Abstract
Abstract This chapter explores the roles of scribes, compositors, and correctors, as discussed in the prefatory materials produced by authors and publishers across the Short Title Catalogue (STC) period. Taking each of these roles in turn, it shows how the errors and mistakes recorded in such preliminaries correct the ideal but unrealistic accounts of the process of print production in early printing manuals like Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick exercises (London, 1683) and Hieronymous Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia (Leipzig, 1608) and in so doing emphasizes the inconstant, highly variable nature of the printed book. Far from offering what Elizabeth Eisenstein famously described as ‘typographical fixity’, printed books often draw attention to their typographical instability in ways that somehow also recuperate the ‘work’, the immaterial text, from the material circumstances of its transmission.
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