University of Virginia Library

I

The bulk of the writing about microfilms and other photocopies of manuscript and printed material (and there is a considerable literature of the subject)[6] does not allude to the possibility of inaccurate or misleading reproduction. Indeed, what is often stressed is the absolute fidelity of photographic copies. For example, Charles F. McCombs, in his widely circulated pamphlet The Photostat in Reference Work (first published in 1920),[7] speaks of the "unlimited possibilities" of photostats because of "the advantages of an absolutely accurate copy" (p. 4), a copy "free from errors and omissions to which the most careful copyist or typist is at times liable" (p. 5). The next year the Bibliographical Society of America devoted a whole issue of its Papers to the subject of "Photographic Copying" (the title on the cover label, though the primary topic was the photostat), and in the course of 53 pages[8] there are only two brief references to any limitations of photocopies: Henrietta C. Bartlett is quoted as saying that the photostat "should not be considered of equal value to the student with the original" (p. 15), and in the discussion of the acceptance of photostats in court "Mr. Winship and others spoke of the possibility of altering or faking photostat copies" (p. 50). Otherwise it is all praise, far less perceptive bibliographically than one would expect in the publication of a bibliographical society. Thus George Watson Cole (Huntington Library), in his survey of "valuable and interesting . . . information" from the responses to a questionnaire, quotes Frederick W. Cook (Archives Division, Commonwealth of Massachusetts) as saying that "the machine makes no mistakes" (p. 5); Alexander J. Wall (New-York Historical Society) writes in his reply that "photostat reproductions answer every purpose for the student of American history and we bind them the same as any pamphlet and treat them as an original publication in their classification" (p. 10); James Thayer Gerould (Princeton University Library) says, "In many cases the photograph is more satisfactory for the scholar's use than the original" (p. 11); and Cole, in his concluding remarks, states as a fact that a photostat "requires no reading back" to check it for accuracy (p. 16).

Such blind faith in the virtues of photography, on the part of those who should know better, has continued. Keyes D. Metcalf reported uncritically in 1938, "It is generally conceded that it [microphotography] will be used extensively by librarians in the place of the original of books and MSS." He added, even more astonishingly, that in photographs "books and MSS. which could not otherwise be found in libraries will become available and may be studied from a bibliographical point of view"—and this statement (like the ones cited by Cole earlier) appeared in

the journal of the Bibliographical Society of America.[9] A quarter-century later the same journal published a piece by Richard W. Hale, Jr., who took as his starting point "the simple thought that a photographic reproduction of bibliographical information is textually trustworthy."[10] In between, Library Trends published an article by Herman H. Fussler implying that microfilm eliminates the necessity of seeing the original: it "permits the historian in Athens, Georgia, for example, to have access, without leaving Athens, to an important collection of manuscripts in the Bancroft Library at the University of California. The cost is clearly less than that of going to California to consult the originals (unless the number of manuscripts required is very large)."[11] And James G. Hodgson, in an early pamphlet on xerography (which, its subtitle predicts, "may be a tool of great importance to libraries"), welcomed the process by asserting that "the final form is a very exact reproduction of the original."[12]

There is no need to multiply examples, for everyone knows that such statements abound—though it is disturbing to find that at least one bibliographical society and several rare-book librarians (on whom one might expect to rely for carefully considered views on this subject) have endorsed the common belief that photocopies do not lie. The reasons for being suspicious of reproductions have not gone entirely unexpressed, however; and one should not be surprised that the essential points were made at a meeting of the London Bibliographical Society as early as the mid-1920s. The March 1926 number of the Library, which prints the papers delivered at the December 1925 meeting and a summary of the ensuing discussion,[13] contains two statements that together make the primary case against reproductions and suggest how copies may appropriately be used. W. W. Greg, in his paper, said simply that "no process but in some measure obscures what it reproduces" (p. 321). And the president of the Society, Frederick George Kenyon, said in the discussion that photographic copies "should be regarded not as substitutes for the originals, but as approximations only helpful in suggesting points which must subsequently be verified" (p. 327). A decade later the Bibliographical Society published, as the tenth of the Supplements to its journal, R. B. Haselden's Scientific Aids for the Study of Manuscripts (1935), which was considered the standard treatment of its subject in the years that followed. Because the book is largely concerned with the examination of the physical characteristics of manuscripts, it naturally begins from the premise that one is studying the originals; but Haselden does say explicitly, in his chapter on photography, "No authoritative conclusion regarding a manuscript can be based on the examination of any known form of reproduction thereof; the original must always be consulted" (p. 70).

