Abstract
OUR recent book, Cataloguing Discrepancies: the 1493 Breviary of York, at the moment in press, deals with some 40 catalogues in which is described the 1493 printing in Venice of the York breviary.1 They range from 1715 to 2005, Coates’ recent catalogue of early printed books in the Bodleian Library,2 and from the briefest of descriptions, as in the 1715 reference, to full descriptions, as in the most recent of these publications. Not one of the 40 is both complete and correct, although the first and last deal only with a single library. All except Coates are, at first glance, irrelevant to the present note, because only in Coates is the concept of the ‘ideal’ copy an issue. In Coates, the following is the structure of the entry for the Breviary of 1493: Inventory of contents, colophon, collation, references. We were informed that the inventory is of the ‘perfect’ (recte ideal) copy after at first thinking it was that of the only other extant copy, with which it is identical, but which Coates does not mention. His ‘first copy’ is the Bodleian book: his ‘second copy’ is the set of fragments in the Bodleian Library. The other complete copy, once in the church of St Helen’s, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, is now held in the Bate collection of Loughborough University Library.
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