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his text, and to hire a skilled editor to prepare the text for printing and to see it through the press. In the early years of printing the editor, who might also act as the corrector of the typesetting, had to stand by to read pages as they came off the press since the great majority of early printers did not have enough type to leave type standing long enough to send out proofs. This need to correct pages as they were being printed remained standard practice, inevitably with some exceptions, until roughly the end of the eigh- teenth century when it is understood that some printers owned enough type to allow type to stand, and printing to continue, while the author corrected proofs.
As early as 1466, in his preface to a corrected version of Aurelius Au- gustinus’s (Augustine of Hippo’s) De arte praedicandi (Book IV of De doctrina christiana) printed in Strassburg by Johann Mentelin, an anonymous scholar described the value and difficulty of preparing as accurate a manuscript as possible for printing, probably for the first time in any printed book:
Nevertheless I have thought it by all means worthwhile that I should first expend much labour over what would be to the common utility of the Church: that I may have this most useful little book—worthy of all esteem—correct, in order that, after correction this way, I would be able to communicate it more usefully to all those wishing to have it. Therefore, as God is my witness, I have taken great pains in the correction of it, in such a way that I have sought out diligently all the copies which I have been able to discover for this purpose in any of the libraries in the school of Heidelberg, in Speyer and in Worms, and finally also in Strassburg. And since in the course of this I have learned by experience that that particular book of Augustine is rare to come by even in the great and well stocked libraries, and even rarer can it be had for copying from any of those same libraries; and also, what is worse, that when it can be found in there it is more rarely corrected or emended; on that account I have been moved to work most carefully to this end; that, according to my
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