"It should not be surprising, then, that contemporaries did not always
identify fixity as a central characteristic of print.  Surveying the
books available to aid ocean navigators, Edmond Halley, for one, noted
that "the first Editions have generally been the best; frequent Copying
most commonly vitiating the Originals." Even when people did refer to
enhanced reliability, it was often in the face of direct evidence to the
contrary. Textual corruption of even such closely monitored texts as the
Bible actually increased with the advent of print, due to various
combinations of piracy and careless printing." The first book reputed to
have been printed without any errors appeared only in 1760.  Before
then, variety was the rule, even within single editions.  Martin
Luther's German translation of Scripture was actually beaten into print
by its first piracy, and in succeeding years the proportion of
unauthorized to authorized texts was roughly ninety to one; these
included Luther's own translation, newly ascribed to others (including
Catholics), and others' work reattributed to him.  A century later, the
first folio of Shakespeare boasted some six hundred different typefaces,
along with nonuniform spelling and punctuation, erratic divisions and
arrangement, mispaging, and irregular proofing.  No two copies were
identical.  It is impossible to decide even that any one is "typical."
In such a world, questions of credit took the place of assumptions of
fixity."

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, Print and Knowledge in the Making,
1998.

Despite modern assumptions that the credibility of a book is assured,
this was not always the case. I find the parallel between the prospects
in corruption of information on the I-way (factional accounts), with
individual authors from unverified backgrounds and biases making wide
distribution with minimal resources, and the history of the credibility
of book knowledge to be interesting.

As we play with our F'f on BP in re-enactment of an assumed historicity
of documentation we should all of us BP preservationeers consider as
well re-enacting the piracy of early print publication and do as much as
possible to confound each other with fiction as fact, fact as fiction,
and blessed lies all in the cause of forcing the boot sorters and
polishers to insist, by threat of imprisonment, torture, heavy fine, or
bad puns, that the world's population, especially us on BP, conform in
drivels, lymes and grocery lists posted out where all can see and be
seen, to an abitrary standard of their august objectivity, though doing
so in March may also assist.

CONTEST:  the first BP'r to post a single e-mail in 600 fonts wins a G&E
T-shirt. (detailed rules upon request)
--
][<en Follett
SOS Gab & Eti -- http://www.geocities.com/~orgrease
Bullamanka-Pinheads website
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?A0=bullamanka-pinheads