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  • Grundriss der Inkunabelkunde. Das gedruckte Buch im Zeitalter des Medienwechsels by Wolfgang Schmitz, and: Materielle Aspekte in der Inkunabelforschung ed. by Christoph Reske, Wolfgang Schmitz
  • Lotte Hellinga (bio)
Grundriss der Inkunabelkunde. Das gedruckte Buch im Zeitalter des Medienwechsels. By Wolfgang Schmitz. (Bibliothek des Buchwesens, 27.) Stuttgart: Hiersemann. 2018. x + 420 pp. + 16 colour plates. €169. isbn 978 3 7772 1800 7.
Materielle Aspekte in der Inkunabelforschung. Ed. by Christoph Reske and Wolfgang Schmitz. (Wolfenbütteler Schriften zur Geschichte des Buchwesens, 49.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, on behalf of the Herzog August Bibliothek. 2017. 224 pp. + 4 colour plates. €68. isbn 978 3 447 10719 8.

When Wolfgang Schmitz was invited to produce an update of Konrad Haebler’s Handbuch der Inkunabelkunde, almost a century after its publication in 1925, it did not take him long to decide that instead it would be better to write a new book from scratch. He also decided not to aim at the comprehensive treatment of the material as implied by the title Handbuch, but instead to present a Grundriss. Here we face a first difficulty: although Grundriss is a traditional term in German scholarship, the literal translation in English as ‘outline’ does no justice to the nature of the book: is it a guide, an introduction, a companion, or rather a primer? Reading on, we encounter a further and more serious translation problem. The German Inkunabelkunde is not directly equivalent to the English-language ‘study of incunabula’, a subject that is rapidly developing, and not only in the English-speaking world. In recent decades the emphasis has shifted from identification of printers and alphabetical or chronological enumeration to addressing textual transmission, dissemination through the book-trade, reception, ownership, and readership. In 2018, in the month Schmitz’s Grundriss was published, two major exhibitions of incunabula opened, running—by coincidence—simultaneously in Bruges and Frankfurt-am-Main. With their extensive catalogues they exemplify the diversity of approaches to early printing, each showing the contextualization of the complex circumstances in which printing houses either thrived or failed to thrive. In September of the same year a large exhibition and seminar in Venice celebrated the completion of the 15c Booktrade Project conceived in conjunction with the MEI database recording provenances in incunabula. Within these wider interests, the basic facts about most incunabula—contents, place of printing, printer, and date— are largely accepted as a given.

To understand what is encompassed by the word Inkunabelkunde we have to backtrack to Haebler’s book. It was no coincidence that it was published in the same year as the first volume of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (hereafter ‘GW’). Haebler, who was its editor-in-chief from the beginning of the project in the early years of the twentieth century, gave in his Handbuch an account of the features of incunabula as recorded in the GW’s descriptions. He rarely departed from the scheme in which we can recognize the structure of specifics given in the GW’s entries: printing types, format, layout, quire-signatures, foliation, etc. In the Handbuch the functions of such features are discussed, and how they fit into the chronology of the development of printing-house practices. Haebler was only moderately interested in the extent that irregularities reveal the actual procedures in printing houses. Understandably, the task of recording and describing all printing of the fifteenth century took priority over analysing the production methods of individual items. Neither did he intend to prescribe how to produce bibliographical descriptions, but he offered guidance to users of the GW, preceded by a short but clear survey of previous bibliographical endeavours. [End Page 510]

In 1904, when the Kommission for the GW was set up, and even in 1925, it worked in the expectation that the GW would be produced by a centrally organized group of staff in Berlin with support from a small number of experts located elsewhere. The most notable exception, politically driven, was M. L. Polain’s decision not to contribute to the GW his continuation of M. Pellechet’s general catalogue of the incunabula in French collections. We all know that not long after 1925 history took...

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