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.

A Guide for the Perplexed.

Paper and related materials.

The Structure of Documents.

Producing Texts.

Analysis and Evidence.

Making Variants.

Setting Conditions.

Last Words.

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.

But this book contains useful material for any librarian seeking good arguments when advocating for the usefulness of their collection.   (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, 2012)

Showing an extensive knowledge of the scholarship in his field he provides an objective assessment, often correcting false reasoning and offering a sound explanation of the facts. For all these reasons, I believe that Mark Bland s Guide would be of help to anyone interested in the discipline.   (European Review of History: Revue europeenne d′histoire, 18 July 2012)

"Bland′s book takes its place in a grand tradition of scholarly guides to analytical and descriptive bibliography ... Bland offers a clear and comprehensive guide to bibliography, and it is appropriate that it is most likely to come into its own as part of the work of making meaning, wedged open beneath a researcher′s elbow." (The Review of English Studies, 23 December 2011)

"This book is indeed a very practical, clear and valuable guide to books and manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . The book is well illustrated and Bland makes good use of the images, especially in his exemplary discussion in Chapter Two about how to use watermark evidence." (Script and Print, 1 August 2011)

"This book will equip students, perhaps encountering sixteenth– and seventeenth–century texts for the first time, in their early printed or manuscript form (as distinct from modern editions), to approach bibliographical description and analysis without fear or confusion and, for those wishing to pursue the subject more widely, it will serve admirably as an introduction." (Routledge ABES, 2011)