Codicological Crossover: The Merging of Manuscript and Print

Abstract

Books containing both manuscript and print items were once common entities, just as it was customary to combine several printed texts into a collective binding, a Sammelband. This article discusses various ways that the two media, the handwritten and the printed, coincided and complemented each other in books from the hand-press era. That handwriting continued to be used for book production even after the introduction of printing is well documented, but the hybrid books with both media present still await their due attention from researchers, a need this article attempts to address. After a brief survey of how the media merged, two examples are described in more detail: they concern books which once belonged to the Jesuit College in Braniewo, Poland, but were taken as war booty and ended up in Uppsala University Library in the early seventeenth century.