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1 237 Variants in the Two Editions (1671,1690) of Witsen’s Treatise on Shipbuilding Dieder ick Wildeman No modern standard textbook exists for the st udy of historical Dutch shipbuilding , and scholars with an interest in the subject have long felt this omission . This work by A. J. Hoving is the first serious attempt to explain and render accessible one of the foremost seventeenth-century sources, Nicolaes Witsen’s Aeloude en He dendaegsche Scheeps-bouw en Bes tier (Ancient and Modern Shipbuilding and Management) of 1671. But no matter how much information we can glean from contemporary sources on seventeenth-century shipbuilding, our knowledge of the subject will never be complete. Shipbuilding of that time was a craft in which the master shipwrights did not entrust the details of their knowledge and methods to paper. The ships they built were no standard product , either. At present, only through underwater archaeology can we gain direct access to the practices of shipbuilding and compare, supplement, and, in some cases, correct the written and printed sources. Nowadays we regard books as a standard product. If we have a certain edition of a text, we t ake for granted that every other copy is exactly the same. This is not the case for books from the preindustrial age. Like shipbuilding, the printing and publishing of books in the seventeenth c entury had many aspects of a craft. By looking at original copies we can learn much about the history of a text. The “archaeology” of books can reveal surprising information about their production and sometimes even their use. Introduction In the seventeenth century if a small error was discovered in the text during the printing process, it was corrected in the type. But paper was an expensive commodity , so the already printed, uncorrected pages were often still used to make the book. Sometimes the author or pub lisher wanted to add or c orrect entire passages or pages after the book was printed, or the authorities wanted to have certain passages removed. In that case, no new edition was printed, but pages were cut out and new ones inserted. These practices explain why even books with identical title pages can contain significant differences. These variations Appendix ฀ ฀ Variations฀on฀Wit฀ sen 238 Appendix (variants, in bibliographical terminology) can explain much about the production of a book, too.1 If certain copies contain the variant pages, they are usually referred to as a “state” of an edition. The user of a modern f acsimile of a seventeenth- century book should be aware of the possibility and par ticularities of variants. Every facsimile should therefore have an introduction describing the makeup of the original book and a statement explaining why a certain copy and a particular state was used as a basis. Preferably, other variant pages should appear in an appendix to the facsimile . Without this information the status of the book as a source is not clear and therefore unreliable. Practically everyone studying Witsen nowadays will be using a facsimile edition, as original copies of the Aeloude en Hedendaegsche Scheeps-bouw en Bes tier have become rare and very expensive. The original 1671 edition is available only in the rare book department of large or specialized libraries. An original copy of the second, 1690 edition is an extremely rare book, bearing the new title Architectura navalis et regimen nauticum ofte Aaloude en Hedendaagsche Scheeps-bouw en Bestier . . . (Shipbuilding and Management, or Ancient and Modern Shipbuilding and Management), which adds Latin to the original Dutch title. Only five copies are known today, and just three are accessible in libraries. A f acsimile of the 16 71 edition was published in 1979. Some years before, in 1970, a facsimile of the 1690 edition had already seen the light.2 Neither facsimile edition of these books contains an introduction. This article aims to provide the user of these facsimiles with some information about the nature of each book and its makeup. It also identifies the variant states and tries to explain why they were made. But before turning our attention to the study of the books themselves, it is useful to elaborate a little on its author. Nicolaes Witsen as an Author on Naval Architecture Nicolaes Witsen (1641–1717) was thirty years old when Aeloude en Hedendaegsche Scheeps-bouw en Bes tier was published. Witsen was certainly not a shipwright himself but rather the son of a wealthy merchant with a leading position within the most...

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