its manufacture, we shall better understand that our present awareness of such textual characteristics in a new electronic environment is not a modern one, but one that is inherent in that supposedly fixative medium, of print; and that print itself has been understood to be unstable since the mid-fifteenth century. Hinman's work on the Shakespeare First Folio, and that of R. M. Flores on the earliest editions of Don Quixote, taught the world one aspect of what had been known to all printers from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries: that printing-house practice resulted in unpredictable and incalculable variation between copies of books bound up from sheets each of whose differences in themselves could be monitored and demonstrated." This has also been clearly demonstrated in the work of Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer on the first press in Paris, and of Lotte Hellinga on the work of Peter Schoeffer at Mainz.18 Books are printed by men as well as by machines. What ought to be a commonplace had to be forcibly demonstrated by McKenzie in his examination of the daily routines, and exceptions to routines, in the Cambridge printing house at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." How exactly authors' and readers' understandings and assumptions of such instabilities have changed over the centuries is another matter, to which I will turn in my final chapters. In a paper on the material origins of the New Bibliography, Joseph E Loewenstein usefully juxtaposed the founding of the Bibliographical Society not just with legal change (the Berne Convention (1886); the British Copyright Act (1911)) but also with technological change, and in particular the phonograph and photography.20 In fact, palaeographers and bibliographers alike had been exploiting the latter for many years, since Roger Fenton

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had photographed pages from the Codex Alexandrinus in 1856. The application of photography to zincography, and hence to the first conventionally printed photographic facsimiles of printed books and manuscripts (notably of the Domesday Book in 1861-3 and of early editions of Shakespeare) under the aegis of Sir Henry James and others in the early 1860s had an immediate and lasting effect on historical understanding among members of the general public.21 The work of Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, Edward Bond, Edward Maunde Thompson and Walter de Gray Birch on the Utrecht Psalter in the 1870s, and the founding of the Palaeographical Society in 1873, mark photography's coming of age for shared research in books.22 In 1892, the very year in which the Bibliographical Societywas founded, Konrad Burger began to issue his series of photographs of fifteenth-century printing types. 23 Late-nineteenth-century perceptions, as well as actions, were changed fundamentally by processes of mechanisation, and their implications for all manner of activities, social, domestic or industrial. Not surprisingly, the assumptions of a mechanised world affected the course of bibliographical theory and research. Transforming though they were, McKerrow, Greg and their circle only partially recovered the world of the author and printer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: McKerrow was a publisher by profession, and Greg's family had expected that he would become editor of The Economist, which it owned." The present book is an attempt to recover a view that is not dependent on the assumptions of a mechanised world, to distinguish between how things are made, and how people think. they are made; between what people see, and what they understand. No less pertinently, because of possible confusion between ways in which bibliography may accommodate or respond to new technologies, Loewenstein remarks of our own time that `new information technologies have often prompted a cult of the deconstructed text, and that as a consequence of these same technologies we prop up `a fetishization of the composite text: In fact, the composite text has enjoyed an existence that has been exploited — openly, or clandestinely, but usually consciously — since the fifteenth century. It has been a bibliographical fact of life, accepted and acknowledged by authors, booksellers, readers and others who would use books ever since the beginning of printing with movable type in the west. In some respects, the advent of hypertext software merely adds to the possible variations, while for the first time also permitting readers to explore further, and unprecedented, confections. With these background points in mind, we may turn now to the relationship between manuscript and print as it has become understood in the last four hundred years.

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

Despite some recent encouraging work to the contrary, there remains too much of a division in historians' minds between manuscript and print. It is well to ponder the implications and the necessary qualifiers of Malcolm Parkes's memorable dictum, that `the late medieval book differs more from its early medieval predecessors than it does from the printed book of our own day'.ZS J. B. Trapp has remarked the unhappy separation of the two media, in his study of illustrations to Petrarch.26 It is one further provoked by chronological assumptions. The late Neil Ker's systematic account of manuscripts in British libraries, an achievement without equal, ended at about 1500.27 He allowed himself some liturgical books from a little later, notably Books of Hours, and one or two other manuscripts from the first twenty years of the sixteenth century also gained a place. But the overall impression remained: that with 1500 the world of the manuscript book came to an end. The reluctant decision to close the magisterial survey of manuscripts illuminated in the British Isles, edited by Jonathan Alexander, with Kathleen Scott's two volumes on the period 1390 to 149028 likewise avoids some of the most complex questions of all concerning the relationship between manuscript and print, and the differing ways in which each found primacy or were joined one to the other either because of the circumstances of their creators or earliest owners, or, more freely, for their mutual exploitation. As David R. Carlson has shown, the manuscript book was also an essential part of the court of Henry VIII ;29 the same was true of that of Queen Elizabeth, and even, if in rather a different and usually more modest way, at that of James 1. In France, the continuing tradition for luxury illuminated manuscripts, and some of the ways by which for a time it was helped by the printing press, has been addressed by François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, in their survey of illumination down to 1520.30 For Hebrew, Greek and music, all requiring type or other printing materials that were not always readily available, or where demand was insufficient to justify them, the manuscript tradition lasted long after the invention of printing. Nineteenth-century Jewish communities in eastern Europe, Italy and Spain all made and used many of their books in manuscript. In Ireland, the manuscript tradition was for many purposes stronger than the printed until the late nineteenth century.31 In educational communities, whether in Europe or North America, the copying out of texts and habits of note-taking implied a continuing commitment to scribal culture alongside that of print.3' Across Europe, news was published in manuscript as well as in print in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.33 Harold Love, Henry Woudhuysen, Peter Beal, Adam Fox, Margaret Ezell and others have all demonstrated the continuing vitality of a manuscript tradition for the

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circulation of texts of all kinds in seventeenth-century England and, indeed, the new ways in which it was valued and employed.34 Whether one considers scribal texts or illumination and decoration, the boundary between manuscript and print is as untidy chronologically as it is commercially, materially or socially. In 1645, the brothers Jacques and Pierre Dupuy succeeded Nicolas Rigault as Keepers of the French Royal Library. Rigault had held that position since 1625, a period of twenty years. His long curatorship was not especially notable for accessions in printed books, old or contemporary. Despite repeated legislation, legal deposit seems to have gone largely unheeded;35 but by 1622, helped by Claude Saurnaise and Jean-Baptiste Hautin, Rigault had already completed a catalogue of the library, both of manuscripts and of printed books. Following the acquisition of the manuscripts of Philippe Hurault in 1622, a separate catalogue was made for these too. In so far as there can be said to have been any policy with regard to accessions, the emphasis in this influential collection was on manuscripts. Under the régime of the Dupuys, little of this changed. Pierre Dupuy died in 1651, followed by his brother in 1656, so bringing their reign to an end. Despite the great increase in the numbers of books published across Europe, and the consequent intellectual crisis in bibliographical management, accessions of printed books to the French Royal Library at this period remained generally poor. Nonetheless, and more importantly for the longer-term organisation of the library, Rigault's catalogue of 1622 for the first time separated out printed books from manuscripts. The catalogue was divided into five sections, three of manuscripts and two of printed books, each of the groups divided again by language. The Dupuys took up Rigault's work, dividing their own catalogue of the library into just three parts — two for manuscripts and one for printing. They identified 1,329 printed works, and their work has been regarded as the ancestor of the modern catalogue of printed books. As a total, and particularly in the context of an increasingly active book trade, the library's holdings were not impressive .36 If, as seems probable, Gutenberg was at work towards, or perhaps even engaged in, his first printing when he was recorded at Mainz in 1448, then we may say that the final separation of manuscript from print in the French Royal Library took almost two hundred years following the invention of printing from moveable type in the west. Other libraries were hardly more responsive to what has nonetheless rightly been called the printing revolution. Thomas James's catalogue of the Bodleian Library (1605) likewise intermingled manuscripts with printed books. They were still mingled, in

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

the catalogue and on the shelf, in the following edition of the catalogue in 1620. By 1635, when John Rous's appendix to this catalogue appeared, they were mingled in the catalogue, but manuscript and print were gradually separated on the shelves, a principle encouraged by the arrival of the manuscripts of Sir Thomas Roe (1628), of the Barocci collection (1629) and of those of Sir Kenelm Digby (1634).37 At Leiden University Library, some manuscripts remained mingled with printed books in 1640, though the Scaliger manuscripts had always been shelved separately, and the divided destiny of the rest of the collections was very largely in place by this date." By the time of the publication of the next Leiden catalogue, in 1674, the division between printed books and manuscripts had been effected. Thus the gradual emergence of the concept of distinction in library organisation between manuscript and print can be mapped in the catalogues and surveys of the mid-century. These catalogues, especially (but not only: there were many private manuscript copies as well) in their printed form, both recorded local holdings for their libraries' readers and by their dispersal across Europe also served a more cosmopolitan purpose in the republic of letters.39 In the absence of systematic national or subject bibliography, save in a very few areas of study, large library catalogues — public or private — were valued as guides to knowledge.40 This was reflected in the common use of the word `bibliothecd to mean library both in the sense of an actual collection of books and also in a more theoretical or (one might say) virtual sense, of the lineaments and government of knowledge. Hence, library catalogues had an influence as guides both to literature, and also to how it was to be organised — whether by subject or according to medium. The divorce of the two media, manuscript and print, was not straightforward, but it was accepted with a readiness encouraged perhaps more by the international circulation of many of these printed catalogues than by mutual consent based on independent assessment. As a class of literature, library catalogues depend heavily on each other for organisation and ideas. This, too, was a stimulus to a common approach. As so often, ideals and plans were frequently contaminated in practice. The word `editus' itself was ambiguous, and was used both of manuscripts and of printed books in Sanderus's great union catalogue Bibbotheca Belgica manuscripta (1641). Ostensibly of manuscripts only, in fact Sanderus's work included a number of printed books, quite explicitly identified in the appropriate place but thus counteracting his title.41 The continued intermingling of print and manuscript presented a persistent problem to cataloguers, as may be seen in the catalogue of the library of the politician and diplomat Adrian Pauw, published at the Hague in 1654.42 After the two media had been

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carefully divided into their respective sections, there was a brief `Appendix aliquot librorum, typis excusorum, qui inter manuscripts inventi sunt.' The books included several folios which would have been hard to overlook. Not surprisingly, Amsterdam, centre of the northern European book trade, was sensitive to such issues. In 1612, the brief shelf-list of its town library mingled the two media, and offered only exiguous details of both. In 1622, the successor to this catalogue was slightly more forthcoming, but still interspersed manuscripts with printed books, both in the catalogue and on the shelves.43 The next, in 1668, revealed a reorganised library in which manuscripts, together with a handful of Chinese printed books, were recorded at the end. At Wolfenbüttel, the young Herzog August mingled manuscripts and printed books in the catalogue he began in 1611;44 but his second and much larger catalogue, begun in 1625, provided separately for manuscripts. Intellectual as well as physical differences are reflected in that of the University Library at Groningen, published in 1669.45 It is a rather late example of a unified catalogue, combining print and manuscript in a single sequence. Yet others were later still. The catalogue of the university library at Franeker (1713),46 pitifully lacking in the most recent books, was prefaced by an earnest appeal to the potential benefactors for whom it was — not least — intended. The few manuscripts that the university possessed were mingled with its printed books. For most of Europe, however, and though it has taken centuries to weed printed books from catalogues of manuscripts, and vice-versa, the two media were henceforth to be treated differently.4i In order to avoid any confusion, Thomas Hyde made a point of the distinction when in 1674 he entitled his work Catalogus impressorum librorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae, but by then the separation had been already generally accepted. His catalogue, used in annotated and interleaved form as the basis for library catalogues in continental Europe as well as in Britain, set an international agenda.48 By the time that Edward Bernard came to edit the Catalogi librorum man uscriptorum Angliae etHiberniae (Oxford, 1697), the divorce was largely effected. In descriptions of a few of the older collections — notably the Laud and Junius collections at Oxford — the existing lack of distinction between manuscript and print meant that some printed books were admitted. The account of Henry Savile's library included many modern printed books (as well as his astronomical instruments); and the much larger library of Bishop John Moore featured a long list of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century books, besides those bearing the adversaria of Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon and others. But, as Bernard explained in his introduction, such admittances were rare exceptions .4' A developing literature on the history of printing, and tl£e

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

gradual focussing of interest specifically in fifteenth-century printing, underscored an acknowledged revolution both in the organisation of libraries and in ways of thinking. Jean de la Caille's paeons in praise of printing, `cet Art divin;50 claimed it to be uniquely responsible for our knowledge not just of ancient texts, but for all human knowledge. In his commitment to his theme, he entirely forgot written or oral memory. Printing was cheap, not merely by comparison with the known prices of manuscripts until the fifteenth century, but even to the extent that the poor need no longer be excluded. `Chacun peut avoir des Livres de toutes Sciences pour une somme tres-modique.'51 It was a view with its roots deep in the fifteenth century, and one made familiar to generations of English readers in the anti-papist gloss set on the subject by John Foxe: hereby tongues are knowen, knowledge groweth, iudgment increaseth, books are dispersed, the Scripture is sene, the doctours be red, stories be opened, times compared, truth decerned, falsehode detected, & with finger poynted, and all (as I sayd) through the benefite of printyng.52 On the other hand, attention to manuscripts as a distinct form of communication, requiring its own skills and knowledge, marked the modern beginnings of the disciplines of palaeography and codicology. Most obviously, these culminated in the work of Mabillon and Montfaucon, fruit of the distinct historical needs of the Church but equally applicable to classical and other texts.53 The course of the divorce settlement is well charted, and was expressed in the influential scheme for ordering libraries published by the Jesuits in Paris in 1678.54 Apart from four main classes of printed books, with a supplement for prohibited books, there was also to be a sixth Cimelium, to comprise not just manuscripts, but also coins and medals, oriental books, antiquities, sculpture and printed images. The separate quality of manuscripts was established not just by their means of manufacture, but also, and more influentially, in the contexts of a culture of collecting. Like so many separations, the seeds had been sown long since. Before the late fifteenth century, a manuscript that was worn out could be preserved only by copying. Of the major classical authors, only a handful survive in witnesses older than the ninth century. Indeed, the Carolingian period is remarkable for what has been referred to as a deliberate salvage effort to preserve the learning of the past.-55 In the early fifteenth century, Poggio Bracciolini was compared with Lycurgus, and with Andronicus of Rhodes, in acknowledgement of his success in recovering and having copied manuscripts from German, Swiss and other libraries.56 Aldus Manutius in

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Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 turn was regarded as the `rescuer of Greek and Latin literature'.17 In other words, once printed there was no longer an overpowering need to preserve the manuscript exemplar. Soon after being printed, and to take just two examples, early manuscripts of Pliny and Livy both disappeared from view.'$ The same philosophy of literary inheritance underlay printing that had helped determine the preservation of texts in manuscript, the difference resting in the multiplicity of copies, not in any distinctly new doctrine. The principle of collation of multiple copies was easily carried over into printed editions. When in 1466 the Strasburg printer Johann Mentelin issued a study edition of Augustine, De arte praedicandi, the editor (Stephan Hoest, a professor of theology at Heidelberg) explained that it was based on manuscripts from Heidelberg, Speier, Worms and Strasburg.59 Aldus and his advisers were by no means the first to apply editorial principles to the study of multiple witnesses in order to arrive at a supposedly more authoritative text. Nor were they the last to discard books when a new edition had been prepared or obtained: the Bodleian Library's treatment of the Shakespeare First Folio is sufficent reminder of this widely familiar phenomenon. 60 The neglect, wilful or accidental, of many aspects of the past, visible in much of the Reformation, was not incompatible with such an attitude. Selectively dismissive historical and theological reasoning, itself a form of suppression of earlier or other untoward texts, took dramatic and visible form in the destruction of so many books at the hands of trades in need of skins whether for glue, wrappings or as parts of bindings for new books. Passive neglect as much as active destruction accomplished in a physical way what reasoning, demagoguery and preaching did in people's minds. But neither the Reformation nor the Counter-Reformation was unique in its attitude to books. The existence of printing, and with it the concept of republication and of new editions, engendered wholly newideas of the status of the physical form which carried a text. Books could be replaced, and replaced easily — if not from the copy to hand, then from another elsewhere. This concept underpinned the bibliographical principles of selection in Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis (1545) and its many followers. 61 Just how manyworks (rather than merely exemplars) were lost as a consequence of neglect, ignorance or more active destruction in the mid-sixteenth century is impossible now to calculate more than approximately.62 It is arresting to realise how little the major educational, quite apart from ecclesiastical, institutions either were able, or showed determination, to preserve what had come to seem no longer in scope either in their subject or in their form. What is well known deserves to be emphasised. Manuscripts were put to other uses.63 It is often thanks to private initiatives that so much has in fact

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

been preserved: by John Leland as agent for the Royal (and private) library; by Matthew Parker and his circle; by Robert Cotton; by Laud and Junius; by Baluze, and Colbert.64 In France, the shelves of Jacques-Auguste de Thou were enriched as a result of the wars of religion." In Italy, a reluctance on the part of libraries to share their inheritance seems to have been driven as much by secrecy as by a positive desire for their safety.66 In the Low Countries, Leiden University was transformed by the acquisition of the Scaliger and the Vossius manuscripts.6' The books dispersed from Amsterdam's conventual libraries in 1578 were preserved thanks mostly to private individuals," Circumstances varied, according to the politically, ecclesiastically or financially based powers of private collectors, and the willingness, interest or need of previous owners. There were, of course, exceptions. At Utrecht, substantial parts of the libraries of the Carthusians and the Regular canons were both received straight into that of the infant university, opened to the public in 1584.69 For most, the effect was the same: a migration of manuscripts from those for whom they had once been of daily use into the hands of those for whom they had a very different status based often on private bibliophily as well as historical, literary or other criteria, a process often continued when these books were entrusted to the new, or newly reformed, institutions of learning. In amalgamating manuscripts of all kinds, old codices and contemporarypapers, the librarians (and, be it added, booksellers) of the seventeenth century confirmed assumptions that had only ever been partially true: that printing displaced manuscripts, and that the two media were definable most appropriately by their means of production. Differences were more important than similarities. Such widespread and ever more deeply rooted assumptions have coloured understanding of the history of authorship, books and communication generally ever since. They have defined how our libraries are organised; and therefore how readers are encouraged to pursue their goals; and therefore how to think. In the interests of connoisseurship, itself defined according to headings based on this distinction, the bibliophile and art market reflects genres and media, rather than historical fact. The following chapters will address this issue from various perspectives. But before turning to them it is worth a moment to reflect on the lessons of this divorce. They lie, inescapably, with misconceptions about the history of the book. They also lie with current debate about the future of library provision. With the advent of powerful and reasonably affordable computer-based information technology, we face the same perplexities that faced the fifteenth

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Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

and sixteenth centuries. Decisions about what should be kept; different values set on new media compared with the old; differing costs of manufacture; the differing status of texts delivered and shared by the computer rather than by established means; differing abilities to manipulate text; questions of textual unanimity. These and many others present what ought to be perceived as dilemmas worthy of careful and informed analysis, since they incur questions not only of how and what is to be preserved from the past for future study, but also of how the means adopted for preservation affect our understanding of the past. In some ways they are but a refiguring of questions that should have been addressed more circumspectly already, in (for example) the changing ways that succeeding generations have understood the concept of facsimile." If (in D. F. McKenzie's words) forms effect meaning," how are meanings to be preserved? The dangers of embracing first microfilm and more recently electronic environments as replacements and even at the expense of what we already possess have been demonstrated repeatedly in the assumptions and mistakes of library management. Both these alternative formats offer major and crucial advantages, but only if their limitations as surrogates of originals, and therefore as reinterpretations, new forms for meaning, are understood. Access to facsimiles on the World Wide Web or on locally held CDRoms is widely offered not as a supplement to library holdings, but as a reason not to stock books, and actively to discard in order to save increasingly expensive shelf space. For books, periodicals and other printed matter, photographic or computerised surrogates are being made to serve not merely as an alternative to originals, but as their replacements. This underlying misunderstanding of the nature of surrogates, that they are not equals, but substitutions, has permeated much library management for decades, most influentially in America. In Britain, the British Library Board's decision to film and discard what were subsequently discovered to include some of the best surviving examples of several hundred rare post1850 foreign newspapers became a humiliation for so great a national library with permanent post-imperial responsibilities to historical understanding. 72 Newspapers, printed by the thousand and even million, are the most influential form of print ever invented. They also now include some of the rarest of all forms of print. The Library's decision that, failing interest from foreign national libraries, they should be sold to the trade for the best price or, if that proved impossible, be sent for pulping, simply so that the Library should be disembarrassed of the cost of keeping them in North London, ignored the facts that microfilm is the most inadequate of surrogates for half-tone printing or for colour, or for understanding the economic and social genesis

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

,,f the power of the newspaper press. It ignored the central historical point: ;,ow newspapers have been conceived with their own hierarchies of proáuction values and presented to readers in particular forms.' It evaded the responsibility of preserving in original form what was of absolute rarity. It ,vas a decision based on the perceptions and pressures of public funding. But, more to the central theme of this book, it also displayed a disheartening lack of curatorial understanding of the link between bibliographical form and its public meaning. How and to what extent we comprehend the ways by which thought and knowledge have been shared and interpreted for five hundred years among authors, printers, publishers and readers, depends on understanding their medium. The implications, historical and bibliographical, of this concept of surrogate and original should be at the centre of training for all who have to deal with books. As Thomas Tanselle has pointed out on another occasion, no museum director would expect to behave in so arrogant or brutally destructive a manner." Nevertheless, for the last many years, numerous libraries, national, university and local, with otherwise long-term commitments to preserving the past for the future, have actively destroyed the past. It has become a habit of thought. In a recent, and often thoughtful and constructive, report on the future of what are broadly termed artifacts in libraries — whether on paper, film or electronic bases — the Council on Library and Information Resources in Washington has sought to suggest ways in which questions in library management might better meet the needs for historians today and the duty of bequeathing artifacts for the unpredictable needs of the future.' But the report became increasingly confused as it sought to define what was meant by artifacts, speaking of `artifactual status' (p. 12) and `artifact status' (p. 23). All objects (to say nothing of electronic environments) have some artifactual status, regardless of their fragility, age, rarity or financial value. In the same report, reference was made to `information content' (pp. 20, 28), and of `library collections ... being promoted, as it were, to resources of artifactual, not just informational, value' (p. 9). While a great deal of information is indeed communicable, and valuable, without much opinion on the receiver's part as to how it is delivered, it remains that for the nature of that knowledge to be understood there must be some understanding of the platform — paper, film or electronic — on which it is delivered, and of the interpretative limitations as well as the possibilities of the medium. This phenomenon (it is by no means a solely modern one), where we see widespread ignorance of the nature of our printed inheritance, or of the nature of the book or pamphlet, newspaper or broadside, as a vehicle for

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meaning, is more than simply a change in medium — from paper to screen, from words fixed to a page to words summoned as chemical reincarnations on film or as electronic pulses in evanescent and re-formed shapes. It also implies many of the same questions that faced the first two centuries of printing. The world of IT, computerised editions of books, and scanned images does indeed offer its own separate and beguiling culture. In similar ways, and sometimes using analogous language, the advent of printing was hailed as God-given; the means to multiply and share work on a scale previously unimagined; a technology immensely faster than hitherto; and therefore a means of communication both superior to that which had gone before and which was to supersede it. In fact, the new can only be understood by reference to the old, and different cultures and media must inevitably exist side by side. Confusion stalks the beginning ofthe twenty-first century just as it stalked the fifteenth and sixteenth. For a while in the 1490s — five hundred years ago — the Benedictine monk Johannes Trithemius believed that scribes should not cease their work, since only by writing could works be preserved: For handwriting placed on parchment will be able to endure a thousand years. But how long, forsooth, will printing last, which is dependent on paper? For if in its paper volume it lasts for two hundred years that is a long time.76 In confusing the processes with their materials he revealed more than, on this occasion, a prejudice against printing. In practice, each new technology does not replace the previous one. Rather, it augments it, and offers alternatives. What we may loosely call the mechanical or electronic achievement is defined not only in its own terms, but also by its applications and purpose — in this case the conventions of letter forms and their use. Print sits beside manuscript, just as computerised IT sits beside print and manuscript. The significance of these relationships — not so much of different generations, as of related cousins, since in practice each lives alongside the next — is, apparently, easily missed. Keeping the same metaphor of the family of different kinds of communication: the separation eventually forced between manuscript and print was imposed by the external agents of libraries and scholarship, it was not one sought by the principals. In re-examining soma of the implications of how intimately connected the relationship really was, in many and divers ways, we may also reflect on how far it is responsible to treat current library management as a culture of replacement. The flexibilities made possible by invention are not just the obvious ones distinctive to an individual medium — vellum or paper, pen, type or pixel. They also require an extension of thought, in that established practice must

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

now operate in an environment larger both in its conception and in its organisation. Conversely, but no less importantly, new invention is inevitably J udged and used according to familiar principles. Printing is a new way of writing. Computers offer new ways of publishing and new ways of sharing information resources. Even hypertext, for all its much vaunted possibilities, raay be fundamentally defined as an extention of textual comparison of a kind familiar to scholarship since Politian, Giorgio Merulla, Giovanni Andrea de'Bussi and others first worked to collate texts for the printing press in the late fifteenth century. The new drives out the old in more ways than just the technological. It also drives out former assumptions of reading, and the old structures of thought. Infatuation with the printed book and with the history of printing led not just to a divorce between manuscript and print, but also, and more seriously, to misunderstandings concerning the relationships between the two that have so far been only partially recovered. The course and consequence of this division form the subject of the following chapter. It explores in more detail how printing combined with older practices and habits of thought in the manuscript tradition, and how it is more realistic to speak not of one superseding the other, but of the two working together. In this, we shall be looking a little further at the extent to which it is sensible to speak of the printing revolution, while defining our terms somewhat more precisely.

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Dependent skills

2

Dependent skills

In the last chapter, we noted the poverty of much bibliographical practice as a direct result of misinterpretation: how printing and manuscripts were divorced both in their organisation and in their study; and how as a consequence modern bibliographical (and therefore historical and literary) study has been weakened. We noted also that by reconsidering the older relationships between the two media, we might expect to understand better the idea of printing itself. As a coda, we further noted the importance of thinking about different media not as replacements one for another, but as having joint and interdependent existence: that one does not wholly drive out the other. As a part of this, we touched briefly on the application of technology to understanding as well as to accessing past literature in libraries of our own time. In this and the following chapters, I wish to explore further some aspects of the relationships between print and manuscript in early printed books. For well over two millennia, much of western European civilisation has been surrounded by the public word, mediated in stone, metal or paint on buildings, on memorials, on notices. For a large part of this time the handwritten public notice has also been familiar in some communities. For about one-fifth of this time, printed words and images have been an increasing part of everyday life.' For more than half a millennium we have assumed familiarity with the privately mediated word, in manuscript, print and now in pixels. Yet these variously produced words, conveying messages of very different kinds and for which the medium carries its own overtones of interpretation as well as of importance or circumstance, are of very differing status. Moreover, their relative status may vary from generation to generation. Notices about immediate everyday life become obsolete, but are preserved for their historical value.' Printed books fall out of and back into fashion, fall apart, or are replaced by different designs. Even stone inscriptions shift their meaning, as the impetus which caused them to be cut is diluted in succeeding generations. No one who now visits the small burial ground in Salem, Massachusetts, and sees the inscriptions on the stones marking the graves of those who died in the seventeenth century, will be grieving at the loss of a

he or she had known. Notwithstanding the nearby garish reminders ~o visitors that they are in `Witch City, they may recollect, in the wording of the inscriptions, the then still relatively recent arrival of British settlers and their families in North America. Such visitors' interest is historical at a further remove, often simply as that of tourists, but yet there is also in this place some sense of the founding of the most powerful nation in history. A mixture of historical selectivity (the Mayflower was by no means the first boat to bring new settlers from Europe) and the accidents of topography and preservation (Salem is very convenient to tourists visiting from Boston, while carefully nurturing its distinct identity) have lent their own influences to modern meanings. This phenomenon, the changing status and meaning of an object over time, is a commonplace of art history, where we may nevertheless say that there is, broadly speaking, a single physical original. That original—painting or (as the case of the Elgin marbles has recently reminded us) even sculpture— may be altered over time by human intervention — cleaning, restoration, alteration — but it always retains, in whatever changed circumstance, appearance or condition, the memory of the identity of its first creation.' For printed books, the case is made the more complicated by what it is that we understand by mechanical reproduction, a phrase made familiar thanks largely to Walter Benjamin' but one that is often used in ways that are, to a bibliographer, loose and imprecise. Later on, I shall be much concerned with the fluid nature of text, of the ways in which what is, or may appear to be, fixed may also exist in a multiplicity of shapes: in other words, what is implied by the concept of mechanical reproduction. What of printing itself? The translators of the Authorised, or King James, Version of the Bible in 1611 had no doubt (fig. 1).5 In a passage that must always have seemed anachronistic to those acquainted even remotely with the history of printing, Job 19.23 was translated as follows: erson

Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead In the rock for ever! The contrast of the transient nature of bodily life with the hope of a life to come, enunciated in the next few lines, could not be greater. The next words, one of the central statements in Job, are familiar from Handel's Messiah: `For I know that my redeemer liveth, with its ensuing allusion to physical destruction, `And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.' Whence comes this allusion to printing in a book, as a means of preservation and acknowledgement for all time? In 1535, Coverdale had more

23

24

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

z,

tjím 4DíälrnY arariest: nmutg. t1 4F:1fr'e-e+tgn:•-fi:üq-,~tséBlJs nat-ab~¢~Ytp bCGilFJ,thoagh 3pdä[Èn }itr Eazrlte rbtbten>tfah

Dependent skills

íD,~tbnbe

lamina, vel celte sculpantur in silice?' The Douai translators, here as generally elsewhere, followed this closely:

ataélte troncttobe.

pa,fdka,

, j ~rn, ti~~p~ poun;t ili~t(:0äptfeb tne,_

'{Jrm'a~r~oln~rtfrpar

ts

iSk[fl~t'af~5 ErCqahrtq;~lf9}taHritt;,~r--

c ,y AR mt i roG1ifti ïar9 abba2r ming; r fl xa aeDg niéR tn an to tç~cü tT a~ptBnne, 4

lrl' ےft6.

:t rr~auepiri¢itponme,tjatt¢pfti¢bpatfm¢, 0 rtn; füenDp,foJ tiJebarta uf c39D batbtmt raçe. rhth.titF.

,: le u r Daa r¢p¢rf¢rute mea~ c~oà dmrl,,arR+ arr. nrr rùt ttfish tuìtb mpflem. , ~'tnarnn;iar;~y~to¢tetuotbíaJftittr,>ID

~Es}s~aDBJaila+ bt>sbelipr

tgrn;utnal

~,Nho will grant me that my wordes may be writen? who wil geue me that they mey be drawen in a boke, with yron penne, and in plate of leade, or els with stile might be grauen in flintstone?

r^~esF'itr~

maqtUrtlttlJt_ " twarnrgq meRbephnn: tí ,entbee ~gematiid nm,ufect4erínt

re

bJaoBe>iof borlte su~ç~uátr. tß ~et@iWaCb¢ItatittaEetfi eat~s,•.r1,;,:,c, ~C, rf ~ G ti,.,,e lf .•.4.f Ì :I~i „fhi ~.P ~NH 4AC:'NYv,e 9: q 44A p~s~c, :.:•.C.l `~..,.H/ I

;

~ :

S>,E

~ ~„~ a1,.aöt„olr.,>,trEa4;~+,.,:.. ~:,jf,,•,.n~:F:ier;-s~er..:h4 a,ete~ ♦ w JfM~.~ur=6.('ea'.tt ~-a.e+o.;.»L-~-L,pF,d~.vch+*.r. ~rirB EUM>e9'~,vo.~,r,a,nL,•6rs,,.~ÿ..,:asa~iei,: >S t,.cY~,» }rn..~.S+ijn..... S~rp„ .},ar,rt>n„s1"-r~\: h.Eÿ.tt 4• F ïe.(,,,.é, 11 „j „t~.n., ~ f;_ a~~,.w

J,,+tai

y.rr~f~.ió/:+t,~a-:e nnEó

lltt}tAts 41rgtDSoIh c NM+

c

7,1 `•1V1111t :aX.r+,i' SL' tt;i~; ,1 :i ,.: rt,ef^. hit,r,ï i..vr~t.ro7

`1tt•t„ JustttY : i-r

i~~11`

P P

#,FAc3~r, _.. _.3, ':~•;

1 r~ Po jE1B' '1 '~ ~ ~.~„~•

;?IflmrT

~ ar'4„?t !

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IM rnl,' „

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l~t~~PYI`2olfnÍtrt yeg.

,,:-e.2 ~: .+:.•9 .111'. t,+a1nt,

t

Figure 6 Albrecht von Eyb, Margarita poetica. The colophon (fo.408v), copied from the edition printed by Ulrich Han (Rome, 1475), is in a different hand from that of the main scribe, and this part of the leaf has been separately ruled for the purpose. New College, Oxford MS 307.

