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Martin Boghardt: A Memoir
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Page 39

Martin Boghardt: A Memoir

by
PAUL NEEDHAM[*]

Martin Boghardt, of the most wide-ranging and
creative bibliographers of the post-World War II era, died
of cancer in Wolfenbüttel on 26 October 1998, just a
month after his sixty-second birthday.[1] In the two years
after the fatal illness was diagnosed, he faced it the way he had faced many
of the difficulties of existence: with a reticent, stoical fatalism, combined
with a stubborn determination to continue on his path of life and intel-
lectual investigation, achieving what he could with the time and strength
left to him. Even into the summer of that year he was hopeful of partici-
pating in the Lyons-Villeurbanne colloquium of 16–21 November 1998,
"Les trois révolutions de l'imprimerie." His topic was one he was uniquely
qualified to discuss: "Printer's Manuals of the Pre-industrial Age: What
They Reveal and What They Conceal" ("Der vorindustrielle Buchdruck
in medialer Funktion: Was seine Lehrbücher beschreiben und was sie
verschweigen"). A half-completed draft, with notes for a conclusion,
survives.

The last years were not a time of unhappiness, far from it. Martin (to
refer to him temporarily in the terms of our own friendship) had many
reasons for satisfaction. Within the world of book scholars his reputation
increased steadily. This was due not to the quantity of his output—he had
no desire to inflate his publication list—but to its uniformly high quality.
He published only when he knew he had something useful to say, and
when his work met his own standard: a more rigorous standard than any
external editor could supply. More than this, his private life was happy,
after years beset by periods of self-doubt and depression. With his third
marriage, to Julie, he had found stability and a devoted supporter. And he
was able to rebuild a close relationship with his son Thomas, from whom
he had been long separated after the breakup of his second marriage.
This was the great consolation of his later years; his pride in Thomas's


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Page 40
academic achievements as an historian far surpassed the satisfaction he
took in his own scholarly work.

Martin Boghardt was born in Berlin on 26 September 1936, the mid-
dle of three children, two boys and a girl, of Fritz Boghardt, a Lutheran-
Evangelical minister, and of his wife Elisabeth.[2] During the pre-war and
most of the war years the family lived near and in Danzig, where Martin's
schooling began; half a year was spent in Esslingen am Neckar, when his
father was on service with the radar corps (Radarabwehr). At the end of
the war the family succeeded in moving west—the mother and children
by one arduous journey through a landscape of devastation, the father
by another—from the Soviet to the English Sector. They were reunited
in Hamburg, where the father found a pastoral position. Martin, aged
ten and never strong in health, became seriously ill. Fritz Boghardt was
helped to find more spacious and sanitary living quarters for his family
by the aid of a sympathetic English officer whose favor he earned by re-
citing Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy in English. The first stage
of Martin's education was completed with his secondary school Abitur in
1955 in the classical curriculum, followed by his first visit, with a school
friend, to Italy, a country and culture to which he became devoted.

The road to bibliographical scholarship was slow and winding.
Boghardt's university studies at Hamburg, Vienna, Munich, and Berlin
were at first directed toward psychology and philosophy. Only in his fourth
year, on his return to Hamburg, did he settle on German philology. He
completed his Prüfungsarbeit in philosophy, under C. F. von Weizsäcker,
in 1962: "The Theory of Knowledge Embodied in Plato's Allegory of the
Cave" ("Der erkenntnistheoretische Gehalt des Höhlengleichnisses"). This
was the year also of his marriage to Inge Brenner. Boghardt's "doctor-
father" was the eminent Hölderlin scholar Adolf Beck. Beck was one of
the advisers to the incipient new critical edition of Klopstock (Historisch-
kritische Klopstockausgabe, 1974-). In 1966 Boghardt joined the project,
where he met Christiane Dalhoff, who became his second wife. Their
son, Thomas, was born in 1970. The following year Boghardt gained his
doctorate with a dissertation on iambic trimeter in drama of the age of
Goethe ( Der jambische Trimeter im Drama der Goethezeit, published in 1973).

Boghardt's introduction to and rapid mastery of the methods of bib-
liographical analysis, as formulated and exemplified by the so-called
"Anglo-Saxon" school of A. W. Pollard (1859–1944), R. B. McKerrow
(1872–1940), Sir Walter Greg (1875–1959), Fredson Bowers (1905–1991),
and Charlton Hinman (1910–1977), did not come until he was in his thir-
ties. He was already at work on the bibliography of Klopstock's writings


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which, in collaboration with his wife Christiane, was his chief responsibil-
ity in the Klopstock editorial office. He was not one to reminisce in print;
our only published information on this significant and transforming mo-
ment comes from a brief statement in the unsigned, third-person-plural
editorial introduction to the Klopstock bibliography:
The editors owe special thanks to Professor Bernhard Fabian, professor of English
at Münster and director of the Institutum Erasmianum, who brought to their atten-
tion the Anglo-Saxon method of analytical bibliography. It must be acknowledged
that our work on Klopstock editions was begun in ignorance of this long-established
method of analysis, which, through Professor Fabian and several of his pupils, has
required a change in our approach.[3]

Whatever the precise form of Prof. Fabian's advice to the Klopstock
project with regard to "Anglo-Saxon" methodology, there is no doubt that
for Boghardt personally this marked a decisive intellectual turning point.
Perhaps for the first time in his life his scholarly inclinations, pursued over
many years in several disciplines, found a focus that drew into effective
action all the facets of his distinctive talents and temperament. Boghardt
was nothing if not a skeptic, instinctively resistant to all systems of belief
that depend on an agreed dogma or that require allegiance to an unexam-
ined authority. It must have been an attraction to him that bibliographical
investigations—the best of them, that is—take nothing on faith, and pay
no attention to the opinions of a socially constituted hierarchy. Verifiable
evidence, and reasoning directly and explicitly tied to that evidence, are
the only tools of the honest bibliographer. This was his standard.

Perhaps out of diffidence, Boghardt's first bibliographical publication
did not appear until 1971, the year he turned thirty-five. This article, a
study of an early printing of Klopstock's Messias, was an offshoot of the
larger Klopstock project, and was a collaboration with his wife, who pro-
vided the impetus for its publication.[4] Although it was a first publication
in this area for both authors, it is a fully mature study that, unobtrusively,
gives a closely argued rationale for the fundamental importance of bib-
liographical analysis.

Klopstock's Messias is by its nature a potentially complicated example
of textual transmission, for it was expanded and modified by the author


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over more than a half century, from the appearance of Gesänge I–III in the
Bremer Beiträge of 1748 (Band 4, Stück 4–5) to the publication of Gesänge
XVI-XX in 1773, and then on to the author's revisions and corrections
for its inclusion in Göschen's 1799/1800 Leipzig edition of Klopstock's
collected works. Christiane and Martin Boghardt's study, establishing and
clarifying the textual relations of the Halle 1751/2 printings of Gesänge
I–V, provides an exemplary demonstration of the unbreakable connection
between bibliographical analysis and textual transmission. The authors
showed that in 1751 the publisher Carl Hermann Hemmerde had Messias
set in type three times, twice in octavo (creating two editions, not previ-
ously distinguished) and once in quarto—Klopstock's preferred format as
it allowed his long lines to be set without breaks. They showed moreover
that the first octavo setting became the printer's copy for both the second
octavo and the quarto setting.

