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Notes
For useful references and comments I am grateful to John Bidwell, G. Thomas Tanselle, and David Vander Meulen. I recall with special pleasure Rachel Stevenson's kindness, some years ago, in presenting to me offprints of most of her husband's articles, and photocopies of several of his unfinished projects. Many of Stevenson's research notes are now in Princeton University Library. Stevenson's chief writings on paper, most of which are discussed in the following pages, are separately listed at the end in chronological order.
In the absence of a settled vocabulary, I use the term "scholarship" to mean the reasoned study of artefacts of all kinds; and "bibliography," the study of printed books. The corresponding study of manuscripts is most commonly called "palaeography," giving to that word a broader meaning than its etymology would imply. This broader sense seems to me to be implicit in, e.g., Ludwig Traube, "Geschichte der Paläographie," in his Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, ed. Franz Boll, 1 (Munich, 1909), 1 sqq.; and in Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, tr. Dáibhí ó Cróinin and David Ganz (Cambridge, 1990), p. 1. In this latter work, "codicology" seems to be treated as a sub-genre of palaeography. It is obvious that palaeography and bibliography, by the definitions just given, are intimately related, and share a number of virtually identical underlying concerns; but their histories have never been treated together.
"James Shirley and the Actors at the First Irish Theater," Modern Philology 40 no. 2 (Nov. 1942), 147-160, at p. 157 n. 53: in discussing the five plays by Fletcher and Shirley entered in the Stationers' Register 25 April 1639, Stevenson notes "The quartos [including Shirley's Opportunitie] are linked by typographical features and watermarks."
If we presume that a large number of copies—say 1,000 to 1,500—of an edition sheet was printed on equal supplies of two different paper stocks, and if we have a random sample of a dozen such sheets, the probability is about .23 that the sample will divide neatly into six sheets of one watermark, and six of the other, and about .77 that the sample will show some different mixture, anything from no example of one of the stocks, to five examples of one and seven of the other.
Stevenson specifically cited Hinman's "New Uses for Headlines as Bibliographical Evidence," English Institute Annual 1941, 208-214; and Bowers's "An Examination of the Method of Press Correction in Lear," The Library 5th ser., 2 (1947-48), 20-44.
Kenneth Povey, "On the Diagnosis of Half-sheet Impositions," The Library 5th ser. 11 (1956), 268-272 at p. 270: "In a crisp copy . . . the order of printing can often be determined from the relationship between the indentations of the type." Compare idem, "A Century of Press Figures,' ibid., 14 (1959), 251-273 at p. 257: ". . . headline skeletons, if they occur, sometimes help to determine the order of printing, but real proof depends on an examination of the indentations of the type in a copy which preserves them." See also idem, "The Optical Identification of First Formes," SB, 13 (1960), 189-190. The same "sequence test" is clearly described by Heinrich Wallau, "Die zweifarbigen Initialen der Psalterdruke von Johann Fust und Peter Schöffer," in Festschrift zum fünfhundertjährigen Geburtstage von Johann Gutenberg (Mainz, 1900), 261-304 at p. 280: "Der seitenweise Druck zunächst ist durch die Thatsache erwiesen, dass die Psalterdrucke von 1457 und 1459 durchweg 'vorwärtslaufenden' zeigen, d.h. die Schattierung der Abdrücke erweist unzweifelhaft, dass stets Recto vor Verso gedruckt wurde."
McKenzie, "Printers of the Mind," Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969), 1-75; cf. p. 2, "Our ignorance about printing-house conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries has left us disastrously free to devise them according to need; and we have at times compounded our errors by giving a spurious air of 'scientific' definitiveness to our conclusions." See pp. 23 sqq. for McKenzie's criticisms of bibliographical arguments as to order of presswork and number of presses based on patterns of skeleton formes.
The plays are:
- (1) John Fletcher, Wit Without Money, Cotes for Crooke & Cooke, 1639. Greg 563, STC 1691.
- (2) ___, The Night Walker, Cotes for Crooke & Cooke, 1640. Greg 574, STC 11072.
- (3) James Shirley, The Maid's Revenge, Cotes for Cooke, 1639. Greg 562, STC 22450, 22450a.
- (4) ___, The Humorous Courtier, Cotes for Cooke, 1640. Greg 577, STC 22447.
