"Armadillos of Invention": A Census of Mechanical Collators

Studies in Bibliography 55 (2002) 133-170

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"Armadillos of Invention":

A Census of Mechanical Collators

Steven Escar Smith ^*

Since the late 1940s literary scholars have developed and used optical devices, known popularly as mechanical collators, to aid in the comparison of printed documents from the same edition. ¹ The first and most famous of these devices was invented by and named for the Shakespeare scholar Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman. Its fame and widespread use inspired the invention of other collators over the years, the most successful being the Lindstrand Comparator, the McLeod Portable Collator, and the Hailey's Comet. ² Charlton Hinman built his machine as an aid in his landmark study of the Shakespeare First Folio (Hinman, Printing and First ). Though the scholarly climate in which he labored has changed considerably, the Hinman Collator and its successors are still enabling important work. Noteworthy among the more recent projects is David Vander Meulen's use of the Hinman in collating copies and examining running titles to resolve the old question of which of the two 1728 issues of Pope's Dunciad came first ("Printing"). He also machine-collated copies for his facsimile edition of the 1728 Dunciad, and even more recently he used the Hinman, the Lindstrand , and the Comet for a study of press variants in bibliographical classics by Fredson Bowers and R. B. McKerrow ("Revision"). Another ambitious project is currently being carried out by R. Carter Hailey, who has examined around sixty copies of the three 1550 editions of Piers Plowman on the Comet (Metzger [2]). Randall McLeod has conducted extensive studies of the Holinshed Chronicle, the 1591 edition of John Harrington's translation of Orlando Furioso, and other texts on his device ("From Tranceformations") . Conor Fahy has also used McLeod's invention for his study of Orlando Furioso (1989). The energy and resourcefulness behind these projects suggest that the practice of machine-aided optical collation is far from its end. Indeed, as long as literary scholars continue to rely on the close examination and comparison of printed materials, there will always be a place for the Hinman or one of its offshoots, if not their computerized equivalent, though practical electronic alternatives have only recently begun to emerge. ³ Whether for quick checks of points between a few copies or for larger projects , the "armadillos of invention," to quote McLeod, are still effective and in most cases the only viable tools (Zalewski 14). And as Peter Shillingsburg has observed: "The optical machines available to editors before the advent of computers remain necessary and useful in order to compare multiple copies of the same typesetting" (135).

This census seeks to document the history of these machines and is divided into six parts—the location lists of Hinmans, Lindstrands, McLeods, and Comets; a list of "One-off Spin-offs" (experimental devices that, for the most part, never developed beyond the prototype stage); and a cumulative index. I should caution that not all of the surviving machines are available to researchers. Anyone interested in using a particular collator is encouraged to make inquiries well in advance of traveling to one. In regard especially to the Hinman, I should also mention that, as with any other aging population , some of these devices have fared better through the years than others. The youngest Hinman Collator is now over twenty years old and the oldest over half a century. As would be expected, the newer models tend to be in better condition than the older ones.

The section on the Hinman is by far the most detailed. I have not consciously followed Falconer Madan's degressive principle of bibliography in constructing this census, though the Hinman is the most important and influential collator. As I have stated elsewhere, it has assumed an almost iconic status within bibliographical circles (Smith 2000). Because of this status and the fact that it is a large and fairly impressive piece of equipment, it has been easier to find people who remember it and to uncover records relating to its acquisition. The Lindstrand Comparator...