Abstract: "Bibliographic databases and early printing: Questions we can’t answer and questions we can’t ask"

For the upcoming meeting of the Wolfenbütteler Arbeitskreises für Bibliotheks-, Buch- und Mediengeschichte on the topic of book history and digital humanities, the paper I'm giving will briefly summarize the paper I gave at the "Lost Books" conference in June, then look specifically at the bibliographical databases of early printing that we have today. These databases are invaluable, but their current design makes some kinds of research easy and other kinds quite difficult. Along with charts and graphs, my presentation will look at some specific examples of what can and can't be done at the moment, and offer some suggestions of what might be done in the future.

Abstract: Bibliographic databases and early printing: Questions we can’t answer and questions we can’t ask.
In 1932, Ernst Consentius first proposed addressing the question of how many incunable editions have been lost by graphing the number of editions preserved in a few copies or just one and projecting an estimate based on that graph. The problem Consentius posed is in fact only a variation of a problem that can be found in many academic fields, known in English since 1943 as the “unseen species problem,” although it has not been recognized as such until very recently. Using the well-established statistical methods and tools for approaching the unseen species problem, I and Frank McIntyre have recently updated the estimate that we first published in 2010. Depending on the assumptions used, our new estimate is that between 33% (of all editions) and 49% (of codex editions, plus an indeterminate but large number of broadsides) have been lost.

The problem of estimating lost editions exemplifies how data-drive approaches can support book history, but it also illustrates how databases of early printing impose limits on research in the way they structure their records and in the user interfaces by which they make data available. Of the current database projects relevant for early printing in Germany (GW, ISTC, VD16, VD17, and USTC), each has particular advantages in the kinds of data it offers, but also particular disadvantages in how it permits that data to be searched and accessed. Clarity and consistency of formatting would help in some cases. All of the databases could profit by adding information that only one or none of the databases currently provide, such as leaf counts. User interfaces should reveal more of each database’s fields, rather than making them only implicitly visible through search results. Monolithic imprint lines, particularly those that make use of arcane or archaic terminology, must be replaced by explicit differentiation of printers and publishers.

Of the current databases, the technological advantages of VD16 are often overlooked.  Its links from editions to a separate listing of shelf marks makes it possible to count copies more simply and accurately than any other database, and its links from authors’ names to an external authority file of biographical data provide the basis for characterizing the development of printing in the sixteenth century.  Most importantly, VD16 provides open access to its MARC-formatted records, allowing an unequaled ease and accuracy when analyzing records of sixteenth-century printing. Many VD16 records lack information about such basic information as their language, however.

The missing language fields in VD16 provide an example of the challenges faced in attempting to compare bibliographic data across borders or centuries. One approach to this problem, taken by the USTC as a database of databases, is to offer relatively sparse data to users. I suggest as an alternative to this a different approach: Databases should open their data to contributions from and analysis by scholars all over the world by making their records freely available. Doing so will allow scholars of book history to pursue data-driven approaches to questions in our field.

German vs. Latin printing, 1450-1700

As I was looking at an older volume of the De Boor/Newald Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, I came across a claim for the percentage of German-language printing that struck me as a bit off. Now that we have some better data from GW/ISTC, VD16, and VD17 to work with, it should be possible to compare German and Latin printing across two and a half centuries, from 1450 to 1700 - at least with a few caveats. For incunables, I'm including only what the ISTC assigns to the region of Germany. VD16 doesn't include broadsides, so for the sake of consistency we should exclude broadsides from the incunables and seventeenth-century books as well, as the percentage of vernacular broadsides can be surprisingly high at times. Also, VD16 only includes language data for not quite half of its titles, so we'll have to compare percentages rather than title counts, and hope that VD16 has provided language data for a reasonably random sample. We also have to keep in mind that VD16 indexes every title in a volume separately, so one volume including multiple titles will be counted multiple times - which is less of a concern, as we're interested in the overall percentage. Finally, we're ignoring bilingual works.

Here's the graph:

What we find for 1480-1600 is not substantially different than what you can find in Uwe Neddermeyer's Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch (2:698, diagram 12a, Reich/nationalsprachlich), although I find the longer time frame of my graph helpful. Vernacular printing declines after the 1480s, experiences a sharp rise at the time of the reformation, then settles into a slow decline that lasts until the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The amount of change between 1530 and 1700 is really quite modest, however.

Visualizing the seventeenth century

How did the Thirty Years' War affect the German publishing industry? One way to obtain a quick overview is to look at the number of different editions printed per year during the seventeenth, and the most obvious place to turn for that is VD17. While it's farther from completion than VD16, it also contains far more records, well over 265,000. Here's the count of VD17 records per year:

I've done a couple things here. First, I've knocked out the totals for years that are multiples of ten, as editions that have been dated "ca. 1670" and the like would give them undue weight. I've added a 2-year moving average trend line to compensate.

The results seem quite clear. After a burst of printing activity just before 1620, the number of titles declines precipitously. There is an interesting spike in 1630-31 that deserves more scrutiny, and then the number of titles printed annually declines even farther. The recovery beginning in 1640 does not reach pre-war levels until 1660.

Beyond looking at titles, we can also get an impression of how much paper was being consumed by the publishing industry by estimating the number of sheets each book required. Instead of counting titles, we divide the total number of leaves in a book by its format, then add the result for all books published in a given year. We have to ignore differing paper sizes and print runs, so the results have to be treated with caution, however. With that in mind, the result looks like this:

I've knocked out the round decades again. Because the data is noisier, I've added a 5-year moving average. In this view, the decline in German publishing due to the Thirty Years' War is deeper - a decline of nearly 70% compared to a decline of titles by 50% - and longer lasting. The publishing industry's consumption of paper doesn't appear to entirely regain its prewar level even by the end of the century. We have to keep in mind that there might be other explanations. Perhaps publishers were choosing larger paper sizes and thus needing fewer total sheets, or perhaps they were printing larger print runs than earlier.