University of Virginia Library

George Parker Winship, reporting in 1913 on the activities of the John Carter Brown Library during the preceding year, said, "A purchase which has had an unexpected influence upon the development of the Library is that of a mechanical photographing machine." It may be hard for us now to imagine how the role of photocopying—once a process for it was readily available—could ever have been "unexpected," for the present academic world is a place that Gore Vidal has with justice called "Xerox-land."[1] Many, perhaps most, scholars in the humanities today would say that the widespread access to inexpensive copying facilities has transformed—for the better— their manner of working. Some have even been heard to name the Xerox Corporation along with two or three inspiring teachers or seminal thinkers in their field as the dominant influences on the way their own work has developed. Although few voices have been raised in complaint, the advent of cheap photocopying is not an unmixed blessing. One of the pejorative implications of Vidal's phrase is obviously that photocopying has enabled scholars increasingly to pack away endless bits of information without digesting it. Unquestionably for some scholars the act of placing material in a file gives them a sense of control over their subject matter; and a bulging file of xerographic copies is likely to provide them greater satisfaction than the smaller file of supposedly less reliable hand-written or typewritten notes that could have been produced in the same amount of time (even though the latter would at least have necessitated reading the material). But there have always been scholars who do not know how to make constructive use of their accumulated data and others who clearly do know how: the ubiquity of copying machines does not change that. In any case, the disturbing aspect of Xerox-land that I wish to address is quite different, but equally fundamental: the total lack of understanding of the nature of documentary evidence that is exhibited by most scholars in their use of photocopies.

Even so thoughtful a bibliographical and historical scholar as Winship could say in that 1913 report, "The machine does accurately and

more quickly what the human copyist transcribes with constant likelihood of error."[2] Winship would certainly have understood that photography is not error-free, but he chose not to weaken his enthusiastic endorsement of the new machine by mentioning any of its limitations. Later commentators, speaking both of photocopying a few pages and of microfilming entire books, have usually taken the same line, though we may be less inclined in many instances to believe that any reservations had occurred to them. One outspoken critic, however, was William A. Jackson, who addressed the Bibliographical Society of America in 1941 on "Some Limitations of Microfilm." He began by asserting that there is really nothing to say except that "microfilms are microfilms and not the original book or manuscript, and [I could] then sit down, my case being stated, and allow the implications of that statement to be worked out by each one of you according to your own experience." But, he added, "I am down for fifteen minutes and so I shall employ the rest of them in elaborating this point."[3] He was right that nothing more ought to need saying; but I, too, shall make some further comments, not because I have an allotted number of minutes or pages to fill but because so many people behave as if they do not understand the differences between reproductions and originals.

I shall be speaking specifically of reproductions of documents (manuscript or printed sheets or books) containing verbal texts, but the points I shall make are of course applicable to documents containing musical or dance-notational texts as well, and they are further applicable to reproductions of works of visual art.[4] When I use the word "reproduction" (and, more loosely, "photocopy," "photofacsimile," and so on), I mean the product of any chemical or electrostatic process that aims to represent with exactness (though perhaps on an enlarged or diminished scale) not only the text of a given document but also the details of its presentation, insofar as they can be duplicated on a different surface. Sometimes—in the past more than now—the text of a printed document is reset in the same typeface as the original and with spacing and lineation intended to imitate the original, and the result is called a "type-facsimile";[5] but such a "facsimile" is not a reproduction as here defined because it involves a new typesetting. Most people, I believe, recognize why this kind of "facsimile" cannot be regarded as the equivalent of the original, whereas they frequently do not see why the same is true of photographic and xerographic copies. I should like to explore both the practical and the theoretical reasons for maintaining that reproductions are not substitutes for originals and then examine a few prominent recent instances of confusion on this point.