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 | Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography |  |
TYPESETTING AND PRESSWORK
In "The Treatment of Typesetting and Presswork in Bibliographical
Description," Studies in Bibliography, 52 (for 1999;
2000), 1–57, I discussed
how some of the results of bibliographical
analysis might be incorporated
into a descriptive bibliography. Analysis, of course,
underlies all aspects
of a description, but I was dealing here only with the kinds
of analysis
that would be reported in a paragraph on typesetting and presswork.
I
have nothing to add to my proposals there, but I do wish to emphasize
again
the importance of including this kind of information in a descrip-
tive
bibliography, as demonstrated long ago in David L. Vander
Meulen's
bibliography of Pope's Dunciad
(1981 dissertation). (A few examples of
analysis that might appear in
paragraphs other than the one on typeset-
ting and presswork: the analysis of format
is generally reported in the col-
lation line; the identification of printers in the
many instances of false or
incomplete imprints, based on the analysis of type-case
contents or print-
ers' ornaments, could well be mentioned in connection with
title-page
transcription; and the distinguishing of impressions, which may
require
a number of analytical techniques, obviously affects the whole
structure
of a description.)
The most comprehensive discussion of bibliographical analysis since
my
1999 essay is my Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical
Introduction (2009),
based on my Sandars Lectures (mentioned as
unpublished in note 3 of that
essay). The second chapter, "Analysis of Manufacturing
Clues" (pp. 31–
60, with notes on pp. 97–108), does not deal with the formal
presenta-
tion of bibliographical evidence but in other respects covers much
the
same ground as the 1999 essay, summarizing the uses of each
technique
of analysis (it also supplements the earlier piece with references to
later
work). (For the analysis of paper, discussed in the book but not in
the
1999 essay, see "Paper" above.) The book includes in its "Subject
Guide"
a listing of the main writings on each analytical technique, useful for
its
selectivity; many additional writings, but only through 2002, are
recorded
in my Introduction to Bibliography
(2002 revision), part 9, pp. 255–365.
I wish to call particular attention to three other post-1999
publica-
tions. They are outstanding examples of the application of analytical
tech-
niques to particular editions; and although they were not intended to
be
general introductions to the subject, they serve that purpose admirably
(at
least for the pre-1700 period): Randall McLeod,
"Chronicling Holin-
shed's Chronicles: Textual Commentary,"
in The Peaceable and Prosperous
Regiment of Blessed Queene
Elizabeth: A Facsimile from Holinshed's "Chronicles"
(1587), ed.
Cyndia Susan Clegg (2005), pp. 19–76; Adrian Weiss, "Casting
Compositors, Foul Cases, and Skeletons:
Printing in Middleton's Age," in
Thomas Middleton and Early Modern
Textual Culture: A Companion to the Col-
lected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (2007),
pp. 195–225
(cf. "Running-Title Movements and Printing Method," pp.
484–485);
and Paul Needham, Galileo
Makes a Book (2011). All three are notable for
their use of
running-title evidence for identification of skeleton-formes,
but their handling of
all techniques is exemplary. In connection with run-
ning titles, it is worth noting
that Needham's chapter "Parallel Printing
and Running Titles" (pp. 155–165), written
with David L. Vander Meu-
len, sets out the running-title
evidence in three tables with grid lines: the
first lists the different settings of
the running titles and shows (with vertical
columns for each sheet) where each one
appears; the second is organized
by forme and indicates which setting is on each
page of each forme; and
the third, arranged by sheet, shows (with vertical columns
for each setting)
all the settings that appear in each sheet. These tables
illustrate one way
in which the more compressed presentation I suggested can be
modified
to produce still greater clarity in some instances. A fourth work,
though
it does not as readily serve the function of an introduction, offers a
com-
prehensive (if flawed) example of how to investigate printing
practices:
Claire M. Bolton's
The Fifteenth-Century Printing Practices of Johann
Zainer,
Ulm, 1473–1478
(2016), which pays
attention to tolerances in measure-
ments (pp. 28–29, 54–56) and includes chapters
on printers' measures
(pp. 81–118), on point-holes (pp. 192–219), and on blind
impressions from
bearer type (pp. 119–158) and from the cloth used to dampen the
paper
(pp. 159–191); cautions about using this work are expressed by B. J. Mc-
Mullin in Script & Print,
41 (2017), 58–62.
Beyond these works, many analyses of more limited scope have ap-
peared since
1999, and I shall list some of them as useful examples of a
variety
of techniques (arranged here in the order followed in the
1999
essay):
IDENTIFIABLE TYPES AND ORNAMENTS. Adrian
Weiss, "A 'Fill-In' Job: The Tex-
tual Crux and Interrupted Printing in
Thomas Middleton's The Triumph of Honour
and Virtue
(1622)," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America, 93 (1999), 53–73.
