The Spread of Printing
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A Knowledge of the spread of printing accumulated unevenly across cities and trade networks after movable-type printing. A striking report could establish that a pattern existed, yet it could not show whether edition multiplication operated elsewhere. Researchers examining the spread of printing therefore moved toward shared definitions and planned comparisons based on bibliographic analysis rather than discarding the earlier record. B For the present account of the spread of printing, printing reduced the cost of producing many similar copies, but books still depended on paper, labour, finance and readers. In book history, the term incunable refers to a book printed in Europe during the earliest period of movable-type printing. The definition gives researchers a common starting point for discussing the spread of printing, but it does not identify a cause by itself. Two observations of the spread of printing can share the label incunable while differing in scale, timing or origin. C Researchers rely chiefly on bibliographic analysis to investigate the spread of printing. Research on the spread of printing has found that researchers compare type, paper, editions, ownership marks and surviving catalogues. They decide their comparison, exclusions and outcome measures for the spread of printing in advance. A result about the spread of printing is treated as stronger when it survives more than one source of evidence, not simply when one instrument measuring the spread of printing reports many decimal places. D The evidence about the spread of printing is informative but conditional. One point relevant to the spread of printing is that print accelerated some forms of circulation and standardisation, while manuscript copying and oral exchange continued. Researchers test edition multiplication as an explanation. Evidence reviewed for the spread of printing shows that a prepared text can be reproduced in many copies before type is redistributed for another work. Confidence in edition multiplication rises when independent measures of the spread of printing agree and rival explanations fail, rather than when a single comparison happens to be statistically precise. E Interpretation of the spread of printing must stop short of a universal claim. For the present account of the spread of printing, survival rates favour valued books, and the number of editions does not reveal who read or understood them. Future work on the spread of printing is organised around provenance-linked catalogues. For future research on the spread of printing, provenance-linked catalogues will reconstruct how individual copies moved and were used. This use of provenance-linked catalogues targets a specific uncertainty about the spread of printing rather than merely increasing the volume of data. F Practical programmes translate evidence about the spread of printing into action. The discussion of the spread of printing notes that historians track printers, booksellers, translators and readers rather than technology alone. Their stated focus is knowledge circulation. Teams working on the spread of printing compare later outcomes with conditions before implementation and record unintended effects. This evaluation of the spread of printing determines whether the original explanation involving edition multiplication remains useful outside the research setting.