Dear all,

This is a fascinating topic: I'd agree that the importance of lithography needs to be recognised and am grateful for Hugh's references. I'd actually go back earlier still, to engraved representations of manuscripts such as in Astle's Origin and Progress of Writing (1784); Montfaucon's Palaeographia Graeca (1708) and much earlier for e.g. engraved facsimiles of epigraphic texts (Camden's Brittania, for one). OED gives 1662 as the earliest usage in English (can anyone give information on other languages?) and has the following examples:

1691   T. Hale Acct. New Inventions p. lxxxvi,   A fac simile might easily be taken.
1742   R. North & M. North Life F. North 59   He..made what they call a fac simile of the Marks and Distances of those small Specks.
[1782   T. Pownall Let. to Astle in Treat. Study Antiq. 178   Drawings copied per factum simile.]
1795   W. Seward Anecd. (1796) III. 10   The annexed Engraving, a complete fac-simile.
1815   R. Wedgwood in Commercial Mag. (1846) I. 259   Fac-similes of a dispatch, written..in London, may with facility be written also in Plymouth, Dover..by the same person, and by one and the same act.
1824   J. Johnson Typographia II. xii. 434   One of the most..ancient of those manuscripts has been printed in fac-simile.
1851   D. Wilson Archaeol. & Prehist. Ann. Scotl. (1863) II. iv. iv. 281   The inscription is produced in facsimile.
1868   G. Stephens Old-Northern Runic Monuments I. p. vi,   Masterly facsimiles.

Some reproductive engraving processes involved taking an impression of a dampened copy of the exemplar, almost like a photographic contact print, which was then engraved - this was probably done, with destructive consequences, for the various facsimiles taken from the Declaration of Independence in the 19th century (for a quick history of those facsimiles, see http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2008/08/early-facsimile-copy-of-declaration.html).

On recent photographic facsimiles of medieval mss, which seems to be the main focus of interest in this discussion, here are some interesting thoughts by a curator of an exhibition of them at Monash - http://www.unimelb.edu.au/culturalcollections/exhibitions/facsimile/essay.html

Best,

Giles


Dr. Giles Bergel

Departmental Lecturer in Bibliography and Textual Criticism
Faculty of English Language and Literature
University of Oxford





On 15 Aug 2013, at 08:16, Hugh Houghton <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

Dear Peter, et al,

On 15 Aug 2013, at 15:14, Peter Robinson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

More usefully, the facsimile is discussed by David McKitterick in his new Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books Since 1700, published by CUP this year, on p.120, where he describes this as the 'first extended facsimile' of a manuscript, with reproductions of 16 pages from a Turin manuscript.  

This description may be correct for photographic facsimiles. But I suggest that the lithographic facsimile of St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 48 produced posthumously for H.C.M. Rettig in 1836, which reproduces each page of the gospel book, is an even earlier contender for "first extended facsimile" (as a printed volume).

I gave references in my response to the original thread on 13th June 2008 (see below).

Best wishes,
Hugh


Subject: Early facsimiles again
From: Hugh Houghton <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: The list of the European Society for Textual Scholarship and the Society for Textual Scholarship <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:57:55 +0100


In November 2007, there was some discussion on this list about the  
earliest photographic facsimile, with the oldest examples being an  
1855 edition of Ulrich von Richental "Das Konzil zu Konstanz" (in  
Hans Zotter, Bibliographie faksimilierter Handschriften, Graz 1976)  
and an edition of the Manuscript Sforza in 1860.

I can't improve on these dates for a photographic facsimile, but I  
have spent the afternoon with something which may be one of the  
oldest lithographic facsimiles as it describes the process in the  
introduction. The volume is an 1836 edition of a bilingual Greco-
Latin gospel manuscript in St Gall (ms 48), by H.C.M. Rettig  
(published posthumously by Frideric Schulthess), reproducing all 395  
pages of the manuscript.

Page v of the introduction runs as follows (a rough translation is  
given below):

"dum igitur librum typis describendum vulgaribus, in modum Knittelii,  
praeparabam, accidit, ut redemtor libri honestissimus prela  
lithographica sibi pararet simulque artem transferendi (die Kunst des  
Ueberdruckes) scripta in lapides addisceret. Statim igitur consilium  
prius abieci. Pictorem nactus sum calligraphum, qui in charte  
pellucida, super codicem expansa, singulas literas, singulas  
lineolas, singulos literarum apices accuratissime perscribebat. Prelo  
lithographico pictura ex charta in lapides transferebatur et  
multiplicabatur. Ita codicis Sangallensis imago saepissime et  
accuratissime repetita et, ita quidem ut nulla alia via, nullaque  
alia arte accuratior apparari queat. Qui enim calamo omnis lineas  
ante ipsius oculos positos sequi debet, errores magnos admittere  
omnino non potest. Si vero vulgari vel arte lithographica vel  
incisione in aeneis tabulis libri repetuntur, errores aeque facile ac  
in typographia admittuntur."

"While I was therefore preparing to present the book using normal  
type, in the manner of Knittel, it happened that the splendid  
publisher of the book acquired a lithographic press and learnt the  
skill of transferring writing onto stones. I therefore abandoned my  
earlier plan, and got hold of a calligraphic artist, who traced as  
accurately as possibly the individual letters, lines and character-
forms on transparent paper spread over the manuscript. The design was  
transferred from the paper onto stones on the lithographic press and  
reproduced. In this way the form of the Codex Sangallensis was most  
frequently and most accurately rendered, and in such a manner that  
cannot be conveyed more accurately by any other means or skill. One  
who must follow with his nib all the lines before his eyes can in no  
way introduce substantial mistakes. If books are reproduced in the  
usual way by lithographic art or by engraving on bronze sheets,  
mistakes are introduced as easily as they are in typesetting."

Of course, this is no substitute for the magnificent modern Codices  
Electronici Sangallenses (www.cesg.unifr.ch), but I hope the  
information may be of interest.

Hugh Houghton
--
www.itsee.bham.ac.uk   www.vetuslatina.org   www.iohannes.com
--
Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing,
University of Birmingham, Elmfield House, Selly Oak, Birmingham B29 6LQ