Printing and Misprinting: A Companion to Mistakes and In-House Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450-1650)

'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.


Author: Geri Della Rocca de Candal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 07/20/2023
Pages: 608
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.65lbs
Size: 9.50h x 7.10w x 2.30d
ISBN: 9780198863045

About the Author

Geri Della Rocca de Candal, President, Society for the Preservation of Rare Books, Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University, Paolo Sachet, Ambizione Postdoctoral Fellow, Institut d'histoire de la Réformation, UNIGE

Geri Della Rocca de Candal, D.Phil. (Oxon), was Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ERC-funded 15cBOOKTRADE project (2014-19) based at Modern Languages and Lincoln College, Oxford. He currently works as a banking consultant. One time Hon. Treasurer of the Oxford Bibliographical Society (2016-19), he is currently President of the Society for the Preservation of Rare Books [SPRB] and Trustee of the Venice in Peril Fund.

Anthony Grafton studied history, history of science, and classics at the University of Chicago and University College London, where he had the opportunity to work with Arnaldo Momigliano. Since 1975 he has taught history at Princeton University. Most of his work deals with the history of scholarship, the history of books, and the history of learned institutions.

Paolo Sachet, PhD (2015), the Warburg Institute, is currently an Ambizione Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut d'histoire de la Réformation, Université de Genève. His main research interest is the impact of printed books on the intellectual history of early modern Europe, including the use of printing by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century governments, textual scholarship on classical and patristic literature, and the history and collecting of early Italian printed books. He has published extensively on these topics in peer-reviewed journals and collective volumes. He co-edited The Afterlife of Aldus (2018) and is the author of Publishing for the Popes (2020).