I’ve been studying the copy of the Philosophical Transactions at he University of Chicago Library Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center on a Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship.
I’m establishing the basic facts of the printing history to link up to the legal and editorial history of Henry Oldenburg’s work on the Transactions from 1665 to 1677.
Today, I spotted a rare survival. Look at the correction above on this webpage from number 81 for 25 March 1672. Compare it with this one from number 82 for 22 April 1672.
Someone reading the text after it was bound into a volume made one correction. Someone working at the printer’s shop made the other correction. Reader’s corrections can be seen fairly frequently in seventeenth-century books like this one. Fewer than a hundred surviving examples of printer’s proof correction from the seventeenth century have been recorded.
In other words, one is neat, but not all that unusual. The other is a rarely recorded survival of primary source evidence from a seventeenth-century printing shop. (Side note: I don’t actually think these are as rare as they appear to be. I think there are many more, like this one, lurking in books.)
Look again, think about it.
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Okay, want a hint?
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Here’s your penultimate hint and your ultimate hint.
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Okay, tell me what you think! Which is which? Maybe you see something I don’t?
Email me or message me below and I’ll post your answer if you want.
