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Notes
A teacher develops chicken-and-egg doubts whether students can use facsimiles before studying originals. Thus it seems impossible to convince M.A. students that the imposition in facsimiles rarely matches the originals. Alan Burns deserves credit for stressing this point in the foreword (p. vi) to the recent Hakluyt (STC 12625).
Though elementary, the handiest summary is Laurence A. Cummings, "Pitfalls of Photocopy Research," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXV (1961), 97-101. He is more concerned with film and photostat than printed facsimiles, and with good reason: the slapdash "editing" of early reels in University Microfilms makes the faults noted in this study fade into insignificance.
"The Problem of Variant Forme in a Facsimile Edition," The Library, 5th ser., VII (1952), 262-272.
Not widely available because privately distributed, the most useful survey of techniques, complete with sample pages, is G. B. Harrison's Facsimile Reprints (London, ?1931), a paper read at the 1931 Anglo-American Conference of Historians. One supposes this a by-product of Harrison's work with the Shakespeare Association series.
The earliest facsimile errata list I have noticed is a disturbing yet reassuring feature of the Griggs-Praetorius quartos.
See A. W. Pollard, Redgrave, Chapman and Greg, "'Facsimile' Reprints of Old Books," The Library, 4th ser., VI (1925-26), 305-328; also, Allen Hazen, "Type-Facsimiles," Modern Philology, XLIV (1946-47), 209-217.
Pollard, op.cit., p. 312, notes that more copies were lost by fire in 1874 so that surviving sets are indeed scarce. Ashbee does not identify his originals, but some were obviously Devonshire-Chatsworth-Huntington.
To my astonished delight, some major problems are solved in George Bullen's Catalogue of the Loan Collection for the 1877 Caxton celebration, pp. 218-219. Thus we learn that Rae's fine 9348 and Tupper's 5057 are tracing-lith, while Blades's elegant 6826 is photo-lith. Check List policy is to omit items that are in doubt.
Giles E. Dawson points out to me that the Folger copy belonged to Gilbert R. Redgrave and contains letters he solicited in 1925 to document the Pollard-Redgrave article previously cited (note 6).
Of some, if not all, a few copies were printed on vellum. Stray quartos on vellum without identifying prelims will prove of this origin.
I had the advantage of using a Folger copy annotated by James G. McManaway, but naturally he is not responsible for any errors in my figures.
Farmer artlessly cites the complete unreliability of his own earlier letter-press edition of STC 25982 as reason for buying his collotype (Hand List, p. 47).
Farmer apparently used stray leaves by Ashbee in some other issues (e.g., 12212). He seems not to have worried about copyright.
Miss Elizabeth Fry of the Huntington staff kindly verified for me the existence of the vestigial ¶ in the HN. copy.
I recall examining these substitute leaves as long ago as 1934 at the suggestion of Prof. B. J. Whiting.
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