49

50

i' Í

I Ì

~I

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

museum organisation, by the book trade, and by bibliographical scholarship itself. The drive among booksellers, bibliophiles and major nineteenthcentury libraries alike to separate the printed from the manuscript, in libraries for the sake of departmental efficiency, resulted directly in the destruction of evidence that demonstrated conclusively the interchangeability of manuscript and print in the minds of earlier readers. At Cambridge, Henry Bradshaw, University Librarian and easily the most acute student of incunabula of his time,10' worked in a well-established tradition. He was responsible for breaking many volumes, but others had done the same before him in the interests of library management. Volumes bound originally at the end of the fifteenth century were dismembered, in order that some printed parts might be sold as duplicates, and manuscript parts might be removed to the manuscript stacks."' Other volumes were broken up so that their constituent parts could be arranged differently on the shelf, according to their printers or dates. Among many, a few examples may be quoted. A volume given to the University Library in 1664 and containing a manuscript dated 1523 bound up with Suetonius (Strasburg, 1512), Glareanus' Duo elegiarum libri (Basel, 1516) and Carolus Verardus's Historia Baetica (Basel, 1494) has now been dispersed in four separate directions — to the manuscript stacks, to the shelves of incunabula, and to different places on the shelves of later printed books.102 Another more obviously coherent volume, containing a manuscript copy of a devotional book written at the London Charterhouse and works printed at Speier, Antwerp and Cologne, including on the leaf of the Colloquium peccatoris et Cruciftxi (Antwerp: Mathias van der Goes, c. 1487) a woodcut image of pity designed as an indulgence and possibly associated with Caxton's workshop, was likewise dispersed, the printed parts according to their printers.10' The person who bound up an early manuscript Constitutiones provinciales with a group of short texts by Dionysius Carthusianus and Hugo de Sancto Caro and the Stella clericorum, printed severally in the 1490s at Cologne, Antwerp and Paris, did so with some religious associations in his mind.' 04 The lawyer who needed several legal texts, in manuscript and printed by John Lettou and William de Machlinia, was likewise organised.1p' But the person who placed between two covers half a dozen miscellaneous texts including Caxton's Mirror of the world, and manuscripts of the Elizabethan statutes of the University of Cambridge and Campion's history of Ireland, dating from a century and more later,10' surely did so for simple tidiness' sake, and so left a late reminder of how the distinctions between manuscript and print might be ignored in the early seventeenth century. All these books, coherent volumes to their owners in different ways, have since been broken up. Bradshaw was

Dependent skills

only one of many people, in libraries and the book trade alike, who saw no fault in such ruptures. It was not simply that manuscript and printed book were divorced. The widespread practice of binding up manuscripts of like dimensions according to individual need or taste, well-established in the fifteenth century, was just one of many habits that did not die with the advent of the printed book. The Sammelband, assembled by owner, librarian or binder, was a feature familiar to libraries of all sizes, and offers its own commentary on ways of thought. By dismantling such volumes, the intellectual thread is broken. More happily, many volumes survive as witnesses of the ways in which manuscript and print were used, and often made, side by side. The volume now in St John's College, Oxford, containing three more or less contemporaneous books printed by Caxton and a manuscript of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, was closely connected with Caxton's own circles.107 Private convenience could be as important as any intellectual or contemporary relationship between the two covers of a volume. One book from the house of the Brethren of the Common Life in Cologne offers suggestive evidence in coupling an early fifteenth-century French manuscript with an edition of John Chrysostom printed at Brussels in 1479.10' A copy of a Psalter for Tournai use printed by the Brethren of the Common Life at Brussels was bound up into a manuscript Breviary belonging to the Nazareth community in Brussels itself, the printed text adjusted to different local use by means of pasted-on slips of paper: the rubrication for both parts is in the same style, and it is probable that the two parts have been together since the beginning.1 ' A volume from the library of the Augustinian canons near Leuven contains a group of tracts by Bonaventura written out by the scribe Peter de Ympens, and a printed copy of Nicolaus de Hanapis' Biblia pauperum printed at Antwerp in 1491.10 A Dutch Plenarium, printed by Govaert Bac at Antwerp in 1496, was provided at an early date with extra narratives of the Passion and gospels for various days, in a book used by a woman in Utrecht.'11 A copy of Terence printed by Mentelin at Strasburg in about 1470 was supplemented by extra leaves including a life of the dramatist and arguments to the plays — the whole volume being rubricated in the same way throughout. 112 In libraries, manuscript and print were shelved side by side, and the early sixteenth-century library catalogue of Syon monastery makes abundantly plain how manuscript and printed works co-existed on an equal footing. The catalogue, a document itself notably more lavishly set out than many others of its kind, adhered to the medieval practice of identifying books by the first words of the second leaf: so far from being distinguished for

51

52

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 their novelty, printed books were treated like manuscripts.113 Much work remains to be done on exploring and analysing contemporary relationships between the two media, both for private and institutional libraries, and in the innumerable surviving books in which they may still be seen bound up as one. In volume after volume, manuscript and print are to be found conjoined even in the mid-seventeenth century, when the political press was a supplement to what was circulated privately, in manuscript.114 Private need frequently was at odds with the printing press, and vice-versa. Printed sheets were added to manuscripts, and manuscript leaves were pasted into printed volumes. As late as about 1625, the (probably) Parisian owner of a manuscript Horae, identifiable now only by the initials C S on the covers, arranged to have his or her prayer book rebound. The manuscript was a run-of-the-mill example from a late-fifteenth-century workshop, and it was now incorporated between the engraved title-page of L'office de la Vierge, and (at the end) the Jesuit Pierre Coton's Oraisons dotes appropriées à

0l i l

toutes sortes d'exercices & actions Chrestiennes, both published by the Paris

a

bookseller Louis Boullenger in 1625.113 Similar admixtures can be found amongst literature of most kinds in the eighteenth century. But it is in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that this cohabitation is at its most instructive, at a time when each might supplement or complement the other — manuscripts supplementing print, and print supplementing manuscript. In this two-way process there was, and is, no reason to regard one as being superior to the other, or one as being more old-fashioned. The social and economic factors that played so large a part in the demise of manuscript for most publication are much less in evidence when we look at the specific records of private needs and interests.

Pictures in motley

In some ways, the most obvious interdependence of print and manuscript is to be seen in the making, copying and printing of illustrations. I wish in this chapter to glance at only some aspects of a subject that has attracted the attention of art historians ever since the eighteenth century. Identities of artists, circles of patronage, the organisation of manufacture and of the market, the dispersal and circulation of copies of printed books: all these topics have benefited from the application of art-historical techniques to the study of the printed word. Some of these scholarly achievements lie behind my own concerns here. So, too, are questions of the extent to which an illustration may be said to be integrated with the meaning of the accompanying text, the ways in which images are compromised by their bearing sometimes startlingly different visual meanings in, for example, the supposed representations of towns and people in the Nuremberg Chronicle, where the same image is used repeatedly for different purposes, or the multiple uses of the same block to depict different plants in many early printed herbals, or the sometimes seemingly random use of images in cheap street literature.' The questions in the following pages are more bibliographical than interpretative, though the former is always intrinsic to the latter. In considering what we may term historically transitional forms or, more accurately in that it ignores any implied periodicity, those that fuse one with the other, it is again important not to assume that print is inevitably different in status from manuscript. The two were used and published side by side. The copy in the Bibliothéque Nationale de France of the Exercitium super Pater Noster from the southern Low Countries, and dating perhaps from just before the middle of the fifteenth century, consists of a series of large woodcuts with a manuscript commentary.' Here we witness manuscript as a natural textual supplement to print, not (as in so many later prayer books) the other way about. A similar concept underlies the celebrated mid-fifteenth-century prayer book known as the Normberg Passion, after the Benedictine abbey in the diocese of Salzburg that owned it for many years,3 and another German prayer book dating from 1430/40, now in Berlin.4 In these, too, as in another very similar group of woodcuts with manuscript on their reverse sides in the British Museum, the manuscript prayers were clearly designed and written

54

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

Pictures in motley

55

How far were these matters not of experiment, but of expediency? How far

"ata

ebw sLNte ~+~ r Isf cnDe

Z àuh?pgw gctbeez ,c92ke rjeav f n cda.d¢n bt,ae: r7hókt,e, I,~~fr' ~le'i ; " rol-Do ta j~" % A11 ~IDCL tu en òtc fbro7~cL -!sr~e u~c ~cboeren ~ ~ m er~ó .~ `1 ,, eewt7 ,»tf ~eibcnaorpfe(" en8e ~;., .Y".°iß JWT me 1b4i¢if tteE~oe3i`;í~;~~t;

Y~,Tsîtffii 2niJn ~emin ea;~ta.a.r:.sii r!k rny 1bAel??i

~ee~ !~ t4A. Yti Uú0

ì;r. j . ._fl!mi'K ~° •Y?i : 9 ~ kY>f~C'%Yt$ et1=

s¢ Dusi_*;h.:::•'.hi;~'

+•.:ros.qutbuCql arnbus doma:miliriysp LY pat tam & auï;tum vnpcnum fit ` ~ nre deinde p.nul.anm dtCeiplin~°utlnsdt(Cidentis pnmo morrs fequatu t tnvmo. ~cietd e ue magu: magtCquc Ispfx Gnr: rum ìce wepeetint pt:iccípües: :.,•resadbcctem ~pora;qutbusnce aic+a nostca: aecxemedùpa:; pof[mua _ ueamsncft,fiocilludefipcçápneinmgniConcee:.~falubre:aehvgifqec a+n isteexcmplìciocumenta.mdlufsxipaf,ct monumentaítuen.lndanbì creipubtirgqu 3rmítcee:apìas.indekamiumìnceptu`:Ceaiumexirn y.:..9 uites.Ceteutm,aut meamar rttg:aní Ct,Gaptz Falltcau tnul(a uoqrcfp.

E,.d,-

".. ~.

•`~ ~

4^ ::

ucnìaantíquicati.utmiG:cndabumanadtuintsprtmoroiaurburmauguftion

fticiat.~Etfi cui pcptrlo hecreupertet mnfecrarc engtnesfuas:etaddcdsre/ tètrc auGtcres•ra~+clliglarcteftpcputoromapo:utcum Cu.um-oondxtxtfquc fútpaanrem Íilzrtem pctilftmumtcrartam bmgcn+es Iuta anç pati.tnntr çquoanirno:31mperiúm patiuntur. Sedbre:& bis Gmtlta:utcun.pataducrea autçRimauctunc.batdcqutdcmmttragnoportámdtfrimmt•Adillam:F,t > profequtfgucacriterimertdatantmum'qupwtt:qutmoresCucnnr.perqu5s uiros: qutbu/'qq: ari tbus eomi: mtlitiçque & partum & auetum tmpe: ium (ir. Ialxnce dándepauL•mn dtCtpl,na: uclutr.ifïidentas pnmo mtires ('cgtuntc animo.Delnae x trtagis: magdque lapfrfrnt: tum ire ccepuíoc prcnpites: nonee ad bec tempoti: qui6us ncc uitia no(kti: nec rem&titi patr pofCumcis Feruentum eft. HociLludeß prçcipue incegmttor.c rez îtltLLre:ac fntgtfe~

~

omnismenemplí+:ccumeatamillufttippnfiumcnumrntommen.lrt3enbi nt}xluetetpra6ltcÇquód tmttere: captas , lnde fccdum mcepru: kedum ex:tu quod uucs.Cçurum:autn:e amor ncgottffufcp;ifalltt: aut nullaunÿrefp. ne. inaior: ne: fancq-tornec benisexemplis duicrtun•. ns inquam ldm Cero auarina: luxurirque ttaamrgnucnní, nec ubi an,tus: ac tam diti pattptrarì:.xc par(ìmohtçbcnosFuciit.adcog`rorcttmtntmctuin:ïfri cupi duatiscrac.Nnp da:ittae attaritum: & abundanras uoluputes def> tu%empcennsma_sdceera~abulzs:quátnemtprisreeumgdiuummon, ment s trnáuntur: a nec afiama.rc: natctcllere: in animo eá. daturhar

r

Figure 12 Livy, Historiae Romanae decades (Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1470), showing different printed and manuscript marginal decoration. The opening of volume I from Bodleian Library AuctL1.8. Figure 13 Livy, Historiae Ronianae decades (Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1470), showing different printed and manuscript marginal decoration. The opening of volume I from Cambridge University Library Inc. 1608.

71

72

Pictures in motley

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

P,~. ACTV R VS NS SI&T OPERAEPRCdú : .x ,, ~,

z

_

qu,-.l in pnnnpio furì,mç rotms,pfcfli lont pIr-rtrp n } t nó requïï•q: plus Zfert fibi rqud op2'„

caritatis ín bona íùa carcádo! q3 fibr betrabaë eí g ad pene fue7e, míf5cnê be f ruáu borrozú fuoaú tvrcádoaú• et bona eí frC carcata=faciéti ca in rrullo ftmt minus vtilla •fed magis g ad augmêtú k mii in vita eterna•hec iRzc•na obffat 6m'7ßona cy obietio ptii m truce eqlzter pzofit•'u fi efTetoblata cuilrbet p feet tïn p udef t tul Irbet.'qítú mertút .gobiatio faerificií in altari pan rvc•cítfit dlíus• oblatiórs memonate•qi rndet tdê 2&ona• qp c`puís tdé (fit•'na tü•C'• trebtgj vrtifozmíteropa"c• n.à ín cruce effuíùm fuit Friü in oímC

da plenitudine f;in altari hëeffedú 5eterminatú cú gtid,e affu• ' tna"c•et ,çpterbcx pma oblatio • Gïn croce nü ttera~• f3 fcäa tteraE et tö illa rô na valet•gz pcedtt acfi effiet equalu effeaus•et itcrft d

lapzo Pi bus eft oblata.li ac fptxialttar pát Freri • f2et obftat tifud byero•q+Cú ,p rêtú aiabus pfal mus ve miffa dz•' nil minus fl) fr ,p vno gltbet bzcere"t accipi.i= btccdrí ení q, byetn(fcut patete2cad-

ductis)`.c9ui"t ~àtiî ad nuttiti+ faciétis>rtó9lti±ad vtdttdtc eiup pm

F"

Figure 29 Franciscus de Platea, Opus restitutionum, usurarum, excominunicationum (Paris: Ulrich Gering, Martin Crantz, Michael Friburger, 1476/7), showing a manuscript addition made perhaps in the printing house. Trinity College, Cambridge VI.14.28.

1517) contain small printed correction slips, a form of correction that continued even into the twentieth century.31 Such examples, where printers accommodated their mistakes by resorting to the pen or type, might be multiplied many times over.

103

104

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

pttmo tnó fuffragía Fa&a fpeáaliter piovno trn!magís piofunt ïp alíísáano alíis nó pzofunt be lege có1- Scdo mó adbuc ma-

,

►Ih

gís pzofunt illi c}j aliis ft caiitaté bnt eqlé• gz ceteri8 panbus ma-

Ot tantá carigts gaudet qfibet be bono taté habere!T plus c5f0lac be fuffragio qd fit patto! gille ,p $ effent biuites gí pau fit-auod ergo arguis q~ melions caditionís pere.cú plura fuffragia Ftát p es-Vico q' na dì inC3uenÍP9 paia peres fi mpliciti r effe meltoz C cádt úats q} oíuites• g7uis Siuítcs in boc nieltons ndttióts frnt•3u7ë dlud puerbrojp.xííi•red¢ptio ai" .., viribiuítie,ïue•q}uís6"igloabipaiuïtesbüapaintelligani•3té naobftat bi$ú }neronybe ~fecra•tn•vo na mbdiocnter •vbi tiz ~ tiz,pcétit aíabus pfalmu5 vY miffa tizlníl mínus g9 fi pro vno gtibettpfozú brcerec accípt"c•qz rndet íFi.u•btcés qyvbfi hiero•bebet intelltgi be valoae pviá afalatwig.vt zitcfit gd~•~ed tn adhuCna videi vm •qz plus gaudet fllzbct be bono ,rpzto! 4p altozû . bee ergo

°"'^N ip referédo altozft ópínione ibz loquí"c Nero-3té nó obflat g bona

glorte ptunbus carcata n mínuunr fingult,s-ergo a ftmíh yec bona gre- .Çiuffragia ai bona gFe pluribus cóicata funt,g rndet idem rFCtc• q+nó eft fiYe• qz glona refpitit oïbug vnú bonít cóe et ng.f; ' "

fuffragiúg;tirefpzcitreatú pene infrnguhebíuerfum•~de~e pla ai g p pma opiníóe adduceban"t íFtndtt g, na valét• L12 1~é

cádeleec vox boâozie fe caicát p nantre necelfetaté• fed fuffrag'ta oEtcari"t p fuffragátis íntéeíoné• 4(d dlude&gd tacU Fuit in qone f•z recipzéét multos ad participatió; bonozû fuozF•fua opa bona

minus elfent vália-biccdfi T na (equi~.gz ptus aFert flbt tllud o137

Caritatis in bona íua cataidoläi Gbr betraha"c ei q ad pene fue re tnífáoné be Fruali bonozú fuozu cóicádozû- et bona ei fir caicata

Faäéti ea in 114110 furit minU6 vtilta•fed magis q ad augrnëtú piaabt mííinvitaeterna•hecíRnc•naObfFat6m7Sona•rg+oblatioptiíín truce eglzterpzofìt!ac fi effet oblata cuilibet p feet tm pzodeß cui, libet'4}bí meruít•g oblatio facnFicií ín altari pari rae•cû fit illius ab!atiais merrouale•qz rndet idé 78ona• q> cpuïs idé Gt!na tn vtr0bic~ virifozmíter opai• n~ in cruce2ffufum Fuit pciû ín oimo~ da plenítudíne• f; ín altari bé efFeaít aetermínatú cft gtidie affu• mac•et,prter boc pmaoblatio•Gin cruce ná rteraë• f3 feria iteraE et tó illa rò na valet•gzipcedtt acG effet equalis effecffus•et iterú ti la pzooibug efl oblata.h ac fpecialtter pat Fierl..j~,ec ob4iat illud hyero~q, ci 3) céfíi aTabus pfaimus vr míffa oz! nil minus g3 fi ,p vno qhl>et aicere"t aecipic• btc dú en hyero(fzcut patet ex ad, a »quigtíadm¢itúfarí¢tí smSRa vtí itat e ius pw ~ ~ ... -~~_vn., - ' ' ,!r..pt r Ldg. itin i>+!1.r rHr

>~

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ad ë "_ _ _

A house of errors

nrtétat bíaée..Etaeaí wnít tnagn9 a fjotribilis.bics iClz bi {;0 tz,liluí illa.bícrs tencbrz;q a caligínis•bica nebulR rCr, a i:.rbínís-bieß trllx Ct dan gozir3 fup 0á9 áui C~ - 3 munita4i^iT fup¢e vês anr{elos exrxlfos. ~:'~, etti pcirútatcs murrítas exp:iini~ti fufpt 2,: mé~s ccl:zi~lap fép ttfenfìvne rxrcübátta•q'. ab fe iflf auvcíêß earü atlpa cula nou abmittût,a quícáb p cxaelfv,is âgelo~ -0bi buplex quífpe femp efl; paries r►íftimperra tocbaftgnarte. 0,uebîa -wriratís fimpíicitat"a fugínt ab fénretipra quobäniá buplicítatii; P t.+¢cFtate reptiCaiue• et aS ê tcteciug apub oogí t.rciícs ruas mfäf}û prutécíc er: ipa fe Culpa im purítaair's e;ctollüt.bieß autc tomitri vimdíâc bíiilíïtc

atq; aiadnea fivtriQ plcua fitp tàititateg muní

tao a fup erctlfoa águlos v

_

L IP S 1 Æ Micliaël Lanrzenb`erger exeuc#ebat Anná 16,08.

Figure 34 Hieronymus Hornschuch,Orthotypographia (Leipzig, 1608) . Cambridge University Library F 160. d. I. L. clear that in his view the seventeenth century had witnessed a decline in standards.64 For Hornschuch, who figured in Zeltner's prosopography, as for Zeltner himself, the corrector's was a distinct occupation: Printers should realise that they need the work of correctors as well as of compositors, if they want to take proper care of printing: they should also realise that the efforts

Every day I had to struggle almost more with monstrously faulty manuscripts [`cum manuscriptis mendosis & monstross'] than with printers' errors (for instance, recently in a certain book actually written by the author's own hand, I was able to find almost two thousand mistakes) I began to think more and more by what means a solution could be found for this deplorable situation." It was as a result of this that he wrote his manual, `whereby inexperienced people could all be taught what is involved in printing'. `Faults that remain as a result of incorrect, unintelligible, badly-produced manuscripts should not be considered typographical errors, but should be attributed to the authors of the books themselves.,67 `Davus sum, non Oedipus': in quoting Terence's Andria, Hornschuch reminded his readers that the printer was but an agent, not an augurer. `If in the face of faulty manuscripts, which cannot be read except with extreme difficulty, they fashion monstrous and prodigious words in their print, the punishment is meted out in the end to the corrector, who is distracted and almost worn out in expunging so many errors at his own cost and the expensive outlay of his time."' As a professional corrector, Hornschuch emphasised the difficulties faced by himself or his colleagues. More generally, his emphasis on bad copy, requiring to be interpreted by the compositor (perhaps consulting with his colleagues) and then interpreted again by the corrector, formulated the process of printing not as one of straightforward copying but as a series of different readings and interpretations each of which was accounted satisfactory by the agent responsible. In other words, the process of printing, from author's, scribe's or printed copy-text to printer's reader (and, he might have added, to the compositor at the stone or the pressmen at their press whose duty it was to apply the

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corrector's own marks) insisted on, and was defined by, a series of texts none of which could be regarded as stable. Despite claims otherwise, the process of printing was inherently unstable, not only in the well-documented habits of correction during press-runs but also in every stage that preceded them. The stability of the final published text depended on a visual sleight of hand in which most of the slippery manufacture was concealed. Thus Hornschuch differed in his purpose from those who intended their remarks to be directed first at professionals in the printing house, whether compositors or proof-readers. His book was not directed primarily at members of the printing trade, but at authors and correctors. Nonetheless, his guidance shares many features in common with the instructions compiled at the Plantin printing house in 1607-8, under Jan Moretus I: attention to punctuation, to turned'letters, to characters that looked very similar especially when poorly printed, a knowledge of Greek and Latin, etc. The compilation of such instructions was born not only of shared standards amongst printing houses, but also of bitter experience. The hours of work, and the remuneration for correctors' labours, clearly caused difficulties within printing houses, since both favoured the corrector at the expense of the compositor. The corrector was a figure in two camps: within and outside the printing house. Able — at least in Antwerp — to end his formal day once proofs had been corrected in the morning (he could not leave to eat until thatwas done), he was afterwards either a free man, or available for other work within the same printing house. In the Plantin house, this might include correction of authors' texts (grammar, punctuation, accents, etc: the equivalent of the modern copy-editor's job), compilation of indexes, translation, revision of older works, or even the compilation of dictionaries. Payments for all these tasks were at one time or another recorded in the Plantin accounts.sy One aspect of what was expected of such people may be glimpsed in the de Tournes printing house at Lyon in the mid-sixteenth century: Ordinairement [the elder de Tournes] eut en sa maison personnages doctes & excellens en toutes disciplines, qui pussent, par leur iugement, & ayde de vieux parchemins, corriger les fautes qui se trouuoyent aux liures imprimés: traduire du Grec & du Latin ... &, pour le dire en vn mot, le secourir de leur sauoir en tout ce qu'il pouuoit coniecturer deuoir apporter plaisir & proffit à ceux qui cherissent les

A house of errors

complicated issue, and was returned to by Zeltner in 1718.72 Both Hornschuch and the Plantin instructions place considerable emphasis on the need in a printer's reader for learning (especially of languages), for an alert eye, for watching out for faults both in the composition and in the copy text (scribal or authorial) and for concentration. There is a justifiable pride in the professional status of the corrector. And yet this idealistic world has to be countered with the everyday realities that faced authors, printers and readers alike. That this was a matter of apprehension, even acute anxiety, to at least some authors is well documented. In 1517, Beatus Rhenanus remarked that while Froben was printing Erasmus De duplici copia verborum, Rhenanus would drop in of an afternoon, and was pleased to discover in the printing house a reader `not without some knowledge, who even allows himself to be put right, and if there is something he does not understand, tries to learn without hesitation from Faber or Bruno or me'.73 Erasmus, knowledgeable beyond many others in these matters, could be frank. `Please, he wrote to Wolfgang Lachner in 1517, and referring again to the Froben printing house, `Warn your proof-reader to learn some more Greek and be ready to listen to men who know more Greek than he does. You cannot think what harm is done to books by a printer's reader with too good a conceit of himself."' Erasmus's edition of the New Testament was of obvious concern. The first edition was printed at considerable speed, printing and editing proceeding almost simultaneously. At least for a period, no less than three sheets were printed each day. Erasmus told Guillaume Bud6 that, following the failure of his hopes that proofs would be checked by two scholars, one of whom was also said to know Hebrew, he had been obliged to check the proofs himself. He knew that he had not given the matter his full attention: he was also working on his edition of Jerome, likewise printed by Froben, while the annotations thought desirable for his edition of the New'Testament proved to be much longer than had been estimated. Hence, even by June 1516, with .75 sales only just under way, he was already preparing a second edition In

Muses.70

1517, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, in effect gave Erasmus the benefit of the doubt, in praising him for preparing a translation `for the common benefit of us all':

The task might be an editorial one, as well as one of everydaypress correction. Hornschuch wrote both for professional correctors, and for those near enough the printing house to be in a position to check their own proofs. But it was, in his view, an intrusion for the author to read his own proofs — a criticism of the corrector, and an expression of lack of trust.71 This was a

I rather think, though, that the printer nodded from time to time, for when I was exercising myself in reading St Paul as you recommend, I often found that he had left out Greek words and sometimes whole sentences. I owe you another thing, too, my dear Erasmus, that up to a point I can make conjectures in places where the Greek and the Latin do not entirely correspond.7ó

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Not surprisingly, by the time that Erasmus faced printing a new edition, he was determined that he should himself be present to oversee the text. `It is a complicated business, and, unless I am there, nothing would go right." Authors were frequently absent, but it was still expected that they, not the printer, would take a lead in these decisions, and that they would be within convenient call. Ariosto's embracing of all aspects of the publication of Orlando Furioso, from purchasing the paper to dealing with booksellers, quite apart from the more ordinary authorial work on proofs and revision, is an extreme example of how an author might be involved in the publication of his work; but he was not unique. 78 In hundreds of errata lists from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mistakes were to be attributed clearly either to authors or to printers. While the larger printing houses could afford to employ correctors on a regular basis — either specialists or scholars wishing to earn a living — most printing houses did not. In practice, correcting was usually haphazard, and relied principally on the author. Moreover, the corrector himself, even when present, was always subject to the opinion and judgement of the author. In 1570, the printing house of John Day was unable to provide a sufficiently skilled corrector to handle Billingsley's translation of Euclid, and so earned a rebuke: Maruaile not (gentle reader) that faultes here following, haue escaped in the correction of this booke. For, for that the matter in it contayned is straunge to our Printers here in England, not hauing bene accustomed to Print many, or rather any bookes contayning such matter, which causeth them to be vnfurnished of a corrector skilfull in that art: I was forced, to my great trauaile and paine, to correcte the whole booke my selfe.79 The following list of errata included not only typographical faults, but also instructions to amend some of the woodcut diagrams. Ignorance was an easy plea, if not a satisfactory one. Both language and professional terminology might be causes for inexactness, and John Legatt in 1633 was content to hide behind this in defending himself against anticipated criticism: The Printer desires to be excused to the Courteous Reader, if in an Argument of this Nature, the Compositer, not throughly acquainted with termes of Nauigation, hath sometimes, which he feareth, and in some words mistaken the Authors minde; as in stowed for stood &c. promising a future amends (if Occasion profer it selfe) by a more exact Impression. 80 It is perhaps not surprising that the tone of self-justification in Hornschuch was one partly of self-defence.

A house of errors

Authors (and printers rather less frequently) drew attention not only to mistakes attributable variously to authors, amanuenses or compositors, but also to the process of presswork itself. Percy Simpson quoted the example of William Gouge, in 1616, at length, since it offered an unusually explicit commentary on a relationship that was most often described in very general terms: Yet I cannot denie but that some faults have escaped in some copies: such diligence hath been vsed by the Author in correcting his worke, that so oft as his leasure permitted him, he came himselfe to the Presse, and as he found a fault amended it, so that there are very few faults but are amended in most of the Bookes. If therefore thou meete with any slippe that may make the sense obscure, compare thy Booke with some others, and thou maiest finde it amended.81 Itwas a fact ofproduction that since proof-reading and correction proceeded even during the press-run, so copies of the final collated sheets would vary: hence the otherwise preposterous supposition that the reader should seek out a better copy if that in his hand made no sense. The brief errata list in Thomas Smith's Sermon preached before the Right Worshipful Company of merchants trading in the Levant (1668) pointed out a mistake made `in some copies: In 1617, Samuel Purchas appealed to his readers to correct what mistakes they found. He had missed `scarsly any sheet (if any)' in his own proof-reading, but he and the printers had clearly not been in entire agreement: Sometimes through their slow negligence in sending them, or ouer-hastie diligence in printing many off, before they could be corrected, many faults haue passed in many Copies. 82 In Dryden's Notes and observations on the Empress of Morocco revised (1674) the note is specific on one of the corrections: `This Errata [sic] is corrected through half the Impression.' Charlton Hinman's exposition of the variants to be found in successive copies of sheets in the collection of Shakespeare's works printed by William laggard in 1622-3 was by no means the first examination of a phenomenon that is now fámilar to all students of early printing. In 1862, William Aldis Wright, editor of Shakespeare, Hebraist, friend of Edward Fitzgerald and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, assembled evidence from ten copies of Francis Bacon's Essays (1625) to show differences between finished sheets: Of these ten copies no two are exactly alike. The differences are numerous, though, except in one case, not important; but, as they throw light upon the manner in which books passed through the press in Bacon's time, I have subjoined a list of

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all that I have noticed. The cause of these differences is not difficult to conjecture. Corrections were made while the sheets were being printed off, and the corrected and uncorrected sheets were afterwards bound up indiscriminately. In this way the number of different copies might be multiplied to any extent." Nor, of course, was this partial process a solely English phenomenon. The bookseller Abel L'Angelier asked readers of a polyglot collection of poems La puce (Paris, 1583) to take notice of a number of misprints, `dont aucunes ne se doiuent corriger qu'en quelques exemplaires'.84 A further example, again, is quoted by Simpson, from a book published in 1617: le confesse que l'incurie & mesgarde des Imprimeurs causent trop de fautes, lesquelles il seroit malaisé de toutes radresser, nous auons corrige les plus remarquables. On pourra trouuer des fautes en quelques copies, qui n se trouueerront SIC en d'autres, pour auoir esté corrigées lors qu'on auoit desia commencé de tirer: les plus ordinaires viennent à raison du facile changement des lettres n.u.c.e.£ f.r.t. mises l'vne pour l'autres' At Lyon, Juan Caramuel complained in 1664 of the ways in which uncorrected and corrected sheets could be muddled, adding pepper to his remarks by including them under the heading `De correctione typographica." `The fowlest errours arc these which follow: and the worst of them are already corrected in the most Copies, assoone as the review came.' With these words a printer at the Hague in 1659 concluded an apology that also explained that not one of his compositors or correctors understood a word of English." In 1702, Pierre Bayle added to a list of errata in the first volume of his Dictionaire historique et critique a warning of the kind familiar to readers: `Notez que quelques-unes des fautes marquées dans cet Errata & ci-dessous ne se trouvent pas dans tous les exemplaires.' A few corrections were of fact or of style, but most were of literals. As we have noted, corrections could be made in the printing house by pasting small slips of paper over mistakes, or they could be erased by scratching out errors, and writing in the correct readingwith a pen. Both were commonplace, and all manner ofbooks were affected in this way. Notwithstanding the panoply of papal authority with which it was published in 1590, the Sixtine edition of the Vulgate, printed by the Vatican Press, proved to be riddled with printers' errors. Corrections were made by several means: by stamping in the correct words in the margins or other spaces, by pasting corrigenda on slips of paper over wrong words or letters, by manuscript crossing-through, by overwriting in manuscript and (in the Book of Numbers) by painting out a mistake in the running head. Surviving copies differ not just in their

A house of errors

mistakes, but also in the extent to which mistakes have been corrected." The Sixtine Bible, rapidly replaced by another two years later, is perhaps the most celebrated example of its kind, but the methods resorted to for correction were commonplace. The first Icelandic Bible, printed at Hólar in 1584, was not only published with a printed list of errata; in addition, further alterations were made in the text, marked in manuscript and with the corrections stamped in with type. 89 When lists of corrigenda were printed, they might appear in some copies but not in others; and when theywere printed to be pasted in it was inevitable that copies escaped without this further attention. Even lists of corrigenda provided opportunities for differences, some offering more corrections than those in other copies of the same edition. So long as proof-reading and consequent correction continued throughout a press-run, such variation between copies was inevitable, and the order of production meant that it could not be otherwise. As sheets were gathered up in a different order again, so the variation between copies of books was further increased. In his wonderfully informative amassing of pertinent quotations on all manner of topics concerning proof-reading and correction, and in attempting an explanation of why corrected and uncorrected sheets were bound up together, Simpson failed to grasp this principal issue in the practicalities of running the early modern printing house. Instead, he was distracted by the custom of awarding copies of finished sheets to those who had worked on them — a form of payment to the journeymen that was designed incidentally to discourage theft.90 Imperfect sheets did not get into circulation as a result of parsimoniousness on the part of the printer, who awarded the early, uncorrected, sheets for this purpose. Rather, they were put into circulation as an ordinary part of everyday production. In other words, variant copies were the norm. Despite all the efforts and all the complaints of printers and of authors, a culture ofvariously composed texts was inevitable, existing in a guise of accuracy and of consistency. It is important also to bear in mind that such changes at the press were not necessarily only those consequent on printers' errors. The pace of the printing process, as books made their way slowly through the press over periods of weeks, months or even years, implied also a different pace on the part of the author. Beatus Rhenanus, for example, substantially altered his text of Seneca while his edition was at the press, `on the spur of the moment, complaining at the same time that he did not like having to make such decisions under pressure.91 In his case, some of the editorial pressure was perhaps partly of his own making, for he may at this time even have been

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living in the house of his printer Johann Froben.92 But he was by no means unusual in being required to work at the pace dictated by the processes of printing once it was under way. Not surprisingly, practices that were so informal are not generally well documented. Corrections were made in the course ofwhat was physically the most demanding part of making a book as the pressmen sweated over their presses. The process was haphazard, intruding at irregular intervals into the time of people whose primary responsibility was the overall appearance of the sheet: its consistency of inking, unbroken type, correct placing of the sheet in relation to the forme, but not, necessarily, the textual accuracy of what they were printing. It required most unusual circumstances for a proper record to be kept, or to be discovered; and if changes at press were alluded to in lists of errata, the wording remained quite general. In one instance, however, we possess an unusually detailed account of this process, an attempt to reconcile the systematic order of proof correction with the randomness of gathering up the finished sheets ready for binding. During his lifetime, Michael Taylor (a notable calculator who had in 1780 also produced for the Board of Admiralty a Seximagesimal table) laboured to compile new seven-figure Tables of logarithms of all numbers from I to 101000. He died even as his work was going through the press, and the book was brought to publication in 1792 by Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal. Mathematical tables were notoriously difficult: tedious to set, awkward to proof-read, and requiring accuracy of the highest order. Taylor had established a procedure designed to meet these circumstances. With the help of an assistant, he read three or four sets of proofs, aiding his concentration by reading different parts against the manuscript in the first two proofs. He also compared the proofs with earlier sets of tables by Briggs, Vlacq and Gardiner. As a yet further test, he mentally checked some of the figures. `By this method, wrote Maskelyne, `and with this care, the 3d proof was generally rendered correct to the author's mind; if not another, and another were taken, till the press was found correct; and the sheet was then worked off.' Nonetheless, mistakes remained; and shortly before he died Taylor discovered some that he intended to correct in all copies of the impression, by erasing the errors and stamping in the correct figures with pieces of type. This was duly done, and (so that there should be a yet further check on the work) Maskelyne included a list of the amendments (fig. 35). In view of Taylor's method of proof-reading, it is not clear how these variations appeared. For not only were there mistakes (easily enough explained), but the mistakes only occurred in some copies. In other words, corrections and alterations must have been made at press. Maskelyne's

A house of errors

il

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Of the LOGARITHMIC TABLES, which. áH6ú only Put otthe Impreffion óf tho Shat, And har. bim oba'reeted by the P&te19= the Imprelron, enept arty may bave ercuped CmreRion through Inadvertence. LOGARITHMS ott NUMBERS. No. 3. C4a-9e in the 1.3n611m comf`.ed with n,a Pen. L 0 0 A R I T H M I C SINES, btc. A X 7r d

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Figure 35 One of the errata lists from Michael Taylor, Tables of logarithms (1792), recording variant readings in different numbers of impressions. Trinity College, Cambridge 5.11.50.

list is unusually enlightening not so much for what it tells us concerning the difficulties attendant on the compilation and printing of mathematical tables, as for the precise figures it provides for how many copies were affected by each correction or other alteration made at press. For once, a haphazard and unrecorded process was minutely set down, as a result of what appears to have been a complete examination of the entire stock of printed sheets. In all, Maskelyne recorded sixty-odd amendments in a quarto book of almost 500 pages. All that is missing in our knowledge of the scale of this task is the size of the edition. Most of the corrections concerned single digits. One affected `about half of the impression, and two about one-third. In other instances, Maskelyne was much more precise: `about 5 quires; `about 107 impressions; `about 25 impressions; or more precise still, as he mentioned figures of 47, 20, 18, 9, 3 or even 1. In half-a-dozen cases fewer than ten copies had been found to be erroneous, a figure that may itself suggest that the pressmen had been eager to start work before one last

