Dane 2013

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

"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"