A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts

A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts provides an introduction to the language and concepts employed in bibliographical studies and textual scholarship as they pertain to early modern manuscripts and printed texts  Winner, Honourable Mention for Literature, Language and Linguistics, American Publishers Prose Awards, 2010 Based almost exclusively on new primary research Explains the complex process of viewing documents as artefacts, showing readers how to describe documents properly and how to read their physical properties Demonstrates how to use the information gleaned as a tool for studying the transmission of literary documents Makes clear why such matters are important and the purposes to which such information is put Features illustrations that are carefully chosen for their unfamiliarity in order to keep the discussion fresh

Table of Contents:
Illustrative Materials viii Acknowledgments ix 1 A Guide for the Perplexed 1 2 Paper and Related Materials 22 3 The Structure of Documents 49 4 Producing Texts 83 5 Analysis and Evidence 122 6 Making Variants 149 7 Setting Conditions 183 8 Last Words 211 Selected Further Reading 219 Index 230

About the Author :
Mark Bland is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at De Montfort University, UK. He has published extensively on early printed books and manuscripts, paper, censorship, stemmatics, and editorial practice, as well as on Ben Jonson and his contemporaries. He is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford edition of The Poems of Ben Jonson

Review :
“But this book contains useful material for any librarian seeking good arguments when advocating for the usefulness of their collection.”  (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, 2012) “Showing an extensive knowledge of the scholarship in his field he provides an objective assessment, often correcting false reasoning and offering a sound explanation of the facts. For all these reasons, I believe that Mark Bland’s Guide would be of help to anyone interested in the discipline.”  (European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire, 18 July 2012) "Bland's book takes its place in a grand tradition of scholarly guides to analytical and descriptive bibliography ... Bland offers a clear and comprehensive guide to bibliography, and it is appropriate that it is most likely to come into its own as part of the work of making meaning, wedged open beneath a researcher's elbow." (The Review of English Studies, 23 December 2011) "This book is indeed a very practical, clear and valuable guide to books and manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . The book is well illustrated and Bland makes good use of the images, especially in his exemplary discussion in Chapter Two about how to use watermark evidence." (Script and Print, 1 August 2011) "This book will equip students, perhaps encountering sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts for the first time, in their early printed or manuscript form (as distinct from modern editions), to approach bibliographical description and analysis without fear or confusion and, for those wishing to pursue the subject more widely, it will serve admirably as an introduction." (Routledge ABES, 2011)