The establishment of this textual stemma was only the first part of
their accomplishment. As the authors demonstrated, the stemmatics of
textual transmission do not directly establish textual authority. They only
establish the parameters within which textual authority can be, often
imperfectly, expressed. Thus, in late December 1750 Klopstock sent to
Hemmerde a list of textual changes to be incorporated in the new edi-
tion. He used as his basis a copy of Hemmerde's 1749 octavo edition of
Gesänge I–III. However, Klopstock himself was evidently unaware that
Hemmerde had printed two superficially identical octavo editions dated
1749, what German bibliographers call Doppeldrucke. The first was set
from the 1748 Bremer Beiträge . The second was copied from the first but
with new errors. It was the second of these that Klopstock used to prepare
the text for the 1751 Halle edition.[5] One of the errors in the second 1749
edition, "in des Todesmeer" instead of the original "in des Todes Meer",
went unnoticed, and so was passed onward into the 1751 Halle editions.
When he subsequently prepared the text for the 1755 Copenhagen edition,
Klopstock noticed the incorrect grammar of the corrupted phrase, but in-
stead of returning to his original words as printed in the Bremer Beiträge,
he modified the corruption, so that we are presented with three versions:

… und geht in des Todes Meer unter. [1748 Bremer Beiträge > 1749, 1st separate
edition]
… und geht in des Todesmeer unter. [1749, 2nd separate edition > 1751/2
Halle]
… geht dann ins Todesmeer unter. [1755 Copenhagen]


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Page 43

The authors remark on the "exemplary significance" of this sequence:
"a supposedly irrelevant printing can have its influence on the develop-
ment of a text, when it is used as the basis for a revision" ("ein an sich ir-
relevanter Druck kann auf die Entwicklung eines Textes einwirken, wenn
er dessen Revision zugrunde gelegt wird").

In a closely similar way, an "original" compositor's error in one of
Hemmerde's 1751/2 editions (that is, an error not present in the setting
copy) was transmitted forward, with a contingent modification, into the
1755 Copenhagen edition of Messias by the agency of Klopstock him-
self. For the text of Gesänge I–V Klopstock supplied to the publisher
a marked copy of the Halle 1752 quarto edition. This edition contains
in one line an erroneous setting, "schweigen" for "schwiegen". Klop-
stock did not, however, restore the reading to "schwiegen", but instead
similarly modified the verb of the parallel clause, from preterite to present
tense:

… allein sie sahen sie schlummern, und schwiegen [1748–9 Bremen]
… allein sie sahen sie schlummern, und schweigen [1751/2 Halle]
… allein sie sehen sie schlummern, und schweigen [1755 Copenhagen]

The textual problems and complications raised by Doppeldrucke—
reset editions that copy preceding editions so closely in type, format, lay-
out and imprint as to be, in the absence of detailed inspection, essentially
invisible—have had a long history of discussion. The American scholar
William Kurrelmeyer (1874–1957) in particular, a pioneering figure vir-
tually invisible to Anglo-American bibliographers, wrote extensively on
Doppeldruck printings of Goethe, Wieland, and others.[6] The study by
Christiane and Martin Boghardt stands out among these, nonetheless,
for the thoroughness and subtlety of its investigation of the textual con-
sequences of the phenomenon. Their work is exemplary in the literal
sense: the careful reader will immediately realize, from these few closely-
reasoned examples, that the same tools of analysis can be applied to all
other texts as they move from one printed edition to another. To put
it more positively: without research and analysis along these lines, the
process of textual transmission through the medium of print cannot be
effectively studied.

In the next two years Boghardt published two more investigations
within this theme, on the first printing of Goethe's "Faust-fragment,"


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and on the concept of Doppeldruck.[7] The study of the Faust-fragment
is another model of analysis. Faust: Ein Fragment was first published in
Leipzig in 1790, both as the first part of volume 7 of Cotta's octavo edi-
tion of Goethe's Schriften and as a self-standing offprint (Sonderdruck,
Einzelausgabe) with a title-page. It had long been recognized that copies
both of Schriften volume 7 and of the Faust-fragment offprint divide into
two distinct groups. The first five sheets A–E are of the same setting in
both. Thereafter, in sheets F–K and half-sheet L, the groups divide into
two different settings. A convenient earmark distinguishing them is that
in one group, the last three lines of p. 144 (K8V) are set again at the top of
p. 145 (Li r). These copies have conventionally been designated as Sm and
Em: i.e., Schriften / Einzelausgabe with (mit) the repeated lines, and the
other group as So and Eo, where p. 145 is without (ohne) the repeated
lines. There had been long discussions, often from the standpoint of the
Goethe collector rather than the textual editor, on the relative priority
of the two groups or editions, and arguments for each group had been
advanced without definitive answer.

The chief focus of the respective arguments, quite naturally, had been
the textual differences between the two settings, of which the errone-
ous repetition on p. 145 of the Sm/Em group was the most conspicuous
example. The beauty of Boghardt's approach was that he looked at the
problem from an entirely fresh angle: not how the texts varied, but how,
and consequently why, the two sets of copies were produced. He stud-
ied closely the headlines or running titles of the two groups of copies.
Very commonly, in printing shops from the fifteenth century onward, the
headline settings were kept standing in the formes—with change only of
what must be changed, such as page numbers—and so were carried over
even as the text pages within the formes were replaced from one sheet to
the next. Boghardt was able to determine that in sheets F and after, the
So/Eo copies continued to use the same headlines as the common setting
of sheets A–E, whereas the Sm/Em copies have reset headlines in sheets F
and after. This strongly reinforces, from independent data, the argument
already made in 1932 by Ernst Schulte-Strathaus from certain textual
variants: the So/Eo sheets were set in direct continuation of the com-
mon setting of sheets A–E, and hence, like those sheets, were set directly
from Goethe's manuscript.[8] The Sm/Em sheets represent a secondary and


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somewhat later setting, using as copy not Goethe's manuscript, but the
So/Eo sheets.[9]

Boghardt's Faust-fragment study underscores a point that even experi-
enced historians sometimes overlook, and that bibliographers in particu-
lar should always keep in mind. His conclusion, that the So/Eo copies of
Faust: Ein Fragment had textual priority over the Sm/Em copies, was not
really a surprise in 1972. The arguments of Schulte-Strathaus for this
sequence were strong ones—including a suggestive if non-definitive argu-
ment from the respective paper stocks used in the two sets of copies—and
were endorsed, for example, by Waltraud Hagen's Die Drucke von Goethes
Werken
(Berlin, 1971). The virtue—one could even say, the beauty—of
Boghardt's analysis is that he brought to light compelling evidence from
a hitherto entirely ignored production feature of the books. Because of
this emphasis, he was able to resolve a generations-long question of tex-
tual criticism without directly using evidence from the texts themselves.
Only a scholar with an unusually creative mind could have approached
the problem from this standpoint. We are reminded that an historical
investigation (for bibliographical studies are always contributions to his-
tory) need not overturn an accepted opinion to be worth publishing. It is
equally useful to reinforce accepted opinions by means of new evidence
and new reasoning.

Boghardt spent the academic year 1973–1974 as library assistant
at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, and the following aca-
demic year at the library school in Cologne (Bibliothekar-Lehrinstitut
des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen). As his Prüfungsarbeit he produced a
detailed survey of bibliographical method that, in revised form, was pub-
lished by Hauswedell in 1977: Analytische Druckforschung: Ein methodischer
Beitrag zu Buchkunde und Textkritik
, dedicated to his young son. This brief
monograph—its text can hardly extend beyond 20,000 words—is a clas-


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sic that remains still insufficiently known to English and American bibli-
ographers. Following a survey chapter on Anglo-American and German
contributions to bibliographical reasoning, Analytische Druckforschung pres-
ents, with extensive, precise illustrations from relevant editions, a compre-
hensive survey of the nature, causes, and characteristic forms of textual
variation in movable-type printing, from in-press corrections and cor-
ruptions to cancels to partial resettings to complete resettings. The result
is considerably more than an "aposde's" application of Anglo-American
methods to German printing. The fact is that the "Anglo-Saxon school"
has never produced a manual giving so clear, methodical, and closely-
reasoned an account and analysis of the many forms and stages of text
variation that are intrinsic to the conditions of printing and publishing in
the age of handset types.

Although it earned favorable reviews in the two major English and
American bibliographical journals and elsewhere—several reviewers
lamented the absence of an index— Analytische Druckforschung seems to
have had relatively little impact on the English-speaking world in the past
quarter-century; as so often, the German language itself has been a bar-
rier. An English reviewer appropriately characterized the book as "lucid
and succinct," and an American reviewer concluded, perhaps a litde mis-
leadingly, "no library … with extensive German holdings will want to be
without it."[10] In my own opinion, this book, with its preternaturally sharp
focus, is an indispensable supplement to the canonical English-language
manuals: R. B. McKerrow's An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Stu-
dents
(1927), Fredson Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949),
and Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972). Even if he
had published nothing after 1977, Analytische Druckforschung and a handful
of shorter articles would still have earned for Boghardt permanent record
in the annals of bibliographical analysis.