- (5) ___, The Coronation, Cotes for Crooke & Cooke, 1640. Greg 572, STC 22440.
- (6) ___, The Opportunitie, Cotes for Crooke & Cooke, 1640. Greg 575, STC 22451, 22451a, 22452.
- (7) ___, Love's Cruelty, Cotes for Crooke, 1640. Greg 573, STC 22449.
- All were entered in the Stationers' Register in either April or July of 1639. Some stocks of this mixed lot of papers recur, as Stevenson notes, in two other plays printed by Cotes in 1640 (both entered 2 April 1640):
- (8) Robert Chamberlain, The Swaggering Damsel, Cotes for Crooke, 1640. Greg 589, STC 4946.
- (9) William Habington, The Queen of Aragon, F°, Cotes for Cooke, 1640. Greg 588, STC 12587.
- Compare Revised STC I, p. xxxviii, ". . . for ordinary publications old-style dating should not be assumed without corroborative evidence."
An historical study focussed on the use of paper evidence in analytical bibliography generally would give more particular attention to John Carter and Graham Pollard, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (134), and to A. T. Hazen, A Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press (1942). Some link between the two is provided by John Carter's several studies (Bibliographical Notes and Queries, May 1936 and April 1938) of the then-mysterious "thick-paper" copies of Odes by Mr. Gray, 4°, "1757," which Hazen eventually demonstrated to be an unauthorized reprint of ca. 1790 by Thomas Kirgate.
Fine eighteenth-century papers often show remarkably similar twin marks, apparently due to both marks being made by bending wires around pin-boards or other forms of template (cf. Stevenson, The Problem of the Missale speciale [1967], Excursus III, "The Watermark Maker," pp. 245-247; and E. G. Loeber, Paper Mould and Mouldmaker [1982], pp. 31 sqq.): for examples, see "Watermarks are Twins," figs. 5, 6. But the forewarned eye can still distinguish them. It may be worth quoting again the papermaker James Whatman Jr.'s deposition, 1770 (Thomas Balston, James Whatman Father and Son [1957], pp. 147-148), at the trial of Edward Burch and Matthew Martin, who were accused of forging a 1764-dated will of Sir Andrew Chadwick, Bart. (d. 1768). The will was written on Whatman paper, and Whatman was asked how he could date its manufacture: "Do you form your judgment merely from the JW [or from] other marks?" He replied: "From other marks; these are a particular mould; they were first began to be used in January 1768 . . . this is made on a mould which is the first mould in which two sheets of this kind of paper was made at once; I am the first person that made it double, two sheets at once; they were in January 1768; and the first . . . ever sent to London was the 11th of March 1768." On cross examination he was asked, "Could not any body copy your work?" and replied, "I have ordered several pair of moulds to be made alike, but never saw any two pair alike; they will differ in a wire or something." I would nominate Messrs. Burch and Martin, who swung for their incuriosity, as the patron saints of the bibliographical obscuri viri who continue to misprise the uses of paper evidence.
Taken from P. Needham, "The Paper Supply of the Gutenberg Bible," PBSA, 79 (1985), 303-374 at p. 317.
mR/mL is a variant of Stevenson's eventual formulation mRF°; the F° seems to me unnecessary, and it is convenient to add here an identification of the chain-space location of the mark.
See David Vander Meulen, "The Identification of Paper without Watermarks: The Example of Pope's Dunciad," SB 37 (1984): 58-81, with much useful information on chainline and tranchefile patterns in eighteenth-century papers. Even in the fifteenth century, there is at least one complication which my specimen description above does not encounter. In Italian papers of that time, it is common to find that the watermark is sewn to an "interpolated" chainline, whose distance from its neighbors is less than that of the other chainspaces.
It has been said, in favor of felt-side reproductions, that this is like looking directly at the mould. But why, one might ask, does it matter whether conceptually one is looking at the mould directly, rather than through the looking glass? By the same argument, one might for bibliographical purposes favor reversed reproductions of printing, on the grounds that this is like looking directly at the type.
But David Vander Meulen (cited note 15 above) has shown how useful Stevenson's measurement system can be, when it is further developed and extended to record the variations in chain-spacing across the entire mould.
When, that is, the marks are centered in one half of the sheet or the other; there are also, of course, instances of "centermarks."
Walter W. Greg, "On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos," The Library, New ser. 9 (1908), 113-131; 381-409.
Greg's English Printed Drama and STC (18796, 22291, 22293, 22297, 22300, 22303, 22341, and 26101) both count these as eight editions, but it will be convenient to treat the last of these, containing The Whole Contention between York and Lancaster (viz. 2 and 3 Henry VI) and Pericles, as two editions. Although Pericles is quired continuously with the two preceding plays, their joint title-page does not mention Pericles, and Pericles has its own title-page, with imprint and date, on a singleton leaf.
"The Shakespeare Quartos of 1619," Modern Philology, 8 (1910), 145-163. For further discussion of Greg's evidence, and of resultant arguments and consequences, see F. P. Wilson, "Shakespeare and the 'New Bibliography,'" in The Bibliographical Society 1892-1942: Studies in Retrospect (1945), 76-135 at pp. 78 sqq., calling this Greg's "most spectacular discovery" (reprinted as Shakespeare and the New Bibliography, revised and edited by Helen Gardner (1970), see pp. 7-10); Greg, English Printed Drama, III, 1107-08; and Peter Blayney, "Compositor B and the Pavier Quartos," The Library, 5th ser. 27 (1972), 179-206.
The paper stocks of the Pavier quartos remain incompletely described. A fuller record could well reflect further on their order of printing and on other questions. The survival rate of the Pavier quartos is strikingly high, over 30 copies each (about triple the average of the other pre-First Folio Shakespearean quartos), so an unusually full sheet-by-sheet record could in principle be gathered.
Compare also Stevenson's remarks in the Hunt Botanical Catalogue, vol. II pt. 1 (1961), p. cxli: Greg was "the greatest bibliographer of our time"; Stevenson's bibliographical introduction to this catalogue is implicitly dedicated to Greg.
"Wasserzeichen und Papier der zweiundvierzigzeiligen Bibel," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1952, 21-29. Stevenson, "Watermarks are Twins," p. 87, noted briefly that the Gutenberg Bible's papers must be twins, but his specific remarks, inferred from watermark reproductions in Dziatzko's pioneering study of the Bible, are very inaccurate.
Johannes Gutenbergs zweiundvierzigzeilige Bibel: Ergänzungsband zur Faksimile-Ausgabe (1923), 26 sqq.
Because of the fineness of the wires and chains of the Piedmontese moulds supplying the Gutenberg Bible shop, the mould and felt sides can be difficult to distinguish. For more details and analysis of the paper evidence, see my study, "The Paper Supply of the Gutenberg Bible," PBSA 79 (1985), 303-374. Kazmeier's four Bull's Head stocks are actually best defined as two stocks, of which one shows three chronologically distinct states, each represented by a different sewing of the twin wiremarks to their respective moulds, with slight reshapings.
Heawood Review (1951), p. 7 note 17; "Briquet and the Future of Paper Studies," note 48; Observations on Paper as Evidence (1961), note 1, respectively. Under this last title, Stevenson's project continued to be announced as "forthcoming" for some years, e.g. The Problem of the Missale Speciale (1967), p. 282 (note V 28).
Since there is, as Stevenson noted, a 50-50 chance that an inserted leaf will show a mould-side sequence as if it were part of the original sheet, it may be necessary to examine a number of copies. As Povey (cited note 8) pointed out, the test of sequence of type impressions may also reveal hidden cancels. Both tests may, in fact, be thought of as "conjugacy analysis." The first can show that leaves hypothesized to belong to the same sheet could not have been folded to produce the mould-side sequence one finds in a copy; the second similarly can show that type-pages hypothesized to have been in the same forme could not have been printed together.
Hunt Botanical Catalogue 595 (Gautier d'Agoty's Collection des plantes, 1767) and 539 (Trew's Plantae selectae, 1750-1773) respectively. It would perhaps have been better to give the format of these books as Broadside, reserving F° for books with conjugate leaves.