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Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 proof-reading.93 It is not clear whether, as a result of all this, Maskelyne was able to ensure that some copies of the book were made up from sheets that had required no correction. It would have been surprising had he not done so. But, for our bibliographical purposes, his scrupulous record substantiates in an arithmetical way what is already well established as a textual principle. Caramuel, L'Angelier, Taylor and others all wrote at times when this remained everyday experience. Aldis Wright, editing a bookprinted long since, wrote at a time when most printing (but not, generally, the composition) had been mechanised, and stop-press correction was unusual. More importantly, the change in what was acceptable came not with the adoption of machine printing in the 1820s and 1830s, but some years before then. This subject, the date of a sea-change in attitudes to the accuracy of the printed word, and the ways in which this was linked to changes in production, will form part of the subject of the final chapters. The process of stop-press correction has been studied sufficiently to form a part of standard modern editorial procedure. But, quite apart from its mechanics and timing, there underlies it a subject that has attracted rather less consideration: the extent to which printers and authors were prepared to issue their work in a form that was never `final' in absolute terms. Stop-press correction is a process towards the issuing of a completed text — variant, certainly; but (since it does not automatically involve the destruction of uncorrected texts) it depends on a view of printed formes that are deemed at the time to be acceptably complete nonetheless. In this, it is not necessarily like other aspects of the compromise between author, printer and reader that constitutes the printed text. I now turn to these further issues. Each of them contributes to the variety among copies in an edition; but they are the fruits of a slightly different attitude to textual correctness. I allude to a number of linked phenomena: manuscript correction or addition; pasted-on amendments; erased words or characters; and stampedin amendments. To this we might add (in some circumstances) cancel leaves, though there is no need here to deal with these more than briefly.94 Cancel title-pages were a normal way of allocating copies among those responsible for paying for a book, with a minimum of attendant expense: the practice is not unknown in the trade today. In the international and multi-lingual trade, a paste-on cancel could provide wording in a different language, as was the case with the major atlases published in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: they were provided as appropriate to their market with Latin, Dutch, French, English, or German details to be pasted into the panels at the centre of the engraved title-pages. 95 So, too, cancel leaves or even whole gatherings provided an economical way

A house of errors

of amending texts. It has been remarked how frequently a cancel leaf may contain some quite trivial alteration;96 but in fact there were quite defensible reasons for this. If a word was misspelt, and felt to be offensive as a consequence, the printer had various options: to amend with a pen or, indeed, a piece of type, to print and paste in a cancel slip of paper, or to print a cancel leaf. Only the last of these would provide a repair that could be made invisible to the attentive reader. It is noticeable that this seems to have been the preferred method in the main printing houses in the eighteenth century, and that during this period there is a marked decline in the use of pen correction or of paste-on cancels. The reasons chosen for one method of correction over another are not generally understood. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the printed sheet as seen by the reader was liable to be the result of much more than the simple process of composition, imposition and presswork that forms the staple of all descriptions of printing, contemporary and retrospective. As has been repeatedly emphasised, its manufacture did not necessarily end with the completion of the press-run at the end of the day. Most obviously, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there might be rubrication or ornamental initials to be added (usually while sheets were still flat, before they had been folded for sewing and binding).97 But this part of the process did not inevitably entail any change to the printed text: merely addition to it, whether for ornament or for articulation. It did not imply alteration, consistent or not, to every copy; and many such additions seem customarily to have been made quite independently of the printing house. Indeed, they constitute some of the most reliable clues to the history of the marketing and dissemination of printed books. By contrast, textual alterations of the kinds that have just been mentioned, generally but not invariably executed in the printing house, must be deemed to be a part of what it was conceived that printing entailed. In this, there is a clear distinction to be drawn between printing, and the reproduction of texts, at least during the first three or four centuries of printing. When the missing lines were added in manuscript to copies of books printed by the first press in Paris,98 the scribe-correctors were following a habit, long ingrained in the correction of manuscripts, that had been carried over to printing. In 1615, the London printer Thomas Snodham omitted some of the text in a book he was printing. The fault was made good in the printing house by a combination of manuscript and print.99 In 1620, copies of a work by Andrew Melville, printed probably in the Netherlands, were supplied — again apparently in the printing house — with manuscript lists of errata.' 00 In the Low Countries, the work of the Brethren of the Common Life

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offers an instructive example of ways in which print was absorbed into the manuscript tradition. The order, founded in the fourteenth century, adopted as one of its principal purposes the reproduction of religious texts — theological, devotional and liturgical. Its manuscripts were produced on a scale that seems now difficult to recover, but was clearly large. The advent of printing provided an obvious aid to such a mission, and in about 1475 the Brethren established a press in Brussels.10' Production could be increased; more books could be produced more quickly and more cheaply. But, like manuscripts, they were subject to correction; and like manuscripts they required rubrication in order that the structure of arguments and the detail of long unbroken passages of prose could be more clearly signposted. The close connection between scribe and printer is well illustrated in their books and books in their milieu. For example, the copy of Jean Gerson's Opuscula (1475: thought to be the first book printed at the Brethren's new press) now in the Huntington Library contains a further two pages added in manuscript evidently before the book was rubricated and bound, up, supplementing what had been printed. Its layout is closely allied to the printed pages, and the style of the rubrication is identical. It was, most probably, written by a scribe in the same house.1 ' In the Brussels copy of Gregory the Great's Homiliae in Ezechielem, but not in all copies, words omitted by the compositor were added in manuscript, in a hand designed to match the typeface as closely as possible."' A similarly close connection between print, script and decoration is to be seen in another volume from the same press, a collection of five short works published together and now in Cambridge University Library. Here, not only have the texts been carefully corrected in pen, but this process was evidently done either before or at the same time that the book was rubricated. The evidence for the very close relationship, in this instance, of the various tasks necessary in finishing the production of a book lies in the facts that some of the manuscript marginal corrections have themselves been rubricated, and that several of the marks of deletion are in red — a feature quite unnecessary for the reading of the text.1 ' Our evidence for such printing-house responsibility lies within the books: not only in what we may observe, but also in the various addresses to readers by printers, stationers or authors, or in the colophons. Fundamentally and crucially, these further changes did not necessarily affect every copy of a press-run. In some instances, apologetic notes were frank: press alterations affected only some copies, and so errata were applicable in various degrees. On other occasions, the differences between copies were made less explicit. In both cases, the implication is clear: that the printed text was not merely liable to variation from copy to copy, or from sheet to sheet, but that it was

A house of errors

itself no more than a preliminary to further amendment, improvement or development after the edition had been run off. Moreover, not all copies would bear the same additional marks or other features of alteration. In this way, it was clearly the case that printing, the reproduction of copies, was acceptable as a range of variations.105 Some surviving copies of Pietro Bembo's short text De Aetna (Aldus Manutius, 1495) have been marked in pen with alterations to individual characters not just to change the words, but to change the alternatives available within the fount of type. But surviving copies bear different marks, some more densely than others."' Supervision of such work was rarely absolute, and in the several extents to which it was either sought, practised or exploited by the author something further may be perceived of the relationship between manuscript and print, and the evasive quality of texts. The variety in patterns of survival amongst copies of books corrected by their authors is reminder enough of differences in circumstance, and hence differences in buying and reading. Copies of Sir William Davenant's poem Gondibert (quarto, 1651) survive with varying numbers of manuscript corrections, apparently in Davenant's hand.10' In the case of Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, urne buriall (1658) a dozen copies survive bearing, again, varying numbers of amendments by Browne himself. In some there are over forty corrections, in one seventy-seven, in others fewer than twenty.10' This unsystematic labour, in which Browne used the printed errata lists only sometimes, was not the result of differences between states of the type. Rather, it suggests that Browne corrected at least those belonging to his friends, or that he gave away; and that in some cases he corrected perhaps even from memory. The affair of Religio medici, printed without Browne's permission in 1642, had made him acutely aware of the ways in which unauthorised copies could be circulated in manuscript. Eight manuscript copies are recorded of this earlier book.109 As he explained in his authorised edition a few months later, this `private exercise directed to my selfe' had been `by transcription successively corrupted untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the presse'. In other words, in these annotated printed texts of Hydriotaphia lie not just Browne's elusive meanings, but also a record of his past experience, and thereby his attitude to the two media. Neither manuscript nor print was the perfect servant. Although a few copies of some of his other books have been similarly corrected, none of these books seem to have been corrected on the scale of Hydriotaphia. Much might be left to the reader. But from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, printers have themselves resorted to the pen or the knife to amend what is printed. The reasons for this intervention, or supplement, are several, though two main strands may be observed.

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First, it maybe straightforward correction of what might, or should, have been discovered in proof-reading and correction. For the author, the printed text might appear to be no more than a part of the process of publication. Not every author in the sixteenth century treated printers with quite the same mixture of insouciance and disregard of manufacturing conventions as Antonio Doni, who was believed (rightly) to supply copy day by day. Was it true, he was asked, che voi ... mettere i vostri libri sotto le stampe senza hauergli composti, ma il primo giorno che cominciate a scriuere, quello istesso si comincia a stampare, ma maggior cosa intendo anchora, che senza rilegger i vostri primi schizzi di scritti, (non asciutto l'inchiostro dice) gli date via & non gli correggete con la penna, & non gli riuedete con la stampa.`0

What the compositor had set, the corrector had passed, and the pressmen had printed, remained still something subject to amendment, alteration, supplementation or correction. When in 1515 Juan de Ortega arranged to have printed in Rome an Italian edition of his work on arithmetic, a list of errata at the end enumerated the manuscript corrections made by Ortega himself in copies of his book — mostly to the numerals in his examples."' Second, it may reflect some difficulties in the printing house. When in 1580 Richard Day, son of the learned printer John Day, printed Peter Baro's De fide eiusque ortu, he added a note. The book, he explained, had been set from copy written by an amanuensis rather than the author himself. As a consequence, `Quod ad impressionem attinet, fefellit me saepius festinata Libelli descriptio, praecipue vero peccarunt infoelices Opificum manus': his workmen had contributed to the mistakes, but the greater difficulty lay in the hasty copying-out of the manuscript. Day was proud of his scholarly training (`qui ex Scholari factus est Typographus'), and had indeed been a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Accordingly, perhaps, such sloppiness offended him. In all of the copies of this book I have seen, he or one of his workmen marked errors bytwo small strokes ofthe pen just beside the words or characters concerned.112 In France, similar problems offended Descartes, who on receiving a copy of the first edition of his Meditationes (Paris: Michel Solt' 1641), noticed several mistakes which changed the sense of what he had written. `Il me semble qu'on les pourroit faire corriger a la main en toutes les feuilles, auant qu'elles soient assemblées, & j'aymerois mieux en payer les frais, he wrote to Mersenne, in an attempt to recover his text.113 Corrections of this kind in the printing house, or at least before binding, remained a common means of alteration with the utmost economy— cheaper

A house of errors

than printing a cancel leaf, as well as ensuring that the binder could not miss an instruction. The habits of thought that encouraged such an approach did not end with the seventeenth century. In 1770 David Hume was distressed to discover, in the recent quarto edition of his Essays, a minor but nonsensical misprint, `useful' for `usual'. He suggested to the printer William Strahan that the answer was simple: `A boy with his pen in half an hour coud go thro all the Copies.'114 But he could not catch the copies that had been already sold. In 1757 he had sought to arrest copies before publication, when he similarly

requested of Strahan that two errata (he described them as `material, since they contradicted his meaning) should be corrected by pen. On this occasion too he was unsuccessful in his attempt.'15 Authors and printers were both quick to point out each others' faults. Thomas Coryate, more verbose than most authors, from the wording of his title-page through the organisation of commendatory verses, the body of his Crudities, and finally to the errata, concluded his work in 1611 with the following: Although it be a custome in the Edition of bookes, to adde a Catalogue of the errors contained therein, to the end of the booke: yet I must tell thee (Courteous Reader) it grieueth me extremely to shut vp my booke with an Index of so many faults as I now present vmo thee, which it makes me in a manner blush for shame to behold. But impute it not I intreate thee to my ignorance: For I would haue thee thinke I haue that poore superficiall smattering in the Greeke and Latin tongues (which thou wilt perceiue if thou shalt happen to reade ouer my whole booke) that it was not for want of learning that some grosse faults haue passed, as authologine for anthologium, monarchie for monarchie, ratria for patria, imptoliis for impolitis; with many more of the like Linde, the very remembrance whereof doth in a manner afflict me. Howbeit I wish there were no faults but of this kinde. But many errors haue beene committed also both in false pointing, and in false figuring of the leaues, and sometimes in the omitting not only of points which are very necessary for the perfiting of the sense, but also of certaine wordes, which being out of the text doe not a little maime the sense. Most of which ascribe I pray thee (candid Reader) to the negligence of the Corrector, and not to myvnskilfiilnesse.116 Amidst all this prose, Coryate was concerned with many of the same issues as Hornschuch, wbether accuracy in the ancient languages, proper punctuation, or faulty page references (which would confound, and not simply mislead, the reader). The issue here is not just one of accuracy. It is also one of presentation, and emphasises again the extent to which the printed book, as presented to

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the reader, is a compromise. Moreover, the extent of that compromise may be disguised. The shortness of an errata list was not necessarily a guarantee of high standards in the setting of type. By its brevity it might even seek to conceal a greater number of inaccuracies. This equivocal quality was summed up in the long apologia by Samuel Jeake to the several hundred errata listed in his edition of his father's Aoyiß-rixrq Aoyia, or, Arithmetick surveighed and reviewed (London, 1696):

reader was required to remain a part of the physical — not just the mental — continuum between author, reader, interpretation and understanding. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, readers were requested by authors, stationers and printers alike to amend with the pen what had been set and printed in type. This was quite apart from the other unnoticed consequences of compromise in the printing house. Accordingly, statements such as the following require a somewhat longer timeframe than its authors seem, by their fifteenth-century context, to have intended:

I know no Reasons that can be assigned for suppressing the Errata: unless to impose on a Credulous Buyer, that the Impression needs no Correction; or that the Author (if found in an Error) may take Sanctuary under the Mistakes of the Press. But neither of these Motives, have any Prevalence with me; as being fully assured, that the Success would prove as contemptible as the Design: When by the Discovery of some Errata; the Reader would (as the natural Consequence of such an unjust Concealment) be tempted, to judge it unsafe to rely in any thing, either upon the Printer or the Author. I do therefore give this Advertisement; that though the distance of my habitation from London, permitted me not to correct the Sheets as they were printed off. Yet I have (before the Publication) carefully examined the whole Impression by the Original Manuscript left by my Father at his death. And have exactly noted all the deviations of the Press, that can possibly mislead the most unexperienced Tyro. So that I may perhaps incur the censure of being unnecessarily scrupulous; in that, together with the Errors which are more material: I have also inserted those that the meanest Genius will scarce think worth the trouble of noting with his Pen; as being only literal. Jeake listed alterations to be made not just to words, figures and punctuation, but also to diagrams, to spacing and to running heads. The likelihood of compositorial errors applied equally to all kinds of text. John Playford, specialist in publishing music, asked readers of Henry Lawes's Treasury of musick (1669) to note that the printer had missed out pages in his numbering; and `As for the other Errata's in the Musick (whereof all Books have some) they are so very few, small and inconsiderable, that I hope I shall need onely to crave the Judicious to mend with their Pen.'117 The place of the reader was thus critical not just in the sense that he or she brought understanding, and a context of experiences; but in that the reader was responsible for apart of the book's physical manufacture. Though familiar to incunabulists, this bibliographical point has tended to elude many authorities concerned with theories of reading, especially in much later periods, and it is an important one. Indeed, the common assumption that the process of printing was in some way brought to perfection in its first fifty or hundred years helps to obscure what remained true for centuries: that the

Under the influence of printing, reading became increasingly an activity of the passive reception of a textthatwas inherently clear and unambiguous. The perfection of printing techniques divested the reader of the last vestiges of his ancient role as textual clarifier and planted the seeds for modern book etiquette, which views the printed page as sacrosanct and consequently all handwritten additions to the printed 118 page as personal notes, detrimental to subsequent common use. The traditional distinction between author and reader is, in practice, blurred still further in that a distinction was often made between those errors considered important and those of too little consequence, or so easy to spot that further elucidation was unnecessary. In 1627, John Lichfield and William Turner printed at Oxford the third edition of Peter Heylyn's, Mixpoxoapos, a little description of thegreat world. The errata list concludes with an invitation: And these good Reader are the principall faults which at this time according to our Authours request in his Epistle to thee, we would desire thee to correct with thy penne. The rest being either of letters transposed, or letters mistaken, we would intreat thee gratiously to passe ouer. It was a select list (Madan records a paste-on cancel at this point, used in some copies"'). Heylyn had greatly expanded his book from its previous edition, and the printers had worked largely from manuscript. The faults included `prisoner' for `poisoner; `Monday & Thursday' for `Maundie thursday, `horse' for `house', `Scotland' for `Scowland, and a few that appear to be authorial changes rather than errant setting of copy. In making the selection, the printers appealed to readers' generosity and good sense. It was not feasible to list all the errata, and some selection had therefore to be made. Hence the invitation to the reader, in Heylyn as in so many other books printed both in Britain and on the continent, to amend further as he or she thought necessary. The printer (and the compositor, proof-reader, corrector and author) were not hereby absolving themselves of responsibility for a consistent or

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accurate text. Their position was a simple one: that they had done the best in the circumstances. Henry Billingsley concluded his apologia with words that were unusually explicit: And if you happen in reading to find any more faultes not here mentioned, as peraduenture you may, for that diuers faultes were vtterly so easie and lighte to correcte, that I would not note them, & besides that, no one man though he be neuer so diligent and circumspecte can espie all thinges, I trust you will therefore impute no blame either vnto me or to the Printer, but gently amend and correct them, accepting our good minde, which was to haue had the booke passed to your handes vtterly without fault, as touching the Printing.120 This express responsibility devolved on the reader, to contribute to the text by making his or her own choice of corrections and alterations, exposes more clearly than any other evidence the shortcomings oftheories of settled textual response. It is not simply that Greg's celebrated (and necessarily sometimes uncertain) distinction between substantive and accidental differences is no longer so widely accepted by editors.121 It is that the definition of a text in the early modern period depended on an understanding by both author and reader that, even within a single impression, texts were themselves liable to be mobile — modulated by the reader's own hand as well as by his or her brain. Well-established bibliographical implications for the history of reading should also now begin to become clearer, in a context that has to be drawn somewhat wider. Books do not just differ from edition to edition. Until the advent of fast machine presses, operating at a speed that made stop-press correction impractical, they were liable to difference, just in their printed form, between copy and copy; and they were, as a consequence, further liable to alteration at the hands of the discriminating and marking reader. However, the technological timetable, based on the traditional distinction between hand and machine press, is an approximate one, and is misleadingly absolute. The invitation to the reader to participate in the creative act; in the way advocated by the printers of Heylyn's book, is a feature of printed books only for a relatively short period. It depends less on technological change than on organisational change, and on assumptions and practices in the management of copy in the printing house. In the final chapters, I shall attempt to be more specific in determining how and why this change came about. In this way, we shall begin to discover not only a chronology of change, but also some of the most important links between historical bibliography and the wider history of reading.

A house of errors

Thomas Coryate has already been quoted. After explaining (at least to his own satisfaction) the mistakes in setting his book, he continued, and turned to the prospects for future improvement. A new edition would bring the opportunity to make good. Therefore if it will please thee to affoord that fauourable conniuence veto these kirde of errors that I doe earnestly craue of thee, I will ingage my selfe now by promise to giue thee this satisfaction for that which is past, euen to bestow that extraordinary care and industry in a most accurate and exactly true Edition of it the next time (if it shall happen to be reprinted before the beginning of my next trauels, a thing not altogether vnlikely) that I will be so bold to compare it for true orthographic and euery thing else that ought to perfit the sense of a booke, with any booke whatsoeuer that hath beene printed in London these twenty yeares. Thus in hope of obtayning pardon for these irrevocably past faults, I offer to thy gentle censure the errors themselues to be thus corrected."' In also raising the possibility of a new and revised edition, Coryate took an authorial view that was ostensibly dependent on publication by print, rather than by manuscript. Eisenstein makes much of this: that Erasmus or Bellarmine could contemplate issuing lists of errata, whereas Jerome could not.123 That is to oversimplify the position to the point of misunderstanding. In fact, the differences between the scribal world of Jerome and the mixture of scribal and printed texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not only concern whether or not revision was possible; they were also about the extent to which revisions could be shared rapidly and, equally, how mistakes could also be shared and dispersed with unwelcome speed. Both in general and in particular, manuscript and print were mutually complementary. Again, in other words, we find a more complicated change than one `from a sequence of corrupted copies to a sequence of improved editions'. 124 Nor was this an issue confined to the first two centuries or so after Gutenberg's invention. Like Erasmus, David Hume took advantage of the press to correct or alter successive editions of his work, and spoke appreciatively of it more than once as a means to improved accuracy. `This power, which. Printing gives us, of continually improving and correcting our Works in successive Editions, appears to me the Chief Advantage of that Art.' `It is one great advantage that results from the Art of printing, that an Author may correct his works, as long as he lives."" But this was a partial judgement. Hume did indeed demand proofs of each successive edition, and he squirmed to discover yet more mistakes when the final printed copies came into his hands. His answer, as we have seen, was to resort to pen corrections

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in just the way that had been employed since the fifteenth century. Authors could suffer in manuscript and in print indifferently, and many were eager to use either as a means of correcting both their own errors and those of their scribes. It has long been the convention to distinguish books bibliographically either as editions, issues, or states. For descriptive bibliography, these terms seem to be inescapable. Some ordering is necessary, and the title-page convention has an indomitable claim for this purpose, as the clearest point of departure. But it should be made plain that this cannot dictate the way in which we consider books from the point of view either of production, or of the reader. For this, bibliography can be a blunt instrument. To take just one simple example: the title-page, developed some years after the invention of printing and rare in earlier manuscripts, eventually became generally a trade document — to announce not just title or (perhaps) authorship, but also the names of those involved in the manufacture (printing; finance) and marketing (selling) of this particular book.126 Save as a herald, or prologue, it has nothing to do with the details of the internal construction of the text, and yet the needs and assumptions of printing have bestowed on it an authority that gives only partial access to the varieties of meanings of individual copies. In fact, the processes of printing and publication, especially from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, require more circumspection. Gaskell attempted a compromise by using the words `substantially the same setting of type' in speaking of editions.12' This raises a useful warning voice. It is much more helpful in its tone than the widespread use — if not the widespread understanding — of the related concept of `ideal copy, a term introduced by Fredson Bowers in 1947 and which is at best of inconsistent value in seeking to arrive at the multiple ways in which either author or printer thought of the reproduced word and image: An ideal copy is that form of the book which the printer or publisher wished to represent the most perfect and complete form to leave his shop. 128 `Ideal copy' has since been variously defined as `the most perfect copy of the work as originally completed by its printer and first put on sale by its publisher' or `the most perfect state of a work as originally intended by its printer or publisher following the completion of all intentional changes' 129 More recently, Greetham has chosen to follow this tradition: `that version intended by the printer for release after all determined corrections had been made, or `a state of the text that, while recognizing the physical differences in individual copies, attempts to describe a form of the book as intended for "publication" by the printer'. ~ 30 Tanselle, by moving away from the concept

A house of errors

of a single copy to one of `copy' as multiples, adapts the English language but reflects bibliographical variety more nearly: The standard or `ideal' copy... is a historical reconstruction of the form or forms of the copies of an impression or issue as they were released to the public by their producer. Such a reconstruction thus encompasses all states of an impression or issue, whether they result from design or accident; and it excludes alterations that occurred in individual copies after the time when those copies ceased to be under the control of the printer or publisher."' Nonetheless, it remains that, for all these various authorities, printers' or publishers' intentions are widely assumed to be at least theoretically finite in a textual, physical, sense, as well as in what we may call a conceptual one: that a printed text can be presented and found acceptable to the printer in one single finished form. Even Tanselle's careful words cannot embrace one of the fundamental points about early printed books: that they can remain physically uncompleted after they have left the printer's or publisher's control. Applications of absolute concepts to the mechanical, material and social reality, and the unavoidable need to choose, are logically untenable. For many printed books from the fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century, and on a lesser scale in other periods since then, such a concept is misleading. The frankness with which multiformity was presented to the world, and the verbal, typographical, illustrative, decorative and physical compromises and alternatives that constitute printed books as they were introduced to the reader, make it unrealistic to speak of printers' (let alone authors') `intentions' as anything other than heterogeneous compromises, deliberate or no, often resulting in a number of versions many of which had to be, for better or worse, equally acceptable. For most authors and printers, just as for the scribe and for the manuscript book, printing was a compromise. This was the root of Erasmus's complaint. Moreover, it was an essential part of that compromise that it was irresolute and fluctuating: not only that copies differed one from another as a matter of course, but that it was accepted that they should do so. The edition of Plautus published by Lazzaro de'Soardi at Venice in 1511 bears title-pages set either in roman or black letter. "' On the verso ofthe page in the black-letter version are two addresses, one of which is repeated later on in the book. The version in roman type, on the other hand, bears only one address, not repeated: it seems that the roman version is the later. But the sheets of the book, during the printing of which various minor changes were made to the placing of the many small woodcuts, by no means coincide in their variety with the two title-pages by which the distinction may be most readily identified in a

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bibliography. Instead, and as might be expected in the context of the printing house, where sheets are mixed as a normal practice, and alterations are made irrespective of other parts of the book, the pattern of coincidence is random. It is in this bibliographical quality of randomness, within a defined bibliographical environment, that we must seek to understand and locate authors' meanings. At the end of the seventeenth century, few authors had spent more time poring over the history of scholarship and of its publication than Pierre Bayle. The first edition of his Dictionaire historique et critique, published by Reinier Leers at Rotterdam, appeared in 1697, and the second in 1702. With a careful eye to the cosmopolitan market, issued by one of the largest of all the international booksellers of his generation, and placed in the midst of the competing linguistic interests of Latin, French, Dutch and English, Bayle offered `un receuil des fautes qui ont été faites, tant par ceux qui ont fait des Dictionnaires, que par d'autres écrivains'. 133 Printers were amongst his targets. With the experience of editing the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres between 1684 and 1687, as well as fortified by his extensive reading, he came to the list of errata in his own present work with a world-weariness that transcended the occasional fury of the wronged author: On attend de l'équité du lecteur qu'il excusera les autres fautes qu'il pourra trouver semblables à celles-ci, &l'on veut esperer qu'elles ne feront pas la peine à ceux qui auront quelque attention, & qui savent du moins en gros ce que c'est qu'imprimerie, & que correction d'épreuves. Quand on sait cela on decouvre plus aisément les causes & les remedes de plusieurs fautes de livre. 134

The following chapter develops this further, but under different heads, and explores how, in such an environment, it is possible further to determine what authors, printers or readers understand by imperfection.

Perfect and imperfect

The renaissance and early modern printed book is not an article of manufacture, in the sense that it has been made by machine. At each stage of its making, its appearance is the creation of individual craftsmen, working on copies one at a time. In their work and in each individual copy we may see their achievements, and their failures; their standards, their lapses of attention and their ingenuity. To examine an early printed book is to seek to understand not only how it was made, and why it looks as it does, but also to seek to understand the people who made, used and read this particular copy, in this particular edition and on this or that particular occasion. We may call books artefacts; but in so doing we should also remind ourselves of the humanity of their making, and be careful to distinguish how their artefactual nature is the creation of a group of individuals not all of whom will have known each other. The myriad notes inserted by printers in their books apologising for shortcomings, explaining difficulties in production, or seeking to enlighten the reader on difficulties with authors, are some reminder of such humanity. However, these printed notes, more or less informal addresses quite separate from the copy as first delivered up to the compositor, decline in frequency in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century are noticeably unusual. There seems to have been a distinct change of culture in this matter from the mid-eighteenth century. It is worth enquirywhyprinters in the nineteenth century and more recently have been less forthcoming in their books than their predecessors on the circumstances of their work. Perhaps such explicit intrusions on the part of manufacturers had become less acceptable; the growth in size of printing firms rendered them more impersonal; the printing trade had lost something of its sense of identity. Reasons were no doubt numerous, but each offers its comment on the trade as a whole, not just on individuals. I shall return to this question in the following chapter. On the other hand, the manifold complaints, excuses and explanations that are a feature of earlier books serve also as a reminder of later periods: that books are made by people subject to illness, geography, weather and a host of other influences, many of them beyond their control. Some authors,

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such as John Taylor the water poet,' made almost a virtue of faults — his own as well as the printers': Faults, but not faults escap d, I would they were, If they were faults escap'd, they were not here: But heere they are, in many a page and line, Men may perceiue the Printers faults, or mine. And since my faults are heere in prison fast, And on record (in print) are like to last, Since the Correcters let them passe the Presse, And my occasions mix'd with sicknesses, And that foure Printers dwelling farre asunder, Did print this booke, pray make the faults no wonder.2 Others were more genuinely (or, at any rate, less light-heartedly) apologetic. John Minsheu seems almost contrite at having been in the country when his book was in the press: Yet do I ... submit my selfe and doings, to the iudgement of the discreete, learned, and wise, that whatsoeuer is amisse, being aduertised thereof, I promise to labour with my best endeuours to correct and amende: for no doubt many thi ngs may escape in printing, and much the more, for that I was in the countreyvpon necessitie, when the Dictionarie was at the presse, and there remained till it was all done.3 John Crandon, of Fawley, in Hampshire, was ill when his attack on Richard Baxter was printed in 1654, and so the printer was obliged to insert a long list of errata, with the familiar appeal that the reader correct the text with his pen. Many others were simply distant, and so could not attend to proofs as they were available. On other occasions it was the printer, rather than the author, who faced difficulties. William Jaggard was blind at least by 1613, when Thomas Milles's Treasurie of auncient and moderne times was passing through his printing house.4 In the 1670s, the nonconformist minister Joseph Hill's printer was called off from his work in Middelburg to be a soldier, leaving Hill's work unprinted.s The difference between larger and smaller printing houses could be important. laggard, a master printer, could take little part in production, whereas it seems that Hill's printer was his own journeyman. Often the master printer was also the proof-reader. In Sir John Pettus's Volatiles from the history of Adam and Eve (1674) we catch a glimpse of an editorial hand as well as a corrective one. It was explained that the printer had been ill, resulting in `want of Orthography, Comma's, Conjunctions, Parenthesis, expunging of needless Adverbs, mistakes of Singulars for Plurals; which

Perfect and imperfect

maybe amended by the Ingenuity of the Reader upon the intended sense of the Sentence'. The implications in this period of such a comment on changes to an author's text as delivered deserves further and better investigation. However, for the reader, many of these were commonplaces. In most kinds of books, authors and printers alike distinguished between mistakes that affected the text, and those that good sense would rectify. John Cotta, a successful doctor in Northamptonshire, summed up a widely shared position in 1624: Of those errours which common sense and euery vulgar scholership may easily and tacitlyvnto it selfe in reading rectifie, he he [sic: i.e. the author] doth ease the Reader in this place, namely, of slight false orthographies, of some senselesse discontinuations, of requisite continuations of some syllables, words, lines, and sentencies, the legges and feete of some verses out of Poets cited beyond their due measure, fine and length extended within the prose, the dislocating of some commaes, prickes, and full points. Those errours only which doe more materially exact their reformation (for that they doe manifestly hood-winke the sense, and ouer-cloude the cleerer sight and vnderstanding) he hath hither summoned.' It was a judicious approach, to be expected of the author of a book that condemned some of the more foolish beliefs concerning witches. The preface to An historical collection of the most memorable accidents, printed by Thomas Creede in 1598, put it more succinctly: `Few booker goes [sic] cleare without an Erata: yet thus much I dare presume, that to my knowledge, no fault heerein committed, hath either spoyled the sence, or mangled the Storie.' No less materially, lists of errata were incomplete even in what might be considered substantive matters — imprecise as that term is. In 1620, Sir Adam Newton saw published his Latin translation of Pietro Sarpi's history of the Council of Trent, written originally in Italian and a standard work on the subject for its generation. It was printed in London (`Augustae Trinobantum') by John Bill, the King's Printer. Newton's own copy is in Trinity College, Cambridge, and bears various amendments in manuscript. The list of `Operarum incuria commissa vel omissa' at the end is easily the most heavily annotated part of the book (fig. 36). The printed list itself contained mistakes, while the manuscript additions provide details of text omitted and of words spelled wrongly and having different meanings. The original list of errata was not unusual in its laxity. Such printed summaries were most often compiled in some haste; they could not take systematic account of stop-press corrections, and thus they could not be compiled on the basis of a properly consistent survey; and, for the printer, they came at the tail-end of a job that might have taken months or even years. In suggesting

141

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

142

Perfect and imperfect

I hope the Printers Errata are not many, and I am discouraged from gathering them, because I see men had rather err themselves, and calumniate the Author, than take notice of them.8

Operarum incuria commiffa vel omiffa. mniExt>? comme un riche Préfent du Ciel ezreuoure (A). En effet, cettemerveilleufc &incomparabie &Liliit;;° t Invention peut très bien difputer de Prix avec toutes les autres, tant anciennes que modernes (a). & fa grande Utilité a été aulT heureuièmcni qu'ingénieufement exprimée dans ce fcul Vers Latin, Is>Y r+) Cgt n g,t.++ nersnx pdpys,mme ,oubam la auwan. t1m RYPnamlt4 o,m mNóm mmWm Vemum [nvcm,a mrxe C 71è poredd ~- /A yrg7,w.r podM piwgndlxl ScUentliillmta,os, Wrnkioccm pg, po. Er tep{a d,r+wpr t.jd db di, rdn

C—dm CM es ro Merv, do,r(ri Amura, ili. rfra ór. Sfti sros lem mmmnm . ,atem qua inyesn4 Aaem, i+

K^ a Iralltb emi4 plat memwauda Y,da t

Q~

1e célébre Henrí P.ticnne, par ces baux Vere qui forte e, T tnePenfé~e~uí s'e~a núur~l úe~nt prÉrcnl le Cornmeneem"tdefo-Mis?}pogropblraQrurimada tduIl d l'Erpdt de dryers de rcafort Panígtriacs. Maia, perdr illldersra 9,úburdum Tyfsgrsp4á, propor q~ n, Cbnfodacnc uteparntü'avoirplusilégammc,tccxpti,aéc quu W19, mamlul cPbìfare tgdtretcatingúúcux Scknrat. Ala

Figure 43 Prosper Marchand, Histoire de l'origine et des premiers progrès de l'imprimerie (The Hague, 1740), with a headpiece by J. V. Schley depicting typefounding and printing presided over by Minerva. Cambridge University Library.

their thoughts with a minimum of care and expense. Like Marchand, Fournier also remarked on the comparative speed of the process when compared with a scribe at a manuscript, alluding to a manuscript of Gratian of which it would, by his calculation, have taken three men 1,750 years to produce 3,000 copies. Most tellingly, by way of an epigraph at the front of a work designed to bring technology into the study, he included a verse that in its way looked back to the values of the fifteenth century:

At one level, this change in perspective is most obviously to be found in a remarkable succession of books that were published between about 1770 and 1785. Some of them, such as Edward Rowe Mores's Dissertation upon English typographical founders and founderies (1778),30 were the products of scholarly eccentricity. Others stemmed more directly from within the trade. Others still were originally literary in their impetus. They share the common feature of looking backwards in one way or another in order to comprehend the present, and to look forward into how matters might be ordered in the future. Mores's privately printed work achieved only a limited circulation even after the stock had been bought by John Nichols. It was reviewed in the Gentleman's Magazine by Nichols, and also in the Monthly Review; 31 but even Mores was aware that his subject required an apology. It seems that he never enjoyed more than a coterie readership. On the other hand, in