Chiaki Hanabusa, "Shared Printing in
Robert Wilson's
The Cobbler's Prophecy (1594),"
of the Second Edition of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)," Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of America , 104 (2010), 277–297. Andrew Benjamin Bricker,
"Who Was 'A. Moore'? The Attribution of Eighteenth-Century Publications with
False and Misleading Imprints," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , 110
(2016): 181–214.
SPELLING AND LAYOUT VARIATIONS. MacD. P.
Jackson, "Finding the Pattern: Pe-
ter Short's Shakespeare Quartos
Revisited," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New
Zealand Bulletin, 25
(2001), 67–86. Paul Werstine, "Scribe or
Compositor: Ralph
Crane, Compositors D and F, and the
First Four Plays in the Shakespeare First Fo-
lio," Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America
, 95
(2001), 315–339. Vernon Guy
Dickson, "What
I Will: Mediating Subjects; Or, Ralph Crane and the Folio's Tem-
pest," Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America
, 97 (2003), 43–56.
T. H. Howard-
Hill, "Early Modern Printers and the
Standardization of English Spelling," Modern
Language Review,
101 (2006), 16–29. S. W. Reid, "Compositor B's
Speech-Prefixes in
the First Folio of Shakespeare and the Question of Copy for 2 Henry IV," Studies in
Bibliography, 58 (for
2007–8; 2010), 73–108.
HEADLINES. Eugene Giddens, "The
Final Stages in Printing Ben Jonson's
Works,
1640–1," Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America
, 97 (2003), 57–68.
Paul Need-
ham, "The Canterbury
Tales and the Rosary: A Mirror of Caxton's Devotions," in
The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki
Takamiya, ed.
Takami Matsuda, Richard Linenthal, and John Scahill
(2004), pp. 313–356 (see p.
323). Andrew
Zurcher, "Printing The Faerie Queene in
1590," Studies in Bibliography, 57
(for
2005–6; 2008), 115–50.
POINT-HOLES. Martin Boghardt,
"Pinhole Patterns in Large-Format Incunables"
(trans. John L.
Flood), The Library, 7th ser., 1 (2000),
263–289. Paul Needham, "Ul-
rich Zel's Early Quartos
Revisited," in Incunabula on the Move, ed. Ed Potten and
Satoko Tokunaga (2014;
Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 15.1,
for
2012), 9–57.
PRESS VARIANTS. Masi Agata,
"Stop-Press Variants in the Gutenberg Bible:
The First Report of the Collation,"
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 97 (2003),
139–165. Neil
Harris, "Nine Reset Sheets in the Aldine Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili,"
Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 2006, pp. 245–275. Paul Needham, "The 1462 Bible of Johann
Fust and Peter Schöffer (GW 4204): A
Survey of Its Variants," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch,
2006, pp. 19–49. Wallace
Kirsop, "An Avowal of Stop-Press Correction in 1817,"
Script & Print, 34.1 (2010), 8. Gabriel Egan, "The Editorial Problem of Press Variants:
Q2 Hamlet as a Test Case," Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America
, 106
(2012),
311–355; and "Press Variants in Q2 Hamlet: An Accident on N(outer)," Studies in
Bib-
liography, 59 (2015), 115–129. Huub van der Linden,
"Printing Music in Italy around
1700: Workshop Practices at the Silvani
Firm in Bologna," Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America
, 109 (2015), 491–532.
IMPRESSIONS FROM MATERIALS NOT MEANT TO PRINT. Randall McLeod, "Where
Angels Fear to Read," in Mar(k)ing the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the
Literary
Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry
(2000), pp. 144–192. Neil
Harris, "Rising
Quadrats in the Woodcuts of the Aldine Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili,"
Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 2002, pp. 158–167; and "The
Blind Impressions in the Aldine
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
(1499),"
Gutenberg-Jahrbuch,
2004, pp. 93–146.
PRESS FIGURES. Robert Dawson,
"Notes on Press-Figures in France and the Lo-
calization of Books during the Later
18th Century," Bibliographical Society of Australia
and New Zealand Bulletin, 28.3
(2004), 97–121. B. J. McMullin, "The Eighth
Edition
of Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 100
(2006), 447–461; and "Early 'Secular'
Press Figures," The Library, 7th ser., 10
(2009),
57–65.