See Paul Needham, "ISTC as a Tool for Analytical Bibliography," in L. Hellinga and J. Goldfinch, eds., Bibliography and the Study of Fifteenth-Century Civilisation (1987), 39-54 at pp. 46-47. I noted there that Goff designates [most, as I should have stated] broadsides as "Bdsde(f°)", where the qualifier f° is at best meaningless: f° is one format, Broadside another. Moreover, Goff's practice, derived from Stillwell's, is, I now see, also inconsistent. Compare Goff I-130 and I-131, two settings of a broadside Indulgence. The first is called Bdsde(4°), the second Bdsde(f°). In fact, they are virtually twins, and of the same format, which may be unambiguously identified as: Bdsde (¼-sheet, oblong). One may also note that STC 2 generally uses the abbreviation "s.sh.", i.e. "single-sheet", to describe English broadsides which only very rarely are literally that, viz. single sheets. In the great majority of cases they are fractions of a sheet. In an even more confused variation of this system, the famous Caxton placard advertizing the Sarum Ordinal is described by STC 2 4890 as "½ sh.obl.fol." Except for obl., I find this format statement virtually impossible to interpret. The advertisement leaf is a quarter-sheet of paper, and hence to be described: Bdsde (¼-sheet, oblong). All these remarks only reinforce the recommendations of Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949), pp. 195-196, who speaks inter alia of "the utter illogicality" of using "single sheet" to indicate a broadside half-sheet. Bowers's formulations 1°, ½°, ¼° for full sheets, half-sheets and quarter-sheets are indeed more compendious than my own use of Bdsde (½-sheet) or Brs (½-sh.) and so on, but the one transposes directly into the other. The choice of formulation must be made by weighing the economy of the one expression against the closer approach to spoken language of the other.
I have made recommendations for identifying paper sizes of fifteenth-century books in "ISTC as a Tool for Analytical Bibliography," [cited preceding note], pp. 41 sqq. These recommendations relate to the four chief sizes of that time. I have since identified a number of less common sizes, which I discuss in a forthcoming issue of Princeton University Library Chronicle. Gaskell used John Johnson, Typographia (1824), as source for paper sizes and names; Stevenson, Hunt Botanical Catalogue p. ccxxvii, provides a more extensive chart of sizes and names, based on a wider range of international sources.
R. W. Chapman, "An Inventory of Paper, 1674," The Library, New Ser. 7 (1927), 402-408. The document is clearly not an inventory; it is better called a price list, apparently giving a summary of French, Dutch, and Italian papers available from two different merchants or factors, Merreatt and Seward.
Cf. "Heawood Review," p. 7, referring to "pot-size moulds"—that is, moulds conforming to a size called Pot or Pott, regardless of whether the wiremarks on these moulds actually depicted Pots.
"Briquet," p. XXXVII: "For England the most useful document [on paper sizes] is the Oxford Pricelist, already mentioned; though scholars have misunderstood its manner of listing measurements." On the same page Stevenson clarified the nature of the dimensions given on the Price-List, one size being "16¼ x 10" for the folio, that is . . . 16¼ x 20" for the opened-out sheet." He omitted, however, to note that he himself had been among those (including Chapman and McKerrow) who had previously misunderstood the record. Cf. also "Labarre Review," 1954, p. 60. Stevenson's Observations on Paper as Evidence (1961) emphasizes the significance of paper sizes but with a few erroneous examples. He correctly (p. 8) identifies Audubon's Birds of America (1827-1838) as being in broadsheet rather than folio format, but gives its sheet as approximately the size of (French) Columbier. In fact Audubon's first prospectus names the size, ordered from Whatman Mills, as Double Elephant (however, the prospectus calls the book itself a "double elephant folio," and the misnomer folio for this book seems to be essentially inexpungible). Stevenson also implies (p. 9) that there were but two paper sizes in the fifteenth century, when there were four common sizes.
Frederick B. Adams, Jr., Fifth Annual Report to the Fellows of The Pierpont Morgan Library (1954), pp. 17-30.
Otto Hupp, Ein Missale speciale Vorläufer des Psalteriums von 1457 (1898; 30 pp.); Gutenbergs erste Drucke: ein weiterer Beitrag zur Geschichte der ältesten Druckwerke (1902; 98 pp.); Zum Streit um das Missale speciale Constantiense (1917; [2] + 142 pp). This statement of Hupps arguments is, of course, reduced to its barest kernel. Hupp continued to publish articles defending his interpretation until as late as 1939, but the three monographs provide all the essential groundwork of his position.