Six years later came W. A. Jackson's forceful paper, mentioned above, asserting flatly that "no photograph can take the place of the original" (p. 287). In the next decade Jerry McDonald's "The Case against Microfilming,"[14] although it deals with the filming of business firms' archives (and partly from the economic point of view),[15] makes many of the points that one would have to make in evaluating the reliability of film for scholarly research: McDonald comments on the necessity for "inspecting" microfilms (by which he implies collation and spot-checking for legibility, if not full proofreading), the loss of detail in them, the drawbacks of not seeing colors or embossings, the errors produced by fluctuations in the electric current supplied to microfilming machines, and the distortions produced by variations in the temperature of the places where microfilms are stored. In 1961 Laurence A. Cummings, writing on "Pitfalls of Photocopy Research,"[16] added to this catalogue of problems: photographers omit material through oversight or the assumption that it could not be significant enough for the customer to wish to pay for;[17] pictures may not be in sharp focus if the leaf photographed does not lie flat or if adjustments are not made when the lens-image distance shifts because of the thickness of the book being photographed; and erasures, show-through from the reverse side of a leaf, uneven surfaces, and spots on the paper or on the lens all can cause photographs to be misleading.[18] Cummings concludes, "any serious editorial work based on examination of microfilms, photostats, and other reproductions without first-hand consulting of the original must be tentative. The camera lens cannot replace the scholar's eye." The word "editorial" could be omitted from this statement, of course, because the problems enumerated would affect any serious work, whether textual or not. The same point could be made about a 1968 comment of Franklin B. Williams, Jr.: "no one questions the principle that an editor must work finally with the originals."[19] For "an editor" one could substitute "all serious readers"—though the idea that "no one" questions such a statement, or even the more limited original one, is far from being literally true (the phrase really means "no one who has thought the matter through with logical rigor"). Williams has provided the best historical survey of the production of facsimiles of pre-1641 English books,[20] accompanying it with what he calls a "cautionary" listing of photofacsimiles and indicating many instances of faulty reproductions, ranging from those based on defective copies to those that mistake type-facsimiles for originals.

Most of the criticisms of reproductions, including some of those just cited, have focused on specific examples, and it is worth mentioning several of them here to suggest the kinds of problems that actually occur. One large class of problems consists of errors arising in the planning or

production of photocopies. Sometimes such mistakes are inadvertent, but at other times they result from misguided attempts to be helpful by tampering with the images. Instances of the former are the omission of the dedication leaf from the 1931 Country Life facsimile of Tusser's Good Husbandry (reported by Williams) and that of the last page of text from the Garland facsimile of William Biggs's Narrative (reported by David Vander Meulen). Besides omitting material, reproductions can also present material in incorrect order: Glenn H. Blayney reports that the Huntington Library microfilm of A Yorkshire Tragedy presents the facing pages B3v/B4r where A3v/A4r ought to be (and vice versa)—because it was made from photostats, not directly from the original, and two of the photostats got switched. Williams calls attention to the use of Smeeton's type-facsimile of Kyd's Solimon and Perseda and Ashbee's hand-traced facsimile of Jack Jugeler, rather than the originals, as the bases for Farmer's collotype facsimiles of these titles; and he notes that Farmer's collotype of Rastell's Of Gentylnes and Nobylyte reproduces the British Library copy without indicating that four leaves in that copy are in type-facsimile, just as the Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints series includes, without notice, a pen-facsimile title page in its reproduction of Palladis Tamia. The 1977 Arno Press facsimile of Donne's Biathanatos represents a compounding of errors (discovered by Ernest W. Sullivan II): it reproduces not the original but Hebel's 1930 facsimile (for the Facsimile Text Society), which in turn incorporated opaquing (to eliminate show-through) that wiped out more than a hundred punctuation marks (some of which were replaced by pen).[21]

The intentional creation of errors by opaquing and retouching is widespread. Of course, those responsible do not think of themselves as creating errors; but if a facsimile purports to represent an original as closely as possible, any alteration that removes distracting marks present in the original (as opposed to those introduced by the camera lens or the surface of the copying machine) produces by definition an error—to say nothing of the inadvertent erasures that often accompany any cleaning up. One of the most famous examples of what opaquing is likely to lead to is the 1954 Yale facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare, which contains an errata list in its second printing and some restored readings in its third and which, as Fredson Bowers reported in his thorough review, contains an enormous number of additional errors, especially erasures of line-end punctuation. Colin McKelvie's 1976 facsimile of the Armagh Public Library copy of Gulliver's Travels (for Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints) contains, as Donald Greene has shown, alterations that go beyond erasures in the reproductions of pages with manuscript revisions in what may be Swift's hand: on one page of the original, "Red"

and "Green" are entered side by side in the margin, whereas in the facsimile "Red" appears below "Green"; on another page the marginal words "Horn and Crown" are much reduced in size from the original; and on a third a large blot in the original is replaced by a seemingly hand-lettered "and" in the facsimile. The first two changes were made because the leaf size of the facsimile would not otherwise have accommodated the annotation (and there are instances of marginal notes that do not show up at all); the third was made on the assumption that the blot was accidental, though it was arguably Swift's way of deleting the "and". Greene concludes, "It is clear that with a little judicious airbrushing and a sharp pen, and photographic enlargement and reduction, a 'facsimile' can be made to say the thing that is not." That facsimiles, like other printed books, can vary from one printing to another is illustrated not only by the Yale Folio but by the Scolar Press reproduction of Pope's 1729 Dunciad Variorum: in the first printing of this facsimile (1966) two superscript footnote letters are properly present on pages 14-15, but in the second printing (1968) a thorough cleaning of marginal spots has taken away these letters. David Vander Meulen has found still other instances of tampering in this facsimile: the errata leaf is placed in its conventional position at the end of the book, although it occurs in a different location in the British Library copy, which the facsimile claims to reproduce; three blank leaves are inserted without comment, apparently to mark divisions, where the original has none; and the pages bearing ornaments or plates are slightly enlarged, suggesting that they may have been produced by a different process.[22]

