Early Print Problems

The stub reglued to the page coming undone with age

The stub reglued to the page coming undone with age

As previously mentioned, Archidoxorum Aureoli Ph. was a very early print of Paracelsus’ compiled works. Gutenburg invented printing at around 1430-40, beginning with type and achieving the full printing of the Gutenburg Bible in 1453. Archidoxorum Aureoli Ph. was printed in 1570 in Basileae (Basel, Switzerland), a little over a century after Gutenburg. Still we see problems with the binding of this specific edition, with first or last pages of bundles of eight (a quire) are for some reason ripped and re-glued before being bound in the book.

IMG_20160304_120212975

The stub can be seen to lift from where it was glued

This occurs in more than one place in this edition, possibly being attributed to accidental rips during production. Closer to the end of the book, between pages 402-415 there are stubs that have been re-glued on nearly every page. This may have been due having sections of the original book separated and then rebound into the compilation we see today at a later date. This would explain the dirty pages as noted in the post on wear and tear, which may instead have been the first pages of its separate section and therefore exceptionally dirty. A rebinding of an original would also explain why certain annotations seemed to have been cut off, as in rebinding tends to involve the clean cutting of worn edges.

All of this is of course just speculation, but these binding flaws certainly give Archidoxorum Aureoli Ph. its own person quirks unique to the edition housed at UBC.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *