Printing and Misprinting: A Companion to Mistakes and In-House Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450–1650). Edited by Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Anthony Grafton, and Paolo Sachet

Not specifically about French literature or even French books, Printing and Misprinting is a major scholarly achievement that merits the attention of anyone interested in early modern European literature and book history. With a Foreword by H. R. Woudhuysen, an Introduction by the three editors, and twenty-four chapters, it paints a brilliantly detailed picture of the types of mistakes that could occur in early modern print and how they were handled by authors, printers, compositors, proofreaders, and readers. A frequently articulated sensitivity to error at the time may suggest that errors were kept to a minimum, but the hazards of the early modern workshop were such that errors were in fact rife, despite the attempts by many agents to suppress or control them. In addition to standard typographical errors, there were errors due to the inking process, including fallen type, errors of mise en page, errors associated with images, which could be misplaced or straightforwardly misrepresentative of the verbal text (in the case of scientific books, for instance (Anthony Grafton)), and errors due to poor-quality paper and tools (used for cheap publications (Laura Carnelos)). Proofreading throughout the printing process could identify and correct errors by stopping the press and re-setting the type, or emending by pen, or, eventually, including errata lists, though in the case of cheap publications, such as early newspapers, where speed was of the essence, error was accepted as unavoidable (Jan Hillgärtner). For all publications, the notion of a perfect volume was a mirage. Most of the time, errors may be inconsequential or, at least, not seriously disruptive to the reading process, but they may have very serious ramifications indeed. The Authorized Version of the Bible published in 1631 in London by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas printed the seventh commandment as ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’, which led to the near-total destruction of the print run (François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles). Very differently, misprints involving the two pairs of homophonous twins in The Comedy of Errors can be seen as compounding the comedy of errors for its readers (Alice Leonard). The contributions are organized into six parts. After a first part examining different kinds of error in general, the remaining five have a thematic focus (humanism, religion, science, the arts, ephemera) and each chapter is a case study. The range is impressive: from a checklist of typographical and manuscript interventions in Aldine incunabula (Geri Della Rocca de Candal) to error and correction in an early Yiddish biblical epic, Shmuel Bukh (Rachel Wamsley). The contributions are consistently excellent. It is hard not to read such a meticulous piece of scholarship on this theme without looking for misprints. I noticed only one: ‘migh’ instead of ‘might’ on page 370. I was also puzzled that between the end of Appendix 2 and the start of the first index there are three unpaginated blank pages, but I shall follow the advice of the Foreword and not ‘try to detect some significant meaning where none was (probably) intended’ (p. vii).