The Present and Future of Incunable Cataloguing, II

Copies of More Than 5,600 Printed Editions from the fifteenth century are described here in a way that such books have rarely been described. The Bodleian Library's extensive collection of incunabula contains copies of nearly one fifth of the known editions, a proportion large enough for this catalogue to represent a historic advance in our approach to early printed books. Its method is new and its publication an occasion for some reflection on the future of cataloguing incunabula.

The definition of this category as books printed before the end of the fifteenth century is arbitrary. Framed by Mallinckrodt in 1639, the definition hardened when such books became eminently collectable, but neither Aldus Manutius nor Wynkyn de Worde would have recognized it. A particular historical interest attaches to the first generations of printing, and a fixed term has the practical convenience of limiting the corpus of books, but bibliographical categories could be defined more specifically. One specific factor is the outward anonymity of many incunabula. The first incunabula, like most manuscripts, had no title-page and no imprint, but, unlike manuscripts, they were not unique: each copy from a particular edition was fundamentally the same as every other. The bibliographical challenge was to establish which copies belonged to the same edition and to work out where, by whom, and when it was printed. This immense and difficult task was put on a secure footing in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Older anonymity can still be a source of great frustration when one uses literary scholarship that predates, or does not make proper use of, the bibliographical reference literature. The gradual emergence of title-pages and imprints meant that well before the end of the century it was already much easier to identify a book and to see that two copies belonged to the same edition. Books printed in 1501 and after sometimes present the same superficial anonymity as books printed in 1460, and in such cases they need, and have sometimes received, similar treatment. But fifteenth-century books with title-pages and imprints showing printer and place of printing and date are as identifiable as they would be in the sixteenth century or later. It is historical interest rather than bibliographical difficulty that allows them to remain in the category of incunabula.

The cataloguing practice for incunabula was focused primarily on editions, and its terms of reference were related to the bibliography of printed books from the sixteenth century and after. The literary habit of listing editions primarily by author and title, with a subordinate arrangement by place of printing, printer, and date, was established by the seventeenth century and survives to this day. Georg Wolfgang Panzer inverted the data, giving priority to place of printing and date, a practice that Henry Bradshaw and Robert Proctor developed into the modern bibliographical arrangement by country, place, and printer, thereby bringing together the typographical data that had to be compared if editions were to be correctly distinguished. In catalogues neither arrangement has proved at all satisfactory as an approach to the works printed. The Bodleian catalogue was, we learn from the introduction, destined to follow the alphabetical arrangement, because the head of catalogues, John Jolliffe, thought 'that Proctor order is an idea that has outlived its usefulness and also not entirely appropriate to a collection as "small" as Bodley's' (J. W. Jolliffe to D. M. Rogers, 19 September 1984; quoted, p. lxxii). Kristian Jensen was appointed to succeed David Rogers in 1985. When he took on the task of producing a catalogue, and set about raising the funds that made it possible, the distinctive aspect of the approach adopted for this catalogue...