Nichols's Biographical and literary anecdotes of William Bowyer (1782) the British public found a book to which it could warm more readily.32 With its copious array of footnotes, this work of pious record by Nichols concerning his old master was simultaneously massively self-indulgent and massively informative. Although, like Mores, it was published privately, it rapidly found its way into libraries across the country — partly, no doubt, on account of its profusion of personal anecdote. Nichols was considered the `most learned Printer of the present day 33 and, like Bowyer before him, saw the world of literature as inseparable from the world that made the circulation of literature possible. Typefounding, stereotyping and publishing were deployed through his pages in a social and technical web of human record. Others, too, were prepared to look backwards rather than forward. One reviewer of The origin of printing in 1774 spoke of William Bowyer as `one of our learned printers; a race of men whom we have observed, with concern, to be almost extinct in Europe, or, at least, in our own country'. The same phrasing was taken up in the review of the book in the Journal des Sfavans, preserving the captious remark on England.34 The process of re-evaluation and of the accompanying changes in practice was a gradual one; but it came about within a definable period, between the mid-1760s and about 1790. It was the outcome of no single issue, but of a mixture. To some extent, it was a result of a commercial revolution, an increasing awareness that skills had a marketable value which could be

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Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

exploited at the expense of the customer. In this, new attitudes to print and to books were a part of the changes in consumer behaviour and in supply whose origins are recognizable at different periods according to different kinds of goods. In the late eighteenth century, reading both for pleasure and for instruction was transformed by the great increase in magazine publication, and in small-format reprints of established authors, but this was only the latest turn in changes oftaste led by the book trades. Their influence is equally clear, if for less of the population as a whole, in the vogue for pompous illustrated books in the late seventeenth century, a century earlier." To know how an article was made was to be able to judge its quality. This widespread attitude was summed up by the reviewer of Robert Dossie's Handmaid to the arts in the Monthly Review in 1758. While artists remain satisfied with reasonable gains, it will ever be cheaper for the consumer to purchase the commodities he wants, than to attempt the manufacturing them for his own use. But yet it is proper for the Public to have a remedy in their hands, against arbitrary combinations to raise exorbitant prices or profits; that thus a due balance may be maintained between the manufacturer and the consumer." The volume of Dossie's work under consideration was dominated by a discussion of the processes ofintaglio printing, but it also dwelt on glass-making and on ceramics. The point was applicable to all. To generalise on the basis of a single review would be foolhardy, yet it is notable that these remarks were made in a generation that was responding to the possibilities of manufacture in new ways. Most directly, the establishment of private presses was the preserve not just of wealthy amateurs such as Horace Walpole in England or Capronnier de Gauffecourt in Switzerland.37 Francis Blomefield, a country clergyman, printed his own county's history at his press in Norfolk. William Davy, in Devon, printed his own sermons, and then added alteration after alteration by means of ever more elaborate extra slips of paper.38 Others turned their creative talents to pictures. The craze for collecting prints (discussed further below) was accompanied by an increasing number of amateur etchers and engravers, who made and printed their plates more for private enjoyment than for gain but who, by giving their time to such a pursuit, inevitably grasped something of both the skills and the long production timetables of professional craftsmen.39 As usual, the issues were international, though the applications and the details often followed national or other local preoccupations. The international search for technological improvements, including extra speed, in type design and manufacture and in type-setting, was given fresh impetus by the European interest attracted through Pierre-Simon Fournier's Manuel

The art of printing typographique, ofwhich two offour projected volumes appeared in 1764-6.40 Unlike most books on technical subjects, Fournier's work found its way not just into printing houses and the workshops of typefounders. La théorie d'un Art si utile ne devroit être ignorée d'aucun de ceux à qui l'usage des livres est familier: il seroit à souhaiter que tout homme de lettres fût en état de juger sainement de la méchanique des ses productions; parlà les Artistes qui s'en occupent, se trouveroient obligés de le respecter assez pour ne le point avilir par des fruits trops communs de leur ignorance & de leur mauvais goût. 41

His book was intended to be as useful to the author as to the printer, a means of consolidating the relationship between the manuscript and the printed page. As the provenances and bindings of some surviving copies demonstrate, it successfully penetrated gentlemen's and other private libraries, to be studied (or at least owned) for the sake of its direct application to the appearance of the printed page. Mechanical, artistic and literary creativity were to be made to work together. Alongside a small group of specimens from typefounders and printers, and evident also in the Fournier specimen of 1742,42 the Manuel's combination of historical and current technological detail characterised the range of thought in printing matters over the next decades among printers and the reading public alike. Similar concerns were voiced to greater or less extent even by founders who made less play of the links between manufacture, literary creativity and reading. Novelty and ingenuity in manufacture had always to be formulated and presented with the users, printers and readers alike, as the arbiters. The French typefounder Joseph Gill& was heavily influenced by Fournier, and in 1773 he emphasised the new technical achievement of his own type, based on punches cut to an extra depth — thus (he claimed) leading to a longer working life for the type before it became too worn for use.13 Gillé was by no means the only founder to claim such qualities, and printers clearly expected hard-wearing type — well cast and of a hard metal. From Lyon to Brussels, typefounders' claims spoke in chorus. At Brussels, J. E Rosart boasted in his specimen of 1768, `Je n'exalterai pas ici la dureté de la matiere que je donne à mes Caracteres, ni la profondeur de mes Poinçons, ainsi que font quelques Fondeurs charlatans qui font valoir peu de chose."' At Lyon, Louis Vernange introduced the work ofhis foundrywith the words, `On peut juger, par ceux je présente, si mes caractères ont cette netteté. Je me suis attaché surtout à les rendre creux, afin qu'ils pussent exécuter plusieurs éditions avec tout l'agrément des caractères neufs."' Innovation and invention were key issues. Gillé, again, commented, `Quoique l'Art de l'Imprimerie semble être

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Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

parvenu aujourd'hui au dernier degré de perfection, it est encore possible de l'embellir & de l'enricher de quelques nouvelles découvertes.'46 Type designs were promoted on the basis (not invariably justified: there was much copying and imitation) of their being new designs. Working also in Paris, in a slightly different vein but likewise looking for gains in time (and therefore, increasingly, of money), François Barletti put forward a scheme in 1776 for the casting of large numbers of ligatured sorts, designed to reduce the numbers of movements required of the compositor and of mistakes to be discovered by proof-readers.47 By this means, he calculated that the processes of composition and of redistribution of type could be reduced by almost half. Though this proposal never seems to have been widely adopted in France, a similar idea was to be taken up by Henry Johnson in England a few years later, and is discussed below. Much of the change in the decoration of books had been accomplished over the past thirty years, conventionally enough using engraved plates. But now it was demonstrated how time might be saved by printing such decorations by letterpress, simultaneously with the text, and how the appearance of books could be improved by not mixing two kinds of printing — letterpress and engraved — on a single page. These were not only of woodcuts. Casts, or `dabs, of woodcuts had been known since the sixteenth century, and seem to have come increasingly into use in the eighteenth, so adding to the repertory of decoration or illustration available to individual printers .48 More ingeniously, Louis Luce, Graveur du Roi, published an Essai d'une nouvelle typographie for the Imprimerie Royale (1771), showing how large ornaments might be built up from casts of separate elements. He was concerned with issues both of efficiency and of taste, even though in the latter his designs were conservative in accordance with the requirements of his particular office. 49 New ideas in music printing by J. G. I. Breitkopf, Fournier, Nicolas Gando and Henric Fougt,50 and in map printing by Breitkopf and by Wilhelm Haas,51 addressed further typographical questions and applications. The limitations of the wooden common press, unchanged in most of its principles since the fifteenth century, were increasingly obvious to a world intent not just on novelty, but on the need to increase production and, if possible, to produce assured higher quality of work. Baskerville had given thought to the latter in the 1750s and 1760s. During the 1770s in Basel, Haas developed an iron press with a platen approximately half as big again as that of the common press. At Paris, experiments with large platens were conducted by the Didots, by Anisson-Duperron, Director of the Imprimerie Royale, and by Philippe-Denis Pierres.52 Further experiments again were conducted in

The art of printing

America. None of these various attempts was fully successful, but they were all in search of a common goal: faster, and better, printing to meet increased demand from an audience among whom were many whose critical eye was ever more informed. In colour printing, Jacob Christoph Le Blon's Art d'imprimer les tableaux, published at Paris in 1756 and dedicated to Robert Walpole, demonstrated for the first time the use of three-tone colour separation. The experimental work by Cornelis Ploos van Amstel, mainly in the reproduction of drawings and paintings, fell between 1760 and 1787 (he died in 1798). Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty (1716-85) was the most successful of several who concentrated much of their effort on the printing of anatomical illustration.53 At Leiden, J. J. Bylaert published in 1772 yet another new method of printing engravings with colour.54 In the same year, Benjamin Martin published his Typographia naturalis, an eight-page pamphlet putting forward a kind of nature printing — a concept already explored by J. H. Kniphof and Christian Gottlieb Ludwig in Germany55 that was to be developed and exploited eighty years later. At Paris the following year, François Stapart proposed a new method of engraving `plus prompte qu'aucune de celles qui sont en usage'. 56 Engraved and other intaglio prints have always attracted experiment, but this generation is noticeable for the way in which new techniques and ideas were published, rather than just kept in the studio. The mid-century craze for prints of all kinds, that was to last for long afterwards, was reflected in increasing numbers of technical manuals and of handbooks for connoisseurs. The old accounts of intaglio printing by Abraham Bosse (1645) and William Faithorne (1662), familiar to almost a century of readers, were revised, absorbed into later work, and eventually displaced .5' For wood-engraving, Jean-Michel Papillon drew on the practical experience of a lifetime to compile his lovingly detailed TraW historique et pratique de la gravure en Bois (Paris, 1766), though he was easily criticised for his historical ineptitude. In England, Dossie's Handmaid to the arts (1758; 2nd edn 1764), mentioned above, made accessible to a general public for the first time many of the basic details of engraving and of etching, and of their printing. A new edition of Evelyn's Sculptura was published in 1755 but, as a kind of barometer of changing taste, it sold slowly.58 The rather fuller Sculptura-historico-technica, designed for the collector, reached a fourth edition in 1770. Even so, George Edwards, who published his Natural history of uncommon birds in 1743-51, complained that he could find little or nothing on etching and engraving copper plates that was written by his countrymen, and that even amongst foreign authors there seemed little by anyone with practical knowledge. Partly in order to remedy this, he published an

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account of his own methods and discoveries `in as short and plain terms as I can, for the benefit of many curious young gentlemen who are my friends and acquaintance: Well aware that many professionals were much more skilled than himself, he also alluded to the issue that influenced all technical publication: the wish to keep secret.59 In the professional world, livelihoods were to be protected, and not to be compromised by shared knowledge. The changes of the mid and late eighteenth century were in attitude as well as in discovery, partly as a result of a rapprochement, incomplete and often mutually suspicious though it was, between professional and amateur. Speaking more directly to connoisseurs, in 1751 the French engraver Robert Hecquet published his influential Catalogue des estampes grav&s d'après Rubens, adding a brief technical explanation as well as words of warning lest collectors choose inferior examples of the prints.60 Gersaint's catalogue of Rembrandt's work, the foundation of subsequent scholarship, appeared in the same year, and was translated into English in 1752.61 In connoisseurship and in collecting, the mood was for new guidance. Horace Walpole's Catalogue of engravers (1762; 2nd edn 1765) derived from his own passion as a collector. William Gilpin's much-republished and revised Essay on prints first appeared in 1768; and at Cambridge there was issued in 1770 a handy list, A chronological series of engravers from the invention of the art to the beginning of the present century. By that date collectors and antiquaries were supplied with a new generation of reference books, and the means of understanding something of how prints were made. Useful as Gilpin, Walpole and the Chronological series were, none commanded the international authority of Baron von Heinecken's Idée générale d'une collection complette d'estampes, published at Leipzig and Vienna in 1771. Just as many others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had sought to impose order on printed knowledge in books, by setting out classification schemes for libraries, so Heinecken offered the fullest so far attempted for the very different questions posed by students and collectors of prints and their makers — emphasising national schools, with subject-matter only as a second consideration. Heinecken based his work on the royal collection at Dresden, where he held the position of keeper of prints.62 His subsequent, and much larger, dictionary of engravers was halted with letter D at the fourth volume in 1790, shortly before his death in 1791. Instead, the most familiar comprehensive dictionary for such work became the shorter one by Joseph Strutt, published in 1785-6 and in use for a century and more. Meanwhile, and by no means only for the wealthiest amateurs, there were other works on the subject by Johann Filssli in Zürich and Giovanni Gandellini in Siena, both published in 1771, and by Carl Ludwig Junker

The art of printing

at Berne in 1776. For the next generation, Adam von Bartsch's productive and influential career as an authority began in 1795, with studies of Anton Waterloo, Lucas van Leyden and Guido Reni. As no printer or bookseller could fail to realise, and as many readers also came to recognise, some of the most difficult questions of all related to paper, the support on which virtually all printing depended. It was costly and it was of variable quality; and it was increasingly difficult to obtain the rag for raw materials. The most celebrated and important outcome of the mid-century interest was the development of wove paper by the elder James Whatman, whose invention was used by John Baskerville for his edition of Virgil (1757). However, it is noticeable that, welcomed as it was by a few, wove paper was not in immediate demand. It was not until the 1780s that the Whatmans' production of it began on a large scale.63 Current research suggests that similar paper was manufactured overseas only from the 1780s in France, and from the 1790s in Italy and Germany.64 For thirty years and more, wove paper, or papier Min, commanded little real interest or understanding either amongst stationers or readers. Indeed, even amidst an established bibliophile market in the 1790s, the emphasis was on hot-pressing — that is, the most obvious surface quality visible to the reader — rather than on earlier stages of manufacture. Other people approached paper from a historical or antiquarian perspective. In England, John Bagford and Humfrey Wanley had both dabbled unsystematically in the history of watermarks at the end of the seventeenth century65 Sixty and more years later, the Dutch antiquary and book collector Gerard Meerman organised a competition to discover the date of the origin of rag paper. 66 For all readers, rather than just the few, the real issues in papermaking lay in the discovery and development of raw materials to meet a growing demand from the printing industry. From the mid-century onwards — and with mounting urgency as curiosity was fed by need — wood, straw, nettles and other vegetable matter were subjects of experiment and of competition, in a search for a material that was plentiful, cheap and reliable. 67 Alongside such manufacturing preoccupations, it is appropriate to set the fast-developing interest among book collectors in the earliest printing. In 1740, book collectors and printers celebrated the jubilee of the invention of printing, as Mallinkrodt and others had a century earlier in what became a conventional anniversary.68 Prosper Marchand wrote his Histoire des origines et des premiers progrès de l'imprimerie (The Hague, 1740) specially for the occasion, and was annoyed when his printer missed the deadline for the best-timed book fair. It was only one of dozens of publications that appeared

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across Europe, from Sweden to Italy and most of all in Germany, marking the jubilee of 1740. Though the anniversary had been observed in 1640, most enduringly in Mallinkrodt's book, the year 1740 provoked an unprecedented efflorescence of books, pamphlets and ephemera either about the history of printing in general, or celebrating particular towns, or concerning Haarlem's rival claims to the invention. It provided an opportunity not only to rehearse the history of the spread of printing across western Europe, to laud local achievements and promote local legend. For those so minded, it also brought the chance publicly to re-examine standards of production, to compare past books with those of the present (often, in writers' eyes, to the benefit of the latter), and to consider such matters as the education of printers and the expectations of the reading public. Most of what appeared was historical, quasi-historical, or little more than laudatory.69 One exception was published at Leipzig. Christian Friedrich Gessner's Die so nöthig als nützliche Buchdrucker-Kunst and Schriftgiesserei, published in four volumes in 1740-5, set out not only the history of the subject, but also much of its modern practice. Amongst a wealth of other information on all kinds of printed matter, Gessner provided accounts of typefounding, the names and sizes of types, composition, the press, press correction and the work of the corrector. A series of illustrations offered technical detail as well as more general views. What was offered as a contribution to the jubilee had, in fact, a much wider and more lasting frame of reference intended for a larger reading public. Within the next five decades, a combination of book collectors and other scholars transformed understanding of early printing, and in doing so drew attention to modern standards and practices as a focus for comparison. By no means everything that was published has stood the test of time, and some of it was more enthusiastic than constructive. But the tendency was unmistakable, and it had its due effect on wider public consciousness. In bibliophile circles, Gerard Meerman in the Hague, engrossed with the Coster legend, brought wide familiarity with early books, and the enthusiasm of a collector, to bear on what he regarded as some of the most intractable questions of all concerning the beginning of printing in the west.70 The work of Jacob Visser on fifteenth-century Dutch printing, published in 1767 and following in the footsteps of Meerman, not only helped to lay firmer foundations for the modern study of this subject, but also, in its notes of locations of individual copies, made clear the importance of private collectors.71 At Amsterdam, a long purse enabled the wealthy Italian merchant Pietro Antonio Crevenna to gather a collection that, when sold at the end of the 1780s, constituted a supplement in its own right to the existing bibliographies of early printing. 72

The art of printing

185

Maittaire's work on the history of printing, published in the Netherlands and in London over the period 1719-41,73 was two generations old, and in need of correction and supplement. Michael Denis, in charge of of the imperial library at Vienna, supplied both .7' Amidst a Europe-wide flurry of work on the history of local printing, Denis's on Vienna culminated in a volume of over 700 pages just on the period from 1482 to 1560;75 Girolamo Baruffaldi published his history of printing in fifteenth-century Ferrara at Florence in 1777; and the young Joseph van Praet, still in his mid-twenties, identified Colard Mansion's influence on Caxton.76 For England, Joseph Ames's old Typographical antiquities, published originally in 1749, was revised by the book collector and antiquary, orientalist and bookseller William Herbert in 1785-90. Much more suggestively and originally, G. E Magné de Marolles, author of a serviceable work on shooting for sport, published in 1782 at Liege an unassuming pamphlet on some of the critical elements of the printed book: Recherches sur l'origine et le premier usage des registres, des signatures, des réclames, et des chiffres de pages dans les livres imprimés. In it, he appealed to bibliographers not just of fifteenth-century printed books, but of all rare books, to note both the conventional bibliographical details and also typeface, number of columns, number of lines to a page, and the presence or absence of page numbers, signatures etc. In many ways he was ahead of his time, and his work enjoyed only limited success. 77 Amidst more general questions of printing history, that of the Bible aroused most attention. The fresh energy that characterised its textual study in the eighteenth century flowed from a new attention to the manuscript tradition. Mill and Bentley in England, and J. D. Michaelis in Germany, each alert to palaeographical and codicological questions, had their indirect effect on collecting. For the printed tradition, it was a logical step to the history of printing and publishing.7' The Bible's bibliography and text attracted the young Georg Wolfgang Panzer in Nuremberg, 79 but the most formative work lay in the revision of Jacob Le Long's Bibliotheca sacra. Originally published at Paris in two octavo volumes in 1709, when this book appeared in a revised version at Halle between 1778 and 1785 it had swelled under the care of its revisers C. E Boerner and Andreas Gottlieb Masch to four volumes in quarto. In this form, it became the key work on its subject, and remained so until the twentieth century. Johann Nast's work on the earliest Bibles in Mainz, Strasburg and Augsburg (Stuttgart, 1767) and that of J. M. Goeze on the printed Bible in Lower Saxony (Halle, 1775)80 offered more particular studies. The list of books in the last few pages is a long one. The frequency with which authors returned to the subject of printing and its means is a

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Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

convenient, if acutely limited, measure of public interest as well as private enthusiasm. It encompassed not just book printing, but also music, images and other technical matters. By no means all of this work proved of enduring value. However, as a manifestation of public awareness its tenor is unmistakable. Whether technological or commercial, visual or historical, textual or religious, these various re-examinations of existing practice and knowledge shared one thing in common: they all sought to understand further the nature of printing and of the book. Both in the focussed taste of bibliophily, and in the author and reader negotiating their ways through the manufacture and publication of new books, there was a clear, and often conscious, change of pace and of practice in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was not just a revolution in reading, a Leserevolution,8' involving changes in reading practice. It affected attitudes to every aspect of the making of books as well.

1 %

7

Re-evaluation: towards the modern book

In Britain, the preliminary — and prolonged — arguments concerning the book trade, and then the decision of Donaldson v. Becket in 1774 concerning the length and ownership of copyright, unsettled the worlds of authors and of booksellers both commercially and textually.' The ending of perpetual copyright was itself destabilising. Furthermore, questions respecting copyright, and therefore the relationship between authors and their work, drew attention to the instability of texts in a different way: that they were always subject to revision. With the death of perpetual copyright, booksellers were forced to look to a changed fixture, one in which former assumptions would no longer obtain: of continuing profits from authors long dead, at no authorial charge. What, too, of living authors? Here, authors and booksellers alike found themselves disquieted. William Kenrick, LLD, hack writer and selfproclaimed discoverer of perpetual motion, was one of several, in a flurry of pamphlet literature during 1774-5, who believed that some further legislation was necessary: for him, it was `so that both writers and booksellers may know how far they are authorized to abridge, copy or make quotations from the works of their predecessors; without which they cannot safely exercise their calling'.2 Quite independently of legislative issues, we may point to means of increasing capital in the book trade. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the evidence of authors' attitudes to their printers and to their texts is often so explicit, most of the printing and stationers' trades were underfunded. Although there were a few printers, mostly in continental Europe, who were able to afford large stocks of type, to employ large numbers of men, and to run more than two or three presses, most were much lesser affairs. The restriction during this period in the London printing trade of one or two presses to each printer was a measure of how small the industry was in Britain as a whole. So, too, was the Stationers' Company's self-seeking insistence on limiting the numbers of master printers, partly in the belief that the trade could support no more. This belief, confounded by Britain's increasing dependence on foreign printing for some of its most basic needs such as Bibles, prayer books and elementary classical texts, was finally destroyed in

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the generation after 1695. The gradual establishment of a more broadlybased printing trade, both in London and in the country, and the development of arrangements in the bookselling and publishing trades that provided larger sums for investment, were of critical importance to attitudes to the book and to printing. At the most basic level, increased quantities oftype, bought with increased investment, not only permitted more to be printed with (often) greater variety of appearance; it also meant that more type could be left standing, and so authors could have more time to read proof. However, it is easy to overstate this phenomenon. In 1723 there were perhaps just below eighty printing houses in London alone.4 In 1764, the printer William Strahan guessed that they numbered between 150 and 200.5 Rhynd's Printers' guide (1804) lists 210 master printers.6 But many of these businesses — and by no means all were listed — were small affairs, working within as cramped a budget and circumstances as most of their predecessors. For the largest printing houses, such as those of Bowyer or Strahan, the situation was very different. When, for example, in 1771 Strahan prepared to print a revised edition of Hume's History of England he was able to afford to have new type cast for the purpose.' The scale of investment could have a direct effect on the timetable of production. Moreover, there had always been books, from the fifteenth century onwards, where composition had required extended proof-reading. The picture of the author attending the press, so as to be on the spot to read proof, was a popular one and one largely based on fact; but it is clear from some of the more complex books that this cannot have been universal. Similarly, the harassed author, hounded by his printer to read proof within a few hours, did not disappear in the eighteenth century. Grub Street was full of such people. The growth of the magazine trade ensured his survival; and the image of Johnson labouring at his dictionary is a powerful reminder of the stress under which a large project, even in the hands of one of the largest printers in London, could be executed.' With such images we may compare one of William Cowper, living at Olney in north Buckinghamshire, about seventy miles from London. Here, in the 1780s, he read the proofs of his poems: first the collection of 1782, and then The task. Each was printed in London, and sheets were sent by his publisher Joseph Johnson to Cowper at irregular intervals in the country. Like any author, he awaited each batch of proofs with impatience: As to Johnson, he sometimes promises fair and proceeds with tolerable dispatch, so that I begin to flatter myself with the hope of a speedy publication. Then comes an

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Interval of three weeks perhaps, and nothing done. It is a fortnight this day since I returned his last pacquet, and though one more Cover may contain all that is yet behind; I know not but another week at least may elapse before he sends it. Then we are to begin again, and the whole is to undergo a second Revisal, which if it proceeds as slowly as the first, will cost another year.9 In two months I have corrected proof-sheets to the amount of 93 pages and no more. In other words, I have received three pacquets. Nothing is quick enough for impatience, and I suppose that the impatience of an Author has the quickest of all possible movements. It appears to me however that at this rate we shall not publish 'till next Autumn.10 In Cowper's mind, Johnson had a reputation for indolence, `like unto some vicious horses that I have known. They would not budge, 'till they were spurred and when they were spurred they would kick."' But Cowper's proofs had been set by the printer, not by Johnson. For Cowper, the distinction scarcely mattered. The most remarkable feature of these delays is not Cowper's irritation, or Johnson's alleged idleness. It is of far more interest for the history of authors and their texts that the printer was apparently able to allow so long a time to pass between first proofs, revises, and printing. In many ways, Cowper was certainly not typical of his generation. A recluse, suffering from bouts of severe depression, he lived well away from London; but there is nothing concrete in the correspondence to suggest that Johnson was treating him differently from many another author. For Hume and Strahan, the distance was very much greater, in miles and therefore also in time, between London and Edinburgh. Hume sent his copy to London, and held himself ready to read proof: `I shall fix to you precisely the day when I shall be ready to receive the first proof Sheet, and you may depend upon my punctuality afterwards."' Such arrangements were only possible because of a reliable and regular postal system, but they also demanded a heavy investment in type metal, and even Strahan found such distant delays a challenge. In printing the later volumes of Hume's History, matters were slower than he would have liked, as almost the whole fount, and a very large one it is, has been occupied in the four first [volumes]. For to keep them going, it was necessary, not only to have the sheets constantly passing to and fro, but some composing, and some printing off, which altogether engrossed a vast quantity.13 Since he sent five sheets of proofs to Hume each week, Strahan will have needed to have between twenty and thirty formes of type made up at any one time. Type was absorbed in much the same way with other jobs. The

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pattern of postal or other communication, coupled with the requirements for a minimum of delay in the printing house, dictated both that proofs were sent off by the packet rather than by the sheet, and hence also the timetable of proof-reading and correction. For the author, there was a difference between reading proofs of matter set from existing type, and that set from manuscript requiring further consideration. Adam Smith was likewise a customer of Strahan's, and like Hume was in Edinburgh. In printing the third edition of the Wealth of nations (published in 1784), Strahan also sent proofs to the author several sheets at a time. Smith expressed himself much pleased with the Paper and letter, and am oblig'd to you for sending the fair sheets rather by the cheap conveyance of the Coach than by the expensive one of the Post. I should be glad, however, to receive the proofs of the Manuscript part by the Post as the speedier conveyance.14 The investment for the printer, in type and in time, was indeed a heavy one, but there were advantages. With the relaxing of the timetable of production for some kinds ofbooks at least, and with a system for proofs and revises to be corrected or altered by the author, the regular expectation that the forme of type would be amended as sheets were printed off became an anachronism. The opportunity remained for stop-press correction (and many a later book shows it), but it no longer needed to be an absolute requirement. Although the most dramatic parts of the technical revolution took place only after 1800, changes in attitudes to printing maybe identified long before then. The second half of the eighteenth century was a period of accommodation as well as of experiment. John Baskerville, manufacturer turned printer, was an outsider in the sense that he had never been apprenticed or trained in the printing trade. He was an innovator, designing a typeface on new principles, experimenting with a new kind of paper, and working to improve the wooden press so as to obtain a sharper impression. Even when they had been printed, his finished sheets were pressed so as to appear smoother to the reader.15 When in 1765 he printed his edition of Robert Barclay's Apology for the true Christian divinity, he added a note of explanation to the errata list: `Those marked with Asterisks, are corrected in some copies.' Baskerville's books are notorious for the numbers of cancel leaves and other alterations that they contain, and this notice was in accordance with other evidence of his constant striving for a more accurate text, in a context where a limited capital prohibited the prolific use of paper.16 His method was the same as had been employed by printers in the sixteenth century. But there was a fundamental modification. Instead of a vague invitation to readers to correct

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with their pens where necessary, and offering no observations on which mistakes were common to all copies and which only to some, Baskerville meticulously noted here those particular errata that had been discovered during the printing process, and changed as stop-press corrections. The attitude was identifiably different, and modern in its attention to manufacturing faults in a mass product. It had an affinity with quality control of the kind necessary in industrial production and familiar to Baskerville in Birmingham's other manufacturing industries. It was a striving for manufacturing precision — in this case for the printed word — and that precision was to be attained by a systematic exactness that is missing from most earlier printing. The major technological innovations did not affect British book production until the turn of the century. The first iron press was introduced into the London printing trade by William Bulmer in 1800 or a little later;" in papermaking, after a few years of experiment Henry Fourdrinier, one of several people working at the same problem, took out a patent for a paper-making machine in 1806;18 the first book stereotyped by the process developed under the auspices of Earl Stanhope did not appear until 1804 — a few years after Didot had successfully developed his own system in Paris.19 In themselves, none of these changes was unheralded. In some respects they built on earlier technology; in others they arrived as a result of needs expressed over a generation and more. In understanding these developments, and in understanding their reception, it is necessary to turn back about a quarter of a century. Here, in a world of demand both larger and more various than hitherto, it is possible also to detect an increasing perception of the longevity of a technology that demanded an overhaul, coupled with a sense of a past in which affairs (and specifically those of the book and of reading) had been ordered differently. John Nichols's authoritative accounts of the British literary world from the perspective of a major London printing house were published in two series: the Literary anecdotes of the eighteenth century in nine volumes between 1812 and 1815, and the Illustrations of the literary history of the eighteenth century in six volunes between 1817 and 1831, the latter with two supplementary volumes in 1848-58.20 Gossipy, quoting copiously from a wealth of family and business correspondence that had been preserved since early in the eighteenth century, and further enriched with anecdotes gleaned from the Gentleman's Magazine, Nichols's volumes immediately became established as the authoritative account of the eighteenth-century world of authors, printers and booksellers. However, though his work was based on the archives of two families of printers, Bowyer and Nichols, John Nichols

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was no technocrat. To read about these families was also to read about the business of printing, yet no attempt was made in these seventeen volumes to explain the details of their craft. For Nichols's readers, Philip Luckombe's History and art of printing (1770, reissued 177 1) had been the first substantial manual in English on printing since that of John Smith in 1755. Smith had dedicated his book to `the printers in Great Britain and Ireland'. The anonymous Printer's grammar (1787), explicitly modelled on his work, was to add those in America as well. By contrast, Luckombe addressed his work to the public, and opened by remarking on the scarcity and high prices of books on the subject. He designed his book to offer `useful Hints to Authors and Compilers, how to prepare copy and correct their own proofs; the whole calculated for the improvement of those who have any concerns in the Letter-Press."' He acknowledged the help of his various predecessors beginning with Moxon; but the page-design of his book made it clear that he was also familiar with some more recent French work. The decorative rules, punctuated with ornaments, around each page, and the floral settings of small sorts at the heads of some sections, hearkened to Louis Luce's Epreuve printed at the Imprimerie Royale in 1740 and to Fournier's Manuel typographique of 1766-8, while the ingenious arrangements of small solid triangles to devise other headpieces were inspired by ideas put forward by Sébastien Truchet in 1704 and by Dominique Douat in 1722.22 In making his bow to French typography, Luckombe sought to bring his own work within the continental world.23 Nonetheless, his book remained firmly English in its content. For much of the technical part of his text he followed Smith word for word, adding occasional extra paragraphs of detail or clarification. Both men emphasised howmuch the process of correctingwas a joint one between author, corrector and compositor: Tho' the term of Corrections is equally given to the Alterations that are made by Authors, it would be more proper to distinguish them by the name of Emendations; notwithstanding it often happens, that after repeatedly mending the matter, the first conceptions are at last recalled: for the truth whereof none can be better vouchers than Compositors, who often suffer by fickle Authors that know no end of making Alterations, and at last doubt whether they are right or wrong; whereby the work is retarded, and the workman greatly prejudiced in his endeavours; especally where he is not sufficiently satisfied for spending his time in humouring whimsical Authors.24 The words were taken verbatim from Smith, published sixteen years previously. Authors had not changed in the meanwhile, nor had the complexities

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of fitting in extra matter, or removing excess. `Compositors are dispirited every time they send a Proof away, as not knowing when and how it may be returned, and how many times more it will be wanted to be seen again, before the Author is tired, or rather ashamed, of altering.'25 For all authors who found their way into print, the essential technology of printing also had not changed. Type could be set, and sheets could be printed, no more quickly. There is ample evidence to support the view that in the eighteenth century authors took an increasingly informed interest in the appearance of their books. Congreve, Pope and Sterne, some of the most obvious examples, all exploited the resources of the type-case.26 Salomon Gessner (1730-88), in Zurich, combined the skills of poet, artist, etcher and bookseller in publishing his own works.27 In Germany, the growing debate over Fraktur and roman type intensified the concerns of Winckelmann, Kant and Goethe.28 Nevertheless, at a more fundamental level, authors were still elusive when the time came for proof-reading. Larger printing houses, better type and more capital investment eased the production of larger books, but the unstable substratum remained. Although attempts to rectify these underlying weaknesses in printing often foundered amidst technical and trade difficulties, the search for speed and for accuracy remained at the head of the agenda. Just as observers in the fifteenth century had emphasised these two characteristics of the new invention, so their successors three centuries later remained preoccupied with what had proved to be a weakness. Dutch stereotyped Bibles in the late seventeenth century, and William Ged's brief career as stereotype printer in Cambridge and Edinburgh in the 1730s, were both driven by the need for speed and for accuracy. 29 Barletti at Paris in the 1770s,30 and Henry Johnson at London in the 1780s, emphasised these same features when they presented independently to the public their new invention of what Johnson termed logography, whereby several letters in frequently occurring combinations were cast at once. The compositor, no longer under the necessity of picking up each letter separately, could now set several simultaneously. Thus, Johnson explained, he would work faster and, since the number of separate sorts was diminished, so also would be the possibility of error. As proof of the expedition in composing by this arrangement, a section of the present treatise was indiscriminately taken, containing two thousand two hundred Letters, and was composed in thirty-four minutes, and it is allowed by all the Trade, that it requires a good Compositor to do one thousand with correction in an hour; consequently this was peforming the work of four hours in one; and can there be a doubt but practice must give it the full scope of the average?31

