McLeod 1994

McLeod, Randall M., ed. Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance. Papers given at the twenty-fourth annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 4-5 November 1988. New York: AMS Press, 1994.

Manuscript into Print, by Nicolas Barker (1-18)

"All manuscripts are copies: all printed books are unique." (1)

"All printed books lead lives independent from others, starting in the womb, so to speak, before the press has finished its work, during which some copies but not others receive the compositor's correction. When they issue into the world, each one (in our period at least) to be bound independently of the others, they set off on a pilgrimage that may ultimately -- but so many more meet an untimely end -- bring them to an editor's hands." (2)

"a view of the stemmatic plan, a family tree, is apt to force the editor into decisions too narrowly based and perhaps even wrong. It is better reflected, not by the familiar pyramid of the stemma, but by a series of parallel lines, sometimes overlapping, with occasional transverse lines. To vary the geometric metaphor, the editor needs to apply lateral thinking. ... What I mean is the recognition that texts can proceed vertically (or chronologically) by different routes using perhaps differen technologies, without contact or with contact only casual or partial in application." (13)

"Tracing texts is the tracing of dissemination. Dissemination takes two forms": transmission, the single passing on of a text from place to place or age to age; and multipliciation, the same process achieved by creating many copies. Books as families, whether viewed contemporaneously as 'extended families' or genealogically by tracing descent, bring us to the same task: the tracing of the line that links us to the original idea and form of a work through the successive or simultaneous copies made of it." (14)