After the completion of his Cologne studies, Boghardt returned to
the Herzog August Bibliothek, first as a stipendiary, then as a permanent
member of the staff, and there he spent the remainder of his profes-
sional life. He did not rise high within the administration of the library,
but the successive directors Paul Raabe and Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer
recognized his unusual scholarly abilities, and he found steady support
for his research projects. It should be noted that, as he himself was well
aware, two earlier librarians at Wolfenbüttel had been pioneers in the


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physical description and analysis of printed books: Friedrich Adolf Ebert
(1791–1834) and Gustav Milchsack (1850–1919). Milchsack's extensive
unpublished notes on "Doppeldrucke" were an important resource for
Boghardt's work on the same topic.[11] The library's support of his research
travels was especially critical, for he was always attracted to the most diffi-
cult and complicated bibliographical problems, the solving of which typi-
cally involved close examination of multiple copies, located in far-spread
libraries. He was never satisfied to stop at the stage of a probable answer,
when the investigation of more copies might move an explanation from
plausibility to certainty or near-certainty.

The most striking example of this was surely his study of the printing
history of the first edition of Philip Melanchthon's Bedencken auffs Interim,
1548, a quarto book of four sheets or eight formes, which appeared with-
out imprint.[12] Boghardt made a forme-by-forme analysis based on the
examination of 54 copies, and determined (to summarize rigorously a
complex situation) that in the first issue, printed by Melchior Lotter in
Magdeburg, six of the formes were set twice and another partially. In a
second issue by Hans Lufft in Wittenberg, sheet A was fully reset (with a
change of attribution from Melanchthon to "the theologians of Witten-
berg"), and joined to Lotter's sheets B–D; the eight examined copies of
that second issue represented three different forme-states of sheets B–D.
German bibliographers traditionally referred to such cases of partial re-
setting as "Zwitterdruck" or hybrid printing, a phrase inaugurated by
Johannes Luther.[13] But that phrase was never carefully defined and ex-
emplified in satisfactory detail until Boghardt's study.

In the 1980s, after the publication of the Klopstock bibliography, the
scope of Boghardt's researches broadened considerably. In association
with Frans A. Janssen (Amsterdam) and Walter Wilkes (Darmstadt), he ed-
ited a series of high quality facsimiles of early German printer's manuals
and Formatbücher (1983–1998), and wrote important introductions for
five of them (see Appendix). This series has greatiy enriched our picture
of the working world of the printing shops of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. Yet no one was more keenly aware than Boghardt that,
however suggestive the narratives of printing-shop practice and prescrip-
tion in these early manuals might be, they were not direct descriptions of
invariable working methods. The manuals are significant secondary evi-
dence, always to be controlled against what can be learned by close analy-


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sis of contemporary printing. This awareness explains the significance of
the sub-clause in the title of Boghardt's uncompleted Lyons paper: "what
[the typographic manuals] reveal and what they conceal."

This also explains the structure of Boghardt's 1980 study of cancels
and book format, a model demonstration of how much more clearly and
vividly we can "see" printed books once we learn to look at them through
the eyes of the printers who made them.[14] The central point is simple yet
subtle: when cancel leaves were called for, printers often tried to fit them
as nearly as possible into the existing structure of the edition, for example
by imposing them in formes where there would otherwise be a blank leaf,
or perhaps, quarter-sheet. Almost the entire study is devoted to showing
that this "structural rationale" is exemplified by the cancels of a variety
of eighteenth-century editions. Only in the last two pages—after estab-
lishing that this rationale is explanatory for actual printing jobs—did
Boghardt show, by quoting from the "Bericht an den Buchbinder" of
Christian Gottiob Taubel's Praktisches Handbuch der Buchdruckerkunst für An-
fänger
(Leipzig, 1791), that the very language of the instructions, as drafted
by an experienced printer (e.g.: "Die Vorstellung der Corrigir-Zeichen,
welches ein halber Bogen ist, wird zu Seite 146 … gebunden"
[italics sup-
plied]), strongly supported his uncovering of this rationale.[15]

Perhaps even more significantly, in the early 1980s Boghardt's atten-
tion began to be drawn back to the earliest period of European printing.
Already in Analytische Druckforschung he had shown his awareness that the
principles of analysis must be true, mutatis mutandis, for movable-type
printing from all periods (see especially 78 sq., "Der Doppelblattkarton").
This contrasts favorably with the major trend of "Anglo-Saxon" bibli-
ography, whose tendency has been to leave aside the study of fifteenth-
century printing as a field to itself, in at least partial exile from the central
matter of the bibliographer's concerns.

At this relatively early stage of his researches, however, Boghardt's
involvement with fifteenth-century printing was only peripheral. What
comes across most clearly in his remarks is a certain frustration with the
lack of clarity and internal consistency to be found, and still to be found,
in many bibliographical descriptions of incunables, even in such standard
works as the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW). Thus, he was dissatis-
fied (footnote 37) with the account of GW 6555, the 30-line Indulgence


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(Mainz, 1455), where in-press variants represented by different copies
or sets of copies are described as indicating six different editions ("sechs
verschiedene … Ausgaben"). He criticized also GW 6688's account of
the three reset sheets found in quire K of some copies of the Cologne
Chronicle ( Cronica van der hilliger stat van Coellen, Cologne: Johann Koelhoff
the younger, 23 Aug. 1499, Goff C–476)
. As he noted, if a description
identifies an earlier and a later state, whether of cancel leaves or sheets,
or of in-press corrections, the evidence for which is earlier and which is
later must be given, "and GW says nothing about this" ("und darüber
findet sich im GW für die Kölner Chronik nichts").[16]

When Boghardt next turned his attention to incunabula, it was to en-
counter a much more challenging problem, that presented by the Mainz
1460 edition of the Catholicon of Johannes Balbus (GW 3182). The paper
copies of this edition divide into three distinct groups, according to their
paper stocks. Researches into these stocks by Theo Gerardy, and then by
Eva Ziesche and Dierk Schnitger, showed convincingly that the three sets
of papers were manufactured and marketed at different times over more
than a decade, from c. 1459–60 to c. 1472–3. Only one set of paper,
with Bull's Head watermark, could have existed in 1460, and associated
with this set by its identical pinhole pattern is the issue printed on vellum.
Another set, with watermark of the Galliziani family, Basel papermakers,
probably came to market in 1469. The third set, with paper from two
mills, one using a Crown watermark and the other a Tower watermark,
probably came to market in 1472.

I became interested in the problem of the date of the "1460" Catholi-
con
, and in 1982 published an article which reconciled the evidence as
then known, and extended it, to arrive at a new explanation of the seem-
ing paradox. By my argument, there were three separate but (with very
small exceptions) textually identical printings of the Catholicon: one in
1460 on Bull's Head paper (plus all vellum copies), one in 1469 on Gal-
liziani paper, and one in 1472/3 on a mixture of Tower and Crown paper.
These printings were textually identical not because a massive quantity of
type, sufficient for more than 700 Royal folio pages of 132 column-lines
per page, was kept standing, undamaged, for a dozen or more years. The
textual identity was owing, rather, to the fact that the type-pages con-
sisted not of movable types, but rather of thin castings of two successive
column-lines each. These castings were apparently disassembled after the


50

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first printing, and stored page-by-page; and then were reassembled twice
more, for the second and third printings.[17]

Nine months after my publication appeared, I received a letter from
Boghardt, who had in the meantime examined copies of the Catholicon in
a dozen libraries, going as far afield as Vienna, Milan, Parma, Rome, and
Naples (fig. 1). He had noted that fo. 169, the fifth leaf of the eighteenth
quire, was a cancel in all the copies he had seen of the Tower-Crown
impression, and was hopeful of finding a copy with an uncancelled leaf,
to discover the reason for cancellation. In subsequent correspondence we
agreed that the evidence of the cancels could provide a crucial test of my
hypothesis. In the typical case of a type-printed book—as Boghardt knew
more thoroughly and comprehensively than anyone—a cancel leaf, if one
were present in one or more copies, would be of a different setting, both
recto and verso, from the leaf it replaced, the so-called cancellandum.
This was naturally the case, for cancels generally represent a late stage of
correction or emendation. By the time they are created, the type-pages
that contained the settings of the cancellandum leaf would have been bro-
ken up and distributed back to the type-case. Except in unusual instances
where the relevant formes remained intact, complete resetting is the only
way to create a cancel (cancellans) leaf.[18]

By my hypothesis of the production of the 1460 Catholicon, cancels
could not behave in the usual way. If they did, I would have to "cancel"
my explanation. Instead, as Boghardt and I agreed, the Catholicon's can-
cels, still unexplored, would have to be identical on both recto and verso
with their respective cancellanda, except where some textual correction
was made. But if a textual correction were made, even of a single letter, it
would of necessity be "embedded" in a complete resetting of the two-line
pair containing that letter. We both began to investigate the cancels, he
much more thoroughly than I.[19] Eventually Boghardt examined person-


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illustration

FIGURE 1. Letter from Martin Boghardt to Paul Needham, 9 September 1983, discussing
Boghardt's examination of copies of the Mainz Catholicon.


52

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ally, on travels extending from Dallas to Saint Petersburg, all twenty-five
(now increased to twenty-six) known copies of the Bull's Head-vellum
impression, which show considerable variations in their patterns of can-
celled vs. uncancelled leaves, and a large number of copies of the follow-
ing two impressions. No uncancelled state of Tower-Grown fo. 169 has,
by the way, come to light, although there remain some copies, including
five in Poland, that have not been closely examined.

The result of the investigations was in conformity with what my expla-
nation absolutely required. For the three leaves of the Bull's Head-vellum
impression where a difference appears between the cancellandum and the
cancellans, the settings are identical on both recto and verso, except at the
places of correction; and all three corrections involved pairs of lines. In
two of these cases, pairs of lines were imposed in the wrong textual order
in the cancellandum, and reimposed in correct order in the cancellans.
In the third case, the most indicative of all, an incorrect word in one line
necessitated not just the replacement of that word, but the resetting of all
of both lines of the pair. That is to say, the entire two lines were reset in
type, and then from those types a new line-pair—a "slug," to borrow the
vocabulary of the Linotype process—was cast.[20]

Boghardt's first publication on the Mainz Catholicon inaugurated a
major reorientation in his research in the last ten years of his life. It
was followed by a series of important and original studies on the earli-
est years of printing, with special emphasis on cancels and other sources
of textual variation. His last published work, appearing posthumously,
represents yet another major initiative in the field of early printing, a
long-overdue extensive summary of the pinhole patterns in early large
format incunables. This topic had been almost entirely ignored in the
generations since Gustav Milchsack and, especially, Paul Schwenke laid
the first groundwork for deriving evidence from the varying placements
of the pins by which sheets were held in position on frames as they went
under the printing press.[21]


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In 1991 Martin Boghardt, with the encouragement of the then di-
rector of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Paul Raabe, planned a single
volume selection of his most significant bibliographical studies (published
posthumously: see Appendix). He presented a detailed oudine to Raabe
in September of that year, under the suggested title Archäologie des gedruck-
ten Buches
, The Archaeology of the Printed Book. The outline provides
interesting clues on how Boghardt looked at the corpus of his work. He
was conscious that it could be organized under a small number of inter-
related themes that may be seen as defining a unique scholarly rationale,
or aesthetic. The layout of this planned volume was in essence a per-
sonal answer, as of 1991, to a question that has been posed as, "Why do
scholars produce what they produce?"[22] Boghardt's scholarly aesthetic
may be brought out by considering three terms, each of which was of his
own making: Printing Analysis (Analytische Druckforschung), The Typo-
graphic Cycle (Der typographische Kreislauf), and the title of his collec-
tion, Archaeology of the Printed Book.

Printing Analysis (Analytische Druckforschung). The 1977 monograph of
this title begins with a section headed "'Critical / Analytical Bibliog-
raphy' in England und den USA." In its first sentence, Boghardt wrote
that these English expressions are best rendered in German as "analyt-
ische Druckforschung": "a special branch of book study … that one can
best express in German as analytische Druckforschung" ("eine besondere
Richtung der Buchkunde … die man im Deutschen am ehesten als ana-
lytische Druckforschung bezeichnen kann"). Dr. Horst Meyer's obituary
(note 1 above) presents a vivid explanation of why Boghardt did not sim-
ply make the direct and obvious translation, "analytische Bibliographie."
The "highly conservative examiners" ("überaus konservative Prüfer") of
the Bibliothekar-Lehrinstitut in Cologne insisted on the change, for the
vocabulary of librarianship already used "analytische Bibliographie" to
mean the itemized listing of articles in periodicals, festschriften, and other
collections.

The story is true and has its amusement, but there is more to say. This
is not simply a fable, with unambiguous moral, of the reincarnation of
the viri obscuri of Cologne. "Analytische Druckforschung" and its shorter


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form "Druckanalyse" are Boghardt's own terms, and he was happy to use
them. They have become standard in German; he himself contributed the
entry "Analytische Druckforschung" to the Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens,
2. Ausgabe (LGB2; Stuttgart, 1987-). Now, a quarter-century after the
terms were coined, we can see that, or at least argue that, they give a
more precise description of this discipline than does the Anglo-American
"analytical bibliography."

The central virtue of Boghardt's expression is that it omits the word
bibliography / Bibliographie, whose range of meanings in ordinary discourse
is so broad that it cannot, standing alone, convey any particular special-
ized sense. Thus, the Oxford English Dictionary's central definitions for
bibliography are "The systematic description and history of books, their au-
thorship, printing, publication, editions, etc.," and "A list of the books of a
particular author, printer, or country, or of those dealing with any partic-
ular theme; the literature of a subject": it is as if the meaning of the word
oscillates between two poles. As G. Thomas Tanselle has stated, "bibliog-
raphy is not 'a subject' but a related group of subjects that happen to be
commonly referred to by the same term."[23] In the Anglo-American world,
attempts to narrow and refine the exceptionally broad scope of the word
bibliography to more circumscribed meanings have chiefly taken the form of
a liberal recourse to adjectival qualifiers. In the writings of Greg, Bowers,
McKenzie, and others we can find references to critical / analytical / pure /
pure analytical / enumerative / systematic / descriptive / textual / his-
torical / physical bibliography; and the list may not be exhaustive. Surely
this is a superfluity of adjectives. Few of us are capable of, or have a desire
of, keeping such a multiplicity of supposed categories and implied hier-
archies distinct from one another. Nor is the utility of doing so apparent.

Boghardt made a simpler division of "analytische Druckforschung"
into three stages: bibliographische Erfassung (roughly, descriptive bibli-
ography), bibliogenetische Erklärung (analysis proper), and textbezogene
Deutung (roughly, textual bibliography). He pointed out that only the first
of these is objective in the sense of being independently verifiable. The other
two stages, depending on the first for their evidence, are in their nature
probabilistic ("Analytische Druckforschung," LGB2 1.85). Partly because
the word bibliography is set aside, "analytische Druckforschung" describes
precisely a rigorously simple concept: the analysis of printing. It does not
pretend to cover every conceivable form of bibliographical research, or
to establish for itself any fixed place in a supposed hierarchy of levels of
scholarship—flaws that reside in many of the "Anglo-Saxon" discussions of
bibliography. Explicitly for Boghardt, "Druckanalyse," like many other sup-


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posedly specialized areas of "auxiliary science," could be seen, depending
on the goals of the particular investigations, as equally a Hilfswissenschaft
and a Grundwissenschaft.[24] Moreover, in consequence of the omission
of the word bibliography, this definition of "analytische Druckforschung"
neither states nor implies that bibliographical analysis in general is con-
fined to, or finds its central function in, the study of printed materials. It
is the formulation of an exceptionally clear-minded pragmatist.

