ERNST BRACHES

Gutenberg's ''

THE NOMANSLANDBETWEEN AND PRINTED

Has there been any bridging of the gap between the study of the printed book and that of in recent years? The opposite seems to be the case. In 1927-8 that first instructor in analytical , Ronald B. McKerrow, hardly recognised its importance. Nearly half a century later, - in 1972, Gaskell seems to have widened the gap even further.2 This is evi- dent from the omission from his title in his own new 'Introduction to Bibliography' of McKerrow's specification 'For Literary Students'. McKenzie's criticism of 1969 can also be seen at work here.' The commo- tion it caused proves that McKenzie was not alone in having forgotten that textual criticism in printed must first of all attend to that which has been the basis of textual criticism in manuscripts for ages: that copying of a text is essentially done by a single person. I have not yet come across a bibliologist who has reached my own conclusion: that throughout five cen- turies of the compositor's errors are in almost every case the same 4 which the copying already made centuries before.4 But not only analytical bibliography could benefit from closer collaboration between the study of the printed book and that of manuscripts.

THE CONFORMITY BETWEEN MANUSCRIPTAND PRINTED BOOK

Curt F. Buhler demonstrated in 19605 that in general the fifteenth-century consumer cared as little about how a book had been produced as we do whether a book is brought into being with metal types or perhaps elec- tronically, as long as the end result is in fact a book, i.e. what a particular society accepts as such.6 During the period books were copied from manuscript to manuscript, from printed book to printed book, from 84 manuscript to printed book and from printed book to manuscript. The end result of all these methods remained simply a book in the only form then conceivable.' 7 Buhler's observation that during the incunable period all the roads of whatever technique always arrived at the same goal, leads to the conclusion that in the early years of printing there could have been no essential dif- ference between the activities of copyist and compositor: every copyist could therefore become a compositor; every compositor had eo ipso to be a copyist. This in turn has the consequence that the production of the earliest typographical workshops has to be seen from the viewpoint of the scrip- torium. Painter was right when in 1970 he described the punchcutter's work 8 as subordinate to the copyist's eye.8

Buhler's observations of 1960 have led to no new trends in Gutenberg research, and this although no other institution could have served as the model for the first typographical workshop than the workshop for hand- written books, the scriptorium. In 1966 Lehmann-Haupt's publication on the 'Giant of ' ap- peared.10 According to Lehmann-Haupt, the high-quality Giant Bible would have been produced at Mainz on behalf of the cathedral, and more precisely between 4 April 1452 and 9 July 1453 (thus concurrently with the printed '' B42). Lehmann-Haupt attributed also other Giant to the same workshop. Moreover, the author referred to the close kinship in the execution of the Giant Bible he discussed with that of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible." With regard to another manuscript Giant Bi- ble, at Wurzburg, Lehmann-Haupt remarks: 'The fact that the Wurzburg Giant Bible is written usually in 36 lines offers tempting prospects for an