A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts

A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts provides a concise introduction to the language and concepts employed in bibliographical studies and textual scholarship as they pertain to early modern manuscripts and printed texts.

Focusing on documents from the late sixteenth and early mid–seventeenth century, the author explains the complex process of viewing documents as artefacts, showing readers how to describe documents properly and how to read their physical properties. This helpful Guide demonstrates how we are to use this information, together with an understanding of the processes of production and modification, as a tool for studying the transmission of literary documents.

An invaluable resource illuminating the complex relationship between the material processes and the meanings of the written and printed word, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts is essential reading for anyone interested in book history and textual scholarship.

Illustrative Materials viii

Acknowledgments ix

1 A Guide for the Perplexed 1

2 Paper and Related Materials 22

3 The Structure of Documents 49

4 Producing Texts 83

5 Analysis and Evidence 122

6 Making Variants 149

7 Setting Conditions 183

8 Last Words 211

Selected Further Reading 219

Index 230

Mark Bland is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at De Montfort University, UK. He has published extensively on early printed books and manuscripts, paper, censorship, stemmatics, and editorial practice, as well as on Ben Jonson and his contemporaries. He is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford edition of The Poems of Ben Jonson