The matter of "localization" (detecting features that are characteristic
of
printing practices in different geographical areas) was taken up briefly
in
note 16 of my essay; the references there can now be supplemented
with Carlo
Dumontet's "Compositorial Practices in Seventeenth-Century
Naples" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 98
[2004], 149–161)
and with Robert Dawson's
article listed just above.
It was only in connection with localization of compositorial practices
that I
mentioned the placement of printed signatures. But the role of
signature positions
in distinguishing editions, an old (and continuingly
useful) technique that has also
been a part of some "fingerprinting" sys-
tems for shorthand identification of
editions (see "Relation to Library
Cataloguing" above), is discussed in my Bibliographical Analysis, p. 103.
Also in that book I commented
(pp. 58–59) on the situation (not un-
common in nineteenth-century books printed
from plates, especially
American ones) where printed signatures do not correspond to
the actual
gatherings. Analysis of such signatures can sometimes reveal
structural
decisions made during the production of a book. For example,
Melville's
Clarel (as I pointed out in the
Northwestern-Newberry Edition [1991],
pp. 678–679) was published in two
volumes gathered in eights, but its
occasional printed signatures do not match that
structure. An analysis
of the occurrence of those signatures suggests that the
original plan was
for a one-volume publication gathered in twelves (and that
signatures for
the earlier plan were incompletely removed). B. J.
McMullin has recently
analyzed a number of examples of conflicting
signatures, in "Gather-
ings and Signatures in Conflict" (Script
& Print, 39 [2015], 241–247). He
groups them into two
categories: those where the discrepancy between
signatures and gatherings was
unintended, resulting from an unforeseen
event or decision at a time when it would
have been inconvenient to make
alterations; and those where two or more sets of
signatures are present,
resulting from a plan to accommodate different impositions.
Both situa-
tions normally imply printing from plates, since the removal or
insertion
of signatures after plating would be especially time-consuming. (See
also
McMullin's "Cowper's Complete
Poetical Works, 1837 (Russell, 166)," Script
& Print, 40 [2016], 45–54.)
The line in which signatures are printed, just below the text of a page
(the
"direction line"), sometimes contains symbols or numbers that are
not regular
signatures, as may happen in the direction lines on other
I mentioned several other kinds of notation that may occur in direction
lines. In his Foxcroft Lecture for 2012, B. J. McMullin provided a much
expanded discussion of these matters (What Readers Should Ignore on the
Printed Page: Communication within the Book Trade, 2014). Besides giving a
basic introduction to press figures (pp. 7, 8–10), he comments on sev-
eral types of "communication between printer and binder": paper-quality
marks (pp. 7–8; see under "Paper" above), sheet numbers (p. 11), part
numbers in works published serially (pp. 11–12), and modified signatures
to handle "disturbances in the printing house" (such as added material,
errors in casting off, and cancels, pp. 12–17). He concludes with a very
different form of binders' instructions: actual statements printed vertically
along left edges or on leaves containing text for binding labels (pp. 17–19,
supplementing his 2010 article on binders' instructions: see "Ideal Copy"
above). All his discussions are accompanied by reproductions of examples,
and his lecture as a whole is a convenient summary of one class of biblio-
graphical evidence that should be analyzed and recorded by descriptive
bibliographers (as should discrepancies in catchwords, which are another
feature of direction lines).
A technique not mentioned in my 1999 essay is the use of variations
in
leading (the spacing between lines of type) to identify different printings
of
the same edition; for an explanation, see Gillian G. M.
Kyles, "Alteration
of Leading within Editions," in Studies in Bibliography, 52 (1999), 187–191.
My
1999 essay (followed by my 2009 book) does touch on the
means for
distinguishing whether type or plates were used to print particular
pages
or books, but it does not raise the question of distinguishing
Monotype
from Linotype. I wish to pass along here a detail communicated to me
by
David L. Vander Meulen: he was told by the printer of Studies in Bib-
liography (in the days when that journal was
printed from Linotype) that
occasionally an individual Linotype matrix might not be
seated properly
before the slug was poured. Thus a slug might contain a type-high
space
that would print (as happened in Studies in
Bibliography, 35 [1982], 275);
and what one might ordinarily
think would be a sign of printing from
separate types cannot be assumed to be so.
This situation is analogous to
that in which a shifting type is caught in one of its
misaligned positions
when a stereotype plate was made. Comparison of multiple copies
will
of course show no further shifting in either the stereotype or
Linotype
instances.
We are now surely beyond the point where the logical validity and
scholarly value
of analytical bibliography can be questioned. D. F.
