Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

Chapter 1- Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector

21 Chapter  Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector Ann Blair The errata list counts as one of the trappings of the book that first appeared with printing. It ranks alongside other innovations linked to printing, such as the title page, signatures, and foliation or pagination, in contrast to features (such as the table of contents, the alphabetical index, and the use of headings and textual divisions) that have antecedents in medieval manuscripts. While errors of course occurred in manuscript production and could be multiplied from one exemplar to many copies (for example in pecia copying), the errors in printed books were immediately multiplied in many hundreds of copies. Corrections ideally would be made in as many copies again. Stop-press corrections could be made during printing and account for the textual variations that can be found within a single edition. In addition, methods were sought to make corrections after the printing was completed. The earliest solutions included entering manuscript or hand-stamped corrections in copy after copy. A more costly and radical solution, and the only one that rendered the error invisible to the reader, was to reprint a new page (called a “cancel”) to be substituted for the faulty one. Although we do not often know why one method of correction was chosen over another, the cancel was likely the optimal response to the intervention of a censor during the printing process, since it erased the offending passage without a trace. But starting in I am grateful for helpful feedback to Bradin Cormack, Seth Lerer, and the readers for the press, and to the participants of the Folger Institute Conference, “Transactions of the Book,” November 2001. . Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 80–88. . David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 126–7. See also R. W. Chapman, Cancels (London: Constable; New York: Richard R. Smith, 1930). Cancels were rare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but more common in the eighteenth. The earliest example Chapman discusses is from 1648 (46–7). In one example he cites from 1800, a cancel was used to enlarge the list of errata (57). For an example of a cancel introduced in a print run probably in response to the demand of a censor, see the two states of Charles Perrault, Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle (Paris: Antoine Dezal- 22 Ann Blair the early sixteenth century, the most common remedy was to include in the book a printed list of errata; these comprised errors noticed once the printing was completed, along with corrections that readers were asked to integrate by hand into their copies of the text after purchase. Errata lists invite different kinds of study. So far they have been used mostly in editing texts to help determine the ideal state of an edition. To study them from a broader perspective, it would be useful to have statistics about which types of books most often contained them and to reflect on the main reasons why. Clearly some printers and authors were particularly attentive to the quality of production, notably of humanist texts, but one can also find errata lists in vernacular works without great scholarly pretensions. Unfortunately, library catalogues are generally not consistent enough in indicating the presence of errata lists to enable one to study the question without a painstaking examination of vast numbers of individual rare books. One might also be able to use errata lists as a clue to printing methods, to discern common patterns of error. Just as today typing generates inversions of letters and scanning introduces confusions of similar-looking symbols, early modern printing generated peculiar types of error, including letters rotated from their correct position or confused (notably long s and f ). Nonetheless, the list of common errors that one sixteenth-century printer included in lieu of a list of specific errata still rings familiar today, with its mix of typographical errors and errors of usage and spelling: confusion of similar letters, double for single consonant or vice versa, wrong punctuation or word division, missing or superfluous letters. A study of errata was amusingly singled out as the epitome of pointless erudition mocked in Jean Paul’s 1795 novel featuring the fifth-form master Quintus Fixlein. “Fixlein had labored—I shall omit his less interesting performances—at a Collection of Errors of the Press in German...