The Typographic Cycle ( Der typographische Kreislauf ). Boghardt considered
the concept of the "typographische Kreislauf," which he first formulated
in 1985 and expanded on in 1990, to be the leitmotiv of all his researches;
and so he intended it to occupy the first and introductory place within his
planned collection.[25] This is the guiding concept for all analysis of printing
with movable types. It involves the study, in all phases, of the "progres-
sion from forme to forme of setting, printing, distribution, and further
setting, through the use of a limited supply of types" ("von Druckform
zu Druckform voranschreitende Abfolge von Setzen, Drucken, Ablegen
und weiterem Setzen mit Hilfe eines … begrenzten Letternvorrats").[26]
In my mind, this is at once the most concisely expressed and the most
fruitful model for thinking about typographic printing that has so far been
formulated. Virtually every complication and situation one encounters in
studying printed artifacts—in-press corrections, cancels, damaged types,
headline changes, and so on—can be clarified, organized and unified by
asking the question: "Where do these particular phenomena lie within
the typographic cycle?" It is perhaps useful to think of the bibliographer's
central or ideal task to be that of attempting to visualize and reconstruct
the full typographic cycle of printing jobs. Ever since reading Boghardt's
article, I have consciously tried to think and speak about types not as (pas-
sively) "movable types" but rather as (actively) "recycling types": types
that are, or historically were, in movement, by the agency of human
hands and by unintended accidents, within a defined cycle, beginning and
ending at typecases.


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Boghardt's 1990 exposition of the typographic cycle was both an ex-
pansion and a compression of his 1977 Analytische Druckforschung . It was
an expansion in two ways. First, he took into account, under the rubric
of "Delaying Factors" ("Retardierende Momente"), the initial correction
phase(s) (Grundkorrektur) of the printing process: a stage of production
that he had intentionally left out of discussion in his 1977 monograph.
Second, he also took into account, under the rubric "New Printing with-
out New Setting?" ("Neudruck ohne Neusatz?"), the question of how the
three books of the Mainz Catholicon Press were printed. It might be
said that the challenge or problem of the Catholicon Press books under
Boghardt's eye was that they seemed not to fit the expectations of the
typographic cycle; and the solution of the problem could only be found
by concluding that the books were not, therefore, directly printed from
recycling types.

So simple and simplifying a concept as that of the typographic cycle
could perhaps only have been formulated by someone with deep experi-
ence in investigating some of the most challenging cases for bibliographi-
cal investigation: German printing in the grand age of "Doppeldruck"
and "Zwitterdruck," where what will look to most eyes like two copies
of the same book may not only be different—they may not even be two
copies of the same edition; where three superficially identical copies may
represent one or two or three editions; and where the several editions,
once diagnosed, will still contain no obvious clues to their relative priority.
For many years, Boghardt's chief tool in these investigations was the Hin-
man Collator, but in later years he became interested in the possibilities
of using computer software to make "virtual" superimpositions of cor-
responding pages or passages of different copies. Five such color-printed
superimpositions were reproduced in his 1990 article, to illustrate a cen-
tral point of the concept of the typographic cycle: for the bibliographer,
as for Torah students over many centuries, not only does every word
have meaning, but so does every letter; not only every letter, but also
every space between letters. But the bibliographer's belief is predicated
on something simpler than reverence for the text. It is a consequence of
the fact that every space on a type-printed page is a blank reflection of
a physical object: a non-printing type that, like the inked types, lies within
the typographic cycle.

The Archaeology of the Printed Book (Archäologie des gedruckten Buche).
Boghardt did not provide a detailed argument of why his bibliographical
investigations—and by extension, those of others—can usefully be de-
scribed as an "archaeology of the printed book," or of why he chose this
as the title for his projected collection. There is only a brief statement in
the 1991 draft of his introduction:


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Printing analysis concerns itself with the printed book as a material object produced
by a combination of hand and mechanical processes, and investigates how it came
into being by means of its physical form, It is a search for clues, an archaeology of
the printed book.[27]

He did not explain or justify his choice of that term any further here, nor
apparently in his published articles to that date, but we may feel confident
that the expression had a precise significance for him, for he never wrote
carelessly.

It is noteworthy, and perhaps directly relevant, that in the post-World
War II years, various manuscript scholars—most notably François Masai
(1909–1979), L. M. J. Delaissé (1914–1972), and G. I. Lieftinck (1902–
1994)—argued that the totality of interconnected ways of studying and
extracting evidence from medieval manuscripts was not adequately re-
vealed by the traditional term palaeography, and would fit better under
the broader rubric, "archaeology of the medieval book." This viewpoint
is reflected in the title of Delaissé's classic study of Thomas à Kempis's
autograph of De imitatione Christi: it was an "archaeological examina-
tion."[28] No clear consensus has emerged from the resulting discussions.
Arguments have been published in favor of the expression; in favor of
using the word codicology to cover the many aspects of book study that
move beyond what the word palaeography strictly implies; and in favor of
keeping the word palaeography, but with the understanding that it must
be interpreted broadly, to encompass every facet of manuscript study.[29]
These discussions have been more or less the reverse of the discussions
among students of printed books about how many subdivisions should
be made of the word bibliography: palaeography seemed to be too narrow a
word, bibliography too broad.

Whatever the specific terms scholars prefer for naming the discipline(s)
that study medieval books, it cannot be wrong to call this, or them, an
"archaeology of the medieval book," for all artifacts have an archaeologi-
cal aspect. Given a book or a group of books, we may inquire into their


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physical materials and how and where they were made; into their physical
structure, and how the text and other graphic markings fit into that struc-
ture; into how and where the book was made; into the binding (or suc-
cession of bindings) that complete its structure; and into the history of its
movements from its beginnings and eventual completion into the present.
All such questions and tools for answering them constitute an archaeo-
logical investigation. Our goal is to try to reconstruct and understand the
totality of human activities that went into creating the object at hand, us-
ing it, and transmitting it from its time and place of making to its current
time and place. To speak of an archaeology of the book is not to create
a heuristic simile, such as Henry Bradshaw's "natural history" method:
it is merely to recognize that books are physical, manufactured objects.
Once we admit that there is an archaeology of the medieval book—that
the expression, whether we favor it or not, has meaning—we must accept
that there is equally an archaeology of the printed book. On the one hand,
incunables must be seen as included under the umbrella of "medieval
books"; on the other hand, none of the questions we ask of incunables
stop being askable or interesting when 1501, or any other date, is reached.

This is self-evident, but it seems, nonetheless, that Boghardt was the
first scholar to refer explicitly to an archaeology of the printed book. His
expression is in symmetry with, and a natural outgrowth of, the discus-
sions of medieval palaeographers, but there is no evidence that he was
deeply influenced by those discussions, which he never cited. My own
suspicion is that he was chiefly led to this expression from a rather differ-
ent direction, guided by the experience of his own long years of research.
The fourth division of the 1991 arrangement of his studies is headed
"Relative Chronologie"; within it he placed three studies of groups of
printed editions whose priorities and sequences of manufacture are not,
prima facie, clear. On closer examination, as he demonstrated, their re-
lationships and sequences can be reliably determined. We might say that
each edition can be located within a defined archaeological stratum, later
perhaps than some other edition, earlier than yet another. Moreover,
the very concept of the typographic cycle implies that it is fruitful to try
to recognize the many subtle, nearly invisible strata that subsist within
a printed book—that is, within individual copies of a printed edition. A
printed book does not come into being as a single event, but as a multitu-
dinous series of events, not uncommonly stretching over weeks, months,
and even years. The archaeologist's skill lies, and Boghardt's skill lay, in
recognizing and understanding the small clues that reflect the passage of
time resident in the objects at hand.

It should not go unsaid that Martin Boghardt followed a strict per-
sonal code of scholarly ethics in all his publications. Some things he would


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always do: investigate, give credit to, and fairly judge the existing litera-
ture on the questions he took up. Others he would never do: advertise
the importance of his own work, artificially set himself up to advantage
against other scholars, prefer a clever phrase to an accurate one. He had
no desire for quarrels, but was firm in defending his own reasoning, and
his right to express his judgments. Some years ago, a brief encyclopedia
notice Boghardt had been asked to write on the Mainz Catholicon was
anonymously modified by the editor, who was dissatisfied with its conclu-
sion. He changed Boghardt's wording at several places without consulta-
tion, and cut the conclusion, which accepted that the Catholicon had been
printed from paired-line castings. When Boghardt protested, the editor
replied that Boghardt had been inappropriately dogmatic ("apodiktisch")
in stating his opinion so positively; and that the changes had been made to
protect Boghardt's reputation. To this Boghardt responded that the editor
had the right to add his own views, but not under Boghardt's name. I have
sometimes wondered whether the editor ever understood the full implica-
tions of that remark, and the chasm it exposed between their respective
views of scholarly ethics.[30]

Typically, Martin wrote of the errors of others with oblique irony
rather than with indignation. In his study of Lessing's Minna von Barn-
helm
(Appendix, no. 4), he began by quoting a recent scholar who had
declared that the edition by Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (1886)
had laid out the textual evidence so thoroughly that there was simply
nothing more to be done in that line: "It would be a waste of energy to
set into motion the entire process of textual criticism all over again, and
by an identical method arrive once more at the identical results" ("Es
wäre ein falscher Kraftaufwand, den ganzen textkritischen Prozeß noch
einmal in Bewegung zu setzen, um mit der gleichen Methode zu den glei-
chen Resultaten zu kommen"). At the end of his study and well removed
from this quotationS—which he did not recall to the reader's attention—
Boghardt summarized the textual sources of that 1886 edition: "The text
portion of the Minna critical edition follows, at the end, a reprint; in the
main portion a reprint of a reprint; and at the beginning, no less than
a reprint of a reprint of a reprint" ("Der Textteil der kritischen Minna-
Ausgabe … folgt … am Schluß … einem Nachdruck, im umfangreichen
Hauptteil … dem Nachdruck eines Nachdrucks und am Anfang sogar
dem Nachdruck des Nachdrucks eines Nachdrucks").

Boghardt was a skeptic to the core but, one may say, an optimistic
skeptic. His capacity for doubt was in perfect balance with a strong fides
bibliographica: a belief in the powerful results that can, although without


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guarantee, be obtained by combining extensive, controlled observations
with repeated rounds of careful reasoning. Regardless of the result, the
effort was worth making. Words written two generations ago in com-
memoration of the Benedictine scholar Dom Donatien De Bruyne apply
equally to the agnostic Martin Boghardt:
Travailler sans relâche; mourir sans gloire … ces mots résument sa carriÉre sci-
entifique, faite d'un labeur acharné et d'une modestie insouciante des honneurs
humains.[31]

APPENDIX

A Selection of Martin Boghardt's
Major Bibliographical Writings

This selection, arranged chronologically, includes the twenty studies re-
printed in his Archäologie des gedruckten Buches (AgB)[32] ; several other signifi-
cant studies; and a list of the five facsimiles of printer's manuals to which
he contributed introductions, together with his bibliography of German
printer's manuals through 1847. One other major monograph must be
cited: Christiane Boghardt, Martin Boghardt, and Rainer Schmidt, Die
zeitgenössischen Drucke von Klopstocks Werken: Eine deskriptive Bibliographie;

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Werke und Briefe, historisch-kritische Aus-
gabe, ed. Adolf Beck et al., Abteilung Addenda III, 2 vols. (Berlin and
New York: de Gruyter, 1981).

  • 1. (with Christiane Boghardt:) "Die Halleschen Messias-Drucke von
    1751/1752," Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 1971, 1-21; "Beri-
    chtigung," 1972, 452 [AgB 13, pp. 343–358].
  • 2. "Zur Bestimmung des Erstdruckes von Goethes Faustfragment,"
    Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 1972, 36–58 [AgB 14, pp. 359—
    374].
  • 3. "Der Begriff des Doppeldruckes," Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hoch-
    stifts
    1973, 400–457 [AgB 4, pp. 131–431].
  • 4. "Zur Textgestalt der 'Minna von Barnhelm,'" Wolfenbütteier Studien zur
    Aufklärung
    2 (1975), 200–222 [AgB 11, pp. 267–284].
  • 5. Analytische Druckforschung: Ein methodischer Beitrag zu Buchkunde und Text-
    kritik
    (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1977).

  • 61

    Page 61
  • 6. "Der erste Einzeldruck von Klopstocks 'Messias': Zur Prioritätsbestim-
    mung gleichdatierter Drucke," Philobiblon 23 (1979), 190–205 [AgB
    15, PP. 375–390].
  • 7. "Das Buchformat und seine Variationsmöglichkeiten: Zur Technik
    der Buchgestaltung im 18. Jahrhundert," in Buchgestaltung in Deutsch-
    land 1740 bis 1890
    , ed. Paul Raabe; Wolfenbütteler Schriften zur Ge-
    schichte des Buchwesens, 5 (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1980), pp. 68–88
    [AgB 9, PP. 231–246].
  • 8. "Hieronymus Hornschuch und seine Orthotypographia (1608/1634),"
    introduction to Hieronymus Hornschuch, Orthotypographia, lateinisch /
    deutsch. Leipzig 1608/1634. Nachdruck
    (Darmstadt and Pinneberg, 1983),
    PP. 5–50 [AgB 7, pp. 195–216].
  • 9. "Der Buchdruck als Überlieferungsträger," in Trasmissione dei testi a
    stampa nel periodo moderno: I seminario internazionale
    , ed. Giovanni Cra-
    pulli (Rome: Ateneo, 1985), pp. 1–15.
  • 10. "The Rylands Catholicon, 1460," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 67
    (1984–85), 561–566.
  • 11. "Instruktionen für Korrektoren der Officina Plantiniana," in Trasmis-
    sione dei testi a stampa nel periodo moderno: II seminario internazionale
    , ed.
    Giovanni Crapulli (Rome: Ateneo, 1987), pp. 1–15 [AgB 8, pp. 217–
    230].
  • 12. "Formatbücher und Buchformat," introduction to Georg Wolffger,
    Format-Büchlein. Graz 1672/1673. Nachdruck (Darmstadt and Pinne-
    berg, 1987), pp. III–XXXI [AgB 2, pp. 77–101].
  • 13. "Die bibliographische Erforschung der ersten Catholicon-Ausgabe(n),"
    Wolfenbütteier Notizen zur Buchgeschichte
    13 (1988), 138–176 [AgB 16,
    PP.393–425]
  • 14. "Der Buchdruck und das Prinzip des typographischen Kreislaufs:
    Modell einer Erfindung," in Gutenberg: 550 Jahre Buchdruck in Europa;
    Ausstellungskataloge der Herzog August Bibliothek, 62 (Weinheim,
    1990), PP. 24–44 [AgB 1, pp. 49–74]
  • 15. "'Meiner Freundin gewidmet': Buchdruck, Raubdruck, Nachdruck, dargestellt am Beispiel von Klopstocks 'Messias,'" Leipziger Jahrbuch
    zur Buchgeschichte
    2 (1992), 43–53 [AgB 6, pp. 175–191].
  • 16. "Die Erforschung des Buchdrucks als Grund- und Hilfswissenschaft,"
    introduction to Rationalisierung der Buchherstellung im Mittelalter und in
    der frühen Neuzeit
    , ed. Peter Rück and Martin Boghardt; elementa dip-
    lomatica, 2 (Marburg an der Lahn: Institut für Historische Hilfswis-
    senschaften, 1994), pp. 5–6. (A brief methodological statement on the
    continuity between the study of handwritten and printed materials.)
  • 17."Der Zwitterdruck: Rationalisierung oder Komplikation der Textver-
    mittlung? Dargestellt an Philip Melanchthons Bedencken auffs Interim,
    1548," ibid., pp. 173–195 [AgB 5, pp. 145–173]

