ABSTRACT
Having examined the physical history of the book as artifact, the textual scholar must then have some system for describing the book. In dealing with printed books, bibliographers have used the concept of
~'ideal copy" to represent a state of the text that, while recognizing the physical differences in individual copies, attempts to describe a form of the book as intended for" publication" by the printer. The codicologist, however, works only from specific manuscripts and usually describes each of them (when dealing with texts with multiple copies) rather than reconstructing an ideal version. Otherwise, the process of description-even the basic terminology and formulae-used by descriptive bibliographers of manuscripts and printed books is quite similar. Some of the practical differences are simply the result of the separate histories of manuscripts and printed books. For example, the "quasi-facsimile" title-page transcription is very important in the descriptive bibliography of printed books but virtually unknown for manuscripts, because title-pages hardly occur in manuscripts (and only rarely in incunabula) but are the primary means of identifying printed books from the sixteenth century on.