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Johnson emphasised the `Correctness, Expedition and Cheapness' of his invention,32 but there lay behind it further arguments, linking linguistic concerns of the late eighteenth century with age-old concerns at the faults of printers. The Acquisition of such an Improvement to Literature in general, must be desirable, as it will remain a standard of good orthography, and the Author presumes must go a great length in assisting as a standard for the Language, should it ever be again attempted. It is not subject to Defects and Errors, from the ignorance of compositors, and inattention of Editors.33 Furthermore, since costs would be reduced, it would be possible to print cheaply much that was now only available in books that were out of print. Indeed, Johnson calculated, instead of publishers' being under the necessity of printing seven or eight hundred copies so as to make a profit, they could print as few as 160 to two hundred. Critics scoffed. Johnson met some of their arguments in his pamphlet, but others lay ready after it was published. One reviewer made much of a prominent misprint on the title-page gainsaying any supposed accuracy; but the practical difficulties of using so greatly an enlarged series of type-cases could not be denied, and the concept of logography never developed beyond a few men's curiosity. Notwithstanding the encouragement given by Benjamin Franklin, who had experimented on similar lines in America, the Logographic Press established in London by John Walter proved to be only a short-term success. Johnson succeeded in seeing his pamphlet brought before the general public (in reviews) and before interested parties in the universities,34 but this new process, designed to improve speed and accuracy, remained mainly a curiosity and Walter closed the Logographic Press in the winter of 1791-2.35 Amongst other benefits designed to appeal primarily to printers, Johnson also offered a means of furthering a more general agreement on language and its use. The same subject lurked behind every discussion of the part of the corrector in the printing house. Before Luckombe, there had been but two printers' grammars published in English: Moxon in 1683-4, and Smith in 1755. In French, the only similar predecessor to Antoine Castillon's privately printed Art de l'imprimerie (1783) had been Fertel's Science pratique de l'imprimerie in 1723 (St Omer: reissued in 1741). In German, Johann Michael Funcke's anonymous Kurtze Anleitung von Form- and Stahlschneiden (Erfurt, 1740; republished 1754) was concerned mostly with typefounding and block-making.36 There was none between Gessner's Der in der Buchdruckerei wohl unterrichtete Lehr-Junge (Leipzig, 1743) and Tdubel's Orthotypographisches Handbuch

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(Halle and Leipzig, 1785).37 In Dutch, no general printer's manual was printed until 1844, though the brothers Ploos van Amstel, typefounders at Amsterdam, issued a prospectus in 1767, and in 1787 another ambitious prospectus was issued by the Middelburg printer Levinus Moens. A slightlylater full guide remained in manuscript, unpublished until 1982.38 In Italian, the first to be printed did not appear until 1861; the guide by Zefirino Campanini of Parma, written in 1789, likewise remained in manuscript, and has again only recently been published.39 These several manuals emphasised different aspects of the printer's skills, and there was (not surprisingly) an inherent tendency for authors to copy from their predecessors, both from specialist manuals and from encyclopaedias. But the pattern of publication in western European languages is striking: a gap of about a generation before a new series appeared in the 1770s and 1780s. We may put forward several possible explanations for this gap just after the mid-century. However, two underlying issues are manifest. First, notwithstanding the great curiosity about all aspects of printing that we saw earlier in this chapter, attitudes to printing (not just printing itself) remained generally stable during this period. Second, while these books are generically termed printers' grammars, in fact — like Fournier's work — some of them found considerable interest among the more skilled literate parts of the reading public. Indeed, as we have noted, Luckombe seems to have adapted Smith's work for just such an audience. The section on correcting was extended very considerably, so as to explain details of this most immediate of processes. An author who took care to deliver perfect manuscripts may expect to have his book perfectly printed. For by no means he ought to mend it in the proof, the compositor not being obliged to it; and it cannot reasonably be expected he should be so good natured to take so much pains to mend such alterations as the second dictates of an author may make, unless he is well paid for ít.40 Casting off copy, `an unpleasant and troublesome employ, likewise depended on the author and the tidiness of his or her manuscript. As with most aspects of printing, the principles were straightforward, and the reality could be both complex and difficult. Handwriting and a properly organised manuscript were critical: What has been said about casting off, is understood of such Copy as is fairly and regularly Written, as well as thoroughly revised. But it is not always the capacious genius that ought to be excused for writing in too great a hurry; for sometimes those of no exuberant brains affect uncouth writing, on purpose to strengthen the

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common notion, `that the more learned the man, the worse is his writing;' which shews, that writing well or bad is but a habit.41 Difficult casting-off led not only to later extra troubles. Luckombe also assumed that if the printer's calculations proved wrong, then composition and imposition would be reorganised so as to accommodate any mistakes. In other words, the author's manuscript, tiresome though it might be, remained the authority. The eighteenth-century printer accepted quite different principles from those of his predecessors, where inaccurate casting-off was commonly accommodated by compositorial changes to the text itself. Nonetheless, while the author and his or her written text were granted this status, the eighteenth-century printer made his own demands in return. In a remarkable final page to a long section that had begun more than 150 pages previously with a description of the printing press, Luckombe summarised the characteristics of authors who wished to send in responsible copy. They chuse Black Ink, and White Paper, to write their Copy on; and consider, that it contributes much to make a Manuscript look fair, though it should not prove so in all other respects. They write their Copy, either in Folio, or in Quarto; because an octavo is too soon filled. They do not over-charge the paper, by writing to the very edges but leave room at least to make Memorandums. They write the main matter of the work on the right-hand side of the paper; and leave the left-hand side for Bottom-notes, Additions, and other incidental Emendations. But some who have a still better method in writing for the Press, divide each side of the paper into two Columns, filling one with Text-matter, and leaving the other Column for Insertions, Alterations, Notes, &c. They take care to put proper References to such places of the Text as are illustrated by Notes; and another of the same shape before the note that illustrates a passage. They chuse such marks and symbols for References as present themselves readilyto the eye; such as Letters and Figures between Parentheses, or Crotchets; Astronomical signs, and other like characters. They use no Abbreviations or Contractions; and if they have accustomed themselves to any, they draw them out, and, together with their explanation, send them with the Copy, to serve the Compositor in setting such Abbreviated words at length " So, by a mixture of threats and blandishments, the author was to be tamed. The process could never be universally successful; but the explicitness of Luckombe's instructions, encompassing not only materials (ink and paper), but also format and, to some extent, style, marked a change of mood brought on by factors only some of which were to be found obviously in the printing

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trade itself. By the 1770s, printers, and especially compositors, were becoming increasingly conscious of the potentials in a more complicated wage structure. The London scale for composition was finally established in 1785, and laid down rates for different kinds of work.43 Compositors had nearly always been paid by the amount set, rather than by time, and the state of an author's manuscript therefore directly affected how much money could be earned in a specific period. More generally, Luckombe strove for a uniformity of presentation, in a way of thinking that also looked to uniformity in spelling, uniformity in punctuation, and even uniformity in pronunciation. He thus stands as a figure of some importance in linking ideas concerning education, writing and reading with the means by which these were to be promoted, in print. At the most obvious level, a concern for uniformity in spelling was of natural concern to printers and educationists alike, in a country dependent for its printing not just on London and the south-east, but also, to a major extent, on Dublin and on Edinburgh and Glasgow. National linguistic unity, linked with practical necessity, worked in their several ways to induce fundamental changes in attitude to printing and its conventions. Just as language was to be settled, so too was printing. John Smith's choice of title for the first separate manual on printing to have been published in Britain since the 1680s, The printer's grammar (1755), was deliberate in its allusion to ordered discipline, and also claimed for printers a place in the literary establishment. Moxon had announced himself on his title-page as `Member of the Royal Society, and Hydrographer to the King's Most Excellent Majesty'. By contrast, Smith modelled himself at least partly on the literary conventions of the school grammar: Conformable to the General method which is observed in Grammars, we begin this also with the Principles thereof, viz. LETTERS; with this difference, that instead of applying their signification, as in others, to the art of speaking and writing some particular language, we shall consider them as the chief Printing-Materials; and in the course of this Chapter treat of their Contexture, Superficial shape, and such Properties as come under the cognizance of Printers, Booksellers and others who have a judgment of printing. 44 Attempts at national reconciliation in spelling, punctuation and pronunciation engrossed the attention of educational and social reformers from Richard Mulcaster (d.1611) onwards.45 In 1702 Abel Boyer, introducing his French—English dictionary, quoted Dryden on standards in writing and speaking. `The English Language is not yet capable of such a certainty [as ancient Greek], and we are at present so far from it, that we are wanting

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in the very Foundation of it, a perfect Gramar.'46 Despite an ever-growing demand for textbooks and basic spelling guides in the eighteenth century especially,47 there was little consent among them. `Of late, wrote James Boswell in 1767, `it has become the fashion to render our language more neat and trim by leaving out k after c, and a in the last syllable of words which used to end in our.' On the whole, Boswell, a Scot, followed Johnson, who had mostly favoured the same practices.48 Others were reluctant to change such long-standing habits. As had been recognised ever since the fifteenth century, writing, printing and language were all facets of the same question. In his study The theory of language, first published in 1783 and republished in 1788, James Beattie went so far as to include a short history of printing in his discussion.49 The many attempts and proposals in the last four decades of the eighteenth century designed for a more uniform English, more uniform spelling, and more uniform pronunciation, drew their inspiration from divers backgrounds. In part these were nationalistic, in the case of Britain within a triangular framework of Scotland, Ireland and England. In part they represented a collision of town and country values. In part they were educational and in part social. Beyond these lay two more partisan issues. First, and notwithstanding the evidence of the hundreds of those who returned from the Grand Tour, there was a belief that in France such a uniformity had been attained, or, if it had not yet quite been attained, would be soon.50 Second, the accession of George III in 1760 at last brought to the throne a monarch willing at least to pay lip service to English: `Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain.151 William Kenrick dedicated his New dictionary of the English language to the King in 1773, and pointedly described him as `the most accomplished Speaker of the English tongue'. The English language was a subject of concern in itself. In 1780, Thomas Sheridan, one of the most influential of all writers at this time on the subject, cast his frame of reference on a deliberately global scale, in opening his preface with the remark that `Of all the languages known in the world, the English is supposed to be the most difficult."' Between 1757 (two years after Johnson's dictionary) and 1780 (the date of Sheridan's Dictionary of the English language), about twentythree new English dictionaries were published, quite apart from the much greater number of new editions of new or older work, many emphasising their use for spelling or for pronunciation, all of them inevitably looking back, explicitly or not, to Samuel Johnson and all of them embodying in their various ways a new concern for a language that could be reduced to uniform practice. 53

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Such concerns were by no means unique to the British Isles, or to the eighteenth century. They had preoccupied French and Italian writers since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and others intermittently as well. In the Netherlands, local usage, and preferences for what became modern accepted spelling, likewise became topics of discussion in the second half of the eighteenth century.54 Frederick the Great's essay De la littérature allemande, first published (in French) at Berlin in 1780, was inspired by his discovery of `une langue à demi barbare, qui se divise en autant de dialectes différents que l'Allemagne contient des provinces': his political motives were barely concealed.55 This new emphasis on the vernacular was expressed and explained in many different ways. For Sheridan, no populist in many respects, the country's lack of skill in writing and in oratory was the result of emphasis on Latin and Greek in ordinary education: All this arises from a wrong bias given to the mind, in our course of education, with regard to two material articles. The first is, a total neglect of our own tongue, from the time and pains necessary to the attainment of two dead languages. The second, an utter inattention to the living language, as delivered to the ear by the organs of speech; from making the written, as presented to the eye by the pen, the sole object of instruction.56 `Copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.' The words were Samuel Johnson's, and they were quoted with approval by Sheridan a generation later. In all this, Sheridan's choice of words again reveals more than his ostensible and immediate purpose. To make a linguistic point, he had spoken of English in the context of the world. To make his more detailed one with respect to teaching, he used a concept also to be found in other contexts. `Grammar has never been taught amongst us as a science.' `Nothing worthy the name of a grammar has hitherto appeared.' He exaggerated in order to strengthen his position, for he had numerous predecessors who had been more than competent. Meanwhile printers needed to make no such claims. For them, on whom any author had to depend if his or her book was to be published in the ordinaryway, there already existed just such a book, in John Smith's Printer's grammar, published in 1755 (the same year as Johnson's Dictionary) and by 1780 incorporated and republished, often (as we have seen) verbatim, in the work of Luckombe. With this in mind, we may turn in more detail to some of those who were most concerned with language, and with its orderly recording in print.

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William Kenrick has already been mentioned. In 1773 he published a New dictionary of the English language, and set his own opinion firmly against recent attempts by Scots or Irish to establish uniform standards for the English language. `There seems indeed a most ridiculous absurdity in the pretensions of a native of Aberdeen or Tipperary, to teach the natives of London to speak and to read.' Kenrick had picked quarrels with much of literary London. Now James Buchanan, whose Essay towards establishing a standard foran elegantand uniform pronunciation of the English language had appeared some years earlier, became his particular victim.57 But Kenrick was merely riding a bandwaggon. Others deserved to be heard more seriously. `Wherever English is taught, wrote Thomas Sheridan (born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Dublin), all may attain a uniformity in spelling, but, with respect to pronunciation, it is left wholly to chance, depending entirely upon the common mode of utterance in the several places of their birth and education. Thus, the same individual books, when read aloud, are pronounced in a quite different manner by the natives of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Yorkshire, and all the several counties of England; nay, in the very metropolis there are two different dialects, one current in the city, and the other at the court end of the town. In all which places English is pronounced according to the corrupt dialect of speech, established by the vulgar in their respective places of abode.58 In a series of interrelated questions, writers during the 1770s and 1780s on pronunciation, reading, spelling and punctuation returned not only to uniformity of speech, but also to linguistic uniformity more generally. `Words are articulate sounds, Robert Lowth had declared in 1762, `used by common consent as signs of ideas, or notions.159 James Beattie said much the same. `A word is an audible and articulate sign of thought.'60 Lowth's Short introduction to English grammar, much reprinted, found a ready market, and both he and Beattie were voicing a long-held commonplace. We may, for example, recall Erasmus in 1528: `Writing is just silent speech, like the nods used in the conversation of the dumb.'61 For a new generation, however, Lowth and Beattie proved influential figures, and in identifying the spoken with the written word — sounds and signs — they pinpointed the relationship between speech and print. The latter represented the former, but the former had also to be capable of transmission by the latter. The relationship was a fragile one, depending not just on the vagaries of region, dialect and education. In an argument that had been explored by Quintilian long before the invention of printing, and which the limitations of printing had sharpened, it had also to be acknowledged that print could not represent speech entirely. Sheridan even invented new ways of accenting letters or syllables so as to

Re-evaluation: towards the modern book

guide the speaker. In Lectures on the art of reading (first published 1775), he took his own readers through much of the prayer book as well as through passages from Milton, Dryden and Pope, to the accompaniment of a battery of diacriticals. Not surprisingly, such typographical novelty found little general favour, and such schemes remained the preserve of educationists and theorists. Punctuation was, in some ways, much more amenable. It required no special sorts for the printer, and it required little extra effort for the reader. That it was inadequate to its purpose was beyond doubt. As Lowth, again, put it, summarising the views of centuries: Though the several articulate sounds are pretty fully and exactly marked by Letters of known and determinate power; yet the several pauses, which are used in a just pronunciation of discourse, are very imperfectly expressed by Points.62 Lowth spoke with the authority and experience of a preacher, as well as a grammarian. Support for his view came from an actor. John Walker had spent many years on the stage, including a period with Garrick at Drury Lane. Now, having turned himself into a professional lecturer, he emphasised a commonly held view. While punctuation was often inadequate to reading aloud, the various experts on elocution, pronunciation and rhetoric were reluctant to advocate very drastic reform. `I must again observe, wrote Walker, that when I contend for the propriety, and even necessity, of pausing, where we find no points in writing or printing, I do not mean to disturb the present practice of punctuation: I wish only to afford such aids to pronunciation as are actually made use of by the best readers and speakers, and such as we must use in reading and speaking in public, if we would wish to pronounce with justness, energy, and ease.63 `To make the best use of that which is already established.164 Walker's aim was in some senses modest, in others ambitious in that it sought to build flexibility on a series of marks that were themselves both inflexible and inadequate to the task of aiding speech. `I know no use of points unless to direct the voice, wrote Cowper as he transcribed his 1785 collection of poems for the press. More fully, he wrote: I have the whole punctuation to settle; which in blank-verse is of the last importance, and of a species, peculiar to that composition; for I know no use of points, unless to direct the voice, the management of which, in the reading of blank-verse, being more difficult than in the reading of any other poetry, requires perpetual hints, and notices, to regulate the inflexions, cadences and pauses. This however is an affair,

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that in spite of grammarians, must be left pretty much ad libitum scriptoris [to the discretion of the writer]. For (I suppose) every author points according to his own reading. 65 In fact, Cowper's own punctuation was judged erratic by contemporary standards, and from 1786 both spelling and punctuation were gradually regularised by the printers employed by his publisher Joseph Johnson for subsequent editions of the poems: Cowper himself seems to have had no hand in proof-reading of later editions. 66 Others were less cautious in their remarks on punctuation in print. With the publication of an anonymous Essay on punctuation in 1785 — only a few months after Walker's book had appeared — the question was brought firmly before printers and both silent and speaking readers alike. The Essay was by Joseph Robertson, and was published by John Walter. With Walter, publisher of Henry Johnson's work on logography, and founder of the Daily Universal Register (later The Times), we move across from educational theorists to a world of metal and of type. Apart from holding a living in Lincolnshire, Robertson was a practised journalist, credited with having contributed over 2,600 articles to the Critical Review by the time that his work on punctuation appeared; later, he was to be a familiar contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine.67 His essay, the first of its kind, won a large audience, and had been printed three more times by 1791. Robertson was more critical of punctuation customs in print. For reading aloud, he agreed with others: `Books are no certain guides; for most of them are carelessly and irregularly pointed; and many pauses are necessary in reading, where no point is inserted by the printer."' He cited Walker with approval, and sought to establish rules where a comma might be `properly and commodiously' admitted.69 But the comma, which attracted so much attention, was not the only feature of composition in the printing house to come under his eye. Quoting from the Bible, the prayer book, Pope and Milton, he observed how past generations had used parentheses in ways that were now deemed unnecessary.7' He noted how the use of capitals for ordinary nouns had declined in recent years. He was also scathing about the use of dashes, `frequently used by hasty and incoherent writers, in a very capricious and arbitrary manner, instead of the regular point'. 71 On the last, there was little need to quote examples of bad practice, for dashes of this kind were to be found in dozens of publications, and not only novels. Like so many of his contemporaries, Robertson was prescriptive. To write (and to print) for formal speech was only one aspect of a complicated relationship. To reproduce conversation, or extempore speech, was to raise

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quite different issues, in which punctuation's role was to record, not to instruct. His book was much read; and it was much ignored. For authors, sometimes writing at speed, the dash served as a better reflection of the moment, and the comma might be used sparingly. Necessarily, different forms of composition required different self-disciplines; yet much of this widely followed late eighteenth-century debate on the subject concentrated on just a few aspects. In particular, it omitted what had been known to classical scholars for years: that to punctuate was to interpret. Erasmus's tone in 1528 had mingled didacticism with wonder: how much correct punctuation (`recta distinctio') could illuminate one's understanding (`adferat lucis ad intelligendam sententiam').72 His concern was primarily with Greek and Latin, both spoken and written. A little later in the same dialogue Erasmus returned to the relationship between the two modes, and `the minor intervals for taking breath, which cannot be dogmatically laid down because the rules proposed by the grammarians are neither invariable nor unanimously agreed on'. 73 Early manuscripts presented their own difficulties; but so did the lack of consent among printers. `I only wish printers were agreed about them. Various signs are in use, but they are not equal to the variety of speech intonation.174 Erasmus's comment on his contemporaries was, in a slightly different typographical context, equally valid for two-and-a-half centuries later. In other words, in many respects the late eighteenth-century debate was not a new one; it was simply being moved into a different sphere. Cowper, educated at Westminster School and an accomplished classicist, apparently revised his earlier version or versions of his poetry in manuscript for punctuation, before submitting them to the press: to do so was one of several final stages of revision. Other authors, such as Adam Smith, finalised their punctuation only in proof 75 In the absence of clear instructions from the author, or in a printing house of fixed practices, the distinction between the light punctuation of informal composition, and regularised punctuation for more formal prose, fell to the compositor and the proof-reader. As Kathryn Sutherland has shown, the first two editions of Mansfield Park (1814, 1816) aptly illustrate the printer's predicament on this point, and hence a fundamental ambiguity for the reader. 76 The printing trades were to make their own contribution to this renewed anxiety at the instability of language in print, by gradually imposing their own set of rules on authors and their texts. In this respect at least, a greater degree of stability was achievable. Compositors' habits were subsumed to printing-house rules. As Robertson reminded his readers, Robert Estienne

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himself had varied the punctuation in each of his editions of the Greek New Testament in the mid-sixteenth century. For classical texts of all kinds, punctuation was expected by the modern reader, but in the absence of marks in early manuscripts it depended on informed editorial interpretation." Contemporary authors, however, might struggle against the printer's chains. Donald Reiman, editor of Shelley, has spoken of the ways in which the `subtle peculiarities in orthography and punctuation are not only characteristic

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of the writings, but even vital to the meaning of Blake, Lamb, Shelley, and Keats — all authors who struggled hard to maintain their individuality amid an age of ever-encroaching uniformity'.78 In itself, the introduction of machine printing by The Times in 1814 did not herald the end of authors'

Traditionally, the virtues of printing spoke almost for themselves, and were summed up shortly before the mid-eighteenth century in the anonymously written Supplement to Harris's dictionary.

independence. But it did help bring about a further change in attitude to what printing could achieve, and therefore how it could be used, both technically and socially. These are subjects beyond the scope of this book, but the following chapter explores some of the issues raised in a world where printing itself, ars conservatrix, was changing.

The Uses of Books are numerous; they make one of the chief Instruments, or Means of acquiring Knowledge; they are the Repositories of the Laws, and the Vehicles of Learning of every Kind; our Religion itself is founded on Books; without them, says Bartholin, God is silent, Justice dormant, Physic at a stand, Philosophy lame, Letters dumb, and all Things involved in Cimerian darkness.' Save that John Foxe, writing almost two hundred years previously,' had taken a more partisan line on the contributions of printing to religion, and the contributor to Harris was more concerned to promote what we may broadly term the sciences, the degree of shared enthusiasm is noticeable. But it was an uncritical enthusiasm, whose predilections were subject to examination from several quarters. Against these virtues were to be set the multitudinous sea of books and editions, and the highway they offered to immorality as well as to morality. Time-worn complaints, at an overwhelming mass ofwriting, in which choice was difficult, and where the poor, the shoddy and the immoral were granted status equal to the best in writing, content or morals, were given a new edge in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, whether morally, religiously or politically poisonous or not, books had also become a distraction: an indirect form of knowledge rather than knowledge itself. Add, that Books have turned the other Instruments of Knowledge out of Doors, as Experiments, Observations, Furnaces, and the like, without which, natural Sciences can never be cultivated to the Purpose; and that in Mathematicks, Books have so far superseded the Exercise of Invention, that the generality of Mathematicians are now contented to learn the Solution of Problems from others; which is to relinquish the chiefEnd of their Sciences: Since what is contained in mathematical Books, is properly the History of the Mathematicks, not the Science, Art or Talent of solving Questions; which is hardly to be had from Books, but only from Nature and Meditation.3

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This was an experimentalist's view. For everyone, to print was not just to share; it was to share in an uncontrolled way with an audience whose extent and nature could never be known, and whose suitability to participate in knowledge was untested by social or intellectual criteria. Hence, manuscripts offered some protection, within a coterie readership. Such issues underpinned the foundation and early years of the Royal Society, and they were inherent in many aspects of the cautiously restrictive decisions to entrust publication (of whatever subject) to manuscript rather than to print.' The nature of knowledge, and of writing more generally, was defined in key respects by its intended audience and the nature of its means of communication.' In the eighteenth century many of the same preoccupations and anxieties remained; but even as they were weakened (at different paces in different fields of enquiry and creativity), so a society that increasingly accepted print rather than manuscript had to adjust to a fundamental realignment of the old arguments concerning its dangers. For some, such as Vicesimus Knox, the question was founded on a conservatism suspicious of the modern world. While contemporary `delicacy of sentiment' brought some advantages, notably in the treatment of women, Knox disapproved of much that he saw in print, and his essays written while a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford returned repeatedly to questions of reading. These essays, first published in 1778, became so popular in educated circles as to be almost required study. They were enlarged to two volumes the following year, and by 1791 had reached their twelfth edition in London. Editions in English also appeared in Dublin (1783), Philadelphia (1792), New York (1793), Basel and Strasburg (1800) and in German at Berlin in 1781. With their inclusion in various collections of British essayists from 1819 onwards, they passed into the literary canon. Knox's growing reputation as an educationist helped, but later generations have admired him less, and his memory has not been enhanced by what have recently been called his `windbag' qualities.6 In his own time, his popularity as a writer is sufficient measure of his representative voice. Modern authors, in his view, were stimulated by avarice, `the frigid excitements of the love of money, rather than by the `noble ardour inspired by the love of fame'.' Richardson, Fielding and Smollett had to be allowed; but importations from France, or English sentimental novels that gave `a degree of gracefulness to modern deformity; and the pernicious ease with which they were to be obtained (`the prudence of their publishers suggests the expedience of making them conveniently portable') linked the form of the book to its moral standing.' Questions of authorship and of publication were inescapably moral; and in his preface Knox summed up his credo:

Machinery and manufacture

`To publish without improving... is to multiply the labours of learning without enlarging its use, and is like increasing the weight without adding to the value of the coin.'9 The moralist, no less than the man of letters, finds himself interested in the consequences resulting from the mechanical mode of multiplying the copies of books. To this cause, he attributes that change in the manners and sentiments which has taken place within the interval of a century or two, and which cannot escape even superficial observation. Philosophy, once preserved among a chosen few, with the selfishness of an Alexander, who reprimanded Aristotle for divulging the secrets of science, has now diffused its influence on the mean as well as the great, the gay and the fair as well as the severe and the studious, the merchant and manufacturer as well as the contemplative professor. Pamphlets and manuals on every subject of human enquiry are circulated by the assiduous trader, at a small price, amongst the lowest ranks of the community, the greatest part of whom have been furnished with the ability of reading by eleemosynary education. A tincture of letters, which was once rare and formed a shining character, has pervaded the mass of the people.10 Knox's view was equivocal, for while the benefits of printing both to learning and to religion could not be denied, its promiscuity was a danger. He devoted the final pages of his Essays moral and literary to the subject, concluding with remarks on the liberty of the press and in his final sentence looking forward to a time `when the Art of Printing shall no more be perverted to embellish vice and justify folly'. In another key sentence he sought to summarise the reasons for its gaining so much attention: From the ingenuity of the contrivance, it has ever excited mechanical curiosity; from its intimate connection with learning, it has justly claimed historical notice; and from its extensive influence on morality, politics and religion, it is now become a subject of the most important speculation." This linking of technology with literature characterised attitudes in the late eighteenth century, though the two were not often juxtaposed so explicitly. Knox's own view was particular. In Oxford, he could see a learned press at work in the midst of the university; and in its products he was willing to find the kind of moral underpinning that seemed so deplorably absent from the generality of the book trade. In a passage that repeatedly used the word `avarice, he spoke warmly of the Clarendon Building. Amidst this lamentable degeneracy, it is happy for mankind, that in the most famous asylum of arts and learning in the known world, a press is conducted by those who, in the edition of the best writers, join to the ornamental excellences of exquisite type and paper, the minutest accuracy.12

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Knox wrote only two decades after Sir William Blackstone had campaigned outspokenly, vigorously, and largely successfully for a reform of Oxford University Press. Blackstone was still alive when Knox reflected on the university, and though he no longer had a direct influence on the Press he was still respected and occasionally consulted as an elder statesman. Only a few months earlier, he had recalled his unrealised hopes for an edition of Cicero — `a cheap, simple expeditious Edition, one that should be useful to the internal Oeconomy of the Printing house, at the same time that by it's Elegance and correctness it should do external Honour to our Press'. 13 Good printing, the choice of type and paper, was expected to bear as much moral weight as did accuracy and content. Blackstone's Commentaries on the laws of England, Richardson's Persian and Arabic dictionary, Musgrave's Euripides, the Syriac New Testament and Kennicott's Hebrew Bible, all of them printed at Oxford in the late 1770s, while Knox was at work on his essays, represented to him the very opposite of avarice. 14 Knox set the modern Oxford achievement in a historical context that lauded the artifice which prevented `private avarice from witholding public benefits: `The art was stolen from Haarlem and brought to Oxford.' His distrust of avarice was consistent. The fact that his history was wrong was, comparatively, oflittle moment. He was byno means alone in insisting on the history of printing as justification for present purposes. The earliest printing was said to have incurred suspicion of witchcraft,15 and Gutenberg's associate Johann Fust was frequently interwoven with his near-namesake Dr Faustus. In 1783, Henry Johnson introduced his invention of logography by explaining that `the celebrated Doctor Faustus privately printed whole sheets with the Words cut in wood, and the Copies which he sold, and were supposed to be Writing, were observed to be so exactly alike, that he then got the name of dealing with the Devil'.16 Such a concatenation of misinformation no doubt continued to mislead some members of the public; but the co-existence of historical detail with modern technology and modern authorship proved a fruitful rhetorical device. It answered a widespread, and increasingly popular, concern with the past, while simultaneously establishing a sense of continuity in contemporary writing. Past and present were combined, and at the same time concern with many of the minutiae of printing could be subsumed into more general questions of principle. When we turn to specifically technical preoccupations and ideas, we thus do so in the company of an audience that has in some sense been distanced. Unlike their predecessors of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, authors were not frequently given to remarking publicly, in print, on the vagaries of printers, the apparent lack of organisation, the delays and

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difficulties of proof-reading, or the dozens of other everyday realities in seeing a book through the press. At first glance, it seems almost as if authors (and stationers) had been broken in, and educated not to complain — or not to complain so vociferously in the very medium that offended. Some of the credit for this seeming change of attitude may be placed at the door of a better organised printing industry. But other, less personal, influences were also at work. By creating for the printing trade a historical context dating back three centuries, stationers and master printers gave a new status to the skills of the printer and to the organisation of the printing house. The author, educated in an historical context, could protest in public less easily. Yet, in private, protest he did, as did William Cowper in 1786 when faced with an unexpected version of his work: It is enough to craze a poor poet to see his verses so miserably misprinted, and which is worse if possible, his very praises in a manner annihilated, by a jumble of the lines out of their places, so that in two instances, the end of the period takes the lead of the beginning of it. The said poet has still the more reason to be crazed, because the said Magazine is in general singularly correct. But at Christmas, no doubt your printer will get drunk as well as another man. 17 Cowper's new volume of poems had been reviewed in the Gentleman's Magazine, and quoted at length. The multiple settings of this journal, designed to meet its very large circulation, added elements of their own to the degree of textual variety liable to be encountered by readers of more than one copy.18 Cowper listed his own complaints concerning the copy that he saw. In other copies, apparently in different settings, not only had the punctuation suffered, italicisation and capitalisation been altered, and words been omitted. The very words had been changed, so that Kate (in `The task') was no longer `craz'd, but `cold, and God became female rather than male. The blossoming of a periodical literature in the 1760s and 1770s did not just bring authors before wider and under-explored reading publics, and help to disperse accounts of new books with a new efficiency. In their thirst for copy, and therefore their practice of generous quotation, and in the printing trade's need to provide for very large weekly or monthly readerships, these journals could destabilise texts under discussion, as compositors' rapidly set work was perforce proof-read hastily, selections were torn from their contexts, and passages were pruned as much to fit the space as for the sake of sense. Cowper's experience was not unique, and it was not unique to poetry. The visual power of images relies on the ways in which they may be copied and

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adapted to all sorts of purposes and circumstances. Cowper's complaint was one that claimed a special distinction for his writing, but it has its parallels in the ways in which long-standing habits in the visual arts also came to be seen by some as offending the canons of authorial authority. Just as Cowper found his text to be corrupted by inattention to its details in magazines, so others, whose work and scientific reputation depended on accurate depiction, found it difficult to accept the destabilising implications of popularity in media for which their work had never been intended. The naturalist George Edwards was prepared to give voice to more generally held concerns of authority. His objections to derivatives of his work were not that they offended any claim that he might have made to copyright (the so-called Hogarth's Act, 8 Geo.II, c.13, had been passed in 173519 ), but that they distorted his achievement. I have observed, that several of our manufacturers that imitate China ware, several print-sellers, and printers of linen and cotton cloths, have filled the shops in London with images, pictures and prints, modelled, copied, drawn, and coloured after the figures in my History of Birds, most of which are sadly represented both as to shape and colouring. Most of the monthly retailers of wits knowledge, and public occurrences, have also in their Magazines, Mercuries, &c. made free both with my figures and descriptions of animals to embellish their pamphlets; though the figures are generally so miserably lamed and distorted in the copying, that the judicious part of the world can form but a mean opinion of the work from which they are plundered, unless they examine the original itself.20 The print trade had provided resources and ideas for the decoration of ceramics since the fifteenth century. In this, Edwards was not new. In a world where, albeit in very different ways, the interests of authors and artists were given new legal meanings, he took offence at an old phenomenon that had been given new meaning: the indiscriminate and undiscriminating proliferation of his work (`filled the shops in London'), and, more particularly, at the ways in which his scrupulous care for accurate depiction had been compromised. In this, author and artist were at one in a world where opportunities for destabilisation proliferated whether in the bookshop or stationer's, china shop or draper's. The series of qualifications that mark the approach to the mechanised book, changes in attitude to the printed word and image, took place over several generations. In this prolonged revolution, we may perceive distinct voices who at different times sought to comprehend the meaning of technological replacement, and the ways in which it affected patterns of thought or

Machinery and manufacture

knowledge. The view of printing as ars conservatrix, the skill and means of conserving knowledge, was an old one, but it was modulated in the eighteenth century as understandings of its possibilities and limitations were ever more widely understood and discussed. In 1757 the EncyclopMie spoke of printing as a means of expression that would `durer autant que le soled, & ne se perdre que daps le bouleversement universel de la nature'.21 In seeking an analogy with a timeframe at once within and yet well beyond human experience, the relationship between nature and technology, a concern to so many other areas of human activity, became the key element. Others took a less exalted view, but in refusing to seek the assurance of astronomy moved in one bound to the opposite extreme, of faith in the not merely terrestrial, but even technological. Quite literally, it was more mundane; but it was closer to experience as it had developed and been understood over three centuries. Printing was, instead, Cet art ingénieux qui fixe la parole et la pensée, et qui, supérieur à l'art d'écrire, multiple les copies avec une rapidité aussi surprenante que la ressemblance parfaite qu'il leur donne à tous. 22

From this, it was not so very far to the concerns of manufacturing more generally. In 1769, writing to James Watt, Matthew Boulton pondered the idea of a manufactory where work could be executed `with as great a difference of accuracy as there is between a blacksmith and the mathematical instrument maker'.2 ' The difficulty lay partly in accuracy of manufacture, and partly in consistency for repetitive standardised production. In these, though they were formulated in different ways, printing and iron founding (or many other kinds of manufacture) shared issues in common. Problems of standardisation, accuracy and quality control were as central to the work of Boulton and Watt and of the Soho Manufactory as they were to those of printers. Late eighteenth-century changes in attitudes to, and requirements of, manufacturing are to be seen as much in readers and printers as they are in engineers.24 Among the most persuasive and lucid on this subject was Charles Babbage (1792-1871), Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839 though he passed most of his professional life elsewhere.25 In an `Introductory view of the principles of manufactures, originally published in the Encyclopaedia metropolitana, he adduced as uses of machinery and manufactures `the addition which they make to human power; — the economy of human time; — and the conversion of substances apparently the most common and most worthless into valuable products'. This essay was later published in a slightly revised form in his much printed On the economy of

