The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0312  Thursday, 22 May 2008
 
From:		John Briggs <
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Date:		Wednesday, 21 May 2008 23:13:00 +0100
Subject: 19.0309 Extant Copies of the Q1609 Sonnets
Comment:	Re: SHK 19.0309 Extant Copies of the Q1609 Sonnets

Carter Hailey wrote:

>If a fresh collation of the thirteen known copies of the 1609 Sonnets
>is thought desirable, the most reliable and potential useful procedure
>would be to use a high-resolution digital facsimile of one copy as a
>control which, displayed on a laptop computer screen, should then be
>collated against all physical copies using either the McLeod or
>Hailey's COMET portable optical collator. (I will immodestly claim
>that the latter is more easily adaptable to this procedure.)
>Facsimiles should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

And I disagree. It would be far better to make digital photographs of all copies and compare the digital images, blinking them electronically. This was done back in 2000 by a Japanese team for the Gutenberg Bible, again looking for variants. 

Disappointingly, their own copy was very uninteresting from that point of view. (They took a massive state-of-the-art digital camera round the globe -- it required a military export licence!)

John Briggs

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