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‘A Clear and Lively Comprehension’: The History and Influence of the Bibliographical Laboratory

from Part I - Rationales

By
Steven Escar Smith
Edited by
Ann R. Hawkins
Steven Escar Smith
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University
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Summary

Understanding the practical details of printing and its related processes is essential for researchers working in the field of bibliography and textual studies. As early as 1913, R. B. McKerrow advocated that all students gain a ‘mechanical’ knowledge of printing processes:

It would, I think, be an excellent thing if all who propose to edit an Elizabethan work from contemporary printed texts could be set to compose a sheet or two in as exact a facsimile as possible of some Elizabethan octavo or quarto, and to print it on a press constructed on the Elizabethan model. Elementary instruction in the mechanical details of book-production need occupy but a very few hours of a University course of literature, and it would, I believe, if the course were intended to turn out scholars capable of serious work, be time well spent.

What McKerrow regarded as necessary for bibliographical understanding was a ‘clear and lively comprehension’, allowing researchers to see the book ‘not only from the point of view of the reader interested in it as literature, but also from the points of view of those who composed, corrected, printed, folded, and bound it’. Gaining such knowledge has never been easy, and it has become less so over the last century as the industry has evolved away from hot and cold metal technology.

Type
Chapter
Information
Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History , pp. 32 - 37
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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