Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on references, quotations, names and pronouns
- Introduction
- 1 The fall of pessimism and the rise of New Bibliography, 1902–1942
- 2 New techniques and the Virginian School: New Bibliography 1939–1968
- 3 New Bibliography 1969–1979
- Intermezzo: the rise and fall of the theory of memorial reconstruction
- 4 New Bibliography critiqued and revised, 1980–1990
- 5 The ‘new’ New Bibliography: the Oxford Complete Works, 1978–1989
- 6 Materialism, unediting and version-editing, 1990–1999
- Conclusion: the twenty-first century
- Appendix 1 How early modern books were made: a brief guide
- Appendix 2 Table of Shakespeare editions up to 1623
- Appendix 3 Editorial principles of the major twentieth-century Shakespeare editions
- Works cited
- Index
3 - New Bibliography 1969–1979
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on references, quotations, names and pronouns
- Introduction
- 1 The fall of pessimism and the rise of New Bibliography, 1902–1942
- 2 New techniques and the Virginian School: New Bibliography 1939–1968
- 3 New Bibliography 1969–1979
- Intermezzo: the rise and fall of the theory of memorial reconstruction
- 4 New Bibliography critiqued and revised, 1980–1990
- 5 The ‘new’ New Bibliography: the Oxford Complete Works, 1978–1989
- 6 Materialism, unediting and version-editing, 1990–1999
- Conclusion: the twenty-first century
- Appendix 1 How early modern books were made: a brief guide
- Appendix 2 Table of Shakespeare editions up to 1623
- Appendix 3 Editorial principles of the major twentieth-century Shakespeare editions
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
The 1970s may fairly be characterized as the heyday of New Bibliography, as there emerged a highly specialized and technical branch of work that attempted to build upon the breakthroughs of the 1950s and 1960s in order to provide what Fredson Bowers had declared (pp. 66–8 above) to be within reach: a comprehensive tabulation of the identities of the compositors of the early editions, their identifying habits, the order of their work and that of the pressmen, the nature of each edition's underlying copy and the kinds of correction introduced during the print run. Knowing what kinds of errors may creep in (as from compositors' misreadings, or miscorrection) would enable a modern editor working from the early editions to better decide upon the kind and the degree of emendation needed to restore the authorial meanings.
D. F. McKENZIE, ‘PRINTERS OF THE MIND’ (1969)
The objections to the Virginian-school approach to bibliography made in ‘Printers of the Mind’ did not come entirely out of the blue. Bowers argued that hurried compositorial work can be detected by the pattern of headline reuse, on the principle that if the compositors fell behind the pressmen there was no advantage to making extra skeletons (pp. 60, 67 above), and Alice Walker (1953) thought she could detect haste in the rate of errors made by compositors.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Struggle for Shakespeare's TextTwentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice, pp. 81 - 99Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010