If all such intentional and inadvertent departures from the originals constitute one category of problems that reproductions present, the other large category consists of those instances in which reproductions that cannot be called inaccurate are nevertheless misleading. There are many places in manuscripts, for example, that cannot be properly interpreted unless the various inks or pencils involved can be distinguished and unless the marks that have bled through a sheet from the other side can be recognized for what they are. Yet most reproductions do not offer a broad enough range of gradation in tone to make such discriminations possible; and frequently the photographic adjustments necessary to make the faintest inscriptions show up cause distortion in the heavier inscriptions. Almost everyone who has ever used reproductions of manuscripts is likely to have misinterpreted them at one point or another, either by thinking something is illegible when it is not or by investing something with an unwarranted significance. We should not be surprised when Jerry McDonald says that "the chief engineer's 'hen scratchings' are much easier to decipher in the original than they are on film" (p. 348),

or when Laurence Cummings reports that what he thought were Sir Walter Ralegh's initials in a Renaissance manuscript examined on film turned out to be "a few random pen scratches and an interesting pattern of wrinkles" (p. 101).

A prominent instance of scholarly work vitiated (among other reasons) by reliance on photocopies that exhibit such problems is Hans Walter Gabler's edition of Joyce's Ulysses. John Kidd has demonstrated that time after time the errors in Gabler's text can be explained by comparing the published facsimiles in The James Joyce Archive (1978-79) with the originals. Gabler prints "Captain Culler" at a point where Joyce's inscription on a surviving proof sheet clearly reads "Captain Buller", presumably because the high-contrast reproduction in The James Joyce Archive makes a printer's pencil mark at this spot look something like a "C". At another point on a surviving proof, Joyce wrote "crême de la crême" in ink, and at a later stage the circumflexes were changed in blue pencil to grave accents; Gabler does not report the circumflexes, which in the facsimile are hidden by the heavy pencil marks. Kidd shows the considerable significance of these particular misreadings for interpretation, but even those of less importance demonstrate the point that facsimiles can be misleading. It is crucial for studying the development of Joyce's text to distinguish two types of black-lead pencil as well as the colors of both ink and lead markings; but the facsimiles do not permit such identification, and it is not provided by Gabler—though he does try to record erasures and inevitably misses many and invents others. Kidd concludes that the Gabler edition "is a study not of Joyce's manuscripts but of inadequate facsimiles."[23]

Reproductions of printed material can be equally misleading. Sometimes light inking or worn spots on a printed page cause type impressions not to show up at all in reproductions, and such reproductions can then give rise to the belief that variants exist where in fact there are none. Williams mentions that three facsimiles of the 1597 Richard III show no paragraph sign beginning the imprint because they used the Devonshire (now Huntington) copy, in which the title page is worn and the paragraph sign faint. Sometimes type impressions, like handwriting, are unclear even in the original, and a facsimile interposes yet another barrier in the way of interpreting such ambiguous spots. A case in point is William Biggs's Narrative (cited in another connection above): the title-page date is unclear (1825 or 1826), particularly so in the Newberry Library copy used for the Garland facsimile, in which the volume is identified as representing an 1825 edition. Uncritical users of this facsimile will assume that the 1825 date has been definitely established and that the indistinct date on the title page probably reflects a flaw in the photography,

whereas in truth this book is regularly catalogued (following Cecil K. Byrd's A Bibliography of Illinois Imprints, 1814-58 [1966]) as from 1826. An even more common situation is that reproductions of printed matter are misleading because the copy chosen is defective or contains variants that make it a poor representative of an edition as a whole. According to Ernest Sullivan, the Hebel facsimile of Biathanatos is based on "a probably unique and textually suspect copy"; and Franklin Williams discovered that the title-page date is missing from the Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints reproduction of The Beggars Ape because it was made from the British Library copy, which is cropped. Rollo Silver has reported that the Readex Microprint reproduction of the first English Bible printed in America was apparently made from an imperfect copy that does not contain the Congressional resolutions authorizing the printing. And Charlyne Dodge describes a photocopy of Harold Frederic's "Preface to a Uniform Edition" in In the Sixties (1897) that fails to show Frederic's initials at the end because it was made from a copy that had been printed on a torn sheet: the flap created by the tear was turned back during printing so that one of the initials fell on it and one struck the hole; when the flap was later put in place, no initials therefore appeared on the recto (and one askew initial was on the verso). Without seeing the original one would have no way of knowing that this photocopy of the "Preface" does not represent a variant state or impression. This printing error is unusual, but the lesson it teaches applies to every use of a reproduction.[24]