The qualifications "let us say" are an attempt to get back to the mind of Hupp. Although one copy of the Gutenberg Bible contains rubricator's dates in August 1456, I think it likely that the Bible was completed in 1455, and perhaps early in that year. More significantly, I think it more than likely that the true first European printing type was the so-called DK or Donatus-Calendar fount. It existed in a perfected form by October 1454, when the 31-line Indulgence was printed; and undated fragments showing less developed states of the fount (but always with provision of abutting forms) very plausibly can be taken back roughly to the period 1450-1453. If the present article were a study of the arguments on the Missale speciale rather than of Stevenson's methodology for using paper evidence, one would be inquiring of every writer on the Missale, "what then is your opinion of the ownership(s) and origin of the DK type?"
There are two important reviews of the Missale speciale question: (a) F. A. Schmidt-Künsemüller, "Der Streit um das Missale speciale," in K. Ohly and W. Krieg, eds., Aus der Welt des Bibliothekars: Festschrift für Rudolf Juchhoff (1961), 51-89 (including a check-list of 75 studies on the Missale speciale from 1896 through 1960); (b) Severin Corsten, "Das Missale speciale," in Hans Widmann, ed., Der gegenwärtige Stand der Gutenberg-Forschung (1972), 185-199. As we shall see below, Schmidt-Künsemüller's attempts in 1961 to arrive at a judgment became quite overtaken at the end by the inflow of paper evidence, whose significance he had some difficulties in assessing adequately.
Paul Schwenke, "Der Einband des Missale abbreviatum," Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 22 (1905), 536.
Aloys Ruppel, Johannes Gutenberg: sein Leben und sein Werk (2. Auflage, 1947), p. 158: "Deshalb besitzt die These Hupps, dass Gutenberg das Missale speciale als eines seiner Erstlingswerke herstellte, eine sehr grosse innere und äussere Wahrscheinlichkeit."
See Observations on Paper as Evidence (1961). The pamphlet is based on a lecture Stevenson delivered at the University of Kansas, 6 November 1959, in which (as we shall examine further) Stevenson referred very discreetly to the Missale speciale question. The footnotes, however, are separately dated from Pittsburgh, 25 June 1960, and in those notes Stevenson twice referred to chapters in his forthcoming book, to be titled The Paper in the Missale speciale.
Observations on Paper as Evidence, p. 25. On p. 23, Stevenson referred very specifically to the paper runs in the European copies of the Missale speciale and Missale abbreviatum, preserved in Munich, Zurich, and at the Benedictine convent of St. Paul im Lavanttal, Carinthia, and one might almost think he had by this date personally examined these copies. Yet Stevenson's article in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1962, "Paper Evidence and the Missale speciale," p. 94, seems to make it clear that he visited these copies for the first time in October 1961. By the kindness of James Helyar at the University of Kansas, I learn that Stevenson supplied the typescript of his lecture for publication on 25 June 1960 (the date of his notes), stating that he had made corrections to the lecture without material change; galleys were sent him in October 1960; final proofs (not surviving) came back from him in late March 1961; and the pamphlet was published before mid-June 1961. The paper stocks of the Zurich and St. Paul (abbreviatum) copies were discussed neither by Piccard nor by Gerardy. I would presume that Stevenson's "Kansas" remarks on the paper in these copies were based on the very imperfect earlier literature, in which the two Bull's Head stocks in particular were never adequately sorted out.
C. F. Bühler, J. McManaway and L. Wroth, Standards of Bibliographical Description (1949), p. 26; criticized by Paul Needham, The Bradshaw Method (1988), pp. 32-33.
Stevenson surely took some ironic pleasure in the thought that what the Morgan Library had acquired at great price and publicity as the first European printed book was in fact an "ordinary" incunable of the 1470s. In correspondence with friends he commonly referred to the Missale speciale as the MI$$AL.
Briquet's Opuscula, p. XLI; Stevenson's introduction is dated from the Newberry Library, April 1955.
