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4. Thinking clearly about bibliographical evidence

Paul Needham's "Johann Gutenberg and the Catholicon Press" is important
for its insight into the earliest era of European printing, but it has
even broader significance as a model of how to employ evidence. Needham
sought to figure out the production history of a group of items long considered,
on the evidence of their type, to have emanated from the same
printer: the lengthy Catholicon of Johannes Balbus, which exists in three
separate printings and was produced (according to its colophon) in Mainz,
Germany, in 1460, and two short works, each of which is found in two
printings. The question has been the subject of long debate, and it has
attracted special interest because of the possibility that the unnamed printer
was Gutenberg himself. Needham's article has generated more than a dozen
major responses and counter-responses, with his own contributions appearing
in journals from four countries (thereby incidentally reflecting the widespread

locations of the evidence).[14] His subsequent pieces elaborate on
some of his discoveries, and their interplay with the questioning of his
challengers provides numerous case studies of contrasting ways of handling
evidence. All the essential features of his method are nonetheless available
in the initial piece.

Fundamental to interpretation is the gathering of evidence. Needham
values the great amount of scholarship that has accumulated, but he also
recognizes the need to verify its findings. (Some criticisms of his argument
prompt him to point out [as in his "Further Corrective Notes," p. 115, and
"Slipped Lines," p. 27] that such testing includes going to actual books
instead of relying on photographs, which, as he shows, can misrepresent the
evidence.) Guided by his predecessors, he first of all refines their reports
of paper stocks—and ultimately their interpretations: "three paper historians,
all eminent practitioners of their science, have studied the Catholicon
question, and have arrived at three mutually contradictory conclusions.
As it happens, all three are wrong" (p. 421). His approach also is to seek
the widest relevant contexts. That method is not original in considerations
of this material—the earlier inference of the "Catholicon printer" from a
number of disparate publications is based on the same principle—but he
expands it:

He then enumerates sixteen important "facts relevant to understanding the
workings of this press." These particular points in turn rest on bibliographical

investigations interconnecting a host of contextual physical features in
addition to paper: among them, accidents of type-setting, progressive type
damage, type printed upside down, reset lines, shifting type over multiple
copies, blind impressions of bearer types, cancel leaves, pinholes, waste sheets
used for binding, and early purchase inscriptions. The article thus also serves
as a primer of bibliographical techniques, but its effectiveness as a model of
reasoning does not depend on bibliographical knowledge as such.

Part of that success comes from Needham's stress on logical method,
particularly on levels of evidence. The adjectives in his phrase "This is
possible, but not probable" (p. 422) become a litany throughout the subsequent
debate. Again, he is not original in making the distinction they
entail, for it is one that has been emphasized by clear thinkers in all fields.
(In bibliography, it is most famously developed by Fredson Bowers in his
1959 Lyell Lectures, published in 1964 as Bibliography and Textual Criticism:
Bowers structures his discussion on the categories of the possible, the
probable, and the demonstrable.) But Needham makes especially vivid use
of the principle as he considers arguments—his own and others'—that have
been put forth about these books. Though insight comes by imagining possibilities,
to conceive of a scenario is not enough; as he says in a later article,
"an indefinitely large number of occurrences are `perfectly possible' without
being likely in the least" ("Corrective Notes," p. 50). Nor is it adequate
to establish the likelihood that within a given era certain events might have
occurred; one needs to show the probability that they happened in a particular
instance, and that such an interpretation is more likely than competing
ones. To this central point Needham offers various corollaries: that
assertion, even repeated assertion, is not proof; that prejudged observations
are dangerous; and that one's premises and presuppositions need constant
examination.

The most striking aspect of the article is the startling conclusion to which
Needham's methods lead him. The facts he has identified "appear to me,"
he says, "to say the following: The Catholicon printer's three books were
not printed with movable types. The type pages of these books were composed
of indissoluble two-line slugs, arranged into columns or pages as the
case may be. After printing, the slugs were retained, and at later times additional
impressions were pulled from them" (p. 425). As with most details of
early printing, no contemporary attestation of such a procedure is known,
and Needham's argument rests strictly on features of objects that were present
in the fifteenth century—the books themselves, which bear evidence of their
creation. It is how to interpret this evidence that has proven contentious.
Scholars have come to general agreement with his observation that the type
of these books does occur in two-line units, but the physical mechanism of
that pairing has continued to provoke debate. As Needham himself points
out, his conclusions bear little relation to the familiar picture of how
fifteenth-century shops operated, but they best take into account what has
been discovered from the books themselves, and they avoid the objections
attendant on other explanations. Eager to confirm for himself what actually

happened, over the course of the articles he proposes tests that could refute
his explanation. But as he meets the challenges to his proposals, it appears
that careful attention to the actual books not only has solved an old puzzle
but also has revealed a printing house practice that no one had suspected.
All these discoveries in turn lead to resolution of a lingering and important
question that Needham discusses in a coda: "I find it impossible to imagine
that the Mainz resident who by 1460 was capable of posing and solving this
problem ["of permanently fixing typographical compositions"] could have
been other than Johann Gutenberg" (p. 432).