.......................................................................................................................................................................

PRINTING AND
MISPRINTING
.......................................................................................................................................................................

A Companion to Mistakes and In-House Corrections

in Renaissance Europe (1450–1650)

Edited by
GERI DELLA ROCCA DE CANDAL,
ANTHONY GRAFTON,
AND
PAOLO SACHET
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022921889
ISBN 978–0–19–886304–5
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863045.001.0001
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 Contents
............................................

List of Illustrations xi
List of Contributors xxiii

Introduction 1
Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Anthony Grafton, and
Paolo Sachet

1. From Copy to Cancels: Matthew Parker and the Quest for Error 7
Anthony Grafton

PA RT I T YPE, PRO OF S, A N D I LLU ST R AT ION S

2. Fallen Type: The Benefits of a Printer’s Error 33
Claire Bolton

3. Proof Sheets as Evidence of Early Pre-Publication Procedures 51

Randall Herz

4. Kludging Type: Some Workarounds in Early English Print 70

James Misson

5. Misprinting Illustrated Books 80

Ilaria Andreoli, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and
Roger Gaskell

PART I I H UMA N I SM
6. Printing and Politics in Italian Humanism: Manuscript and Stop-Press
Corrections in Poliziano’s Coniurationis commentarium 107
Marta Celati

7. Manus Manutii: A Preliminary Checklist of Typographical and

Manuscript Interventions in Aldine Incunabula (1495–1500) 121
Geri Della Rocca de Candal
 contents ix

8. Aldus as Proofreader: The Case of the Thesaurus Cornu

copiae (1496) 165
Paolo Sachet

9. Managing Misprints: Jan Moretus I’s Diverse Approaches to Correcting

Errors 198
Dirk Imhof

PA RT I I I RELIGION
10. Misprinting the Word and the Image of God (Paris, 1498–1538) 215
François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles

11. The Collective Editorial Strategy of the Unity of the Brethren 233
Veronika Sladk´

12. Biblical Misprints: Error and Correction in an Early Yiddish Epic 248
Rachel Wamsley

13. ‘Before the Law’: Jewish Correctors of Early Printed Books 261
Pavel Sl´dek

14. ‘But to whose charge shall I lay it? Your Printer is all readie loaden’: The
Rhetoric of Printers’ Errors in Early Modern Religious Disputes 278
Matthew Day

PA RT I V SC I ENC E
15. Controlling Errors in the First Printed Book of Astronomical Tables:
Regiomontanus’s Ephemerides (Nuremberg, 1474) 295
Richard L. Kremer

16. Misprinting Aristotle: The Birth and Life of a Frankenstein’s Fish 325
Grigory Vorobyev

17. Conrad Gessner as Corrector: How to Deal with Errors in Images 345
Anthony Grafton
x contents

PA RT V POET RY, MU SIC , A N D T H EAT RE

18. Fernando de Herrera Contra Errata: A Re-evaluation of his Edition of
Garcilaso de la Vega 369
Pablo Alvarez

19. Marketing a Misprint: Christopher Tye’s The Actes of the Apostles and
Early English Music Publishing 385
Anne Heminger

20. Misprinting and Misreading in The Comedy of Errors 399

Alice Leonard

21. Making Sense of Error in Commercial Drama: The Case of

Edward III 415
Amy Lidster

PART VI WI DESPREA D A N D EPH EMER A L

CI RC U L AT ION
22. Drawn Corrections and Pictorial Instability in Devotional Books from
the Workshop of Gerard Leeu 431
Anna Dlabačov´

23. Learning from Mistakes: Paper and Printing Defects in Sixteenth-Century

Italian Popular Books 446
Laura Carnelos

24. Printing under Pressure: Mistakes in the Earliest Newspapers 463

Jan Hillgärtner

Appendix A: Glossary of Printing and Misprinting 481

Appendix B: Glossary Translation Tables 504
Index of Subjects 566
Index of Names 568
 .........................................................................................................

in trodu c tion
.........................................................................................................

geri della rocca de candal,

anthony grafton, and paolo sachet

The kingdom of error in early modern Europe was as vividly real as the Kingdom of Satan.
It was located not in the bowels of the earth but on its surface, in the shops of printers. The
most learned and painstaking writers, printers, and correctors found themselves constantly
embroiled, like modern Laocoons, in struggles with error-ridden copy, type, proofs, and
finished books. ‘I am learning’, Balthasar Moretus wrote in 1602 to his favourite author,
Justus Lipsius, ‘that if error is the normal condition in any area, it is certainly so in correcting
printed books’.1 Even extraordinary efforts could not prevent mistakes from taking place.
In the 1730s, the engraver John Pine set out to produce an edition of Horace that would be
not only handsome, but impeccable. Following precedents that had been adopted in Asia
for quite different reasons, he took the text of a 1701 edition by James Talbot, one of Richard
Bentley’s many enemies at Trinity College, Cambridge, and engraved each page, to prevent
the errors caused by the use of moveable type.2 As Pine explained in his short preface,

The form of printing carried out with fixed letters cut into brass plates is more handsome than
that produced by moveable metal type. It also has another advantage: so long as the plates are
engraved without errors, whatever they depict on the paper must be immaculately corrected.
The course of events in the printing house is different. There, while the press is being worked,
letters are commonly pushed down or fall out.3

1 Balthasar Moretus to Justus Lipsius, 12 February 1602, Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus, Arch.
12, fols 198, 14: ‘et si usquam in re alia, in typographica hac correctione labi hominis proprium esse disco.’
2 Pine followed the text in Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera ad optimorum exemplarium fidem recognita,
ed. J. Tabot, Cambridge, 1701. Talbot’s first edition appeared 1699. On Talbot, see R. Unwin, ‘“An English
Writer on Music”: James Talbot, 1664–1708’, The Galpin Society Journal, 40, 1987, pp. 53–72. Though Bent-
ley did not see Talbot’s edition as significant, it was certainly better than one of its competitors, the edition
published in 1701 by William Baxter, whose many errors drew the ire of John Locke. See F. Waldmann,
‘Locke, Horace and a Syllabus Errorum’, Locke Studies, 15, 2015, pp. 3–29.
3 Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera, 2 vols, London, 1733–1737, I, sig. b1r: ‘Impressio, quam characteres
immobiles aeneis tabulis incisi faciunt, eam ex metallicis typis mobilibus ductam non solum nitore
superat: sed illud commodi etiam habet, ut, modo tabulae sine mendis sint insculptae, quidquid per
easdem in charta repraesentatur, non possit esse non perquam emendatum; cum in typographia aliter
eveniat, ubi, dum prelum exercetur, literae haud raro aut deprimuntur, aut intercidunt.’

Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Anthony Grafton, and Paolo Sachet, Introduction. In: Printing and Misprinting. Edited by Geri Della Rocca de
Candal, Anthony Grafton, and Paolo Sachet, Oxford University Press. © Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Anthony Grafton, and
Paolo Sachet (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863045.003.0001
2 printing and misprinting

This project evoked immense enthusiasm. The Prince of Wales and throngs of noblemen
subscribed to the first volume, the Kings of England and France to the second, and the
finished book was very handsome. Unfortunately, however, Homer nodded. Pine illustrated
his edition with fine images of many antiquities. In reproducing a Roman coin, he slipped
and engraved ‘POST EST’ in place of ‘POTEST’. The error had to be corrected in a second
impression.⁴
‘To err is human’. As a material and mechanical process, as an effort to give old and
new texts a permanent, reliable, and accessible form, early printing made no exception
to this general rule. Conventional wisdom treats printing as a technological triumph that
spread freedom and knowledge. In fact, the history of the book is largely a story of errors
and adjustments. Mistakes of many kinds regularly crept in while texts were transferred
from manuscript to printed forms, and various emendation strategies were adopted when
printers and their workers spotted them. In practice, the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ turned into
something like a black hole which sucked texts in and mangled them. Publishers, editors,
and authors reacted to these failures in highly creative ways. They aimed at impeccability in
both style and contents, developed time- and money-efficient ways to cope with mistakes,
and soon came to link formal accuracy with authoritative and reliable information. Most of
these features remained standard in the publishing industry until present days, despite such
worrying recent developments as the decline of copy-editing and the spread of ‘fake news’.
Yet none of these strategies functioned perfectly: control and correction not only prevented,
but generated errors.
In spite of its pervasiveness, early modern misprinting has so far received only passing
mentions in scholarship and it has never been treated together with proofreading in a sys-
tematic way. Even specialised manuals — from McKerrow, Bowers, Haebler, and Gaskell
up to Greetham and Tanselle — refrained from describing the causes and types of errors
in detail.⁵ In recent times, a few bibliographers, including Lotte Hellinga, Neil Harris, Ran-
dall McLeod, Edoardo Barbieri, A. S. G. Edwards, and Ann Blair, have started working on
specific issues. Room remains, however, for a comprehensive account.
In-house correction has benefited from a slightly higher degree of attention, though
the procedures used in printing shops have often been idealised as smooth and consis-
tent. While the two most authoritative and recent companions to the book world adopt
a novel global perspective and offer up-to-date insights into economic, social, and didactic
aspects of printing, they include only short entries on cancel, erasure, errata, manuscript
corrections, overprinting, and proofs.⁶

⁴ See the online entry, ‘Monumentum aere perennius: John Pine’s Horace’, University of Missouri,
https://library.missouri.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/engraved/horace, accessed 30 September
2022.
⁵ R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, Oxford, 1927; F. Bowers, Prin-
ciples of Bibliographical Description, Princeton, 1949; K. Haebler, The Study of Incunabula, transl. L. E.
Osborne, New York, 1933 (originally published in German in 1925 and 1932); P. Gaskell, A New Intro-
duction to Bibliography, Oxford, 1972; D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction, New York,
1992; G. T. Tanselle, Descriptive Bibliography, Charlottesville (VA), 2020.
⁶ M. F. Suarez and H. Woudhuysen (eds), The Oxford Companion to the Book, Oxford, 2010;
L. Howsam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, Cambridge, 2015. D. Dun-
can and A. Smyth (eds), Book Parts, Oxford, 2019, includes A. Smyth, ‘Errata Lists’, pp. 251–61,
 introduction 3

More often than not, scholars have concentrated on the people involved and their efforts
to impose new standards of usage and style, rather than on their methods for dealing with
typographical and textual mistakes. Percy Simpson’s Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Sev-
enteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1935, repr. 1970 and 1976), a rich if chaotic array of
anecdotes of and about correctors, exemplifies the first tendency. In indispensable studies,
D. F. McKenzie, David McKitterick, George Hoffman, Paolo Trovato, and Brian Richard-
son have traced the links between correction and the social history of texts and languages,
especially for English, French, and Italian literatures in the early modern period.⁷ One of
the editors of this Companion has treated the attitudes and practices of learned correc-
tores in some detail. But he also points out that many unresolved problems await further
investigation, notably outside the market for scholarly books.⁸
Misprinting and correction are far from being as well integrated in book studies and
intellectual history as they are, for example, in classical and medieval philology.⁹ Literary
scholars, in particular, have studied textual mistakes as well as efforts to correct them.1⁰
Recent books by Alice Leonard, one of the contributors to this volume, Adam Smyth, and
Jennifer Richards provide further illumination, taking new paths from the narrower view
championed by such pioneers as Fredson Bowers, Charlton Hinman, and W. W. Greg, who
examined errors because they were useful for reconstructing an Urtext.11
Textual and non-textual misprints and corrections, after all, are not obviously attractive
topics. Often, those who have studied them have been inspired to do so by stumbling on
or reading about an individual case. Yet there are millions of the former and thousands

while S. Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–1800: A Practical Guide, Hoboken (NJ), 2019, briefly
discusses ‘Corrections and Changes’ at pp. 61–4.
⁷ D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, Cambridge, 1999; D. F. McKenzie, Making
Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. P. D. McDonald and M. F. Suarez, Amherst (MA),
2002; D. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830, Cambridge, 2013; G. Hoff-
man, ‘Writing Without Leisure: Proofreading as Labour in the Renaissance’, The Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 25, 1995, pp. 17–31; P. Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto: la stampa e le revisioni
editoriali dei testi letterari italiani, 1470–1570, Bologna, 1991; B. Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers
in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, 1999. For broader overviews, see, among others, F. Janssen, ‘Authors
Want to Read Proofs! From Erasmus to Schopenhauer’, Bulletin du Bibliophile, 1, 2012, pp. 33–50 and
C. Clavería Laguarda, Los correctores: tipos duros en imprentas antiguas, Zaragoza, 2019.
⁸ A. Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe, London, 2011 and A. Grafton, Inky
Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge (MA), 2020.
⁹ See, e.g., S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, Florence, 1963 (new edn. Turin, 2010);
B. Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie, Paris, 1989; G. Most (ed.), Editing
Texts/Texte edieren, Göttingen, 1998; C. Macé, Textual Scholarship, http://www.textualscholarship.org/
index.html, accessed 30 September 2022. Also see: P. Trovato, Everything you Always Wanted to Know
About Lachmann’s Method: A Non-Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of
Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text, rev. edn, Padua, 2017.
1⁰ See J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, Chicago and London, 1983 (rev. edn. Char-
lottesville (VA), 1992); J. Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, Cambridge, 2002; and
S. Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern, New York, 2002. Cf.
also J. Ziolkowski, ‘Metaphilology’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 104/2, 2005, pp. 239–72.
11 A. Leonard, Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error, London, 2020; A. Smyth, Material Texts
in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 2018; J. Richards, Voice and Books in the English Renaissance: A
New History of Reading, Oxford, 2019. On the strengths and drawbacks of the methodology adopted
by Bowers, Hinman, and Greg, see G. T. Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: An Historical Introduction,
Cambridge, 2009, pp. 6–30.
4 printing and misprinting

of the latter in the products of early printing — ‘Saul has slain his thousands, and David
his tens of thousands’. Printing multiplied the copies of a given text by the hundreds, but
it sprayed out misprints in vastly greater numbers. The traditional systems of correction,
many of them inherited from scribes, could not dam the flood of mistakes loosed by the
new system of production, or even keep it in bounds. Early printing was not a smooth, mod-
ern process, but a barely ordered chaos. Only negligible fractions of these early errors and
corrections have so far been identified or studied: less the tip of an iceberg than a single ice
cube perched on that tip. Most scholars and students working at any level on early modern
books still lack a method for recognising and recording mistakes and publishers’ correc-
tions. They often end up overlooking their presence and missing their relevance as sources of
information.
This book provides the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary guide to the complex
relationships among textual production in print, technical and human errors, and more
or less successful attempts at emendation. The twenty-four specialist contributions present
new evidence on what we can learn from misprints in relation to publishers’ practices, print-
ing and pre-publication procedures, and editorial strategies between 1450 and 1650. They
focus on texts, images, and mise-en-page in incunabula, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-
century books issued throughout Europe, from the stately creations of humanist printers to
humble vernacular pamphlets. Through a series of case studies and comparative analyses,
the authors tackle the entire spectrum of errors, their sources, and the ways of dealing with
them. Their source material includes manuscripts, proof sheets and printed copies retain-
ing preparatory interventions for new editions; extant copies of a faulty edition which was
corrected by the publisher more or less systematically; different faulty editions by the same
publisher and/or of the same text; printed errata; and contemporary paratextual material,
scholarly correspondence and treatises discussing typographical mistakes and publisher’s
corrections. A detailed appendix provides the first account of the various misprints and
corrections one can encounter while studying books as material objects and vehicle of texts.
The methodology employed in the book combines textual and material bibliography
with history of information, scholarship, and ideas. This integrated approach makes pos-
sible a well-rounded investigation of the subject and aims at maximum accessibility to
non-specialist readers. Its chief innovations take four forms.

1) The extended timespan, embracing the first two centuries of Western printing, is
designed to overcome the divisions, traditional in book studies, among manuscripts,
incunabula, and later publications. This book treats editiones principes and early
scientific publications side by side with illustrated sixteenth-century books, Shake-
speare’s plays, and the precursors of modern newspapers.
2) This volume also attends to genres well outside the classical and vernacular mas-
terpieces that have been the object of most previous studies. It covers examples of
religious, scientific, and popular literature, and images, numerals, and music, as well
as texts, and broadens our understanding of the practices used in varied provinces of
the world of early printing.
3) Another strength of the volume is its geographical and linguistic range. From Spain
to Poland, Renaissance Europe is represented in all its magnificent variety of peoples
and pursuits, including religious minorities and the eastern parts of the continent.
 introduction 5

4) Numerous illustrations, detailed appendices and indexes, and efforts to avoid jargon
and refer to evidence in consistent, transparent ways aim to make this book accessible
to students as well as scholars.

This collection chiefly addresses academic readers, at both an institutional and an indi-
vidual level. Still, it is intended as a resource not only for book historians and analytical
bibliographers, but also for a broader readership. We hope that it will find users in many
institutions, among scholars, librarians, and students interested in classical and early mod-
ern literature (from Homer to Shakespeare), religious history (Christianity and Hebraism),
art history (book illustrations), history of science (astronomy and zoology), popular culture
(devotion and chap books) and information (early gazettes), and the intellectual history of
Renaissance Europe.
The chapters are thematically arranged, with each session following an internal chrono-
logical order. This ensures maximum clarity and readability. Chapter 1 serves as an intro-
duction. It offers a case study that suggests the range of ways in which error haunted all
involved in making books. The chapters in Part I address four technical problems that
early modern printers had to deal with, from proofreading to inclusion and arrangement
of images. Part II focuses on celebrated humanist printers, active in Florence, Venice, and
Antwerp, and their Latin, Greek, and Hebrew books. The various challenges involved in
printing sacred texts and related commentaries are examined in Part III, which draws com-
parisons among the practices of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Errors and emendations
in astronomical and zoological treatises are fully explored for the first time in Part IV,
with special attention to the tables and figures that appear in so many early modern books,
but few of which have yet been fully studied.12 Part V concentrates on vernacular poetry,
music, and theatre, three genres which are often characterised by textual fluidity and, espe-
cially for music, required complex printing abilities. Finally, Part VI examines the attitudes
toward errors and the practices of emendation characteristic of printers of popular litera-
ture, ranging from devotional books to early newspapers. Their tendency to value time and
productivity over precision and correctness had, on occasion, dramatic results.
The volume ends with two appendices and indexes for subjects and names. Appendix
A comprises a glossary detailing for the first time the many cases of misprinting and cor-
rection, while Appendix B offers tables of translation of the glossary’s entry words into a
number of different languages.
As children of Ford and Taylor, we tend to imagine early modern workplaces as orderly,
even though well-known documents like Thomas Platter’s autobiography and innovative
historical works by Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, and others should have taught
us to know better.13 The evidence collected and sifted here enables us to understand the
texture of working lives in the printer’s shop in a new way. Our material shows that in-house
quality control was sporadic at best. By studying the problems that arose in the course of

12 For a notable exception see S. Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text and Argument
in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany, Chicago and London, 2011.
13 T. Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, ed. A. Hartmann, 2nd edn. rev. by U. Dill, Basel, 1999, pp. 119–20,
and discussed in Gaskell, A New Introduction (n. 5 above), pp. 48–9; N. Zemon Davis, Society and Culture
in Early Modern France: Eight Essays, Stanford, 1975, Chapter 1; R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and
Other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York, 1984 (rev. edn., New York, 2009), Chapter 2.
6 printing and misprinting

everyday work, we not only see that theory and practice often did not match, but also gain
a deeper mastery of the ways in which books were produced.
Many years ago, the eldest editor of this volume met Sir Roger Mynors, appropriately in
Duke Humfrey’s library. When the subject of errors came up, Sir Roger said that even in the
most recent iteration of his OUP edition of Vergil, new typographical errors had appeared.
On a visit to the Clarendon Press, he requested an explanation. The press officials produced
a compositor, whom Sir Rogers described as a small man with a strong Oxfordshire accent.
Asked about the errors, he told a story. He himself had never dared to enter the premises of
the Press on Walton Street on a Saturday night. Colleagues who had done so, however, had
witnessed pieces of type dancing. Presumably, they had escaped from the locked formes, and
some of them had eventually climbed back into the wrong positions. Anyone who hopes to
understand the world and work of hand-press printers — and some of their more recent
successors — should meditate on this tale.
We are grateful to the OUP editorial team for helping us get this Companion into the best
possible shape. Unlike most of our early modern colleagues, we will not blame the printer
for the mistakes that might still be found in the book.