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    Page 62
  • 18. "Anton Ulrichs 'Römische Octavia', 1677–1714: Verleger- und
    Druckerstrategien einer Veröffentlichung," Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Bu-
    chgeschichte
    4 (1994), 29–47 [AgB 10, pp. 247–265].
  • 19. "The Second Disturbance in Quire F: An Unsolved Mystery in Fust
    and Schöffer's Psalterium Benedictinum of 1459," in The German Book
    1450–1750: Studies Presented to David L. Paisey in His Retirement
    , ed.
    John L. Flood and William A. Kelly (London: British Library, 1995),
    pp. 9–21 [cf. AgB 18, pp. 443–459: Boghardt's original German ver-
    sion, previously unpublished].
  • 20. "Druckanalyse und Druckbeschreibung: Zur Ermittlung und Bezeich-
    nung von Satzidentität und satzinterner Varianz," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch
    1995, 202–221 [AgB 3, pp. 103–129].
  • 21. "Blattersetzung und Neusatz in frühen Inkunabeln," Bibliothek und
    Wissenschaft
    29 (1996), 24–58 [AgB 20, pp. 487–512].
  • 22. "Ein spezieller Schachtelbogen im Berliner Exemplar des Psalterium
    Benedictinum von 1459," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1997, 76–94 [AgB 19,
    pp. 461–485].
  • 23. "'auf einem Falz befestigt, der nicht zum Buchblock oder zum Ein-
    band gehört': Kodikologische Bemerkungen zum Gothaer Exemplar
    der Mainzer Catholicon-Ausgabe von 1460," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1998,
    80–89 [AgB 17, pp. 427–441].
  • 24. "änderungen in Wort und Bild," La Bibliofilia 100.2 –3(1998 [=1999]),
    513–581 [AgB 12, pp. 285–340].
  • 25. "Punkturmuster in großformatigen Inkunabeln und die Datierung des
    Mainzer 'Catholicon,'" Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1999, 75–88.
 
[32]

Martin Boghardt, Archäologie des gedruckten Buches, herausgegeben von Paul Needham
in Verbindung mit Julie Boghardt; Wolfenbütteier Schriften zur Geschichte des Buchwesens,
Band 42 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008).

German Printer's Manuals

  • "'Der in der Buchdruckerei wohl unterrichtete Lehr-Junge': Bibliographische Besch-
    reibung der im deutschsprachigen Raum zwischen 1608 und 1847 erschienenen ty-
    pographischen Lehrbücher," Philobiblon 27 (1983), 5–57.
  • [In the series of reprints of German printer's manuals published by Verlag Renate Raecke,
    Pinneberg, general editors Martin Boghardt, Frans A. Janssen, and Walter Wilkes, the
    following contain introductions by Boghardt:]
  • Hieronymus Hornschuch, Orthotypographia, lateinisch / deutsch. Leipzig 1608/1634. Nach-
    druck
    (Darmstadt and Pinneberg, 1983): see also no. 8, above.
  • Johann Ludwig Vietor and Jacob Redinger, Format-Büchlein. Frankfurt am Main 1679; and
    Johann Rist, Depositio Cornuti Typographici. Frankfurt am Main 1677. Nachdruck (Darm-
    stadt and Pinneberg, 1983).
  • Christian Gottlob Täubel, Orthotypographisches Handbuch. Halle und Leipzig 1785. Nachdruck
    (Darmstadt and Pinneberg, 1984).
  • —, Allgemeines theoretisch-praktisches Wörterbuch der Buchdruckerkunst und Schriftgießerei.
    3 Bände. Wien 1805–1809. Nachdruck
    (Darmstadt and Pinneberg, 1986).
  • Georg Wolffger, Format-Büchlein. Graz 1672/1673. Nachdruck des Londoner Handexemplars
    (Darmstadt and Pinneberg, 1987); see also no. 12, above.
 
[*]

This essay is a slightly revised version of my Introduction to Martin Boghardt's Archäologie
des gedruckten Buches
(Wiesbaden, 2008): see Appendix for further details of this work.

[1]

Obituaries: Horst Meyer, "Martin Boghardt in memoriam," Buchhandelsgeschichte 1998,
no. 4: B207–208; Stephan Füssel, "Martin Boghardt—Bibliothekar und Buchforscher,"
Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1999: 335–336.

[2]

I am grateful to Julie Boghardt for supplying significant information and documenta-
tion, including the reminiscences of Elisabeth Boghardt, and for her constant encouragement.

[3]

Christiane Boghardt, Martin Boghardt, and Rainer Schmidt, Die zeitgenössischen Drucke
von Klopstocks Werken: Eine deskriptive Bibliographie
(Berlin and New York, 1981), p. XIX: "Beson-
deren Dank schulden [die Verfasser] Professor Bernhard Fabian, dem Münsteraner Anglisten
und Direktor des Institutum Erasmianum, der sie auf die 'Analytische Bibliographie' der An-
gelsachsen hingewiesen hat. Es sei nicht verschwiegen, daß die Arbeit an den Klopstockdrucken
ohne die Kenntnis dieser längst etablierten Forschungsrichtung begonnen wurde und hier erst
durch Professor Fabian und einige seiner Schüler ein Wandel veranlaßt worden ist."

[4]

Christiane Boghardt and Martin Boghardt, "Die Halleschen Messias-Drucke von
1751/1752," 1971 (Appendix, no. 1).

[5]

Boghardt analyzed the two 1749 editions in greater detail in "Der erste Einzeldruck
von Klopstocks Messias: Zur Prioritätsbestimmung gleichdatierter Drucke," 1979 (Appendix,
no. 6).

[6]

William H. McClain, "William Kurrelmeyer: German American 1874–1957," The
Report, A Journal of German-American History
37 (1978), 8–18; E. Albrecht, "Bibliography of
William Kurrelmeyer," Modern Language Notes 68 (1953), 291–299. The first of Kurrelmeyer's
many bibliographical investigations in this area was "Doppeldrucke von Schillers Jungfrau von
Orleans," Modern Language Notes 25 (1910), 97–102, 131–137.

[7]

"Zur Bestimmung des Erstdruckes von Goethes Faustfragment," 1972 (Appendix,
no. 2); "Der Begriff des Doppeldruckes," 1973 (Appendix, no. 3).

[8]

Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, Die echten Ausgaben von Goethes Faust (Munich: Bremer Presse for
Martin Bodmer, 1932), 85 copies printed; idem, Goethes Faust-Fragment 1790: Eine buchkundliche
Untersuchung;
Schriften der Corona, XXVI (Zurich and Munich, 1940).

[9]

Two secondary remarks may be useful. Boghardt's work was cited and discussed by
Percy H. Muir, "Goethe Bibliography with Special Reference to Faust Ein Fragment 1790,"
The Book Collector 26.3 (1977), 342–352. Although he agreed with Boghardt's result, Muir seems
not to have understood the details of the argument (he likewise failed to understand Schulte-
Strathaus's arguments from the paper stocks). Muir missed entirely that the headline evidence
was the core, and the original feature, of Boghardt's study. Misleadingly, he wrote (p. 347),
"Boghardt takes the view first expressed by Kurrelmeyer that the more correct text should
always be considered to be the earlier, a standpoint which appears to me to be dubious." It is
significant that he did not support this by quoting Boghardt, who said no such thing. Muir had
it backwards: Boghardt argued explicitly against treating this as a rule. In fact, for Kurrelmeyer
too, this was not a rule, but rather a general presumption, always to be tested in specific cases.
On the other hand, Boghardt suggested that the inner formes of the Faust-fragment sheets went
to press first, and the outer formes second. My examination of the sequence of type impressions
in two Eo copies of the Faust-fragment convinces me that the outer formes were, at least for
most sheets, printed first.

[10]

John L. Flood, review in The Library 5th ser. 33.3 (1978), 246–248; James E. Walsh, re-
view in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73.3 (1979), 380–383. Although Walsh's final
sentence seemed to suggest that the interest of the monograph would be more or less limited to
Germanists, he in fact recognized that its importance was much wider (p. 381): "[T]he critical
method outlined by Boghardt for the collation, stemmatization, and evaluation of successive
printed forms of a text has a validity not limited to any one country or century."

[11]

Cf. Analytische Druckforschung, pp. 15–17, "Analytische Druckforschung in Deutschland.

[12]

"Der Zwitterdruck: Rationalisierung oder Komplikation der Textvermittlung? Darge-
stellt an Philip Melanchthons Bedencken auffs Interim, 1548," 1994 (Appendix, no. 17).

[13]

Johannes Luther, "Zwitterdrucke in der Reformationszeit," Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde
neue Folge 1 (1909), 109–114.

[14.]

"Das Buchformat und seine Variationsmöglichkeiten: Zur Technik der Buchgestaltung
im 18. Jahrhundert," 1980 (Appendix, no. 7).

[15]

Twenty years later, independently of Boghardt's work, virtually the same point was
established with regard to one particular job carried out by the English novelist and printer
Samuel Richardson: James E. May, "Interrelating the Cancellantia and Partial Gatherings in
the First Edition of Edward Young's The Centaur not Fabulous," Studies in Bibliography 53 (2000
[2002]), 241–263.

[16]

Analytische Druckforschung, pp. 79 and 155 (note 37). As it happens, GW's identification
of the first and second settings of these sheets, K.3.8, 4.7, and 5.6, is backwards. In the first
setting, these sheets are signed with majuscule K, as in sheets K1–2 and the text types are
the same as K1–2. In the rarer second setting, the sheets are signed with minuscule k, and the
typographic layout of the text varies from that of sheets K1–2.

[17]

"Johann Gutenberg and the Catholicon Press," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America
76.4 (1982), 395–456. Two brief Chancery quarto tracts from the Catholicon shop
(probably Johann Gutenberg's shop) were printed by the same technique, with first impressions
of their two-line castings made c. 1459–60, and second impressions made c. 1469.

[18]

Analytische Druckforschung, p. 84: "Der Einblattkarton ist ein meist auf Neusatz
beruhendes Ersatzblatt, das anstelle eines zu tilgenden Blattes eingeklebt wird." Ibid., pp. 92–
97, illustrates several rare examples, in copies of Klopstock's Oden (Hamburg, 1771, 4°), his Die
deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik
(Hamburg, 1774, 8°), and Goethe's Schriften, Bd. 3 (Leipzig, 1787/1790,
8°) where the cancellandum and cancellans leaves are the same setting, except for in-press
corrections made in the cancellans. Martin discussed and reproduced one more example in
"Der Buchdruck und das Prinzip des typographischen Kreislaufs: Modell einer Erfindung,"
1990 (Appendix, no. 14), fig. [19], from his own copy of Eduard Mörike, Gedichte (Stuttgart and
Tübingen, 1838), which retains both the cancellanda and the cancels.

[19]

At the time of this first correspondence, September 1983, Boghardt had examined
four copies of the second impression of die Catholicon (Galliziani) and eight of the third (Tower-
Crown), but had not seen a copy of the first impression. I had seen three copies of the first
(Bull's Head-vellum) impression, two on paper and one on vellum, but only relatively briefly.
In my reply to Boghardt I wrote, "There are cancel leaves in the Bull's Head = vellum im-
pression … but … I still don't have an adequate list of exactly how many leaves, and which
leaves … were cancelled."

[20]

Martin Boghardt, "Die bibliographische Erforschung der ersten Catholicon-Aasgabe(n),"
1988 (Appendix, no. 13); Paul Needham, "The Catholicon Press of Johann Gutenberg: A Hid-
den Chapter in the Invention of Printing," Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 13 (1988),
199–230.

[21]

"Punkturmuster in großformatigen Inkunabeln und die Datierung des Mainzer
Catholicon,"
1999 (Appendix, no. 25). This study, based on a lecture given at the Gutenberg-
Museum in Mainz, 20 June 1997, was uncompleted at Boghardt's death. He did not have time
to verify and revise some of the information on imprints and dates of the incunable editions,
nor to prepare the footnotes that he would have considered indispensable. Nonetheless, it
presents an extensive survey of, and makes valuable comments on, varying pinhole patterns in
about 75 early Royal and Imperial folio editions from Mainz, Strassburg, Bamberg, Augsburg,
and Nuremberg. A reduced English version, assembled and translated by John Flood, was
published in The Library 7th ser. 1.3 (2000), 263–289, as "Pinhole Patterns in Large-Format
Incunabula." This version, well-intentioned though it was, cannot be looked on as an authen-
tic publication by Boghardt, who played no part in it. Flood purposely omitted the central
focus of Boghardt's study, the varying pinhole patterns of the three impressions of the Mainz
Catholicon, stating that he had made the text "more suitable for an audience less familiar with
the minutiae of the prolonged and sometimes fraught debate over the printing of the Mainz
Catholicon…."

[22]

John Barrie Hall, "Jacobus van Wageningen, Manilius, and Housman," in Latin Studies
in Groningen 1877–1977
, ed. Heinz Hofmann (Groningen, 1990), pp. 57–72 (p. 61).

[23]

G. Thomas Tanselle, "Science and Bibliography," Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974),
55–89 (p. 87).

[24]

"Die Erforschung des Buchdrucks als Grund- und Hilfswissenschaft," 1995 (Appendix,
no. 16), p. 5: "Indessen räume ich gerne ein … daß die historischen Wissenschaften, die man
zu recht auch Grundwissenschaften genannt hat, keineswegs reine Fakten- und Datenhuberei
sind. …" This may be compared with Ludwig Traube's introductory remark in his Munich
lectures, 1902–1905: "Was bei allen Universitätsfächern der Fall ist, trifft im höchsten Grade
bei der lateinische Philologie des Mittelalters zu. Sie besteht für sich allein, sie kann die Kraft
eines einzelnen voll in Anspruch nehmen. … Aber zugleich ist sie Hilfswissenschaft—und
vielfach unentbehrliche—für den, der ganz sich andern Fächern hingibt" (Einleitung in die
lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters
, ed. Paul Lehmann; Ludwig Traube, Vorlesungen und Ab-
handlungen … zweiter Band [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1911], p. 2).

[25]

"Der Buchdruck als Überlieferungsträger," 1985 (Appendix, no. 9), pp. 5–6; enlarged
in "Der Buchdruck und das Prinzip des typographischen Kreislaufs: Modell einer Erfindung,"
1990 (Appendix, no. 14).

[26]

From Boghardt's draft introduction to his planned collected papers, September 1991.

[27]

"Die analytische Druckforschung beschäftigt sich mit dem gedruckten Buch als einem
materiellen, handwerklich-technischen Produkt und untersucht dessen Entstehungsweise an-
hand seines Erscheinungsbildes. Sie ist eine Indizienforschung, eine Archäologie des gedruck-
ten Buches." He used the same sentences in "Druckanalyse und Druckbestimmung," 1995
(Appendix, no. 20), p. 202, an article based on a talk he gave in late November 1991, at the
tenth annual meeting of the Wolfenbütteier Arbeitskreis für Geschichte des Buchwesens.

[28]

Le manuscrit autographe de Thomas a Kempis et "l'Imitation de Jésus-Christ." Examen ar-
chéologique et édition diplomatique du Bruxellensis 5853–61
, 2 vols. (Antwerp, 1956).

[29]

A convenient collection of discussions of the topic is to be found in Codicologica I:
Théories et principes, ed. Albert Gruys and J. P. Gumbert (Leiden, 1976); it includes relevant
studies by Gruys, Masai, Albert Derolez, T. J. Brown, and Delaissé. See also Wolfgang Milde,
"Spezielle Handschriftenkunde," in Karl Löffler, Einjührung in die Handschriftenkunde, neu bear-
beitet von Wolfgang Milde (Stuttgart, 1997)
, pp. 19–25.

[30]

For Martin's public statement on this episode see "Die bibliographische Erforschung
der ersten Catholicon-Ausgabe(n)," 1988 (Appendix, no. 13), note 33.

[31]

Dom Philibert Schmitz, "Dom Donatien De Bruyne: In memoriam," Revue Bénédictine
47 (1935), 205–206 (p. 206).