Lost Incunabula

Part 1 In the Beginning: Lost Incunabula ∵ Falk Eisermann - 9789004311824 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:07:25PM via free access <UN> Falk Eisermann - 9789004311824 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:07:25PM via free access chapter 2 The Gutenberg Galaxy’s Dark Matter: Lost Incunabula, and Ways to Retrieve Them Falk Eisermann In Memory of Dieter Mertens and Jochen Bepler After almost four hundred years of bibliographical effort, it seems safe to say that the Gutenberg Galaxy is a comparatively small clump of stars.1 The overall figure of surviving incunabula editions known today is only slightly bigger than the estimate given in 1972 by German librarians Karl Dachs and Wieland Schmidt, who by way of a simple calculation concluded that the number of fifteenth-century books and broadsides preserved in at least one copy stands around 27,000.2 However, when it comes to counting incunabula there is a range of uncertainties. Many early editions cannot be dated much more accu- rately than ‘circa 1500’ and may belong to either side of the incunabular water- shed; others, formerly described as incunabula, have since been dated to the sixteenth century. Not all ghosts and duplicate descriptions in the various rep- ertories have yet been identified, and there are forgeries and bibliographical hoaxes waiting to be discovered.3 Bibliographers also tend to find differing, 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented in a Graham Pollard Memorial Lecture, 17 April 2012, to the Bibliographical Society, London, and to audiences at the Centres for Medieval Studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Greifswald. I am grateful to the colleagues partici- pating in the discussions after these presentations, and above all to Andrew Pettegree, Flavia Bruni and the participants of the St Andrews Lost Books Conference, where many of my pre- liminary ideas were put into perspective. I also thank Martin Davies, Richard L. Kremer, Michael Laird, Christine Magin, Paul Needham and Eric White for their input, suggestions and correc- tions. All online resources quoted in this article were last consulted on 20 October 2014. 2 Karl Dachs and Wieland Schmidt, ‘Wieviele Inkunabelausgaben gibt es wirklich?’ Biblio theksforum Bayern, 2 (1974), pp. 83–95. Most recently Lotte Hellinga, Texts in Transit. Manuscript to Proof and Print in the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 20, gives an estimate of “between 28,000 and 28,500”. On 17 September 2014, my istc count for editions printed before 1501 was 28,623; the overall number given on the istc website as of March 2014 was 30,375 editions, including dubious material and imprints from after 1500. The gw database con- tains more than 36,000 descriptions including many ghosts not eligible for istc (see below). 3 For a rather obvious (and lame) bibliographical joke see Hans A. Halbey, Ein unbekannter deutschsprachiger Druck Gutenbergs. Zu einer Entdeckung im GutenbergMuseum (Rheinbach- Merzbach, 1984). There are hoaxes in both the istc (via BSB-Ink) and gw databases. I am not © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi �0.��63/97890043��8�4_003 Falk Eisermann - 9789004311824 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:07:25PM via free access <UN> 32 Eisermann if not controversial, answers to the question “what is a variant, and what con- stitutes an edition of its own right?” Furthermore, both the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (gw) and the istc frequently add new entries to their databases.4 Thus the number of known, documented, and surviving incunabula editions is slightly higher today than forty years ago, but still fluctuating. No reliable esti- mates, however, are available for what can be termed the “dark matter of the Gutenberg Galaxy”: entire editions which are known to have existed but have vanished altogether. The existence of dark matter in the real universe was first mathematically discovered in the 1930s, when the Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky analysed the Coma Cluster, a conglomerate of galaxies 300 million light years away in the constellation Coma Berenice. Zwicky observed that the radial velocity of the galaxies in this conspicuous cloud, their “getting away from each other” in lay- man’s terms, is much too high in relation to the calculated mass of the cluster’s visible stars. His observation did not comply with contemporary theories on mass-gravitation relations, according to which the cluster should have disinte- grated long ago. Something was wrong with the astronomical equations, as too much of the required mass was not accounted for, and Zwicky concluded: “Should this turn out to be true, the surprising result would follow that dark matter is present in a much higher density than radiating matter”.5 Historians of all disciplines, including historians of the book, find them- selves confronted with similar problems of measure and relation. We have to deal with the basic question asked by Arnold Esch: how do historical percep- tion and research relate not only to extant documents and sources, but to the totality of what was once there?6 Like astronomers we constantly look back in going to identify them here, but see Martin Davies’ review of Bibliothèque nationale de France. Catalogue des incunables (cibn), Tome 1, Fasc. 3: C-D (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 2006), The Library, 9 (2008), pp. 225–228, at pp. 226–227. 