Mc-
Kenzie's "Printers of the Mind" in the 1969
Studies in Bibliography was
the culmination of a tradition of
doing so. But I hope that my repeated
note 6, in my 2004 overview of McKenzie's work (Papers of the Biblio-
graphical Society of America , 98 [2004], 511–521; reprinted in my Portraits
and Reviews [2015], pp. 405–415), and in my 2009 book (pp. 26–29)—
have sufficiently summarized the reasons for continuing the attempt to
uncover, from the physical evidence in individual books, the printing-
shop activities that produced those books. Recently a new assessment of
McKenzie's essay was put forward by Joseph A. Dane in Blind Impres-
sions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History (2013), in a chapter called
"Bibliographers of the Mind" (pp. 58–72). Although he does not cite
my comments, he makes some of the same points, especially noting the
problems entailed by McKenzie's elevation of printers' records over the
books themselves as primary evidence—and as unfailingly accurate docu-
ments at that. Even if what Dane says is not new, the central five pages
of his chapter (pp. 63–68) are worth reading for his striking way of stat-
ing the defects of McKenzie's piece. For example, he rightly says that if
primary evidence is limited to external evidence (printers' records), then
McKenzie's "criticisms of analytical bibliography are little better than
tautologies" (p. 68).
Given this sound evaluation, it seems contradictory that Dane
calls
McKenzie's piece "the article that should have
sounded the death knell on
compositorial study" (p. 60). The attempt to define
individual composi-
tors' habits is only one kind of analysis, and Dane's focus wavers between
analytical bibliography in general
and compositor study in particular. He
seems to have an irrational dislike for the
latter, saying "I have never be-
lieved in the virtues of compositorial analysis"
(p. 59) and "The habits of
a compositor … are not interesting to me" (p. 70). He
adds, irrelevantly,
"I cannot think of a single case where a significant Shakespeare
word or
phrase is better documented because we have determined
compositorial
stints." This statement, even if true, is irrelevant because (1) there
is al-
ways the possibility that such analysis might be productive in the hands
of
future scholars, and (2) the value of an analytical technique does not
turn
on its usefulness for establishing texts. Whatever can be learned about
the
production of a book is a contribution to history, whether or not it
helps
editors.
A far more consequential criticism of compositor study (at least when
dependent on
variant spellings) has been offered by Pervez Rizvi in
"The
Use of Spellings for Compositor Attribution in the First Folio" (Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of America
, 110 [2016], 1–53). After an
amazingly
thorough and fascinating analysis (based on many more spellings
than
have conventionally been used), Rizvi concludes that
compositors' spell-
ings were so variable as to "support or rebut almost any
attribution" and
idea that individual compositors might have had no fixed spelling prefer-
ences (and might have been influenced in their choices by a great many
factors, or simply the whim of the moment) should not be surprising, for it
accords with human nature. But human beings have varying dispositions,
and some compositors may actually have had firm spelling habits; investi-
gating other editions in the way Rizvi has examined the First Folio would
not necessarily prove inconclusive in every case. After all, even within the
Folio, the division of Macbeth between two compositors, first proposed in
1920, "remains unchallenged and still appears very convincing," accord-
ing to Rizvi (p. 18). This degree of success may be rare, but it is possible.
Whether or not the tabulation of spellings (and abbreviations, punctua-
tion, and spacing) results in a convincing determination of compositorial
divisions, it gives one information, for the pervasive variation that defies
interpretation is itself a fact about the typesetting of a particular edition
(and about the historical development of written language). Rizvi has
provided bibliographers with a more comprehensive set of cautions for
pursuing this kind of work than they have had before. (The sensible re-
quirements suggested by Mark Bland in A Guide to Early Printed Books and
Manuscripts [2010], pp. 139–140, are commendable, but they should now
be supplemented by an awareness of Rizvi's observations.)
Compositor analysis of all kinds has long been recognized as some-
what more
speculative than presswork analysis (though the latter is not
without its problems);
but ruling out any potentially helpful approach is
unwise. A great deal of
historical research in all fields leads to results that
are less than certain, but
that is no reason to abandon it, when conducted
responsibly with awareness of the
pitfalls. Books are full of traces of their
own production, and (as I have said many
times) scholars must persist in
making every effort to tap this great body of
evidence. The point has been
especially well argued by David L.
Vander Meulen in "Thoughts on the
Future of Bibliographical Analysis" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
Canada, 46
[2008], 17–34); he concludes that it is "important to proceed
with an
understanding of the role of the physical in human activity and
the role of physical
evidence in revealing the past and understanding the
present." This is ultimately
the reason that we must follow the clues we
find in books, using all the tools at
our disposal.
| Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography | |