Dane 2013

Dane, Joseph. Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

"As bibliographers or book historians, we perform our work by changing the function of the objects we study. We rarely pick up an Aldine edition to read one of the classical texts it contains. No one reads the Bible in Gutenberg’s version, and as for books by Koberger, staples of histories of early printing, we don’t read the texts they contain at all, and perhaps would not even recognize them. Bentley’s Milton has nothing to do with Milton, nor does the mythology surrounding it have much to do with Bentley,  and no one learns Latin by reading Donatus. Print culture, under this notion, is not a medium for writing or thought, but a historical object of study; our bibliographical field, our own concoction, becomes the true referent of the objects we define as at its foundation." (1-2)

"Perhaps our book, selected and seen as the epitome of book culture, print culture, literary culture, or some sort of culture (always in the West) can be seen as something else again: not the epitome of this abstraction of culture (however we define it) but its antithesis, the thing that marks the limits of the abstraction, or perhaps the line in the sand where the abstraction loses force. This object defines our abstractions more rationally in a negative sense. To single out a particular book-copy is to define what such a copy is not. It reveals our abstractions only by insisting in its very materiality that those abstractions do not exist “out there” in the culture or history or series of events we claim to be interested in." (2)

"Ca. 1800": What's in a Date?

Pg 39 -- how slippery history of printing is; the books we tend to look at don't prove

Size of sheet of paper determines format in early books; but this excludes playing cards and independent engravings -- machine made paper makes formats a matter of convention -- then becomes a matter of categories for shelving

Stereotyping too "changes what a book or an edition is, and changes too the basic definitions bibliographers use to define these things" (42)

Overimportance of Moxon -- has somewhat arbitrarily become the classic work in the field

Bibliographers of the Mind

McKenzie's "Printers of the Mind"; showing that conclusions of analytic bibliography do not match what historic records we have (e.g. of Cambridge UP)

Easy test: have some make conclusions based on analytic bibliography, others make conclusions from records -- test them against each other; but this hasn't been done, compositorial studies continue to happen

"Bibliographers often invoke science, yet they seem completely indifferent to scientific method and the tedious repetitiveness that method entails: the obsession with performing an experiment once, then performing it again." (60)

Not clear that the distinctions between analytical and descriptive and enumerative bibliography are what we assume! (60-61)

Anglo-American bibliography defined by STC, all books printed in England to 1640, catalogued by editions; how to define the unit "edition" is the question of Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description

Descriptive bibliography covers the "ideal copy"