Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture (review)

Joseph A. Dane's Out of Sorts is part of the distinguished Material Texts series published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and follows his Abstractions of Evidence in the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, reviewed in Textual Cultures 5.1 (2010). Like the earlier book, it is divided into two parts: the first is called "Out of Sorts" and looks at problems concerned with the classification of type; the second, "Images and Texts", is concerned with different sorts of reproductions. The book's eight chapters are topped and tailed by an Introduction and Conclusion, with an "Interlude" separating the two halves. It is pleasing that most of the material in the book is new, with only two chapters previously published in journals: that on Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) first appeared in Eighteenth-Century Life (2005) and that on the filiation of the Chaucer folios was published in "a somewhat more tangled version" (243) in Studies in Bibliography (1998).

Dane is always a lively and provocative writer with lots of ideas and a strong awareness that difference is the bibliographer's stock-in-trade. In the Conclusion (191), he writes of his initial ideas for the book: "I began this thinking of this work as an extension of a polemic I have been conducting for several years". He would have a critique of "the notion of the bibliographical grand récit, that large general abstraction within which all material evidence is placed, and which defines out of existence the very possibility of counter-evidence". He goes on to talk about how he has found "my own version of the narrative I have critiqued elsewhere" and confesses that some of the chapters deal with topics "that have been irritating me for some time". His general view seems to be that in the composition of the book "chance trumps intent". The genial tone and paradoxical turn of some of his earlier work has given way to a sense of irritation and frustration that things in material and digital forms are never quite what they seem to be. Chance seems to have played a significant role in the book's composition and the result is not entirely happy: it is hard to discern an overall argument that holds its different parts together.

The problem is evident from the Introduction which works well as a starting-point for the first four chapters in the first part and mentions chapter 5 in part two, but says little about the remaining three chapters. Similarly, the Conclusion has a characteristically engaging page or two of autobiography (191-93) and then turns, without explanation or comment, into a "Note on a Note by Walt Whitman", dealing with the so-called "Deathbed Edition" of Leaves of Grass. Some readers will be able to see (more or less) why Dane chooses to end with a brief consideration of that "edition", but he offers almost no help with joining up the dots—the presence of the discussion of this particular publication seems quite random. Whitman is a long way from the book's first chapter which is about Gutenberg's early types. Dane argues that little is known about the processes employed in their early manufacture and that "material and textual evidence from the seventeenth century and even the eighteenth century" has been "transferred" to the fifteenth century (31). In the next chapter, he turns to the history of the second type associated with Mainz and Gutenberg, the so-called DK Type, named after the early editions of Donatus and the "Kalender" printed in it. In addition to examining Gottfried Zedler's role in the dating of the works printed in DK, he also touches on the reproductions of its alphabets in scholarly accounts of it and then, more puzzlingly, writes about the two-color initials in them. The third essay traces the history of the argument that gothic...