The Mythical Indies and Columbus's Apocalyptic Letter by Elizabeth Willingham

Author:Elizabeth Willingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

9

DEBRIEFING: INK AND PAPER, MEN, AND STEMMA

The Folio is infamous for its plain and tatty appearance, for its supposed mix of languages and wayward composition and its slip-shod presswork. The opening initial presages the quality of the rest of the printing: it looks slightly tipsy with its smaller lower compartment and rocking base, and its position overshadows the opening type (h) of the third line. No organizing headings or text divisions that one finds in other contemporary printings — and in some efforts to edit the Letter — announce its contents. Margins may be more ragged than justified, and the types appear to come from different fonts of about the same body size. Spacing, punctuation, and the use of initials respond to no regular rationales, and words are broken, unannounced by hyphens at line-end. The effort to suppress a line set in error is only partly successful, and a good many lines waver along their courses. Inking is uneven, and types print awry. Other than the knocked-down line, no contemporary mark of correction, insertion, or suppression indicates that a fifteenth-century person holding a writing instrument took an interest in sorting out the reading. In contrast to the hidden grace of its watermark — the plumed helm of a knight crowned with a long-stemmed cross or a star — and the forthcoming prominence of its writer, the folio Letter presents itself as an utterly inconsequential piece of early printing.

Print-period scholar Theodore De Vinne could have had his eye on the Folio when he catalogued his complaints of the early compositor’s and pressman’s work:

No feature of early printing is more unworkmanlike than that of composition. Imitating the style of the manuscript copy, the compositor huddled together words and paragraphs in solid columns of dismal blackness, and sent his forms to press without title, running-titles, chapter-heads and paging-figures. The space for the ornamental borders and letters … seems extravagant when contrasted with the pinched spaces between lines and words…. Proper names were printed with or without capitals, apparently to suit the whim of the compositor. [Punctuation was …] employed capriciously and illogically. Crooked and unevenly spaced lines and errors of arrangement or making-up were common…. Words were mangled in division, and in the display of lines in capital letters, in a manner that seems inexcusable…. [H]e made the words fit, chopping them off on any letter or in any position indifferent to the wants of the reader or to the properties of language. (525)

De Vinne applies the printing standards of his time to early printed books, and however disconnected his understanding may appear from the context of the period it addresses, he provides a useful view of the distinctions between earlier and later norms.1When the Letter was printed, standards of practice for capitalization, spelling, and punctuation for vernacular languages did not exist in any sense that parallels those of De Vinne’s time, and what was essentially a read-and-recycle printing like the folio Letter is unlikely to have warranted great care in those respects in any case.

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