ABSTRACT

It is not just the physical form of the publication that affects meaning. The very way in which literature gets put into print can change the meaning of a text. For instance, when a compositor’s hand misses the correct section of his type tray (or ‘case’), or when his assistant puts the type in the wrong section of the case, or when he misreads the manuscript copy from which he is setting the book, then Hamlet’s ‘too, too solid flesh’ becomes ‘sullied’ or ‘sallied’. (For other examples of this, see Bruce Harkness, ‘Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy’, in Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ed. O.M. Brack, Jr and Warner Barnes, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969.) Never forget that texts are material objects – written, printed, advertised, sold (or borrowed or stolen) and used by fallible human beings, many of whom would not have had a particularly reverential attitude towards the materials they were dealing in.