The science of the study of texts, their paper, their ink, their typography, their printing and publishing history is called Critical Bibliography. It is a rather obscure form of scholarship, often taught within the discipline of Library Science. It is part of the detective work of scholarship which aims to determine the true and correct and original text of a written and or printed work. For example, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries critical bibliographers swarmed over the early texts of Shakespeare's plays trying to determine which were the earliest and which the most accurate and trying to determine, as much as possible, William Shakespeare's original words.
The same kind of painstaking activity centers around the first fifty years of printing by movable type--from the 1450s to 1501--referred to as the incunable period (from the Latin word for "cradle") when printing was still in its infancy. The first and probably most famous printed book is the Gutenberg Bible. Yet, when it appeared in the mid-1450s, it was incredibly perfect, springing miraculously from the press of Johannes Gutenberg like Athena from the head of Zeus. Little is still known about the steps by which Gutenberg achieved such perfection. The art of printing, was, for a long time a secret, passed on from master to apprentice. Likewise, the spread of this revolutionary technology from Germany to Italy and to the rest of Europe was something which had to be pieced together over time and long after the fact. Few inventions in human history have had the intellectual and revolutionary impact of the printed book--the mass production of identical, portable texts that soon became widely affordable to larger and larger audiences.
In investigating the work of these early printers, the chief source of evidence is the books that they produced. The paper, the inks, the type fonts, the errors, the marks in them--intentional and unintentional--all these things when understood properly, help tell a story about the spread of printing, the history of a text, and of the printshop that produced that book. Sometimes an otherwise anonymous typesetter can be identified by a typical spelling error or by a way of setting type peculiar to him.
Highlighted above is a simple printer's error. A "w" is turned upside
down.
This simple error is a launching point for speculations of fact and
speculations of fiction. Was Martin Delany his own typesetter? If not,
who worked for him? Was this issue of "The Mystery" composed in unusual
haste? Where did this 19th century African-American abolitionist editor
acquire his press and his type? Or did he farm out his work to others? Who
else in Pittsburgh was using the same
kind of type fonts as appear in "The Mystery?" What was "the mind of the
shop" back in 1846? Was the editorial office of "The Mystery" a place
where ideas were exchanged, politics argued and the end of slavery
passionately prompted? What atmosphere inspirited laboring employees,
casual visitors?
However these questions are answered, printers' errors are clear reflections of personality behind the technology. These errors say that this newspaper was put together by human beings, perhaps distracted, fallible, careless, harried, but certainly human. Nearly 150 years separate us from the minds that composed the words and from the hands that set the type, but by accident or by forethought, the heritage of Pittsburgh and its African-American community has been preserved. Through a new, potent technology, undreamed-of in Martin Delany's time, that heritage is now accessible 'round the world.
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