In an article called ‘Printers of the Mind’, published in 1969, the bibliographer D.F. McKenzie unraveled certain fundamental assumptions imagined and repeated by scholars who studied the production of books. Central to these mistakes was the idea that printers worked on one book after another, in tidy and separated sequence. Instead, McKenzie proposed a model of concurrent printing.
Interesting... I'm trying to imagine what a full-on, annotated, scholarly variorum edition of even a single poem would look like, bringing every retrievable concurrent, adjacent, and potentially contributory factor to bear in this way. Sort of internet sized, probably... I see the Treaty of Amiens was signed on 25th March 1802: could some version of "morphic resonance" or "six degrees of separation" link Napoleon to Mr. Ollif's dung? (Shakespeare got there first, of course: "Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away"...)
Apart from the fact that scholarly, annotated editions are already pretty distracting, when the footnotes outweigh the text, I'm wondering how anyone would retain their sanity, confronted with such an overwhelming sense of intertextuality? We could be entering into Borges territory here, and creating a 1:1 scale map. Help!
Concurrency
Interesting... I'm trying to imagine what a full-on, annotated, scholarly variorum edition of even a single poem would look like, bringing every retrievable concurrent, adjacent, and potentially contributory factor to bear in this way. Sort of internet sized, probably... I see the Treaty of Amiens was signed on 25th March 1802: could some version of "morphic resonance" or "six degrees of separation" link Napoleon to Mr. Ollif's dung? (Shakespeare got there first, of course: "Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away"...)
Apart from the fact that scholarly, annotated editions are already pretty distracting, when the footnotes outweigh the text, I'm wondering how anyone would retain their sanity, confronted with such an overwhelming sense of intertextuality? We could be entering into Borges territory here, and creating a 1:1 scale map. Help!
Mike