See in particular Bühler, "Watermarks," p. 222, quoting the remarks of Karl Schorbach concerning Johann Mentelin's use of "the" Bull's Head paper in both his earliest, ca. 1460, and latest, ca. 1477, imprints; "the" Bull's Head paper means in fact a variety of stocks in several sizes. The resources of the Morgan Library would have been sufficient to clarify this. Bühler, ibid., even more uncritically cites an unclear remark by Paul Heitz suggesting that the same paper was used in a Strassburg document of the mid-fourteenth century and a Strassburg incunable of the 1470s. Sometimes Bühler quoted only so much from an authority as suited his own purposes. Thus, at p. 218 n. 4, to counter Stevenson's suggestion that the average period of use of a given paper stock was about three years, he cites Heawood's Watermarks, p. 31, as expressing "a more hesitant view." But the passage in Heawood that he quotes has a quite different sense. Heawood acknowledged that for older paper, "The idea that paper-moulds had a fairly long life has been pretty generally held," as many as thirty years of use having been suggested—he acknowledged the opinion without endorsing it. But for the later periods—the periods where he had direct knowledge—Heawood states that this idea "is to be questioned." The difference of opinion between Stevenson and Heawood is imaginary. Heawood goes on in the next paragraph to give examples based on English dated watermarks which, however incompletely and tentatively, support Stevenson's view of the relatively brief average lifespan of paper moulds: "[A]n examination of some 80 cases in the first few decades of the 19th Century has given an average interval of not quite three years, and it would be less if cases were thrown out in which the paper was used by a traveller abroad, who evidently took out a stock of paper with him and used it until it was finished." The reader of Bühler's note could never have guessed at the true trend of Heawood's remarks.
Gerhard Piccard, "Die Datierung des Missale speciale (Constantiense) durch seine Papiermarken," Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 2, Lieferung 7-9 (1960), 571-584, first published in the 22 February 1960 issue of Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel; Theo Gerardy, "Die Wasserzeichen des mit Gutenbergs kleiner Psaltertype gedruckten Missale speciale," Papiergeschichte 10 no. 2 (May, 1960), 13-22.
A fourth, unwatermarked stock in the Missale speciale has not played a role in dating the book.
Les Filigranes des papiers contenus dans les incunables strasbourgeois de la Bibliothèque Impériale de Strasbourg (Strasbourg, 1903). The tracings, made for Heitz, are of high quality; the identifications of the incunables in which they are found are beset by innumerable inaccuracies. With the aid of Heitz, be it noted, the discoveries which Gerardy and Stevenson made in the late 1950s could have been made in 1903.
Schmidt-Künsemüller p. 74: "Selbst [Irvine] Masson hat nicht scharf genug zwischen der Herstellung der Schrift und ihrem Gebrauch beim Druck des Psalters geschieden und offenbar nicht genügend berücksichtigt, dass für Psalter und M[issale] sp[eciale] verschiedene Typengüsse benutzt worden."
Very few indeed of the earliest Basel books are dated or signed. At the time, there was a respectable argument, based on studies by Kurt Ohly and Victor Scholderer, that printing began in Basel by 1468; I would now argue, particularly on the basis of the Royalsize papers found in the supposed first books of the first printer, Berthold Ruppel, that there is no compelling reason to date any Basel printing earlier than 1471. A date in the later 1460s for the Missale speciale was also argued by Wolfgang Irtenkauf, Ferdinand Geldner, and (in a letter quoted by Schmidt-Künsemüller) Ernst Schulz, on liturgical grounds which are too complex to summarize here, and which are partly superseded by the paper evidence.
A suggestion based on the occurrence of Missal papers in books from the anonymous Ariminensis Press in Strassburg, a press which Kurt Ohly had recently assigned to the printer Georg Reyser. I would now argue that the Ariminensis Press designation, first defined by Proctor, is a conflation of several distinct shops, and that the Ariminensis type 1 editions—the ones in question—are much more plausibly assignable to Heinrich Eggestein. Besides the studies by Piccard and Gerardy, Schmidt-Künsemüller was vaguely aware (p. 81) that "der Amerikaner Allan Stephenson" had also announced that the Missale speciale could not have been printed before 1460(!).
Schmidt-Künsemüller p. 80: "Nur die absolute Übereinstimmung der Eigentümlichkeiten des Wasserzeichens . . . kann zu einer exakteren Datierung verhelfen, und auch dann ist immer noch mit einer zeitlichen Spanne zu rechnen, die gewiss grösser ist, als die Wasserzeichenforscher wahrhaben wollen."