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machinery and manufactures.26 Babbage's book, a result of extensive visits

to manufacturing industries in connection with his search for ideas for a calculating engine, had at one stage been designed as a series of lectures before the University of Cambridge: the lectures were never delivered. Both in monograph form and in the many copies circulated of the Encyclopaedia metropolitana (which was itself stereotyped to meet the demand for an encyclopaedia that, in its organisation according to broad topics and grouping of subjects, broke away from the single alphabetical order of headings), Babbage's ideas won an exceptionally wide circulation. We may note in his examples two particular applications to printing: first, the conversion of rag into paper, and second, the time that is saved in printing — the very feature that had been so frequently remarked by fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century observers, and which became of overriding interest in the development of power-driven machines in the nineteenth century. The difference in application lay in advances in mechanisation. The former and familiar machine, the wooden common press, was displaced by a mechanically driven means of replication, dependent on steam and made of iron and steel. Type-setting, dependent on shapes of metal that had been moulded in an industrial process in turn dependent on the skill of the eye, hand and wrist, remained essentially (and notwithstanding many semi-mechanised inventions21) the same until the invention of machine setting with newly cast type — typically the Linotype or the Monotype at the end of the nineteenth century. But type-settingwas also transformed in its application bythe much earlier invention of stereotype, the means of fixing in metal what had been assembled by hand and to which we have already alluded. As a process it was not new to the early nineteenth century. A similar process, of making casts of set type, seems to have been employed at Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century for the production of (among other books) copies of the English Bible and New Testaments for export to Britain.28 In the seventeenth century, the need had been for a means to print large numbers of copies without repeated resort to English-speaking compositors and proof-readers. Early in the eighteenth century, stereotyping was employed in the Netherlands for a Syriac New Testament. 29 Further attempts in eighteenth-century Britain had foundered, and with the revival of interest by the end of the century much of the literature on the subject was as much concerned with national claims to priority — Holland, Britain or France — as with technical innovations.30 All this changed in Britain with Andrew Wilson's successful development of recognisably modern methods of stereotyping, at the instigation of Earl Stanhope, in the first years of the nineteenth century.31 As stereotyping

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became the centre of disputes over questions of printing management and economy, a further advantage was offered: that the process could ensure continuing accuracy. For the Bible, such accuracy was essential, and variations from edition to edition were to be condemned. In France, its combination of cheapness and textual advantage made an ideal vehicle for the publication of large editions of standard literature, and in Germany it was soon applied to the production of classical texts for the international market. In his survey of the machine economy, Babbage went on to introduce various examples from a range of industries, but it is noticeable how frequently he returned to examples from printing. Under the head `Executing operations too delicate for human touch' he drew attention to a method adopted by the Bank of Ireland for damping bank-note paper before it received an impression. Under that for `Economy of the materials employed' he compared the waste of ink endemic in ink-balls, when a crust of hardened ink would form round the edges of the worked surface on each ball, with the great reduction in the amount of ink required for modern inking rollers. Under `The identity of the work when it is of the same kind' he first adduced the way in which boxes and their lids could be made by machine, and then continued: The same identity pervades all the arts of printing; the impressions from the same block, or the same copper-plate, have a similarity which no labour could produce by hand. The minutest traces are transferred to all the impressions, and no omission can arise from the inattention or unskilfulness of the operator.32 The longest section of all concerned `Of copying: It included a great range of casting, whether of plaster casts, casts of the human body, tobaccopipe making or steel chains; it included a section on copying by elongation (wire drawing; lead pipes); and it included a further one on copying with altered dimensions, as with the pantograph or in the copying of dies by lathes. But it was dominated by applications in printing, including music and calico-printing, descriptions of stereotype, lithographic copies, engraving by pressure, and the French manufacture of clichés. Security printing, and the manufacture of facsimiles of early printed books, alike awoke Babbage's interest. He was not merely attentive to printing; he was captivated by the different applications of simple principles, and by the possibilities inherent in their exploitation. We may single out two interests in particular. First, when addressing the still comparatively young process of lithography (Hullmandel's lithographic printing house in London had been established only since 181833), he reflected:

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There is one application of lithographic printing which does not appear to have received sufficient attention, and perhaps farther experiments are necessary to bring it to perfection. It is the reprinting of works which have just arrived from other countries. A few years ago one of the Paris newspapers was reprinted at Brussels as soon as it arrived, by means of lithography. Whilst the ink is yet fresh this may easily be accomplished: it is only necessary to place one copy of the newspaper on a lithographic stone; and by means of great pressure applied to it in a rolling press, a sufficient quantity of the printing ink will be transferred to the stone. By similar means, the other side of the newspaper may be copied on another stone, and these stones will then furnish impressions in the usual way. If printing from stone could be reduced to the same price per thousand as that from moveable types, this process might be adopted with great advantage for the supply of works for the use of distant countries possessing the same language. For a single copy of the work might be printed off with transfer ink, which is better adapted to this purpose; and thus an English work, for example, might be published in America from stone, whilst the original, printed from moveable types, made its appearance on the same day in England.34 Babbage's fecund imagination knew no technical obstacles: it is difficult not to anticipate the near-certain destruction of a lithographic stone were it to be subjected to the pressure of a rolling-press. But the principle — of two places sharing the same setting of text — was a powerful one. It promised not just a saving in time and labour, but also a clear gain in uniformity and an avoidance of variation. Compositorial error would be reduced, and the sense of shared reading in an international sphere, familiar since the fifteenth century, would be enhanced. More mundanely, the reproductive possibilities of lithography offered a means of avoiding error. For generations, mathematicians had fretted at the mistakes which crept so easily into mathematical and astronomical tables." Were lithographic reproduction to be applied, even the cost of resetting might be avoided, since all that would be necessary would be to reproduce what had already been printed. Babbage had stated his motivation in his introduction; but as he developed his argument, so further aspects were raised respecting mechanical reproduction. He was fascinated by the idea of the facsmile, whether in stereotype, in the copying of steel-engravings by means of a soft-steel or copper intermediary, or in the difficulties inherent in preventing forgery of bank-notes. But he completed his discussion of copying with a summary of the steps in stereotyping; and instead of describing the process in the manner usually to be found in printers' manuals of his time, which proceeded from type and composition to moulds and plates and ultimately to the printed

Machinery and manufacture

page, Babbage led his readers backwards, from printed copies (the page before the reader) to stereotype plate and, eventually, to the matrix and the punch. The whole was, in Babbage's eyes, a series of copying processes. Since few of his readers were necessarily aware of the sequence, or its constituent parts, he set them out: 1 They are copies, by printing, from stereotype plates. 2 These stereotype plates are copied, by the art of casting, from moulds formed of plaster of Paris. 3 Those moulds are themselves copied by casting the plaster in a liquid state upon the movable types set up by the compositor. [It is here that the union of the intellectual and the mechanical department takes place. The mysteries, however, of an author's copying, form no part of our inquiry, although it may be fairly remarked, that, in numerous instances, the mental far eclipses the mechanical copyist.] 4 These movable types, the obedient messengers of the most opposite thoughts, the most conflicting theories, are themselves copies by casting from moulds of copper called matrices ...36 In his intervention, set in square brackets, Babbage sought to identify the moment when the manual became the mechanical, when the mind was obliged to release its control of what it had done. He emphasised that he had no concern at this moment with the author, but with processes of manufacture: the point at which hand-set type was finally captured, the letters that had been composed and set, sort by sort, in a composing stick, then transferred to a galley and then tied up into pages. The loose type became a fixed mass, a point of no return. In his phrasing, `the union of the intellectual and the mechanical; Babbage identified in his own mind one crucial aspect of the mechanisation of the printed book. For him, as for many others, it was not the invention of new and faster presses (König's steam press had been introduced for The Times as long ago as 28 November 1814); nor was it the invention of machine-made paper. Instead, it was the invention of stereotyping, the subject whose merits or otherwise, practical or economical, dominated discussions of recent printing innovations whether in encyclopaedias or in printers' manuals.37

Babbage recorded his views after several decades of change to the printing, publishing, papermaking and bookselling trades: changes in technology, in method, in organisation and in employment. By the time that he wrote, many methods of production, and many features of the finished book, were very similar to those that were to be familiar for the next several generations,

215

216

E

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

whereas they would have been equally unfamiliar to his grandparents' generation. In many respects these changes were designed to produce books bearing close semblances to their predecessors. As in the 1450s and 1460s, so in the 1780s to 1820s, the purpose of technological and managerial change was simultaneously innovative and conservative. The responses of authors and the reading public to this change likewise share many of the same preoccupations: of appearance, of cost, of speed. In this, the expectation of change, and attempts at change, were as important as change itself.

9

Instabilities: the inherent and the deliberate

Peter Shillingsburg, editor of Thackeray, was succinct: There was a time when textual criticism was universally understood to be the art of establishing what the author wrote and literary criticism was universally understood to be the art of what the author meant.' If re-examination of theories of copy-text, as expressed in the work of McKerrow, Greg and Bowers, has exposed some of the fallacies of AngloAmerican bibliography, it remains that the chasm of understanding between the implications of how texts are produced, multiplied and changed, and how they are received and reinterpreted, remains only imperfectly bridged.' Much of the present book impinges directly, and sometimes adversely, on critical theory, on theories of reading, and on bibliographical theory and practice. Though in some respects criticism and bibliographical understanding have moved closer together in the past two or three decades, the detailed application of this book to such theories must remain for another occasion. Here, I have generally preferred to concentrate on the inescapable material evidence, found in copies of books rather than in the sometimes more nebulously termed `texts': critical vocabulary is by no means at one on this expression. In editing, the once familiar concept of author's final intentions stands always subject to question. Since authors may in practice have several such intentions, and rest content with any of them (the cases of John Cotton, William Davenant and Sir Thomas Browne offer examples3) it is not one that necessarily aids the process of textual evaluation. We are also used to the simple concept of the unstable text: the revisions of Othello, Richardson's successive alterations to his novels, the several versions of The prelude, the process of revision in the poems of Keats.' The spoken word, even in formal speeches, is liable to change as it is accommodated to the rhythms and formalities of print (fig. 44): as texts, delivered at different times, in different circumstances and in different media, each is valid, though in different senses according to the extent to which it has the imprimatur of the author.5 My aim has been to demonstrate that instability in print is not just a linear process, from speech to manuscript to print, nor even one that depends

218

Instabilities: the inherent and the deliberate

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830

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260

Notes to pages 67-75

Antoine Wrard, Parisian publisher, 1485-1512 ; prologues, poems, and presentations (Geneva, 1997). Brigitte Moreau and Philippe Renouard, Inventaire chronologique des éditions parisiennes du xvie siècle, I—II. (1501-20) (Paris, 1972-7) offers a full list of his sixteenth-century publications. 73 British Library C.22.b.2: BMC viii. 83. 74 BNF Rés. Vélins 1223: see Coron, Livres rares, no. 73. 75 Trinity College, Cambridge VI.15.82: Goff S373. I am grateful to Mary Beth Winn and James Carley for help with this book: it does not figure in the catalogues of Henry VIII's library: see J. P. Carley (ed.), The libraries of KingHenry VIII (2000). 76 Smeyers, Flemish miniatures, concentrates on the better examples. 77 Pierpont Morgan Library 17588 (1525: Roger Wieck, Painted prayers; the Book of Hours in medieval and renaissance art (New York, 1998), p. 59); Sotheby's (London), 27 June 1995 (Otto Schäfer collection), lot 108 (1525, but with rather flatter colouring); Trinity College, Cambridge C.12.104 (1531: Adams L1040); Sotheby's (New York), 21 April 1998 (Jaime Ortiz-Patino collection), lot 42 (1525). By contrast, cf. the heavier colouring on the Harvard copy of the 1525 edition: Mortimer, French, no. 303. 78 See, for example, the copy in the Bodleian Library (Auct.L.1.8,9). The copy in Cambridge University Library (Oates 1608) derives from two different owners: the opening page ofvolume I has woodcut decorations, but volume II is decorated only in manuscript. For the Corsivi copy (with a similar palette of colouring to that in the first Cambridge volume), see Victor Masséna, Prince d'Essling, Les

livres a figures vénétiens de la fin du xve siècle et du commencement du xvie, 3 parts (Florence, 1907), 1, plate opposite p. 56; for the Laurenziana copy (D'Elci 457), with a quite different decorative scheme, see Angela Dillon Bussi et al., Incunaboli ed edizioni rare; la collezione di Angelo Maria D'Elci (Florence, 1989), pp. 205-7 and plates 20-2. 79 Lamberto Donati, `I fregi xilografici stampati a mano negl'incunaboli italiani, La Bibliofilia74 (1972), pp. 157-64, 303-27; 75 (1973), pp. 125-74; Armstrong, Renaissance miniature painters, pp. 21-9; and Lilian Armstrong, `The impact of printing on miniaturists in Venice, in Hindman, Printing, pp. 174-202, at pp. 195-200; Susy Marcon, `Esempi di xilominiatura nella Biblioteca di S. Marco, Ateneo Veneto, n.s. 24 (1986), pp. 173-93 and figs. 50-63; George Abrams, `Venetian xylographic update, Gutenberg jahrbuch 63 (1988), pp. 43-53; Holger Nickel, A Roman initial alphabet, in Davies, Incunabula, pp. 129-39. 80 Armstrong, Renaissance miniature painters, pp. 5-6; Armstrong, `The impact of printing, pp. 174-202 ; Jonathan Alexander (ed.), The painted page; Italian

renaissance book illumination, 1450-1550 (1994), pp. 163-208. 81 Gustav Waagen, Treasures of art in Great Britain, 3 vols. (1854), III, p. 452. 82 Oates 1640; T. F. Dibdin, Horae bibliographicae Cantabrigienses (New Castle, Del., 1989), p. 38; C. H. Hartshorne, The book rarities in the University of Cambridge (1829), p. 42; Armstrong, Renaissance miniature painters, p. 130, no. 41. 83 Lilian Armstrong,`Problems of decoration and provenance of incunables illuminated by north Italian miniaturists; PBSA 91 (1997), pp. 467-76.

. ~~11IIII~

Notes to pages 75-80

84 Goff B183: the printer was Guilelmus Anima Mia, or Guglielmo da Trino: for details of variants in the text see Curt E Bühler, `Variants in the first atlas of the Mediterranean, GI (1957), pp. 94-7. One of the two copies in Trinity College, Cambridge (VI.14.10), annotated with geographical identifications, belonged to the inveterate late-sixteenth-century traveller Matthew Lok, who in the 1590s briefly held a post at Aleppo with the Levant Company. See also Tony Campbell, The earliest printed maps, 1472-1500 (1987), pp. 89-92; facsimile of the plain Rosenwald copy, ed. F. R. Goff (Amsterdam, 1972). 85 Goff H559. The copy in Trinity College, Cambridge (Grylls.3.290) has somewhat roughly executed pen and watercolour drawings: I have not yet attempted to compare them systematically either with other surviving copies or with manuscripts: cf. P. McGurk, Catalogue of astrological and mythological illuminated manuscripts in the Latin middle ages 4 (1966); A. W. Byvank, `De platen in de Aratea van Hugo de Groot, Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, n.s. 12 (1949), pp. 169-236, at pp. 229-33; and the textual summary by M. D. Reeve in L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and transmission (Oxford, 1983), pp. 187-9. For use of images derived from Hyginus in decorative schemes, see Gisela Noehles-Doerk, `Die Universitdtsbibliothek von Salamanca im 15. Jahrhundert and ihr kosmologisches Ausmalungsprogramm, in Carsten-Peter Warncke (ed.), Ikonographie der Bibliotheken (Wiesbaden, 1992), pp. 11-41. The Ferrara edition is rare: only seven copies are known in Italy, and six in the rest of the world. For the Este library in 1495, see G. Bertoni, La biblioteca Estense e la coltura ferrarese ai tempi del duca Ercole I (1471-1505) (Turin, 1903), pp. 235-52; for printing in Ferrara, see in particular Gustave Gruyer, L'art ferrarais à Pépoque des Princes d'Este, 2 vols. (Paris, 1897), II, pp. 501-73, and Victor Scholderer, `Printing at Ferrara in the fifteenth century, in Gutenberg-Festschrift (Mainz, 1925), pp. 73-8, repr. in his Fifty essays, ed. D. E. Rhodes (Amsterdam, 1966), pp. 91-5. 86 W. W. Greg, `Bibliography — an apologia; The Library, new ser., 13 (1932), pp. 113-43, repr. in his Collected papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford, 1966), pp. 239-66, at p. 243. For his `catholic view, see p. 246. 87 Gaskell, New introduction, p. 313. 88 A coloured copy is reproduced in The Helmut N. Friedlaender library part 1, Christie's (New York), 23 April 2001, lot 173. The coloured copyin the Wellcome Institute (Wellcome 866) is less gaudy than the Friedlaender copy, and exhibits various differences in pigment, the niger being for example more brown than blue, and the red being much less clear; but note, however, that the colouring of the doctor and patient are the same in both copies. The circular block in the second Wellcome copy (Wellcome 867) is on a leaf either from another copy of the book, or, more probably, is a facsimile. The British Library copy (C.112.d.5) is uncoloured, and belonged in 1552 to Thomas Yale of Queens' College, Cambridge, who added various marginal notes. 89 Agnes Arber, `The colouring of sixteenth-century herbals', Nature 145 (1940), pp. 803-4; Thegreatherbal ofLeonhardtFuchs, ed. Frederick G. Meyer and others,

261

262

2 vols. (Stanford, Calif , 1999), I, pp. 119-20, 663-5. Contrary to the impression given by Arber, Plantin did not employ colourists in his own printing house, but contracted out such work. For further related issues, see also Sachiko Kusukawa, `Leonhart Fuchs on the importance of pictures, Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997), pp. 403-27.

90 Hunt catalogue, II, part 1, p. clxxii. 91 Some of the issues raised in the description of books with inserted plates are tackled in Roger Gaskell, Catalogue 27 (Warboys, Cambridgeshire, 2000), `Notes on new symbols and terminology' 92 The earliest documented example of a rolling press (rather than some simpler rolling apparatus) seems to date from Mechelen, in 1540: see Landau and Parshall, Renaissance print, pp. 29-30. See also Henry Meier, `The origin of the printing and roller press, Print Collector's Quarterly 28 (1941), pp. 9-55. 93 Goff L117. `The engraving appears to be directly pulled on the verso of the first leaf, in a limited issue of copies, preserved now only in the Huntington copy' (note by Paul Needham, in Sotheby's (New York) catalogue, 8 December 1994, lot 11). For some of the complications surrounding this engraving, see also Lotte Hellinga-Querido, `Reading an engraving: William Caxton's dedication to Margaret York, Duchess of Burgundy, in Susan Roach (ed.), Across the narrow seas; studies in the history and bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries presented to Anna E. C. Simoni (1991), pp. 1-15. The earliest printed books with engraved illustrations are listed in Schafer Katalog, I, pp. 119-21. 94 BMC vi. 626; Arthur M. Hind, A history of engraving & etching, 3rd edn (1923), p. 47, is more cautious in speaking of this book as `one of the earliest instances known where the copper-plates used for book illustration were printed directly on to the page of text'. See also Schafer Katalog, no. 14, and Sotheby's (New York), 8 December 1994, lot 11; Gisèle Lambert, Les premières gravures italiennes, quattrocento — début du cinquecento; inventaire de la collection du Département des Estampes et de la Photographie (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1999), pp. 81-2. 95 Goff D29, BMC vi. 628-9. E Lippman, Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante s Divina commedia; reduced facsimiles after the originals (1896); Kenneth Clark, The drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante's Divine comedy after the originals in the Berlin museums and the Vatican (New York, 1976); L. Donati, Il Botticelli e le prime illustrazioni della Divina Commedia (Florence, 1962); H. T. Schulze Altcappenberg, Sandro Botticelli: the drawings for Dante's Divine comedy (2000). For detailed accounts of this book, see Schafer Katalog, no. 115 and the notes by Paul Needham in the sale catalogue at Sotheby's (New York), 8 December 1994, lot 66; Lambert, Les premières gravures italiennes, pp. 82-9. Peter Dreyer, `Botticelli's series of engravings "of 1481" , Print Quarterly 1 (1984), pp. 111-15, assumes that all copies were bound by 1483 or shortly after, and that the late arrival of the plates meant that they could only be pasted into the already bound volumes. It seems more probable that we are witnessing here a stock of plates

263

Notes to pages 82-87

Notes to pages 80-82

printed in varying quantities, at different times, which gradually ran dry after different intervals as copies were made up and bound over a period of several years. 96 Richardson, Renaissance Italy, p. 21; Paolo Trovato, `Il libro toscano dell'età di Lorenzo: schede ed ipotesi, in La Toscana al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico; politica, economia, cultura, arte, 3 vols. (Pisa, 1996), II, pp. 525-63, repr. with a postscript in his L'ordine dei tipografi; lettori, stampatori, correttori tra quattro e cinquecento (Rome, 1998), pp. 49-89. 97 BNF Rés.Yd.17; reproduced in Antoine Coron (ed.), Des livres rares depuis l'invention de l'imprimerie (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1998), no. 13. 98 Oates 596; GW 3766. See Henry Bradshaw, `Note on a book printed at Cologne in 1477, with two illustrations engraved on copper', Collected papers (Cambridge, 1889), pp. 244-6. 99 BMC ix.p.132; GW 4432; Le cinquième centenaire de l'imprimerie dans les anciens Pays-Bas (Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, Brussels, 1973), no. 102; H. Michel, L'imprimeur Colard Mansion et le Boccace de la Bibliothèque d'Amiens (Paris, 1925); Schafer Katalog, no. 63; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Fünf Jahrhunderte Buchillustration (Nuremberg, 1987), no. 11; Sotheby's (London), 1 November 1995, lot 42, now in the collection of Sir Paul Getty: see The Wormsley Library (1999), no. 15. The copy in Amiens, Bibliothèque Municipale, H4425, is illustrated in Maximiliaan P. J. Martens (ed.), Bruges and the renaissance; Memling to Pourbus (Bruges, 1998), no. 175; for further details of the illustrations, see also Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish, xii, pp. 119 ff. Some of the artistic background to Mansion's illustrated edition is discussed, with further references, in J. P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Livelier than life; the Master of theAmsterdam Cabinet or the Housebook Master, ca. 1470-1500 (Amsterdam, 1985), pp. 190-1, and in Pierette Jean-Richard, Graveurs en taille-douce des anciens Pays-Bas, 143011440-1555 (Paris, 1998), pp. 50-9.

100 Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, et al., Lodewijk van Gruuthuse; Mecenas en Europees diplomaat, ca. 1427-1492 (Bruges, 1992). 101 Le cinquième centenaire de l'imprimerie dans les anciens Pays-Bas, pp. 227-38 (notes on the printed edition by Marc Goetinck); Bruges, Stadsbibliotheek nos. 3877, 3878, illustrated in Martens (ed.), Bruges and the renaissance, no. 177. 102 Oates 3835; Le cinquième centenaire de l'imprimerie dans les anciens Pays-Bas,

no. 103; Alain Arnould and Jean Michel Massing, Splendours of Flanders (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1993), p. 164. 103 Goff B812, BMC ix. 206; Le cinquième centenaire de l'imprimerie dans les anciens Pays-Bas, no. 160; Arnould and Massing, Splendours of Flanders, pp. 168-71; J. Machiels, Meester Arend de Keysere, 1480-1490 (Ghent, 1973); J. Machiels, De boekdrukkunst te Gent tot 1560 (Ghent, 1994). 104 For the Rosenwald copy of the de Keysere edition of Boethius and the Cambridge University Library copy of the Mansion edition, Oates 3835, see

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264

Notes to pages 87-90

Hindman and Farquhar, Pen to press, p. 126 and úg.50, and Le cinquième centenaire de l'imprimerie dans les anciens Pays-Bas, no. 103. For Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS N6erl.1, see Martens et al., Lodewijk van Gruuthuse, p. 150. 105 Schafer Katalog, no. 63 and Sotheby's (New York), 1 November 1995, lot 42. 106 The Cambridge copy (Oates 4003) is illustrated in Arnould and Massing, Splendours of Flanders, p. 169. 107 Adams R407. 108 George Henderson, `Bible illustration in the age of Laud, TCBS 8 (1982), pp. 173-216; McKitterick, Cambridge University Press I, pp. 327-8. 109 Goff G5. 110 Mortimer Italian, no. 96; H. George Fletcher, New Aldine studies (San Francisco, 1988), pp. 116-19. 111 See STC 10560 and below, p. 134. 112 Barthélemy Aneau, Picta poesis (Lyon: M. Bonhomme, 1552), fo. F5v; Adams A1092. In the Cambridge University Library copy the cancel impression is simply tipped on at one corner; see also Mortimer, French, no. 25. 113 Latino Orsini, Trattato del radio latino (Rome: Marc'Antonio Moretti and Iacomo Briazi, 1586); Adams 0318 (Trinity College, Cambridge S.3.110). 114 Adams H850. The Trinity College, Cambridge and Cambridge University Library copies are as the Harvard copy (see Mortimer, French, no. 315). 115 Jean Cousin, Le livre de perspective (Paris: J. Le Royer, 1560), fo. C3v; Adams C2852; Mortimer, French, no. 157. The Trinity College, Cambridge copy is not so corrected. 116 St John's College, Cambridge Kk.6.33: the error was made with tab.VI, lib.l. 117 For examples, see M. H. Black: `The evolution of a book-form: the octavo Bible from manuscript to the Geneva version, The Library, 5th ser., 16 (1961), pp. 15-28 and `The evolution of a book-form. II. The folio Bible to 1560, The Library, 5th ser., 18 (1963), pp. 191-203; T. A. Birrell, `The influence of seventeenth-century publishers on the presentation of English literature, in Mary-Jo Arn et al. (ed.), Historical and editorial studies in medieval and early modern English for Johan Gerritsen (Groningen, 1985), pp. 163-73; Jerome J. McGann, `The book of Byron and the book of the world, in his The beauty of inflexions; literary investigations in historical method and theory (Oxford, 1988), pp. 255-93. 118 For an Amsterdam example of 1711, see Hellinga, Copy and print, fig. 161. 119 For Holbein's drawings, published in facsimile, edited by H. A. Schmid (Basel, 1931), see Erika Michael, The drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger for Erasmus' `Praise of folly' (New York, 1986); Christian Muller, Hans Holbein d.J.; Zeichnungen aus dem Kupferstichkabinett der Offentlichen Kunstsammlung Basel (Basel: Kunstmuseum, 1988), pp. 20-33. The drawings have been widely published in conjunction with the English translation by White Kennett. The Suetonius (1675) was edited by Charles Patin, who commented on the original

Notes to pages 90-99

drawings in Moriae encomium in his Relations historiques et curieuses de voyages (Amsterdam, 1695), pp. 127-8. 120 Mortimer, Italian, no. 30; Adams A1677. See also Enid T. Falaschi, `Notes on some illustrations of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso; La Bibliofilia 75 (1973), pp. 175-88. 121 See, for example, the illustration of an atelier by Abraham Bosse (1642), clearly showing work proceeding on several plates simultaneously. Reproduced, for example in Marianne G. Rivel, Le commerce de l'estampe a Paris au xviie siècle (Geneva, 1986), p. 18. See also p. 91. 122 Mortimer, Italian, no. 223; Adams G1355. 123 Mortimer, Italian, no. 255; A. M. Hind, Catalogue of early Italian engravings in the British Museum, 2 vols. (1909-10), pp. 469-70. 124 McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, II, p. 242. 125 Karen Lee Bowen, Christopher Plantin's Books of Hours (Nieuwkoop, 1997); Bowen, `Wierix and Plantin; a question of originals and copies, Print Quarterly 14 (1997), pp. 131-50. 126 See above, pp. 61-5. 127 Cambridge University Library Rel.c.62.1. 128 Antony Griffiths, Prints and printmaking; an introduction to the history and techniques, 2nd edn (1996), pp. 139-40. 129 For a copy of the reversed image in STC 25723, see Peterborough Cathedral Library Pet.K.1.32; for a similar one in STC 25723a, see Trinity College, Cambridge C.11.114'. STC does not mention the differences in the frontispiece.

4 A house of errors 1 Calendar Patent Rolls, Edward VI, 3, p. 227. 2 STC 2856; Herbert 79. 3 STC 2821; Herbert 88. 4 STC 2859.7-2860; Herbert 90. 5 `Doch iemand, die zelf niet nauwkeurig is, zal'er vele niet eens merken; den nauwkeurigen zullen de kleinere feilen niet hinderen, en hij zal (hoop ik) de overige verschoonen.' Lambertus van Bolhuis, Beknopte aanleiding tot de kennis der spelling, spraakdeelen, en zinteekenen van de Nederduitsche taal (Groningen, 1776), fo. M4r. 6 See above, p. 10. 7 Cf. John Dreyfus, `The invention of spectacles and the advent of printing, The Library, 6th. ser., 10 (1988), pp. 93-106, repr. in his Into print (1994), pp. 298-310. 8 Some readers of the 42-line Bible certainly read with a critical textual eye. For the Frankfurt copy, collated at an early date with a manuscript copy of the Vulgate, see Gerhardt Powitz, Die Frankfurter Gutenberg-Bibel: ein Beitragzum Buchwesen des 15. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1990); for the Cambridge

265

1!

266

Notes to pages 99-100

University Library copy, corrected for the edition printed by Eggestein at Strasburg in about 1469, see Paul Needham, A Gutenberg Bible used as printer's copy by Heinrich Eggestein in Strassburg, ca. 1469, TCBS 9 (1986), pp. 36-75; for the Texas (formerly Pforzheimer) copy, see William B. Todd, The Gutenberg Bible; new evidence of the original printing (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982). 9 For early correction habits, see for example Brian Richardson, Renaissance Italy, pp. 14-16. In view of the importance attached by printers to correction, it is as well to emphasise the distinction between correction by printers, and correction at the hands of censorship, in particular by authority of the various Roman Catholic Indexes. Antonio Possevino was concerned with the latter, including those from Spain and Louvain: `Iam libri corriguntur, emendantur, purgantur' (Cultura ingeniorum (Paris, 1605), p. 182). See further below, pp. 151-65. 10 These issues have underlain, for example, Eisenstein, Printing press as an agent of change, and The printing revolution in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983), E. J. Kenney, The classical text; aspects of editing in the age of the printed book (Berkeley, 1974), and Lotte Hellinga, `Manuscripts in the hands of printers, in J. B. Trapp (ed.), Manuscripts in the fifty years after the invention of printing (1983), pp. 3-11. See also Peter E McNally, The advent of printing; historians of

science respond to Elizabeth Eisenstein's `The printing press as an agent of change'

MOM

(Montreal, 1987), and the remarks in Johns, Nature of the book, ch. 1. The nature and speed of changes are discussed further by Uwe Neddermeyer in a review of the German translation of Eisenstein, Zeitschrift fiir Historische Forschung 27 (2000), pp. 436-8. 11 Alister E. McGrath, Reformation thought; an introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993, repr. 1993), p. 13. 12 H. G. Koenigsberger, Medieval Europe 400-1500 (1987), p. 298. 13 For Tours, see David Ganz, `Mass production of early medieval manuscripts: the Carolingian Bibles from Tours, in R. Gameson (ed.), The early medieval Bible; its production, decoration and use (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 53-62; R. D. McKitterick, `Carolingian Bible production; the Tours anomaly, ibid., pp. 63-77; for the thirteenth century, Laura Light: `Versions et révisions du texte biblique; in Pierre Riche and Guy Lobrichon (eds.), Le moyen âge et la Bible (Paris, 1984), pp. 55-93; and `French Bibles, c.1200-30: a new look at the origin of the Paris Bible, in Gameson (ed.), Early medieval Bible, pp. 155-76 ; Christopher de Hamel, Glossed books of the Bible and the origins of the Paris book trade (Woodbridge, 1984); for the pecia system, Graham Pollard, `The pecia system in the medieval universities, in M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (eds.), Medieval scribes, manuscripts and libraries, essays presented to N. R. Ker (1978), pp. 145-61; Louis Bataillon, et al. (eds.), La production du livre universitaire au moyen âge; exemplar etpecia (Paris, 1988); R. H. Rouse and M. Rouse, Manuscripts and their makers; commercial book production in medieval Paris, 1200-1500, 2 vols. (2000). 14 Johannes Busch, Chronicon Windeshemense, ed. Karl Grube (Halle, 1886), pp. 310-13; Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, `Correction and emendation

Notes to pages 100-101

of texts in the fifteenth century and the autograph of the Opus pacis by "Oswaldus Anglicus" , in S. Kramer and M. Bernhard (eds.), Scire litteras; Forschungen zum mittelalterlichen Geistesleben (Munich, 1988), pp. 333-46. 15 `Incidit ut vehementer probaremus Germanum inventorem, qui per haec tempora pressionibus quibusdam characterum efficeret ut diebus centum plus ducenta volumina librorum opera hominum non plus trium exscripta redderet, dato ab exemplari; unica enim pressione, integram exscriptam reddit paginam majoris chartae.' Leon Battista Alberti, De cifra (Opera inedita, ed. J. Mancini (Florence, 1890), p. 310); see also Richardson, Renaissance Italy, p. 3. 16 Justinus, Epitome in Trogi Pompeii Historias (Rome: Ulrich Han, c. 1470-1): BMC ív.19. See also Brian Richardson, `The debates on printing in renaissance Italy, in Luigi Balsamo and Pierangelo Belletini (eds.), Anatome bibliologiche; saggi di storia del libro per il centenario de `La Bibliofilia' (Florence, 1999), pp. 135-55, at pp. 137-8. 17 Polydore Vergil, De inventoribus rerum (Venice: Christophorus de Pensis, 1499). fo. 5r; An abridgemente of the notable worke of Polidore Virgile, rev. Thomas Langley [c. 1560], fo. xlivverso. C£ Baptista Fulgosus (c. 1494), De dictis factisque memorabilibus collectanea a Camillo Gilino latina jacta libri LX (Milan, 1509), fo. ll 2v.: `nam non solum uno die imprimendo plura scribere quam uno anno calamis docuit'. A selection of early commentators specifically on Gutenberg is provided in Alfred Swierk, `Johannes Gutenberg als Erfinder in Zeugnissen seiner Zeit, in Hans Widmann (ed.), Der gegenwdrtige Stand der GutenbergForschung (Bibliothek des Buchwesens 1) (Stuttgart, 1972), pp. 79-90. John Foxe, the martyrologist, was only one among many later commentators to return to the same theme: John Foxe, Actes and monumentes, 2 vols. (1570), I, p. 838. The comparison between the speeds of the two media is in some ways a figure of speech, but for the actual speed of scribes see Michael Gullick, `How fast did scribes write? Evidence from romanesque manuscripts, in Linda L. Brownrigg (ed.), Making the medieval book; techniques of production (Los Altos Hills, Calif., 1995), pp. 39-58, and J. P. Gumbert, `The speed of scribes, in E. Condello and G. de Gregorio (eds.), Scribi e colofoni; le sottoscrizioni di copisti dalle origini all'avvento della stampa (Spoleto, 1995), pp. 57-69. 18 Robert W. Scheller, Exemplum; model-book drawings and the practice of artistic transmission in the middle ages (ca. 900—ca. 1470) (Amsterdam, 1995); Lilian Armstrong, Renaissance miniature painters and classical imagery (1981), nos. 4 and 7; and, `The impact of printing on miniaturists in Venice after 1469, in Hindman, Printing, pp. 174-202. Scheller (Exemplum, p. 87) points out the distinction between the traditional model book and the kind of detailed directions for executing border ornament provided by the so-called Göttingen model book (H. Lehmann-Haupt, The Göttingen model book (Columbia, 1972)). Glasgow University Library Stirling Maxwell 1161, a Netherlandish manuscript containing alphabets and other decorative material, dates from 1529: Nigel Thorp, The

267

268

Notes to pages 101-107

glory of the page; medieval & renaissance illuminated manuscripts from Glasgow University Library (1987), no. 129. 19 Goff D403; Eberhard König, `The influence of the invention of printing on the development of German illustration, in Trapp (ed.), Manuscripts in the fifty years after the invention of printing, pp. 85-96; and, `New perspectives on the history of Mainz printing: a fresh look at illuminated imprints, in Hindman, Printing, pp. 143-73, at p. 158; E. König, `Filr Johannes Fust, in Hans Limburg, et al. (eds.), Ars impressoria; Entstehung und Entwicklung des Buchdrucks. Festgabe f it Severin Corsten (Munich, 1986), pp. 285-313. 20 See above, pp. 59, 69. 21 Goff T144; A. A. Renouard, Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde, 3rd edn (Paris, 1834), pp. 5-7. 22 Christie's (New York), 22 October 1987 (Estelle Doheny collection: incunabula), lot 3. The catalogue was by Felix de Marez Oyens and Paul Needham. 23 See for example the additions by the Venice monk Theoleptus to a copy of Aldus's edition ofApollonius Dyscolus (1495): Christie's (London), 11 July 2000 (library of William Foyle), lot 175. 24 Goff A959; GW 2334. 25 Bartholomaeus de Sancto Concordio, Summa de casibus conscientiae: GW 3452; Robert Proctor, An index to the early printed books in the British Museum: from the invention of printing to the yearM.D. with notes of those in the Bodleian Library (1898), 3452; 7836; Bodleian Library Auct.1.Q.1.25. 26 Franciscus de Platea, Opus restitutionum: Goff P757; BMC viii.8. For other annotated copies see those at Trinity College, Cambridge, VI. 14.28, Magdalen College, Oxford, Arch.C.I.4.7, and in H. P. Kraus catalogue 209 (1998), no. 116. 27 Goff G436, Oates 341, 342; at least the Cambridge and the misbound British Library copies (IÁ.2851; C.9.a.16) have been corrected in manuscript. 28 Goff A229; GW 596; Oates 973. 29 Goff C200. See Elly Cockx-Indestege, `Marks in books printed by the Brothers of the Common Life in Brussels: production and reception, PBSA 91 (1997), pp. 607-33, at pp. 612-13 and fig.4. The Cambridge University Library copy (Oates 3847) is also amended in this way, but the corrections have been mostly washed out — presumably by the nineteenth-century binder. 30 GoffP855; (Poggio) Kraus catalogue 131 (Monumentaxylographicaettypographica): BMC ív.36 (John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas). 31 The Helmut N. Friedlaender Library, Christie's (New York), 23 April 2001, lot 172 (copy on vellum); see also Fairfax Murray, German, no. 329, for a paper copy. 32 The settings are distinguishable by uoi or voi in line one of the insertion. The first exists in Cambridge University Library, T*.3.4(D) and SSS.56.5 and in Trinity College, Cambridge, Grylls.6.217, the second in Trinity College, G.12.64. 33 Goff G436, Oates 341. For Zell and printing on half sheets, see Francis Jenkinson, `Ulrich Zell's early quartos, The Library, 4th ser., 7 (1927), pp. 46-66.

