The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) is an electronic bibliographic database maintained by the British Library which seeks to catalogue all known incunabula. The database lists books by individual editions, recording standard bibliographic details for each edition as well as giving a brief census of known copies, organised by location. It currently holds records of over 30,000 editions. [2]
Previous efforts to comprehensively catalog 15th century printing include Georg Wolfgang Panzer's Annales Typographici ab Artis Inventae Origine ad Annum MD (1793–97) and Ludwig Hain's Repertorium Bibliographicum (1822). Hain's work was later supplemented by Copinger's Supplement and Reichling's Appendices, which would pave the way for the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (1925). The Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW) was the most comprehensive catalog of incunables to date (and still offers more in-depth information than ISTC), [3] but in recent decades work on the catalog has slowed to such a degree that the goal of cataloging all extant incunables under the GW's system is indefinitely far-off. [4]
The ISTC was created to establish a system of incunable cataloging that was simple enough to be expanded quickly, bringing the goal of a complete incunable catalog back into focus. Furthermore, the ISTC would use standardized entries that could be entered into a machine-searchable database.
Work on the ISTC began in 1980 under the leadership of the British Library's Lotte Hellinga. Frederick R. Goff's Incunabula in American Libraries (1973) was the first pre-existing catalog to be keyed into ISTC's database. Besides providing the catalog's first 12,900 entries, Goff's system for classifying information about incunables formed the basis for the structure of ISTC's records. Entries for all of the incunables in British Library and the Italian union catalog (IGI) were added next, followed by other national incunable catalogs. [5]
ISTC records retain many characteristics of the records from Goff's census. Each record represents one edition of a work. Information such as author, title, printer, place of printing, year of printing, language, and format is entered into discrete fields to make the records searchable by a computer. Catalogue entries are reduced to a standard form, for ease of indexing and access, which includes the use of standard names for authors and printers—a major issue in an era where the use of Latinised names and vernacular ones interchangeably was common—and contemporary English names for places. Dates are reduced to conventional years where possible. [6]
The ISTC has recorded 29,777 editions to date, although some of the records included in that number are actually 16th-century works that were included in previous incunable catalogs in error, so the number of true incunabula recorded is 27,460. [7] The number of extant incunabula is estimated to be approximately 28,000 editions, which puts ISTC extraordinarily close to completing its goal of total coverage. Documenting these last few hundred editions is a tremendous undertaking, as the works are scattered in unknown locations in many countries, leaving bibliographers with no organized way to search for them except to "look everywhere". [4]
While the ISTC is unsurpassed in coverage, it does not offer the same level of detail as the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke or the numerous collection catalogs that are available. Rather, the ISTC complements these resources by providing a searchable index of editions, referring to other catalogs and bibliographies for further detail. ISTC does not include information about individual copies of a work as standard, though a brief census of confirmed locations is provided, and may contain brief notes. [3]
In general, the ISTC only covers extant editions, although records exist for some works that were sufficiently well-documented before being lost to fire or other calamities.
An illustrated edition of the ISTC was made available on CD-ROM in 1998. The addition of illustrations offers important information about a book's layout, format, and printing type. The images represent samples of each text rather than the full text. [7]
An incunable or incunabulum is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. Incunabula were produced before the printing press became widespread on the continent and are distinct from manuscripts, which are documents written by hand. Some authorities on the history of printing include block books from the same time period as incunabula, whereas others limit the term to works printed using movable type.
Octavo, a Latin word meaning "in eighth" or "for the eighth time", is a technical term describing the format of a book, which refers to the size of leaves produced from folding a full sheet of paper on which multiple pages of text were printed to form the individual sections of a book. An octavo is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets on which 16 pages of text were printed, which were then folded three times to produce eight leaves. Each leaf of an octavo book thus represents one eighth the size of the original sheet. Other common book formats are folios and quartos. Octavo is also used as a general description of the size of books that are about 8 to 10 inches tall, and as such does not necessarily indicate the actual printing format of the books, which may even be unknown as is the case for many modern books. These terms are discussed in greater detail in book sizes.
The Summa grammaticalis quae vocatur Catholicon, or Catholicon, is a 13th-century Latin dictionary which found wide use throughout Latin Christendom. Some of the entries contain encyclopedic information, and a Latin grammar is also included. The work was created by John Balbi, of Genoa, a Dominican, who finished it on March 7, 1286. The work served in the late Middle Ages to interpret the Bible. The Catholicon was one of the first books to be printed, using the new printing technology of Johannes Gutenberg in 1460.