Ibid., p. 82: "Das Rätsel um das M. Sp. ist also nach wie vor ungelöst . . . So bleibt schliesslich, wie so oft in der Gutenberg-Forschung, nur die Hoffnung auf einen neuen archivalischen Fund, der allein wohl das Rätsel endgültig lösen kann." I am not, by the way, aware of any case where an "archival find" has sufficed to solve a chronological problem of early typography.
The waste, with visible date "Anno lxxiij", was reproduced by Wilhelm-Jos. Meyer, Catalogue des incunables de la Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Fribourg (Suisse) (Fribourg, 1917), pl. [7b]; and discussed by Gustav Binz, "Die Anfänge des Buchdrucks in Basel," in Gutenberg-Festschrift (Mainz, 1925), 385-397 at p. 390. Unfortunately, the Morgan copy at some unspecified later stage but probably while in the Morgan Library underwent binding repairs and replacement of endleaves, and no such waste can now be found.
See Paul Geissler, "Ein viertes Exemplar des Missale speciale in der Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1962, 86-93.
Curt F. Bühler, "The Missale speciale and the Feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary," PBSA 66 no. 1 (1st Quarter 1972), 1-11.
Curt F. Bühler "Last Words on Watermarks," PBSA 67 no. 1 (1st Quarter 1973), 1-16. This was the one scholarly question that disturbed Bühler's equanimity. He accused Stevenson of making "a few, curiously discourteous, innuendoes" about his 1957 study, "Watermarks and the Dates of Fifteenth-Century Books" (cited note 50 above). This is not true; Stevenson was restrained but accurate in his comments on a study which, as he surely saw, entirely missed the mark. Perhaps his most open comment (Problem of the Missale speciale, p. 61) was that "Dr. Bühler speaks of 'the same paper' with no clear intimation of what he means by it." But in this Stevenson was simply right—Bühler's 1973 article further confirms this—and if plain speaking is to be accounted a fault, how are we to judge Greg and Bowers?
The classic study of this phenomenon, but confined only to Italian examples, is Rudolf Juchhoff, "Das Fortleben mittelalterlicher Schreibgewohnheiten in den Druckschriften des 15. Jahrhunderts," Beiträge zur Inkunabelkunde, neue Folge, 1 (1935): 65-77; reprinted in his Kleine Schriften (Bonn, 1973): 17-34.
Stevenson's lectures were published in 1991 as "The Problem of the Blockbooks," based on a typescript which he left at the Stadsbibliotheek, Haarlem. It must be emphasized that these lectures are not at all in a state that Stevenson himself would have considered worthy of publication. Moreover, the text is in many places corrupt. Some years ago, Rachel Stevenson gave me a photocopy of the lectures which includes substantial corrections and additions in Stevenson's hand. A preliminary comparison of the two texts suggests that the published text could be corrected in many points from this photocopy. At various places, however, the texts show very different phraseologies, and it is not immediately apparent which represents the later intention. Stevenson published also a brief summary of his lectures as "The Quincentennial of Netherlandish Blockbooks" (1966), with beta-radiographic reproductions of three paper stocks.
In particular, the recent descriptions of the Bibliothèque Nationale's great collection of blockbooks by Ursula Baurmeister may be called Stevensonian (Bibliothèque Nationale: Catalogue des incunables (CIBN). Tome I, fasc. 1: Xylographes et A. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1992).
In published form, his work on Caxton was confined to scattered remarks and to a brief mimeographed handout accompanying a small exhibition at the British Museum in 1967: "Caxton and the Unicorns."
"The First Book Printed at Louvain," 1970. I have criticized elsewhere the specifics of this study (yet tentatively accepted its conclusion): see "Caxton in Cologne," in Ars impressoria . . . Festgabe für Severin Corsten (Munich, 1986), 103-131, at pp. 123-126.
A very different but related monograph was produced by Gerhard Piccard for a shorter period and more restricted place: "Papiererzeugung und Buchdruck in Basel bis zum Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts," Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 8 (1966), cols. 25-322. Piccard stated there, in passing, that his census of dated documentary uses of the Missal papers during the period 1472-1476 had considerably grown, but without, unfortunately, giving details.
See particularly the reviews by G. Thomas Tanselle in Library Quarterly 39 (1969), 201-202; and by George D. Painter in The Book Collector (1969), 95-102: "This is a great book from a great scholar, who will be named, with McKerrow, Greg, Masson, Bowers, among the masters and innovators of analytical bibliography."
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