4 Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, 11 vols. (to be continued), vols. 1–8 (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1925–1940), 2nd rev. ed. vols. 1–7 (Stuttgart-New York: Hiersemann, 1968); vol. 8ff. (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1978–). gw numbers without preceding letter ‘M’ can be looked up in the printed volumes as well as in the database; for the ‘M’ numbers see <www.gesamtkatalogder wiegendrucke.de>. 5 Robert H. Sanders, The Dark Matter Problem. A Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 14. 6 Arnold Esch, ‘Überlieferungs-Chance und Überlieferungs-Zufall als methodisches Problem des Historikers’, Historische Zeitschrift, 240 (1985), pp. 529–570. For a case study on the loss of charters, see Stefan Sonderegger, ‘Verluste – Zahlen statt Spekulationen: drei Fälle von quan- tifizierbaren Urkundenverlusten in der Sanktgaller Überlieferung des Spätmittelalters’, Archiv für Diplomatik, 59 (2013), pp. 433–452. Falk Eisermann - 9789004311824 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:07:25PM via free access <UN> The Gutenberg Galaxy’s Dark Matter 33 time and find that a large number of material objects of interest are untrace- able. Like astronomers, we know of the dark matter, but cannot see it. Thus we need to find ways of approximation and methods which help us close some of the knowledge gaps caused by the unreliability of historical transmission. Mathematics, the magic weapon of astrophysicists, seems inept for our purposes. Recent statistical experiments applied to the world of books are interesting, but unsatisfactory from a bibliographical point of view.7 We know that many books, even entire editions, have been lost, but do we really need calcu- lations which apply complicated statistics in order to demonstrate that many, many books seem indeed to be lost? On the other hand, there is no systematic survey focussing on the dark matter. I myself cannot offer such a survey at this point, but will try to map some ways of retrieving information about lost incunabula which may enhance our general bibliographical knowledge. My interest in this subject was instigated by a lively exchange on the mailing list Exlibris; subsequently, I began to compare the total number of entries in gw and istc in order to find editions not included in istc because no surviving copy is recorded.8 Delving into the very large number of these “ISTC-less” entries in the gw database – at the time of writing the number stands at more than 6,200 – I found myself on a journey into a very interesting, 7 Jonathan Green, Frank McIntyre and Paul Needham, ‘The Shape of Incunable Survival and Statistical Estimation of Lost Editions’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 105 (2012), pp. 141–175. See also Jonathan Green and Frank McIntyre’s contribution in the present volume. Other surveys, often on manuscripts and/or early modern books, that were helpful during the preparation of the present article include Peter Beal, ‘Lost: the Destruction, Dispersal and Rediscovery of Manuscripts’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), Books on the Move. Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade (London: Oak Knoll Press/The British Library, 2007), pp. 1–15; Neil Harris, ‘The Italian Renaissance Book: Catalogues, Censuses and Survival’, in Malcolm Walsby and Graeme Kemp (eds.), The Book Triumphant. Print in Transition in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 26–56, and Neil Harris, ‘La sopravvivenza del libro, ossia appunti per una lista della lavandaia’, Ecdotica, 4 (2007), pp. 24–65; David McKitterick, ‘The Survival of Books’, The Book Collector, 43 (1994), pp. 9–26; Paul Needham, ‘The Late Use of Incunables and the Paths of Book Survival’, Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte, 29 (2004), pp. 35–59; Goran Proot and Leo Egghe, ‘Estimating Editions on the Basis of Survivals: Printed Programmes of Jesuit Plays in the Provincia Flandro-Belgica before 1733, with a Note on the “Book Historical Law”’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102 (2008), pp. 149–174; Alexander S. Wilkinson, ‘Lost Books in French before 1601’, The Library, 10 (2009), pp. 188–205. 8 Special thanks to Michael Laird who first suggested the term ‘dark matter’ in reference to early printed books, and gratefully allowed me to use it for my purposes. I profited very much from our communication about the subject since 2008. Falk Eisermann - 9789004311824 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:07:25PM via free access <UN> 34 Eisermann and often strange, bibliographical field. Of course many of these entries are eas- ily recognisable as, for instance, errors, duplicate descriptions, or descriptions of editions patently belonging to the sixteenth century.

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