In library and information science, cataloging (US) or cataloguing (UK) is the process of creating metadata representing information resources, such as books, sound recordings, moving images, etc. Cataloging provides information such as author's names, titles, and subject terms that describe resources, typically through the creation of bibliographic records. The records serve as surrogates for the stored information resources. Since the 1970s these metadata are in machine-readable form and are indexed by information retrieval tools, such as bibliographic databases or search engines. While typically the cataloging process results in the production of library catalogs, it also produces other types of discovery tools for documents and collections.
Richard Pynson was one of the first printers of English books. Born in Normandy, he moved to London, where he became one of the leading printers of the generation following William Caxton. His books were printed to a high standard of craftsmanship, and his Morton Missal (1500) is regarded as among the finest books printed in England in the period.
The so-called Preußische Instruktionen or PI are a cataloging set of rules for libraries which was used in scientific libraries in German-speaking countries and beyond. First published in 1899, the PI were replaced by other sets of rules such as the Regeln für die alphabetische Katalogisierung (RAK) from the 1980s onwards, which in turn have been replaced by the Resource Description and Access (RDA) rules since 2015.
A short-title catalogue is a bibliographical resource that lists printed items in an abbreviated fashion, recording the most important words of their titles. The term is commonly encountered in the context of early modern books, which frequently have lengthy, descriptive titles on their title pages. Many short-title catalogues are union catalogues, listing items in the custody of multiple libraries.
Quarto is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produce eight book pages. Each printed page presents as one-fourth size of the full sheet.
Ludwig Friedrich Theodor Hain was a German editor and bibliographer.
Theoderic Rood was a printer of incunabula at Oxford, England. His activities in the city can be dated with any certainty only to the years 1481 and 1482, but probably extend between around 1481 and 1484. Several earlier printed books, dating from 1478 and 1479, and an edition of John Mirk's Liber festivalis of 1486 or 1487, which were once attributed to Rood's press are now thought to be the work of other, as yet unidentified, printers.
A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century now in the Bodleian Library is a short-title catalogue of more than 5,600 incunabula held in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Bod-inc. stands out among incunabula catalogues for its detailed listing of the contents of each edition being described. It was published on 7 July 2005 by Oxford University Press in six volumes.
Der Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke is an ongoing project of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and appears in conjunction with the print edition of the union catalogue of incunabula. The Gesamtkatalog serves as a bibliography or collection of cradle prints or incunabula. The word incunabula stems from the Latin word incunabulum. In the world of books, incunabula refer to books that were printed using metal type up to the year 1500. The work is based on the description of the individual prints, each complete description consists of the bibliographic note, the collation, the description in the narrower sense, the source, and the copy. The database contains all together 36,000 descriptions of incunabula, distributed over at least 3,900 articles. The Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke is available in part in print and in its entirety—in draft form—via an online database.
Frederick Richmond Goff was an American rare book librarian and specialist in incunabula.
Edward Gordon Duff, known as Gordon Duff, was a British bibliographer and librarian known for his works on early English printing.
Peter of Kastl was a Benedictine monk who very probably composed a translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy.
The St Albans Press was the third printing press set up in England, in 1479. It was situated in the Abbey Gateway, St Albans, a part of the Benedictine Monastery of St Albans. The name of the printer is unknown, only referred to by Wynkyn de Worde in a reprinting of one of the St Albans books as 'Sometime schoolmaster'. He has sometimes been identified as John Marchall, master of St Albans School; however, a passage written by Worde in 1497 implies that the printer was deceased, and Marchall is known to have lived until 1501. Recent research has produced the name John Haule as a possible candidate for the Schoolmaster Printer. He presented the school with its first printed textbook, the Elegantiolae, which was the first book printed at the press, and he was a printer, probably in St Albans in 1479.
The Facetiae is an anthology of jokes by Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), first published in 1470. It was the first printed joke book. The collection, "the most famous jokebook of the Renaissance", is notable for its inclusion of scatological jokes and tales, six of the tales involving flatulation humor and six involving defecation.
The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) is a consortium of research libraries, primarily in Europe, that facilitates access to historians with an interest in the history of the book by providing online resources. The organisation also makes grants to librarians, holds seminars and workshops, and since 1998 has published a periodical called CERL Papers. It was founded in 1992 and since 2021 has been registered in the Republic of Ireland as a company limited by guarantee, based in Dublin.
Lotte Hellinga, FBA is a book historian and expert in early printing. She is an authority on the work of William Caxton.
Paul Needham is an American academic librarian. From 1998 to 2020, he worked at the Scheide Library at Princeton University. A Guggenheim Fellow and Bibliographical Society Gold Medallist, Needham has delivered the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge, the A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford. His focus is on incunabula, the earliest printed books in Europe.
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