Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books (1450-1800): A Practical Guide (Wiley Blackwell, 2019)
There can be few students of Shakespeare and the early modern period who do not come into contact with early printed books at some time or another during their studies – and some, of course, more frequently than others. But while we may become familiar with their format, there are always questions at the back of our minds: How were these books printed? Why were they printed in the way that they were? Who was involved in their production? What is the meaning of the printers ornaments, headpieces and tailpieces? How were the pages identified? What were the costs involved? Why is the spelling inconsistent? And why might two copies of the same book bought from the same bookseller at the same time be different from each other?
In this excellent book – a practical guide – Sarah Werner addresses all these questions and more in a detailed account of the entire printing process of the early modern book, from blank sheets of paper to sequential pages of printed text (it was the responsibility of the bookseller, not the printer, the bind the texts as required). This information is presented first as an overview, then again in more detail in subsequent chapters, thereby offering a format that can be utilised by the reader in a number of ways. The book then moves on to discuss the use of advertisements and title pages as marketing tools – the economics of printing are constantly borne in mind. All the less familiar features that might appear on the page, apart from the actual text, such as printer’s devices (the fore-runner of the logo), marginal notes, signature marks and so on are explained in detail and the various ways of reproducing images, including movable diagrams which were popular in astronomy and navigation books, are all discussed and illustrated. By the end of Part 3, we have pretty good idea how an early printed book came into being. But for the researcher of course, this is just the beginning!
The remaining two parts of the book are concerned with what we can learn of a book from looking at (not necessarily reading) the early printed text. What are it’s physical features and how should we handle old books? Werner deals with working with both a physical book in our hands, as well as the increasing number of early printed texts which are now available in digital form. Clearly this advance in technology makes such texts far more accessible to us and possibly easier to navigate, but digitization brings it’s own problems. Although we can see all the words, we cannot feel the pages, smell the book, see the binding – and often, it is not at all certain whether or not we are looking at the complete book.
Werner ends by urging us to treasure and value these early books, not just for what is written within their pages, but what they can tell us about the world in which they were produced:
‘Books tell us stories. It’s easy enough to read what’s written. It’s harder to read in a different type of languge, to look at the signs left by long-ago workers about their unseen actions…. no book exists outside of it’s making’.
Dr Jill Francis, Library Assistant
Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books (1450-1800): A Practical Guide (Wiley Blackwell, 2019) is available now on the New Acquisitions shelf in the newly reburbished library – come and have a look at both!
Shakespeare Institute Library 