Texts in Transit: Manuscript to Proof and Print in the Fifteenth Century by Lotte Hellinga, and: Incunabula in Transit: People and Trade by Lotte Hellinga (review)

After a long and distinguished career as a historian of early printing, punctuated but not crowned by a Festschrift in her honour in 1999, Lotte Hellinga has treated herself and us to a retrospective of her greatest hits in not one but two substantial volumes. (By an unlucky combination of mix-ups and mishaps, for which the reviewer is only partly responsible, the first was not given a timely review in these pages when it came out five years ago. In what follows I refer to that volume as TT, and to Incunabula in Transit as IT.) These are not just collected essays, however, as every one of them has been reworked, refreshed, or variously sliced and diced since its first publication, sometimes decades ago. Over the years her work has been remarkable for its consistency of topics and approach, but even so she has tried to shape the originally self-standing pieces here to form coherent chapters, with running themes and glances backward and forward.

Her virtues are well known: scrupulous attention to the evidence, which can be at times excessively recalcitrant, at others extremely sparse; an enthusiasm for dealing with hard and central questions, and a willingness to take on and assault established positions, even if those positions were themselves at one time revolutionary; not shying away from amassing detail and sorting it out in classified and digested form; a wide range of interests, from the highly technical to the affably essayistic, taking in type and printing, binding, illumination, and the history of trade and collecting along the way; and not least an active imagination which proceeds by bold, sometimes vertiginous bounds. Henry Bradshaw’s passing comment in a letter of 1868 advising the investigator to ‘Arrange your facts vigorously and get them plainly before you and let them speak for themselves, which they will always do’ has been elevated almost to the status of Bradshaw’s First Law. But what are the facts that can speak for themselves when vigorously arranged? One has to feel a measure of sympathy with the author when she writes that ‘The few facts we have can be arranged in various ways …’ (IT, p. 335). And determining what is a fact rather than an acceptable or debatable deduction in the primeval period of printing is often hazardous. The bulk of these papers in any case place known data under intense bibliographical scrutiny rather than revealing novelties or new ‘facts’. There is little in either book that stems from archival research or surprise discoveries. It is rather a patient knitting together of observation and inference.

The two books have a quite distinct feel. Texts in Transit focuses very closely on analysis of the transition from pen to press. Dr Hellinga falls with delight upon printing-house errors which, as she says, ‘usually offer an opportunity to come closer to methods of production’ (TT, p. 198), and this indeed is at the centre of her interests: ‘My point of departure was the process of production …’ (TT, p. 229). The process is manifested by the marks that show how the pages were calculated in advance of composition—‘casting-off’—or by increases in contraction, by extraneous leaves or variations in page-size, disturbances or irregularities of various sorts which often betray copy-fitting and reveal why it was needed. The principal piece here is the fifty-five-page ‘Proofreading and Printing in Mainz in 1459’, greatly expanded from its...