Magyar Könyvszemle, 1971 (87. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
Borsa Gedeon: Computer-assisted examination of printing types of early printings 165
GEDEON BORSA Computer-assisted examination of printing types of early printings An ever recurring problem of handling early printings is to complète certain missing items of the imprint (place, date of publication, the printer's name). This is not a mere meticulousness on the part of librarians, but — in many cases — the very basis of processing, since a clear statement of thèse data is of great moment in the bibliographie analysis of publications dating from earlier centuries. Thus the date of publication forms the basis of separating the products of 15th-century printers, incunabula as thèse printings are called, from other publications. Processing old books by countries and/or towns is another wide-spread practice. It seems sufficient here to refer to the "Short Title Catalogue" of the British Museum, a séries listing 15th to 16th-century publications by countries so that each volume covers a certain country: Germany, Italy, France, and so forth. There are works which undertake to list the publications of a geographically defined area in chronological order such as Régi Magyarországi Nyomtatványok 1473—1600 (Early Printings, from Hungary 1473—1600) published recently. In several other cases, efforts are made to compile a bibliography of the products of a certain printer or printing office which makes it indispensable to détermine the provenance of publications containing no référence to the printing office. Furthermore, determining the place and date of publication may cast light upon a number of other connections (commercial or personal relations and the like) which would otherwise remain unrevealed. Thus e.g. the successful détermination of the place of publication of a political pamphlet of some importance, in which the place was deliberately left out or falsified, might obviously throw light upon new aspects for the scholar of political history. Therefore, those engaged in this field of library studies have long been making efforts to make up for the missing data in the imprint, particularly as regards the earliest printings. Some 40 per cent of 15th-century publications do not contain any référence to the place or date of publication. Until the middle of the last Century, attempts at determining these data had been based either on certain facts connected with the work under examination (e.g. where the works of the individual authors were published?) or on formal éléments (e.g. the printer's device). Since all this had been mostly based on intuition rather than painstaking investigations, the results pro ved questionable. It was due to the fact that — even in case of one and the same work — various investigators came to various — and not infrequently widely differing — conclusions. What a serious progress in this field needed was a systematic investigation instead of highly intuitive process of détermination. One of those adopting thi