Notes to pages 107-111

34 The George Abrams collection, Sotheby's, 16-17 November 1989, lot 61 (notes by Paul Needham). At the end of the book are four extra quires of ten leaves each, three of them written in a hand very similar to that which made good the missing text. The book is in a contemporary, presumably South German, binding. 35 Goff A1063; Emmanuel College, Cambridge, MS 5.1.16; see also CockxIndestege, `Marks in books printed by the Brothers of the Common Life, at p. 613. 36 Oates 3365. 37 STC 15908.5: British Library copy, C 123.d.32. This copy was sold at Sotheby's (London), 1 July 1968, lot 43. 38 Goff J96; Oates 655. The book was bound by the Lily Binder (cf. J. B. Oldham, English blind-stamped bindings (Cambridge, 1952), p. 29) and was once chained. 39 On deposit in Cambridge University Library: Pet.G.9.2. 40 James Walsh, A catalogue of the fifteenth-century printed books in the Harvard University Library 1 (Binghamton, NY, 1991), headnote to descriptions of copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493: Goff S307), p. 287. 41 Erasmus to Jacob Batt, Orléans, c. 12 December 1500: Erasmus, Works. Correspondence 1, pp. 301-2. For discussions of aspects of Erasmus's appreciation of the printing press, see A. Hayum, `Diirer's portrait of Erasmus and the ars typographorum, Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985), pp. 650-87, and Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, man of letters; the construction of charisma in print (Princeton, 1993). 42 Erasmus, Adagia ( Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1508), f.114r; Erasmus, Works. Adages II.i.l to Il.vi.100, trans. and annotated by R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto, 1991), P. 10. 43 Martin Lowry, The world of Aldus Manutius (Oxford, 1979), pp. 244-5, 255 nn.109-10. 44 Erasmus, Adagio (Basel: Froben, 1528), `Festina lente, pp. 348-56; Erasmus, Works. Adages ILi.I to II.vi.100, trans. Mynors, p. 11. 45 Goff P787. Perotti himself was attacked in turn for his own edition. M. C. Davies, `Making sense of Pliny in the Quattrocento; Renaissance Studies 9 (1995), pp. 239-55. 46 `Supt enim pene innumerabiles per orbem terra[ru]m ubicumque diffusi, qui hanc diuinam imprimendi artem sua barbarie et inscitia inuertunt et multorum ingeniorum clarissima ingenia feda corruptione infamant quodque ab omnipotenti deo benignissimo numine ad humani generis laudem et exaltationem concessum est, in pernitiem uertunt, dum sine omni adhibito libramine libros optime emendatos pessime negligentissimeque non imprimunt sed corrumpunt.' Conrad Leontorius to Johann Amerbach, Maulbronn, 17 November 1497: Alfred Hartmann and Beat R. Jenny (ed.), Die Amerbachkorrespondenz (Basel, 1942— ) I, no. 66; see also Barbara C. Halporn, The correspondence of Johann Amerbach; early printing in its social context (Ann Arbor, 2000). 47 Erasmus, Adagia.

269

270

Notes to pages 111-115

48 Petrarch, Li sonetti, canzone, triumphi (Venice: Bernardino Stagnino, 1513), fo.+2r—v. Adams P789. 49 See, for example, the many English examples gathered in Simpson, Proof-reading; for a detailed example, see Charlton Hinman, The printing and proof-reading of the first folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1963). For a book published at Amsterdam in 1671, see Hellinga, Copy and print, pp. 150-1. 50 In parenthesis, it maybe remarked that while it is misleading to describe groups of like manuscripts as of one `edition, and in doing so to use a word that in the context of book manufacture is generally applied to particularly defined groups of copies of printed books, the term does usefully suggest something of the relationship between some copies of manuscripts. 51 See also Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, Theologia praeterintentionalis 4 (Lyon, 1664), and V Romani, Il `Syntagma de arte typographica' di Juan Caramuel ed altri testi secenteschi sulla tipografia e l'edizione (Manziana, 1988), pp. 46-7. 52 Louis le Roy, De la vicissitude ou varietè des chose en l'univers (Paris, 1576), fos. e3v, e4r. Further editions followed in 1579,1583 and 1584. On LeRoy, see Werner L. Gundersheimer, The life and works of Louis le Roy (Geneva, 1966). Passages from Le Roy and others are included in Don Cameron Allen, `Some contemporary accounts of renaissance printing methods, The Library, 4th ser., 17 (1936), pp. 167-71, and in Conor Fahy, `Descrizioni cinquecentesche della fabricazione dei caratteri e del processo tipografico, La Bibliofilia 88 (1986), pp. 47-86, at pp. 64-70. 53 A summary of the editions is given in Gundersheimer, Louis le Roy, p. 150. 54 A. Thevet, Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (Paris, 1584), fo. 516v. 55 René François [Etienne Binet], Essay des merveilles de nature, et des plus nobles artifices (Paris, 1631), p. 300. 56 Ibid., p. 305. 57 Iconologia, of uytbeeldingen des verstands: van Cesare Ripa van Perugien, Ridder van S. S. Mauritius en Lazzaro ... uyt het Italiaens vertaelt door D. Pietersz. Pers (Amsterdam, 1644),p. 636. Quoted in Hellinga, Copy and print, p.146 (Hellinga's translation). 58 Pasquier to Antoine Loisel, April 1586: E. Pasquier, Lettres (Paris, 1586), pp. 329-30, quoted also in Nina Catach, L'orthographe frankaise à l'époque de la renaissance; auteurs —imprimeurs —ateliers d'imprimerie (Geneva, 1968), p. 289. 59 Pierre Coton, Du très-sainct, et très-auguste sacrement, et sacrifice de la messe (Avignon, 1600). 60 John Peckham, Perspectiva communis (Venice: for G. B. Sessa, 1504). Adams P534; Mortimer, Italian, no. 367. 61 Recent work has tended to concentrate on literary texts, for example Catach, L'orthographie française; Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto; la stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470-1570) (Bologna, 1991); Brian Richardson, Print culture in renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1994); Anthony Grafton, Bring out your dead; the past as revelation (Cambridge,

Notes to pages 115-119

Mass., 2001), ch. 7, `Printers' correctors and the publication of classical texts'. 62 Hieronymus Hornschuch, Orthotypographia, 1608, ed. and trans. Philip Gaskell and Patricia Bradford (Cambridge, 1972); also as Orthotypographia; lateinisch/deutsch, 1608 Leipzig 1634, ed. Martin Boghardt, Frans A. Janssen and Walter Wilkes (Darmstadt, n.d.). See also Simpson, Proof-reading, pp. 126-33. For correctors in France, see for example Annie Parent, Les métiers du livre à Paris an xvie siècle (1535-1560) (Geneva, 1974), pp. 124-6, and Paul Chauvet, Les ouvriers du livre en France des origines à la Révolution de 1789 (Paris, 1959), pp. 305-11. 63 A doctor who lances a tumor, cuts out the bad and cauterizes is not an evil man. He inflicts pain to restore health. He is troublesome, but if he were not, he would be of no use.' (Orthotypographia: translation by Philip Gaskell and Patricia Bradford. All translations are quoted from this edition.) 64 J. C. Zeltner, C. D. Correctorum in typographiis eruditorum centuria speciminis loco collecta (Nuremberg, 1716), p. 578. Zeltner included a very useful account of earlier correctors, with brief biographies. The list in Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto, pp. 51-60, adds many more names, but ignores Zeltner's pioneering work. 65 Hornschuch, Orthotypographia, p. 7. 66 Ibid., Dedicatoria, fo. A5r-v. 67 Ibid., p. 9. 68 Ibid., p. 29. 69 H. D. L. Vervliet, `Une instruction Plantinienne à l'intention des correcteurs, Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1959), pp. 99-103; Martin Boghardt, `Instruktionen für Korrektoren der Officina Plantiniana, in G. Crapulli (ed.), Trasmissione dei testi a stampa nel periodo moderno 2 (Rome, 1987), pp. 1-15. Boghardt reproduces pages from the two surviving versions of these instructions (Plantin Museum Archives vols. 13, fo.164v. and 118, fo. lr. ): the many manuscript alterations made to each (but especially the first) suggest that several people were involved in their compilation. 70 Suetonius, De la vie des XII. Cesars (Lyons: J. de Tournes, 1569): see Mortimer, French, no. 506; Alfred Cartier, Bibliographie des éditions de De Tournes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1938) Il, nos. 347, 533. 71 Hornschuch, Orthotypographia, pp. xii, 34. 72 Zeltner, C. D. correctorum... centuria, pp. 586-8. 73 Beatus Rhenanus to Erasmus, Basel, 24 April 1517: Erasmus, Correspondence, no. 575: Collected works, 4 (Toronto, 1977). See also Johan Gerritsen, `Printing at Froben's: an eye-witness account, SB 44(1991), pp. 144-63, discussing a description written by an editor in 1534. 74 Erasmus to Wolfgang Lachner [Louvain, 15171: Erasmus, Works. Correspondence, no. 704a. For Lachner and his links with Froben, see Contemporaries of Erasmus, II, pp. 279-80.

271

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Notes to pages 119-126

75 Erasmus to Guillaume Budé [Antwerp, c. 19 June 1516]: Erasmus, Works. Correspondence, no. 421. In September 1515, Erasmus had told Pieter Gillis that work had started, but had had to be broken off for want of a corrector. The whole was finished in March 1516. 76 John Fisher to Erasmus [ c. June 1517] : Erasmus, Works. Correspondence, no. 592. 77 Erasmus to [William Warham?], Louvain, 5 March 1518: Erasmus, Works. Correspondence, no. 781. He wrote in similar terms to Jean Le Sauvage at about the same time: no. 793. 78 Conor Fahy, L'Orlando Furioso del 1532; profilo di una edizione (Milan, 1989); Richardson, Renaissance Italy, pp. 85-7. 79 Euclid, Elements, trans. H. Billingsley (1570), `Faultes escaped. 80 John Legatt, The strange and dangerous voyage of Captaine Thomas fames, in his intended discouery of the Northwest Passage into the South Sea (1633). 81 William Gouge, The whole-armor of God (1616), quoted in Simpson, Proofreading, p. 18. 82 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage, 3rd edn (1617), notice to reader at the end. 83 Francis Bacon, Essays, ed. W. Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1862), p. 420; Essayes, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford, 1985), pp. lxxxv—cviii. 84 Catherine des Roches, E. Pasquier, et al., La puce (Paris, 1583). 85 Etienne Moquot, L'examen et censures des Bibles des églises prétendues reformées de France (`Poctiers, 1617), Au lecteur; quoted in Simpson, Proof-reading, p. 18, n. 1. 86 Romani, Il `Syntagma de arte typographica' di Juan Caramuel, pp. 46-7. 87 John Bramhall, Popocacr 0io-Topc,5 ó~eta or The Church of England defended (Printed at the Hague, and published at London, 1659). 88 For further details, see the notes to Darlow and Moule, no. 6181. 89 Adams BI 186; Darlow and Moule, no. 5489; see also W. S. Allen, `Three Icelandic Bibles, TCBS 10 (1991), pp. 75-85. 90 Simpson, Proof-reading, pp. 18-19. 91 Beatus Rhenanus to Erasmus, Basel, 17 April 1515: Erasmus, Works. Correspondence, no. 328. 92 Contemporaries of Erasmus, I, p. 105. 93 Michael Taylor, Tables of logarithms (Printed by Christopher Buckton and sold by Francis Wingrave, 1792), pp. 63-4 and fo.SCv: there are two lists of errata. One of the copies belonging to Sir Joseph Banks (British Library, 434.i.7) has two additional errata added in manuscript at the end of the final list. 94 The standard work on cancels is R. W. Chapman. Cancels (1930), but see also, for a more detailed view, Brian Gerrard, A new taxonomy of post-impression corrections, in R. Harvey, W. Kirsop and B. J. McMullin (eds.), An index of civilisation; studies of printing and publishing in honour of Keith Maslen (Melbourne, 1993), pp. 45-54.

Notes to pages 126-129

273

95 For details, see Cornelis Koeman, AtlantesNeerlandici; bibliography of terrestrial, maritime and celestial atlases and pilot books, published in the Netherlands up to 1880, 5 vols. and suppl. (Amsterdam and Alphen aan den Rijn, 1967-85); new edn, vol. 1 (Utrecht, 1997). 96 Gaskell, New introduction, p. 135, an opinion based partly on the work of the printer John Baskerville: see also his John Baskerville; a bibliography (Cambridge, 1959). 97 See, for example, the flyleaves of Peterborough Cathedral Library G.5.19 (STC 19849 etc.; on deposit in Cambridge University Library), consisting of fragments of flat but rubricated sheets. 98 See above, p. 102. 99 STC 21152. See, for example, the two copies in Cambridge University Library, Dd*.3.21(E) and 8.28.25(3). 100 STC 17810 and appendix. See, for example, the two copies in Cambridge University Library, Bb*.11.14(4)(E), 0*.11.35(2) and that in Peterborough Cathedral Library. 101 Le cinquième centenaire de l'imprimerie dans les anciens Pays-Bas (Brussels, 1973), pp. 195-211; Elly Cockx-Indestege, `Queeste naar het gebruik van drukwerk van de Brusselse fraters, in Rita Schlusemann, Jos.M. M. Hermans and Margriet Hoogvliet (eds.), Sources for the history of medieval books and libraries (Groningen, 1999), pp. 31-59, with further references. 102 Goff G246, TLC 1090; R. B. Haselden, A scribe and printer in the fifteenth century, Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1938-9), pp. 205-11; for the printing context, see W. and L. Hellinga, The fifteenth-century printing types of the Low Countries, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1966) I, pp. 25-8. 103 Goff G424, ILC 1116; Brussels KB Inc.B.1403: reproduced in Elly CockxIndestege, `Queeste, fig. 19. 104 Oates 3840-44: the volume's unity as a publication is recorded by the printed Tabula pasted onto the final leaf. cf. Polain 3877 and ILC 2119. 105 See for example Curt F. Bühler, `Pen corrections in the first edition of Paolo Manuzio's `Antiquitatum Romanarum liber de legibus" , Italia Medioevale e

Umanistica 5 (1962), pp. 165-70. 106 Goff B304. Giovanni Mardersteig, `Il De Aetna di Pietro Bembo, in his Scritti sulla storia dei caratteri e della tipografia (Milan, 1988), pp. 217-25. 107 Peter Beal, Index of English literary manuscripts, 2: 1625-1700, pt I, Behn —King (1987), pp. 310-11.

108 Sir Geoffrey Keynes, A bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1981), pp. 73-4, drawing on the research principally of John Carter. No. 9 in this list was sold at Sotheby's, 9 November 1964, to the London booksellers Dawsons of Pall Mall. 109 Keynes, Bibliography, pp. 3-4; Beal, Index of English literary manuscripts, pp. 15-16.

A

274

Notes to pages 136-141

Notes to pages 130-136

110 A. E Doni, I mondi, libro primo (secondo) (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1552-3), quoted in Mortimer, Italian, no. 166. 111 Juan de Ortega, Suma de arithmetica (Rome: Etienne Guillery,1515); Mortimer, Italian, no. 331. 112 I have examined five copies in Cambridge University Library (S*.6.37(3)(G), D*14.43(F), Syn.8.53.39(4), Syn.8.58.172(1) and Pet.E3.72 (Peterborough Cathedral Library), as well as Trinity College, Cambridge C.8.68(1). Not all copies are completely marked for correction, and some formes were corrected at press. See also J. W. Binns, Intellectual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; the Latin writing of the age (Leeds, 1990), pp. 413-14. Binns, who saw this book only on microfilm, describes Day's mark as a capital H. For Richard Day, see A. N. L. Munby, `The gifts of Elizabethan printers to the library of King's College, Cambridge, The Library, 5th ser., 2 (1948), pp. 224-32. 113 Descartes to Mersenne, 23 June 1641: Descartes, Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Correspondance, 3 (1996), p. 388. Quoted in Wallace Kirsop, Manuscrits et imprimés: une cohabitation équivoque (Clayton, Victoria, 2001), p. 7. 114 Hume to Strahan, 5 June 1770: David Hume, Letters to William Strahan, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1888), p. 151. The copy in Trinity College, Cambridge remains uncorrected. 115 Hume to Strahan, 3 September 1757: Letters to Strahan, p. 23. 116 Thomas Coryate, Coryat's crudities (1611), fo.Eee3r. 117 Henry Lawes, The treasury of musick: containing ayres and dialogues to sing to the theorbo-lute or basse-viol (1669). 118 Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen, `Incunable decription and its implication for the analysis of fifteenth-century reading habits, in Hindman, Printing, pp. 225-58, at p. 254. See also Wendy Wall, The imprint of gender; authorship and publication in the English renaissance (Ithaca, 1993), p. 88. 119 Falconer Madan, The early Oxfordpress; a bibliography ofprintingandpublishing at Oxford, `1468'-1640 (Oxford, 1890), p. 133. 120 Euclid, Elements, trans. H. Billingsley (John Day, 1570), `Faultes escaped'. 121 W. W. Greg, `The rationale of copy-text, SB 3 (1950-1), pp. 19-36, repr. with some alterations in his Collected papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford, 1966); G. Thomas Tanselle, Textual criticism since Greg; a chronicle, 1950-1985 (Charlottesville, 1987). 122 Thomas Coryate, Coryats crudities (1611), fo.Eee3r. 123 Eisenstein, Printing press, I, p. 80. 124 Ibid., p. 112. 125 Hume to Strahan, 25 March and 22 July 1771: Letters to William Strahan, pp. 182, 213. 126 A. W. Pollard, Lastwords on the history of the title-page (1891); A. W. Pollard, `The title-pages in some Italian manuscripts', The Printing Art 12 (1908), pp. 81-7; T. L. de Vinne, A treatise of title-pages (The practice of typography) (New York,

1902); Margaret M. Smith, The title-page, its early development, 1460-1510 (2000). 127 Philip Gaskell, A new introduction to bibliography. Repr. with corrections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 313. 128 Fredson Bowers, `Criteria for classifying hand-printed books as issues and variant states, PBSA 41 (1947), pp. 271-92, at p. 290; see also Bowers, Principles of bibliographical description (Princeton, 1949), pp. 113-23. 129 Gaskell, New introduction, pp. 315, 321. 130 Greetham, Textual scholarship, pp. 7, 153. 131 G. Thomas Tanselle, `The concept ofideal copy, SB 33 (1980), pp. 18-53, atp. 46, also quoted in William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott, An introduction to bibliographical and textual studies, 2nd edn (New York, 1989), p. 29. 132 Adams P1481; Mortimer, Italian, no. 387. 133 Bayle to Jean de Naudis, 22 May 1692, quoted in Hubert Bost, Un `intellectuel' avant la lettre: le journaliste Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) (Amsterdam, 1994), p. 191; see also Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle. I: Du pays de foix à la cité d'Erasme, 2nd edn (Dordrecht, 1985). For Leers, see Otto S. Lankhorst, Reinier Leers (1654-1714), uitgever & boekverkoper te Rotterdam (Amsterdam, 1983). 134 Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire historique et critique, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Rotterdam, 1702), I, errata, p.i.

5 Perfect and imperfect 1 Bernard Capp, The world of John Taylor the water-poet, 1578-1653 (Oxford, 1994); Alexandra Halasz, `Pamphlet surplus: John Taylor and subscription publication, in Arthur E Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (eds.), Print, manuscript,

& performance; the changing relations of the media in early modern England (Columbus, Ohio, 2000), pp. 90-102. 2 John Taylor, All the workes (1630), fo. A4v. 3 Richard Percival, A dictionarie in Spanish and English, revised by John Minsheu (1599), `To the reader'. 4 Pedro Mexia, The treasury of auncientand moderne times (1613), `To the reader'; see also W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare first folio; its textual and bibliographical history (Oxford, 1955), pp. 7, 22. 5 [Joseph Hill] The interest of the United Provinces, being a defence of the Zeelanders choice (Middelburg, printed according to the Dutch copie printed at Amsterdam, 1673), Postscript. Hill had graduated from St John's College, Cambridge, and served as Senior Proctor in the University in 1658, but he declined to conform in 1662 and left for the Netherlands soon after. In 1667 he became pastor of the Scottish church at Middelburg (DNB). 6 John Cotta, The infallible true and assured witch (1624), `The errata. 7 STC 11275: An historical collection of the most memorable accidents, and tragicall massacres of France (1598), `To the courteous and friendly reader'.

275

276

Notes to pages 143-146

8 Richard Baxter, Full and easie satisfaction which is the true and safe religion (1674), epistle to the reader. 9 Moxon, Mechanick exercises, pp. 321-2. See also Zefirino Campanini, Istruzioni pratiche ad un novello capo-stampa, o sia regolamento per la direzione di una tipografia officina (1789), ed. C. Fahy (Florence, 1998), p. 271. 10 See above, pp. 107-8, 127-9. 11 Bernard Quaritch Ltd, catalogue 1027, English poetry before 1701 (1982) offered a selection of such fragments saved from their own old stock and from that of the firms of Dobell and of Pickering and Chatto. 12 Nicolas Barker, Bibliotheca Lindesiana (Roxburghe Club, 1977), pp. 74-6 etc. For the strained relations between Libri and Brunet, see P. Allessandra Maccioni Ruju and Marco Mostert, The life and times of Guglielmo Libri (1802-1869), scientist, patriot, scholar, journalist and thief; a nineteenth-century story (Hilversum, 1995).

13 Melvin H. Wolf, Catalogue and indexes to the title-pages of English printed books

in the British Library's Bagford collection (1974). 14 Les faitz et prouesses du noble et vaillant chevalier Jourdain de Blaves (Paris, `1520' [i.e., c.1548-62] ), now in the Beinecke Library, Yale University: see Bernard M. Rosenthal, The Rosenthal collection of printed books with manuscript annotations (New Haven, 1997), no. 67, with illustration. 15 I am grateful to Michael Twyman for supplying me with a copy of this advertisement from Reading University Library. 16 See also Neil Harris, `The Ripoli Decameron, Guglielmo Libri and the "incomparable" Harris, in Denis V. Reidy (ed.), The Italian book, 1465-1800; studies presented to Dennis E. Rhodes on his 70th birthday (1993), pp. 323-33, with further references. 17 K. I. D. Maslen, `Three eighteenth-century reprints of the castrated sheets in Holinshed's Chronicles'. The Library, 5th ser.,13 (1958), pp. 120-4, repr. in his An early London printing house atwork: studies in the Bowyer ledgers (Bibliographical Soc. of America, 1993), pp. 27-32; Keith Maslen and John Lancaster (eds.), The Bowyer ledgers (Bibliographical Soc. and Bibliographical Soc. of America, 1991), nos 968, 1015, 1594; see also Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 7. 18 STC 12626, note; D. B. Quinn, The Hakluyt handbook, 2 vols. (Hakluyt Soc., 1974), 11, pp. 490-5.

19454: Cambridge University Library Syn.7.63.114. The title-leaf of this copy, also in poor condition, was restored in the nineteenth century, and provided with a faked (and incorrect) imprint. 20 Sidney Lee, Shakespeare's comedies, histories & tragedies... A census of extant

19 STC

copies (1902). 21 Fredson Bowers, `The Yale Folio facsimile and scholarship, Modern Philology 53 (1955), pp. 50-7; David McKitterick, `Old faces and new acquaintances; typography and the association of ideas, PESA 87 (1993), pp. 163-86; Anthony

Notes to pages 147-149

277

J. Hamber, `A higher branch of the art'; photographing the fine arts in England, 1839-1880 (Amsterdam, 1996). 22 See below, p. 190. 23 R. B. McKerrow, Notes on bibliographical evidence for literary students and ed-

itors of English works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; reprinted from the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, vol.xii (1914); McKerrow, An introduction to bibliography for literary students. 2nd impression with corrections (Oxford, 1928), repr. with introduction by D. McKitterick (Winchester, 1994).

24 Edited by Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1962). See also Philip Gaskell, Giles Barber and Georgina Warrilow, An annotated list of printers' manuals to 1850, JPHS 4 (1968), pp. 11-31; and `Addenda and corrigenda', JPHS 7 (1971), pp. 65-6; G. G. Barber, French letterpress printing; a list of French

printing manuals and other texts in French bearing on the technique of letterpress printing, 1567-1900 (Oxford Bibliographical Soc., 1969); Frans A. Janssen, `De overdracht van typografisch-technische kennis v66r 1800' (England, France, Germany, The Netherlands), in Frans A. Janssen (ed.), Zetten en drukken in de achttiende eeuw; David Wardenaar's Beschrijving der boekdrukkunst (1801) (Haarlem, 1982), pp. 11-50. 25 C£ Frans A. Janssen, `L'emploi des manuels d'imprimerie par les bibiiologues', in G. Crapulli (ed.), Trasmissione dei testi a stampa nel periodo moderno, 2 vols. (Rome, 1985-7) II, pp. 33-42. 26 Seymour de Ricci, English collectors of books & manuscripts (1530-1930) and their marks of ownership (Cambridge, 1930), pp. 46, 79, 81. 27 Francis Johnson, `Printers' "copybooks" and the black market in the Elizabethan book trade, The Library, 5th ser., 1 (1946), pp. 97-105, at p. 105. 28 Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington, DC, 1991). 29 All the following examples are English. I have not attempted to explore this phenomenon among booksellers overseas. 30 P. du Moulin, Anatome missae (Leiden: Elzevir, 1637): Trinity College, Cambridge, K.13.40. 31 Merton College, Oxford, 94.e.20. I am grateful to Paul Morgan for drawing this to my attention. 32 Irenaeus, Adversus Valentina etsimilium Gnosticorum haereses libri quinque (Paris, 1639): Trinity College, Cambridge, E.17.4. 33 Franciscus Vieta, Opera mathematica (Leiden, 1646): Clare College, Cambridge, P.4.7.

34 Christ Church, Oxford, W.a.6.51. Again, I am grateful to Paul Morgan. 35 McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, I, p. 472, with further references. 36 Paul E Gehl, "`Manche uno alfabeto intero": recording defective book shipments in Counter-Reformation Florence, PBSA 93 (1999), pp. 316-58. 37 Theodorus Canterus, Epistolae: brieven (1570-1614), ed. J. A. Gruys (Amsterdam, 1997), p. 231.

... ,:. . .. .

~..:

., .

278

Notes to pages 149-152

38 David McKitterick, '"Ovid with a Littleton"; the cost of English books in the early seventeenth century, TCBS 11 (1997), pp. 184-234, at p. 215. 39 Adam Smith to Thomas Cadell, 25 October [1780]: Adam Smith, Correspondence, edited by Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross [2nd edn] (Oxford, 1987), p. 248. 40 Smith to Cadell, 19 June 1784, 25 May 1790: Smith, Correspondence, pp. 277, 325. 41 For these examples, see F. C. Francis, `Booksellers' warranties, The Library, 5th ser., 1 (1946-7), pp. 244-5. 42 STC 22719 etc.: see especially the note preceding STC 22716. 43 STC 23039, and the note preceding it: see W. W. Greg, A companion to Arber (Oxford, 1967), p. 301. See also the note on the similar bibliographical difficulties encountered in Sternhold and Hopkins's paraphrase of the Psalms, STC 2419 and following. 44 Now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, copy 7; see Sir Sidney Lee, `Shakespeare and the Inquisition: a Spanish Second Folio, in his Elizabethan and other essays (Oxford, 1929), pp. 184-98; A. Luis Pujante, `Spanish and European Shakespeares, Folio; Shakespeare- Genootschapvan Nederland en Vlaanderen 6 (1999), pp. 18-38, at pp. 21-5. The whole of Measure for measure has been removed, presumably as religiously offensive. The personal choice of the marks of censorship (crossings-through of words or passages, most of which can nonetheless still be read with reasonable ease) is manifest. Much of the anti-papal opening of King John and the close of Henry VIII are scored through; so too, throughout the volume, are negative remarks about monks and references to codpieces and sexual activity; but many other passages of sexual parleying and double-entendre are left untouched. 45 Franz Heinrich Reusch, Der Index der verboten Bücher; ein Beitrag zur Kirchenund Literaturgeschichte, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1883-5); Joseph Hilgers, Der Index der verboten Bücher (Freiburg, 1905). George Putnam, The censorship of the Church of Rome, 2 vols. (1906), largely depending on Hilgers, takes a more critical view than him: see Michael J. Walsh, `Church censorship in the 19th century: the Index of Leo XIII, in R. Myers and M. Harris (eds.), Censorship and the control of print in England and France, 1600-1910 (Winchester, 1992), pp. 111-22. For an overview of documentary records, see Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi, in association with Charles Amiel (eds.), The Inquisition in early modern Europe; studies on sources and methods (DeKalb, Ill., 1986). 46 For one exception, see G. van Calster, `La censure louvaniste du Nouveau Testament, et la rédaction de l'Index Érasmien expurgatoire de 1571, in J. Coppens (ed.), Scrinium Erasmianum, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1969), II, pp. 379-436. I am by no means the first to lament the absence of detailed study on the bibliographical implications of the various editions of the Index: see also, for example, Grendler, Roman Inquisition, p. xvii. It seems clear that much more copy-specific

Notes to pages 152-153

information is required before an adequate estimate can be rendered of the effectiveness of the Holy Office, its allies and its competitors. 47 See further below, pp. 162, 163. 48 N. R. Ker, `Thomas James's collation of Gregory, Cyprian and Ambrose, Bodleian Library Record 4 (1952), pp. 16-30, at p. 16. For James, and for further references to his work, see I. G. Philip, The Bodleian Library in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Oxford, 1983), and Richard W. Clement, `Librarianship and polemics: the career of Thomas James (1572-1629), Libraries and Culture 26 (1991) 269-82. 49 The literature on censorship is vast, and my remarks apply to only a small part of the subject. For seventeenth-century England, see for example Sheila Lambert, `State control of the press in theory and practice: the role of the Stationers' Company before 1640, in Myers and Harris (eds.), Censorship and the control of print, pp. 1-32; Anthony Milton, `Licensing, censorship and religious orthodoxy in early Stuart England. Historical Journal 41 (1998), pp. 625-51; Philip Hamburger, `The development of the law of seditious libel and the control of the press, Stanford Law Journal 37 (1984-5), pp. 661-765. For control in France, see for example (in a very large literature) Malesherbes, Mémoires sur la librairie et sur la liberté de la presse, ed. Graham E. Rodmell (Chapel Hill, 1979), including information on earlier periods; Daniel Roche, `La censure, in H.-J. Martin and R. Chartier (eds.), Histoire de l'édition française II. Le livre triomphant (Paris, 1984), pp. 76-83, with further references on p. 626; Anne Goldgar, `The absolutism of taste; journalists as censors in 18th-century Paris, in Myers and Harris (eds.), Censorship and the control of print, pp. 87-110; Barbara de Negroni, Lectures interdites; le travail des censeurs au xviiie siècle, 1723-1774 (Paris, 1995); Georges Minois, Censure et culture sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris, 1995); Robert Darnton, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary France (1996). The control of print by the Roman Catholic Church has attracted increasing attention. For one example of the negotiations that could precede judgement by the Church, see Alfred Soman, De Thou and the Index; letters from Christophe Dupuy (1603-1607) (Geneva, 1972). The sixteenth-century Indexes have been edited in a valuable series by de Bujanda, Index des livres interdits. For Italy, see (with many further references) Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo; la censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471-1605) (Bologna, 1997), especially pp. 227-73. For Venice, see Paul E Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (Princeton, 1977). For Friuli, see Ugo Rozzo, Biblioteche italiane del Cinquecento tra Riforma e Controriforma (Udine, 1994). For southern Italy, see the several books by Pasquale Lopez, in particular his Inquisizione, stampa e censura nel Regno di Napoli tra '500 e'600 (Naples, 1974). For Portugal, including reproductions of early editions of the Index, see I. S. Revah, La censure inquisitoriale portugaise an xvie siècle 1 (Lisbon, 1960). For Spain, see for example Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition; an historical revision (1997), especially ch. 6. For recent work, marking the completion of de

