Critical Text Production

The editor began by collecting eleven facsimiles (photographic reproductions) of Sum, printed from 1660 to 1697, but only those between 1660 to 1685 saw significant use. All reproductions were substantially marred, mostly due to careless photography that resulted in missing text at the outer, and especially inner margins. Thanks be to God, however, the text content was surprisingly uniform except for idiosyncrasies in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation; these rarely left the intended word in doubt. In fact, it was observable that printers often simply propagated obvious errors. The result was that due to differences in typesetting, while one copy missed text at a margin, the same text would be near the center of the page in a different copy. The editor then chose two better quality facsimiles, and typed up the text, including capitalization, punctuation, and occurrences of white space as found for each of the two. One of the facsimiles turned out to be truncated, so recourse was had to a third to complete the process. Recourse was had to other facsimiles to obtain the text when required due to unreadable or missing text. Effort was made to use different facsimiles for this purpose for each of the main texts.

The result was two computer readable text files. The editor then wrote a program that displayed and compared the two text files, and which stopped and marked in both files the first place in which a discrepancy occurred. After correction, the comparison was restarted and the next discrepancy located. By repeating this to the ends of the files, two identical text files resulted from which both errors in the facsimiles and the editor’s own typing errors were eliminated. Virtually all of the discrepancies had immediately obvious corrections. In a few cases, other facsimiles were consulted. In no case did any discrepancies survive the simple use of common sense and leave the intended text in doubt.