Printing and misprinting: a companion to mistakes and in-house corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450-1650)

Abstract

"'To err is human'. As a material and mechanical process, early printing made no exception to this general rule. Against the conventional wisdom of a technological triumph spreading freedom and knowledge, the history of the book is largely a story of errors and adjustments. Various mistakes normally crept in while texts were transferred from manuscript to printing formes and different emendation strategies were adopted when errors were spotted. In this regard, the 'Gutenberg galaxy' provides an unrivalled example of how scholars, publishers, authors and readers reacted to failure: they increasingly aimed at impeccability in both style and content, developed time and money-efficient ways to cope with mistakes, and ultimately came to link formal accuracy with authoritative and reliable information. Most of these features shaped the publishing industry until the present day, in spite of mounting issues related to false news and approximation in the digital age. Early modern misprinting, however, has so far received only passing mentions in scholarship and has never been treated together with proofreading in a complementary fashion. Correction benefited from a somewhat higher degree of attention, though check procedures in print shops have often been idealised as smooth and consistent. Furthermore, the emphasis has fallen on the people involved and their intervention in the linguistic and stylistic domains, rather than on their methodologies for dealing with typographical and textual mistakes. This book seeks to fill this gap in literature, providing the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary guide into the complex relationship between textual production in print, technical and human faults and more or less successful attempts at emendation. The 24 carefully selected contributors present new evidence on what we can learn from misprints in relation to publishers' practices, printing and pre-publication procedures, and editorial strategies between 1450 and 1650. They focus on texts, images and the layout of incunabula, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century books issued throughout Europe, stretching from the output of humanist printers to wide-ranging vernacular publications."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

From copy to cancels / Anthony Grafton -- Part I. Type, proofs, and illustrations. Tallen type : the benefits of a printer's error / Claire Bolton ; Proof sheets as evidence of early pre-publication procedures / Randall Herz ; Kludging type : some workarounds in early English print / James Mission ; Misprinting illustrated books / Ilaria Andreoli, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and Roger Gaskell -- Part II. Humanism. Printing and politics in Italian humanism : manuscript and stop-press corrections in Poliziano's Coniurationis commentarium / Marta Celati ; Manus manutii : a preliminary checklist of typographical and manuscript interventions in Aldine incunabula (1495-1500) / Geri Della Rocca de Candal ; Aldus as proofreader : the case of the Thesaurus Cornu copiae (1496) / Paolo Sachet ; Managing misprints : Jan Moretus I's diverse approaches to correcting errors / Dirk Imhof -- Part III. Religion. Misprinting the word and the image of God (Paris, 1498-1538) / François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles ; The collective editorial strategy of the Unity of the Brethren / Veronika Sladká ; Biblical misprints : error and correction in an early Yiddish epic / Rachel Wamsley ; 'Before the law' : Jewish correctors of early printed books / Pavel Sládek ; 'But to whose charge shall I lay it? Your printer is all readie loaden' : the rhetoric of printers' errors in early modern religious disputes / Matthew Day -- Part IV. Science. Controlling errors in the first printed book of astronomical tables : Regiomontanus's Ephemerides (Nuremberg, 1474) / Richard L. Kremer ; Misprinting Aristotle : the birth and life of a Frankenstein's fish / Grigory Vorobyev ; Conrad Gessner as corrector : how to deal with errors in images / Anthony Grafton -- Part V. Poetry, music, and theatre. Fernando de Herrera Contra errata : a re-evaluation of his edition of Garcilaso de la Vega / Pablo Alvarez ; Marketing a misprint : Christopher Rye's The Actes of the Apostles and early English music publishing / Anne Heminger ; Misprinting and misreading in The comedy of errors / Alice Leonard ; Making sense of error in commercial drama : the case of Edward III / Amy Lidster -- Part VI. Widespread and ephemeral circulation. Drawn corrections and pictorial instability in devotional books from the workshop of Gerard Leeu / Anna Dlabačová ; Learning from mistakes : paper and printing defects in sixteenth-century Italian popular books / Laura Carnelos ; Printing under pressure : mistakes in the earliest newspapers / Jan Hillgärtner.