279

280

Notes to pages 153-156

Bujandds edition of the sixteenth-century Indices, see Ugo Rozzo (ed.), La censura libraria nell'Europa del secolo XVI (Udine, 1997). For the Netherlands see Ingrid Weckhout, Boekcensuur in de Noordelijke Nederlanden; die vrijheid van drukpers in de zeventiende eeuw (The Hague, 1998), but see also the review by Marieke van Delft, Quaerendo 30 (2000), pp. 64-7. For the Holy Roman Empire, see for example Ulrich Eisenhardt, Die kaiserliche Aufsicht über Buchdruck, Buchhandel und Presse im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation (1496-1806) (Studien und Quellen zur Geschichte des deutschen Verfassungsrechts, 3) (Karlsruhe, 1970). Concise introductions to many aspects of the subject are provided in Paul F. Grendler, `Printing and censorship, in Charles B. Schmitt, et al. (eds.), The Cambridge history of renaissance philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 25-53; Mario Infelise, `La censure dans les pays méditerranéens, 1600-1750, in Hans Bots and Françoise Wacquet (eds.), Commercium litterarum... 1600-1750 (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 261-79; Mario Infelise, I libri proibiti da Gutenberg all'Encyclopédie (Rome, 1999), with an extensive bibliography. 50 For earlier sixteenth-century Paris, see Francis M. Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne; a bibliographical study of books in French censured by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, 1520-1551 (Geneva, 1979). 51 E H. Reusch, Die Indices librorum prohibitorum desXVL Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1886); E H. Wilcox, L'introduction des décrets du Concile de Trente (Leuven,1929); de Bujanda, Index des livres interdits. 52 For the reactions of the Venice book trade to the 1559 Index, see Grendler, Roman Inquisition, pp. 118-27. 53 `Libri, quorum principale argumentum bonum est, in quibus tamen obiter aliqua inserta sunt, quae ad haeresim, seu impietatem, diuinationem, seu superstitionem spectant, a Catholicis Theologis, Inquisitions generalis auctoritate, expurgati, concedi possunt. Idem iudicium sit de prologis, summariis, seu annotationibus, quae a damnatis auctoribus, libris non damnatis, appositae sunt; sedposthac non nisi emendati excludantur.' Index librorum prohibitorum (Rome, 1564), pp. 17-18. See also de Bujanda, Index de Rome, 1557, 1559, 1564 (Index des livres interdits, VIII), pp. 83-94, 106-8. 54 Index librorum prohibitorum (Rome, 1564), p. 16. 55 Clive Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville; the history of a printing and merchant dynasty (Oxford, 1988), pp. 121-2. 56 Darlow and Moule 6176. The setting and manuscript date of the Inquisitorial licence in the Bible Society copy varies from that in the Bodleian Library. 57 See for example the preface to An exact reprint of the Roman Index expurgatorius, by Richard Gibbings, of Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin, 1837). See also below, pp. 162-3. 58 B. Rekers, Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598) (1972), pp. 16,131. 59 For one small example, see the letter from Cardinal Borghese (in Rome) to the Inquisitor at Modena, October 1603, reporting on the gathering-in of Francesco Suarez's commentaryon Thomas Aquinas: Antonio Rotond6, `Nuovi documenti

Notes to pages 156-157

per la storia dell' "Indice dei libri proibiti" (1572-1638) , Rinascimento, 2nd ser., 3 (1963), pp. 145-211, at p. 179. 60 Grendler, Roman Inquisition, p. 167. 61 Index expurgatorius (Antwerp: Plantin, 1571); repr. in facsimile in de Bujanda, Index des livres interdits, VII. 62 Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, pp. 117-18. 63 De Bujanda, Index des livres interdits, VI (Madrid, 1584) and VII (Antwerp, 1571); Bernard de Sandoval, Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum (Madrid, 1612). The 1584 edition was republished at Saumur in 1601. 64 For some of the background to this work, and the reluctance of Italian scholars to implement a project that threatened humanistic scholarship, see John A. Tedeschi, `Florentine documents for a history of the Index of prohibited books', in Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance studies in honor of Hans Baron (Florence, 1971), pp. 577-605. 65 For Erasmus, see especially Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne; recherches sur l'histoire spirituelle du xvie siècle (Paris, 1937); Miguel Avilés, Erasmo y la Inquisición: el libelo de Valladolid y la Apologia de Erasmo contra los frailes espanoles (Madrid, 1980); Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, 1520-1580 (Turin, 1987), chs. 12 and 13; Silvana Seidel Menchi,`Sette modi di censurare Erasmo, in Rozzo (ed.), La censura, pp. 177-206. Many examples of Erasmus's works are included, and sometimes illustrated, in the exhibition catalogue Erasmo na Biblioteca National, seculo XVI (Lisbon, 1987): unfortunately there is little discussion of the individual copies exhibited. Much work has tended to concentrate on the manuscript documentary evidence, rather than on surviving copies of the books at which criticism was directed. But see Grendler, Roman Inquisition, who concludes that `the Index and Inquisition also stifled Erasmian humanism in Italy' (p. 287); see further Marcella and Paul Grendler, `The survival of Erasmus in Italy, Erasmus in English 8 (1976), pp. 2-22. 66 For example in the copy of his translation of Euripides published byAldus Manutins in 1507, now in Cambridge University Library, Td.52.52 (Adams E1045). Among many other examples of Erasmus's work in the hands of censors, see Fairfax Murray, German; Grendler, Roman Inquisition, úg.16; Silvana Seidel Menchi,`Sette modi' ; and Erasmo na Biblioteca National. 67 See Contemporaries of Erasmus, I, p. 377. 68 Trinity College, Cambridge E.13.6; Adams B356. The volume was bequeathed to Trinity College by John Colbatch (d.1748), who had served as chaplain at Lisbon at the end of the seventeenth century: see also D. McKitterick, Cambridge University Library; a history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 244-5. The letter is printed in Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen, et al., 12 vols. (Oxford, 1906-58) X, pp. 13-16. 69 Erasmus, Opera omnia (Basel: Froben, 1540-2), Mechelen, Bibliotheek Groot Seminarie N.53-62: Erasmus en België (Brussels: Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I, 1969), no. 63, with illustrations; G. van Calster, `La censure louvaniste du

281

282

Notes to pages 157-160

Nouveau Testament et la rédaction de l'Index Erasmien expurgatoire de 1571, in J. Coppens (ed.), Scrinium Erasmianum, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1969), II, pp. 379-436; Frans Gistelinck and Maurits Sabbe (eds.), Early sixteenth-century printed books, 1501-1540, in the library of the Leuven Faculty of Theology (Leuven, 1994), pp. 325-6. 70 British Library 3225.£7. Reported `destroyed' in May 2000. But see the description in R. C. Alston, Books in manuscript, a short title catalogue of books with manuscript notes in the British Library (1994), p. 203. 71 Mortimer, French, no. 538: Virgil, Opera (Lyons: Crespin, 1529), bearing notes in Spanish concerning this and other expurgations. 72 On Gentili, see, apart from the DNB, Diego Panizza, Alberico Gentili, giurista ideologo nell'Inghilterra Elisabettiana (Padua, 1981), and John Barton, `The Faculty of Law, in James McConica (ed.), The collegiate university (The history of the University of Oxford, III, Oxford, 1986), pp. 257-93, esp. pp. 265-6,289-93. De legationibus was edited by E. Nys, 2 vols. (New York, 1924). 73 STC 11737: copy in Trinity College, Cambridge, with the signature of the censor on the title-page. 74 Quoted in translation in Henry Kamen, The phoenix and the flame; Catalonia and the Counter-Reformation (New Haven, 1993), p. 223. 75 Ibid., p. 228. 76 See, for example, the informative survey of several censored copies of Amatus Lusitanus's Centuriae Vet VI (Venice, 1560) by Dov Front, `The expurgation of the books of Amatus Lusitanus, The Book Collector 47 (1998), pp. 520-36. An example of bisquing in a copy of Martin Luther, Acta apud d. legatum apostolicum Augustae recognita ([Wittenberg, 1518] is illustrated in Roger Stoddard, Marks in books (Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass., 1985), no. 15. 77 Thomas James, A Treatise of the corruption of scripture (1612), part iv, p. 35. K. M. Pogson, A Grand Inquisitor and his library, Bodleian Quarterly Record 3 (1922), pp. 239--44, including a list of books given by Essex in 1600: many of them came from the library of Ferdinand Martins Mascarentias (d.1628), Bishop of Faro and later Grand Inquisitor of Portugal; Philip, Bodleian Library, p. 10; (on books from Cadiz, now in Hereford Cathedral Library) P. S. Allen, `Books brought from Spain in 1596, English Historical Review 31 (1916), pp. 606-10. 78 See for example the copy of Franciscus Georgius, In scripturam sacram problemata (Paris, 1574), now in the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The book was placed on the Index in 1580, and this copy is marked up by the censor, but the original printed text is easily readable. The volume is from the Carthusian library at Buxheim, but whether it was expurgated there is not yet clear. See Rosenthal, Manuscript annotations, no. 57, with illustration. See also M. Mersenne, Observationes, et emendationes ad Francisci Georgii Veneti Problemata (Paris, 1623). 79 Bernard de Sandoval, Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum (Matriti, 1612), Index librorum expurgatorum. For Gesner and the Index, see Alberto

Notes to pages 161-165

Moreni, `La Biblioteca Universalis di Konrad Gesner e gh Indici dei libri proibiti, La Bibliofilia 88 (1986), pp. 131-50. 80 Hugo Soly and Johan van de Wiele (eds.) Carolus; Charles Quint, 1500-1558 (exhibition catalogue, Ghent, 1999), no. 57, with further references. 81 Index expurgatorius librorum (Antwerp, 1571), p. [2]. 82 L. Voet: The Plantin press (1555-1589) 6 vols. (Amsterdam, 1980-3), III, p. 1239; and The golden compasses, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1969-72), II, pp. 169-73. Voet, Plantin press, III, p. 1240, unique copy recorded in the Plantin—Moretus 83 Museum; Paul Valkema Blouw, Typographia Batava, 1541-1600, 2 vols. (Nieuwkoop, 1998), no. 6005, unique copy recorded at Deventer. 84 James, Treatise, part iv, p. 13. 85 Ibid., p. 22. On p. 48 James again remarked that copies of the `Indices Expurgatorie' were `few, and hardly to be gotten' 86 Van Calster, `La censure louvaniste; pp. 394-5. 87 Bodleian Library 4°.V.46.Th.; see also Thomas Hearne, Remarks and collections. ed. C. E. Doble, et al., 11 vols. (Oxford Historical Soc., 1885-1921), I, pp. 14-15; W. D. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1890), pp. 126-7. 88 For different kinds of censorship of this book, see Mortimer, French, no. 387. One of the Cambridge University Library copies (Adams 3.53.2) has been restored, so that Munster's name, formerly removed from fo. d4r, has been reinstated in nineteenth-century pen-facsimile. 89 Owen Gingerich, The eye of heaven; Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (New York, 1993), pp. 281-4; P.-N. Mayaud, SI, La condamnation des livres coperniciens et sa révocation (Rome, 1997), pp. 37-84. But see now the detailed survey by Owen Gingerich, An annotated census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden, 2002). The copy of the 1566 edition belonging to Juan de Pineda, who worked on the Seville Index (1631 etc.), now in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, bears only some marks of censorship: see Gingerich, Census, pp. 200-1. A copy of the 1543 edition in the Biblioteca Pública Municipal, Porto, bears a note that the book was prohibited in 1616: see Gingerich, Census, p. 188. 90 Enrique González, Salvador Albinana and Victor Gutiérrez, Vives; edicions princeps (Valencia, 1992), no. 17 bis, with illustration. The page illustrated in this catalogue is striking for having been marked at one time, yet far more is crossed through than was required by older editions of the Spanish Index: see for example the details for expurgation given in Bernard de Sandoval, Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum (Matriti, 1612), `Index librorum expurgatorum; pp. 37-9. 91 James, Treatise, part iv, p.15. 92 Grendler, Roman Inquisition, pp. 162-9,183 4, etc. But Pietro Longo, who smuggled books from north of the Alps on a large scale in the 1570s, was sentenced to death for his activities: he was drowned at night by the Holy Office (p. 189). For other sixteenth-century executions at Venice for heresy, see ibid., p. 57.

283

I,1

284

Notes to pages 166-172

Notes to pages 172-177

6 The art of printing

21 Though he understates the new attention given specifically to printing and the book arts, Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic visions; scientific dictionaries and Enlightenment culture (Cambridge, 2001) explores some of these issues, including problems of terminology: see especially pp. 146-69. 22 Encyclopédie, `Discours préliminaire; p. xxxix. 23 S. Schaffer, `The consuming flame: electrical showmen and Tory mystics in the world of goods, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the world of goods (1993), pp. 489-526; A. N. Walters, `Conversation pieces; science and politeness in eighteenth-century England, History of Science 35 (1997), pp. 121-54; Alan Q. Morton and Jane A. West, Public & private science; the King George III collection (Oxford, 1993), chapters 2-4; D. Hudson and K. W. Luckburst, The Royal Society of Arts, 1754-1954 (1954); D. G. C. Allen and John L. Abbott (eds.), The virtuoso tribe of arts & sciences; studies in the eighteenthcentury work and membership of the London Society of Arts (Athens, Ga.,

1 Bernard Colombat and Elisabeth Lazcano (eds.), Corpus représentatif des grammaires et des traditions linguistiques, 2 vols., Histoire, Epistémologie, Langage H. S. 2-3 (1998-2000), with further references; for English, see in particular R. C. Alston, A bibliography of the English language from the invention of printing to the year 1800 (Ilkley, 1974— ). 2 Daniel R. Headrick, When information came of age; technologies of knowledge in the age of reason and revolution, 1700-1850 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 2. 3 The best concise summary of these changes remains Gaskell, New introduction. 4 S. Palmer, Ageneral history of printing (1732), p. 287. 5 Ibid., pp. 287-92. Colophons are conveniently assembled in the collection by the Bénédictins de Bouveret, Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux des origines au XVIe siècle 1-6 (Spicilegii Friburgensis Subsidia 2-7) (Fribourg, 1965-82). See also Albert Derolez, `Pourquoi les copistes signaient-ils leurs manuscrits?, in E. Condello and G. de Gregorio (eds.), Scribi e colofoni; le sottoscrizioni di copisti dalle origini all'avento della stampa ( Spoleto, 1995), pp. 37-56. 6 Palmer, General history of printing, preface. 7 George Psalmanazar, Memoirs (1764), pp. 284-5. 8 John Nichols, Literary anecdotes, V, p. 264, notes that the manuscript came into the hands of Joseph Ames. It formed part of lot 681 of the sale of Ames's books by Langford on 5 May 1760. 9 Palmer, General history of printing, p. 4. 10 Ibid., p. 153. 11 Ibid., p. 273. 12 Ibid., p. 280. 13 For Kiliaan (d.1607 ), see Voet, Golden compasses, index. 14 Palmer, General history of printing, pp. 308-9. 15 Ibid., p. 310. 16 Horace Walpole, Journal of the printing-office at Strawberry Hill, ed. Paget Toynbee (1923), pp. 1-2. 17 Lael Ely Bradshaw, `John Harris's Lexicon technicum, in Frank A. Kafker (ed.),

Notable encyclopedias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: nine predecessors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford, 1981), pp. 107-21. 18 John Nichols, Biographical and literary anecdotes of William Bowyer (1782), p. 558. 19 G. G. Barber, Bookmaking in Diderot's Encyclopédie (Farnborough, 1973); Robert Darnton, The business of Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Frank A. Kafker ( ed.), Notable encyclopedias of the late eighteenth century; eleven successors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford, 1994). 20 Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon, 64 vols. (Halle and Leipzig, 1731-54), art. `Büchdrückerey'; Peter E. Carels and Dan Florey, `Johann Heinrich Zedler's Universal Lexicon, in Kafker (ed.), Notable encyclopedias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pp. 165-96.

285

1992).

24 André Jammes, La réforme de la typographie royale sous Louis XIV; Le Grandjean (Paris, 1961; repr., slightly reduced, Paris, 1985); André Jammes, Académisme et typographie; the making of the Romain du Roi, JPHS 1 (1965), pp. 71-95; see also Robin Briggs, `The Académie Royale des Sciences and the pursuit of utility,

Past and Present 131 (1991), pp. 38-88. 25 P. A. Orlandi, Origine e progressi della stampa osia dell'arte impressoria (Bologna, 1722), pp. 218-27. 26 Universal Magazine 1 (1747), pp. 27-33, 60-2 (Printing); 6 (1750), pp. 274-8 (Punchcutting andTypefounding); 10 (1752), pp. 324-6 (Papermaking), all with plates.

27 The bibliophile and literary scholar Richard Farmer's opinion was set firmly on the front board of his copy of The origin of printing (1774): `Had Mr Bowyer seen the famous Oxford book dated 1468, he would have immediately found it was not printed on wooden types; & consequently that his Argument against Caxton falls to the Ground' (Cambridge University Library 7850. d.12.) 28 Prosper Marchand, Histoire de l'origine et des premiers progrès de l'imprimerie (The Hague, 1740), pp. 1, 2, 4. For Marchand, see Christiane BerkvensStevelinck, Prosper Marchand: la vie et l'oeuvre, 1678-1756 (Leiden, 1987). The verses added to Tortellius's book appeared in editions published at Treviso, Vicenza and Venice: see Polain (B) 3791-5. 29 Pierre-Simon Fournier le jeune, Manuel typographique utile aux gens de lettres, 2 vols. (Paris, 1764-6), I, Avertissment préliminaire, p. vii. 30 Edited by Harry Carter and Christopher Ricks (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1961). 31 Gentleman's Magazine 49 (1779), pp. 556-7; Monthly Review 63 (1780), p. 552.

32 This was developed from a 52-page privately printed pamphlet, Anecdotes bio-

graphical and literary, of the late Mr. William Bowyer, printer (1778).

. . _ ... . _ -

_., ~..~~: • .`; 4 ~ . .. ..

. ... . .. .. - .

.

..

..

286

Notes to pages 177-179

Notes to pages 179-181

33 William Cowper to William Unwin, 20 October 1784: William Cowper, The Letters and prose writings, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1976-86), II, p. 287. 34 Monthly Review 52 (1775), pp. 51-4, at pp. 53-4; `un de nos derniers savans imprimeurs dont la race paroit actuellement éteinte, au moins, en Angleterre, Journal des Sfavans 79 (1775), pp. 523-31. 35 Lorna Weatherill, Consumer behaviour and material culture in Britain, 1660-1760, 2nd edn (1995). See also James Raven, Judging new wealth; popular publishing and responses to commerce, 1750-1800 (Oxford, 1992). Like many other aspects of consumer behaviour, fashions for lavish or ostentatious printed books developed considerably earlier than the eighteenth century. 36 Review of Dossie, vol.2, Monthly Review 19 (1758), pp. 348-53. 37 Walpole, Journal of the printing-office at Strawberry Hill; A. T. Hazen, A bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press, new edn (New Haven, 1973); Jean-Vincent Capronnier de Gauffecourt, Traité de la relieure des livres, trans. Claude Benaiteau, introd. John P. Chalmers (Austin, Tex., 1987). 38 Francis Blomefield, Correspondence (1705-52), ed. David A. Stoker (Norfolk Record Soc. and Bibliographical Soc., 1992). For Davy's System of divinity (Lustleigh,1795-1807), see for example the copies in the British Library (26 vols: 1023.i.1-20, k.1-6), Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian Library. An overview of these and other private presses is provided in Roderick Cave, The private press, 2nd edn (New York, 1983), especially chapters 4, 5 and 7. 39 For some aspects of this phenomenon in England, see Christopher White, David Alexander and Ellen D'Oench, Rembrandt in eighteenth-century England (New Haven, 1983); David Alexander, Amateurs and printmaking in England, 1750-1830; a loan exhibition (Wolfson College, Oxford, 1983); Janice G. Schimmelman, Art in the early English magazines, 1731-1800; a checklist of articles on drawing, painting and sculpture from the Gentleman's Magazine, London Magazine and Universal Magazine, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 108 (1999), pp. 397-478; Kim Sloan, A noble art'; amateur artists and drawing masters, c.1600-1800 (British Museum, 2000). 40 The standard edition, with an English translation by Harry Carter, is The manuel typographique of Pierre-Simon Fournier, edited in facsimile with an introduction and notes by James Mosley, 3 vols. (Darmstadt, 1995). 41 Fournier, Manuel, I, p. ix. Those who habitually use books should surely not be unfamiliar with the theory of so useful an art. Indeed, it is greatly to be wished that every literary man were in a position to form a sound judgement upon the typography of his books, for in that case the artists concerned with it would be obliged to have sufficient respect for his work not to disfigure it, as they too often do, with the results of their ignorance and want of taste. (TRANS. HARRY CARTER)

42 S. P. Fournier, Modéles des caractères (Paris, 1742), repr. in facsimile with an introduction by James Mosley (1965).

43 Joseph Gillé, Epreuves de caracteres de la fonderie de Joseph Gillé, graveur &

fondeur des caracteres de l'imprimerie des Départemens de la Guerre, Marine 6Affaires Etrangeres (Paris, 1773). For the Gill& foundry, see John Dreyfus, Aspects of French eighteenth-century typography (Roxburghe Club, 1982), pp. 76-80. The Broxbourne collection of type specimens, now in Cambridge University Library, is described in an appendix to this work. See also Marius Audin, Les Livrets typographiques des fonderies françaises créées avant 1800 (Paris, 1933) and Ellic Howe, `French type specimen books, The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951), pp. 28-41. 44 J. E Rosart, Epreuve des caractères, qui se gravent & fondent dans la nouvelle fonderie (Brusseles, 1768), fo.**lr. 45 Louis Vernange, Epreuves des caractères de la fonderie de Louis Vernange (Lyon, [1770?]. 46 Gill&, Epreuves. 47 François Barletti de Saint-Paul, Nouveau système typographique, ou moyen de

diminuer le travail et les frais de composition, de correction et de distribution (Paris, 1776). 48 [Johann Michael Funcke], Kurtze Anleitung von Form- und Stahlschneiden (Erfurt, 1740), repr. with an introduction by James Mosley (Darmstadt, 1998), introduction, pp. *61—*74; James Mosley, "`So du die Schrifft abformen wilst"; Abklatschen, clichage, dabbing and the duplication of typographical printing surfaces, in P. Mick and Martin Boghardt (eds. ), Rationalisierung der B uchherstellung in Mittelalter und Friihneuzeit (Marburg an der Lahn, 1994), pp. 197-204; for an earlier example see also Stephen Harvard, Ornamental initials; the woodcut initials of Christopher Plantin (New York, 1974), no. 39. 49 For Luce, see Dreyfus, Aspects, pp. 52-63. 50 H. Edmund Poole, `New music types: invention in the eighteenth century, JPHS 1 (1965), pp. 21-38; 2 (1966), pp. 23-44; D. W. Krummel and Stanley Sadie (eds.), Music printing and publishing (1990). 51 J. G. I. Breitkopf, Ueber den Druck der geographischen Charten (Leipzig, 1777); Elizabeth M. Harris, `Miscellaneous map printing processes in the nineteenth century, in David Woodward (ed.), Five centuries of map printing (Chicago, 1975), pp. 113-36, at pp. 115-15. 52 Much of the innovative work in France, especially in Paris, is recorded in Ernest Coyecque, Inventaire de la Collection Anisson sur l'histoire de l'imprimerie et de la librairie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1900). For Pierres, see also P. D. Pierres, Description d'une nouvelle presse d'imprimerie (Paris, 1786), and David Chambers, An improved printing press by Philippe-Denis Pierres; JPHS 3 (1967), pp. 82-92. For a survey of technical aspects of the construction of these and other hand-presses, see Walter Wilkes, Die Entwicklung der eisernen Buchdruckerpresse; eine Dokumentation (Darmstadt, 1988). 53 For Le Blon, see Otto M. Lilien, Jacob Christoph Le Blon, 1667-1741 (Stuttgart, 1985); for Ploos van Amstel, see Th.Laurentius, J. W. Niemeijer and G. Ploos van Amstel, Cornelis Ploos van Amstel, 1726-1798; kunstverzamelaar en

287

288

Notes to pages 181-183

prentuitgever (Assen, 1980). A selection of this and other eighteenth-century work is shown in Colin and Charlotte Franklin, A catalogue of early colour printing, from chiaroscuro to aquatint (Culham,1977); see also, and more fully, Florian Rodari (ed.), Anatomie de la couleur; l'invention de l'estampe en couleurs (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1996). 54 J. J. Bylaert, Niewe manier om plaet-tekeningen in t'koper te brengen (Leiden, 1772). The book was published in Dutch and French parallel texts. 55 J. H. Kniphof, Botanica in originali (Erfurt, 1733; Halle, 1757-64); Christian Gottlieb Ludwig, Ectypa vegetabilium usibus medicis praecipue destinatorum (Halle and Leipzig, 1760--4). 56 François Stapart, L'art de graver au pinceau (Paris, 1773). 57 Abraham Bosse, Traité des manières de graver en taille douce (Paris, 1645; 2nd edn with additions, 1701; enlarged by C. N. Cochin, 1745; further enlarged, 1758); William Faithorne, The art of graveing and etching (1662). 58 The 1755 edition was reissued with new title-pages in 1759, 1765 and 1769: see Geoffrey Keynes, John Evelyn; a study in bibliophily and a bibliography of his writings, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1968), pp. 121-2. For a more general view, see Timothy Clayton, The English print, 1688-1802 (New Haven, 1997). 59 George Edwards, Essays upon natural history, and other miscellaneous subjects (1770), pp. 159, 171. 60 Paris, 1751. A much enlarged edition was published by Pierre-François Basan in 1767. For Hecquet and Basan, see Maxime Préaud and others, Dictionnaire des éditeurs d'estampes à Paris sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1987), with further references. 61 E. E Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné de toutes les pièces qui forment l'oeuvre de Rembrandt (Paris, 1751). A supplement by Pierre Yver was published at Amsterdam in 1756. For Gersaint, `marchand de curiosités, see Préaud, Dictionnaire, pp. 136-7. 62 For Heinecken, see Hugues-Adrien Joly, Lettres a Karl-Heinrich von Heinecken, 1772-1789, ed. W. McAllister Johnson (Paris, 1988). He had discussed fifteenthcentury printing in his Nachrichten von Kiinstlern und Kunst-sachen, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1768-9). 63 John Balston, The Whatmans and wove paper; its invention and development in the West (West Farleigh, 1998), pp. 116-20. 64 Ibid., pp. 116-17, 124, 175-7. 65 Bagford's collection of paper specimens and traced or copied watermarks is now divided between the Harleian manuscripts in the British Library and Cambridge University Library MS Add.8578; see also Humfrey Wanley, Letters, ed. R L. Heyworth (Oxford, 1989), pp. 27-9. 66 Gerard Meerman, and others, De chartae vulgaris seu linea origine, ed. Jacobus van Vaassen I (The Hague, 1767); J. van Heel, `Gerard Meerman: bibliofiel, geleerde en mecenas, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis 4 (1997), pp. 75-100.

Notes to pages 183-185

67 Dard Hunter, Papermaking,• the history and technique of an ancient craft, 2nd edn (New York, 1947), pp. 309-40; a summary of the literature down to Matthias Koops's Historical account (printed on strawpaper, 1800) is presented in chronological order in his The literature of papermaking, 1390-1800 (1925; repr. New York, 1971). 68 Bernard von Mallinkrodt, De ortu ac progressu antis typographicae (Cologne, 1640). For older lists of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century anniversary literature, see for example A. van der Linde, Geschichte der Erfindung der Buchdruckkunst, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1886) and Otto Mdhlbrecht, Die Biicherliebhaberei am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1896). For more recent surveys. see Erdmann Weyrauch, et al. (eds.), Wolfenbütteler Bibliographie zur Geschichte des Buchwesens im deutschen Sprachgebiet, 1840-1980, 12 vols. (Munich, 1990-9) II, pp. 49-68, and John L. Flood, `On Gutenberg's 600th anniversary; towards a history of jubilees of printing', JPHS n.s. 1 (2000), pp. 5-36. The whole subject is treated more extensively in Monika Estermann, O werthe Druckerkunst/Du Mutter aller Kunst; Gutenbergfeiern im Laufe der Jahrhunderte (Mainz: GutenbergMuseum, 1999). 69 See for example Johann Christian Wolf, Monumenta typographica, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1740); Johann Christian Seitz, Het derde jubeljaar der uitgevondene boekdrukkonst (Haarlem, 1740); Christian Gottlieb Schwarz, Primaria quaedam documenta de origine typographiae ( Altdorf, 1740); Prosper Marchand, Histoire des origine et des premiers progrès de l'imprimerie (The Hague, 1740); Johann Heinrich Leich, De origine et incrementis typographiae lipsiensis (Leipzig, 1740); Friedrich Christian Lesser, Typographia iubilans (Leipzig, 1740). See also Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Prosper Marchand; la vie et l'oeuvre (1678-1756) (Leiden, 1987), pp. 39, 186-7. Books in German achieved a smaller circulation across Europe than much of the Latin literature. 70 Gerard Meerman, Conspectus originum typographicarum ([Amsterdam] 1761); Gerard Meerman, Origines typographicae, 2 vols. (The Hague, Paris and London, 1765). 71 Jacob Visser, Uitvinding der boekdrukkunst (Amsterdam, 1767). Visser attached to this a chronological account of books printed in the area covered by the United Provinces in the fifteenth century, basing his work partly on bibliographical references and partly on copies in public or private collections. 72 Catalogue raisonné de la collection de livres de M. Pierre Antoine Crevenna, 6 vols. [Amsterdam] (1775-6); Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de M. R-A. Bolongaro-Crevenna, 5 vols. (Amsterdam, 1789-90); Jos van Heel, Bolongaro Crevenna: een Italiaans koopman en bibliofiel in Amsterdam, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis 5 (1998), pp. 73-94. 73 Michael Maittaire, Annales typographici (The Hague, 1719; new edn 5 vols. in 7 (The Hague, Amsterdam, London, 1722-41)). 74 Michael Denis, Annalium typographicorum v. cl. Michaelis Maittaire supplementum, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1789).

289

290

Notes to pages 188-191

Notes to pages 185-187

75 Michael Denis, Wiens Buchdruckergeschichte von 1481 bis 1560 (Vienna, 1782). 76 J. B. B. van Praet, Recherches sur la vie, les écrits et les éditions de Colard Mansion ... (Paris, 1780). 77 It was originally published in the Esprit des Journaux, May 1782. The Bodleian Library copy of the pamphlet belonged to the bibliophile Francis Douce. 78 Some aspects of this are discussed in Yvon Belaval and Dominique Bourel (eds.), Le siècle des lumières et la Bible (Paris, 1986). 79 G. W. Panzer, Litterarische Nachricht von den allerältesten gedruckten deutschen Bibeln aus dem funfzehenden Jahrhundert (Nuremberg, 1777). 80 Johannes Nast, Historisch-critische-Nachrichten von den sechs ersten teutschen Bibel-Ausgaben (Stuttgart, 1767; new edn Stuttgart, 1779); J. M. Goeze, Versuch einer Historie der gedruckten niedersächsischen Bibeln vom Jahre 1470 bis 1621 (Halle, 1775). 81 Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500-1800 (Stuttgart, 1974). The nature and extent of this revolution has since been much debated: see, for example, Hans Erich Bödeker, `D'une "histoire littéraire du lecteur" à "l'histoire du lecteur"; bilan et perspectives de l'histoire de la lecture en Allemagne, in Roger Chartier (ed.), Histoires de la lecture; un bilan des recherches (Paris, 1995), pp. 93-124, and Reinhard Wittmann, `Was there a reading revolution at the end of the eighteenth century?, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A history of reading in the west (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 284-312 (originally published in Italian (Rome, 1995) and French (Paris, 1997)). For further observations, see T. C. W. Blanning, The culture of power and the power of culture; old régime Europe, 1660-1789 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 142-4.

291

1637-1723, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Aspects of printing from 1600 (1987), pp. 141-70.

4 Treadwell, `Lists, p. 155, based on Samuel Negus's list of that year. 5 Strahan to David Hume, 10 July 1764: David Hume, Letters to William Strahan, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1888), p. 47. Strahan referred to `presses', but he must have meant printing houses.

6 Rhynd's printers' guide: being a new and correct list of master printers, in London and its vicinity, 3rd edn (1804): see John Pendred, The earliest directory of the book trade, ed. Graham Pollard (Bibliographical Soc., 1955), p. 55. 7 Strahan to Hume, 23 July 1771: Hume, Letters to Strahan, p. 187. For reprints in the Bowyer printing house, see Keith Maslen and John Lancaster (eds.), The Bowyer ledgers (1991), Topical index, s.v. Re-impression. For some details of reprints from standing type, see for example William B. Todd, A bibliography of Edmund Burke, reissue with new notes (Winchester, 1982). 8 Pat Rogers, Grub Street; studies in a sub-culture (1972); Allen Reddick, The making of Johnson's Dictionary, 1746-1773, revised edn (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 74-7; Paula McDowell, The women of Grub Street,• press, politics and gender in the London literary marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford, 1998). 9 Cowper to John Newton, 13 January 1782: William Cowper, Letters and prose writings, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1979-85), II, p. 6. For the publication of the Poems (1782) and The task (1785), see Norma Russell, A bibliography of William Cowper to 1837 (Oxford Bibliographical Soc., 1963), pp. 38-54. 10 Cowper to William Unwin, 20 March 1785: Letters, II, p. 336. 11 Cowper to John Newton, c.15 April 1785: Letters, II, p. 342; to Unwin, 30 April 1785, p. 345.

7 Re-evaluation: towards the modern book 1 G. Walters, `The booksellers in 1759 and 1774; the battle for literary property, The Library, 5th ser., 29 (1974), pp. 287-311; David Saunders, Authorship and copyright (1992), pp. 65-9, with further references. 2 W. Kenrick, An address to the artists and manufacturers of Great Britain (1774), p. 48. For a more general overview, see especially Mark Rose, Authors and owners; the invention of copyright (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), and for another perspective see the essay `Genius and the copyright' by Martha Woodmansee in her The author, art, and the market; rereading the history of aesthetics (New York, 1994), pp. 35-55. Some aspects of authorship and trade protectionism in England before the Act of Queen Anne are examined in Joseph F. Loewenstein, `Legal proofs and corrected readings: press-agency and the new bibliography, in David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair and Harold Weber (eds.), The production of English renaissance culture (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 93-122. 3 W. W. Greg (ed.), A companion to Arber (Oxford 1467), pp. 41-2, 54; Michael Treadwell, `Lists of master printers: the 'zLondon printing trp-'

12 Hume to Strahan, 22 July 1771: Hume, Letters to Strahan, p. 213. 13 Strahan to Hume, 27 February 1772: Hume, Letters to Strahan, p. 244. 14 Adam Smith to William Strahan, 10 June 1784: Adam Smith, Correspondence, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Moss [2nd edn] (Oxford, 1987), p. 275. 15 John Dreyfus, 'Baskerville 's methods of printing, Signature, new ser., 12 (1951), pp. 41-51; E E. Pardoe, John Baskerville of Birmingham, letter founder & printer (1975).

16 Philip Gaskell, John Baskerville; a bibliography, repr. with additions and corrections (Chicheley, 1973). 17 Horace Hart, Charles Earl Stanhope and the Oxford University Press, ed. James Mosley (Printing Historical Soc., 1966), p. xxiii. 18 D. C. Coleman, The British paper industry, 1495-1860; a study in industrial growth (Oxford, 1958), pp. 179-92; R. H. Clapperton, Thepaper-making machine (Oxford, 1967). 19 André Jammes and Françoise Courbage, Les Didot; trois siècles de typographie et de bibliophilie, 1698-1998 (Paris, 1998).

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