According to the Chicago Manual of Style (2017), editorial style for the modern print trade âgoverns such things as when to use numerals or per cent signs, how to treat abbreviations or special terms, and how tables are typically organized. Consistency of design and style contributes to [a bookâs] identity; readers know what to expect, and the substantive contribution [âŠ] stands out more sharply when typographical distractions are at a minimumâ. That is, editorial style relates to rules designed to ensure not only consistency within and across all titles produced by a publishing company but also the consistency and effectiveness of authorsâ meaning. These rules are known as house style and are typically associated with editors whose responsibility, among many others, is to prepare manuscripts for typesetting and eventual publication.
Editors do not prepare manuscripts in isolation, however: they liaise, or negotiate, with authors and publishers to correct and finalise content, and with numerous other stakeholders such as typesetters, proofreaders and printers during production and final printing. The process leading up to and including printing is therefore âan exercise in communal responsibilityâ (McKitterick 2003, 117)âit is a shared, collaborative experience in which all stakeholders, not only editors, are accountable not just for the page but for the final printed product.
Stakeholders such as authors, editors and printers typically refer to style guides for instruction on editorial style . Style guides outline the rules pertaining to grammar, punctuation, spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation and italicisation, for example; explain the parts of a book, such as the preliminaries, headings, body text and end matter, their typography and typesetting; and include proofreading (also called proof-correction) symbols that are used to mark authorial and editorial corrections , either interlineally or in margins, on manuscript and typeset page proofs to be incorporated by typesetters. Such mark-up represents the communication channel, or metalanguage, necessary for these stakeholders to share the same working space, regardless of where or in what manner they complete their individual daily tasks. Editorial practice embodies all such work.
Questions that arise from such contemplation include when and how did style guides originate; how did they contribute to the evolution of editorial style ; and how did they impact the publishing of content historically. That is, how did the various stakeholders within the print tradeâsuch as authors, editors, typesetters and printersâinterpret and apply the guidelines provided in early modern style guides to create, negotiate and typeset content? Addressing these questions required a defined scope. The scope of this book was therefore determined by publication chronology of early modern style guides: from when the first style guide was published in England in the final quarter of the seventeenth century to when editorial innovation plateaued in the mid-nineteenth century, manifesting a punctuated evolution of editorial style, not a gradual one. (The concept of punctuated evolution is explained later in this introduction.) In this way, this book resides at the intersection of editorial theory and book-history research. Its focus is twofold: to provide a historical study of the evolution of editorial style and its progress towards standardisation through an examination of early modern style guides; and to explore how multiple stakeholdersânamely authors, editors and printersâeither directly implemented, or uniquely interpreted and adapted, the guidelines of contemporary style guides as part of their editorial practice .
The critical questions given above have yet to be considered for early modern English print culture. Research regarding editorial theory has concentrated traditionally on error and the identification of authorial intention, and the nature of such research has been polarised. On the one hand, scholars have examined principally the âbestâ copy-text considered closest to the authorâs final intention, as introduced by W. W. Greg ; and, on the other, a radial compilation has been advocated by AngloâAmerican New Critics (Greg 1950; Bowers 1976; Gaskell 1978; Tanselle 1990; Cohen 1991; Bornstein 1996). Furthermore, research into early modern style guides has focused principally on their typographical aspects, not their editorial content (Wroth 1935; Janssen 2000; Maruca 2003; Mosley 2009). The only comparable research relates to correction in classical and Renaissance Europe (Kenney 1974; Richardson 1994; Grafton 2011a, b; Hellinga 2014). Robert Ritter âs (2010) doctoral thesis, âThe Transformation of Authority in Print and the Rise of House Styleâ, examines similar issues to those in this book but for a later period, specifically from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Addressing these questions therefore places directly into the foreground the hands-on labour of stakeholders in the print trade, such as authors, editors and printersâtheir specialised interaction with content. Indeed, this minimises attention given to errors resulting from such work as book-making encompasses a series of interdependent processes with the united objective of bringing content to print. Marrying theory and practice in this manner serves to refashion modern perceptions of, and textual bibliographic approaches to, early modern book-making specifically and book history more generally.
Critically Mapping Early Modern Style Guides
Philip Gaskell, Giles Barber and Georgina Warrilow published in 1968 an annotated list of style guides (or, as they were termed in the early modern period, printerâs manuals or grammars) to 1850. Their purpose was to âsummarize their contents and to locate a few copies of each oneâ; their enumeration âfollowed in the giant steps of E. C. Bigmore and C. W. H. Wyman , whose astonishingly comprehensive Bibliography of Printing (1884â6) mentions all but three of the sixty-six manuals describedâ in their article (Gaskell et al. 1968, 11). Of these 66 manuals, 23 were English; 19 were French; 23, German; and 1, Spanish.
The first English printerâs manual was Joseph Moxonâs Mechanick Exercises: Or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing in 1683; and the second, John Smith âs The Printerâs Grammar , appeared approximately 70 years later in 1755. Three German manuals had been printed between 1608 and 1673 before Moxonâs Mechanick Exercises , while fiveâfour from Germany and one from Franceâemerged between 1684 and 1749 before Smithâs The Printerâs Grammar . Given that the English manuals printed after 1755 primarily consisted of material reproduced verbatim from those of Moxon and Smith, such as Philip Luckombeâs A Concise History of the Origin and Progress of Printing and Caleb Stower âs The Printerâs Grammar , which were published in 1770 and 1808, respectively, the potential influence of these German and French manuals on Moxon and Smith is considered below.
The first printerâs manual, Hieronymus Hornschuchâs Orthotypographia , was the first manual to be published in 1608 in Leipzig. His audience comprised mainly correctors (the early modern equivalent to editors), though his instruction was also directed partly to authors. Hornschuch wrote his manual in Latin; however, two German t...