Page 255 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

1 Appendix
Variations on Witsen
Variants in the Two Editions (1671,1690) of Witsen’s Treatise on Shipbuilding Dieder ick Wildeman
No modern standard textbook exists for the st udy of historical Dutch ship- building, and scholars with an interest in the subject have long felt this omis- sion. This work by A. J. Hoving is the first serious attempt to explain and render accessible one of the foremost seventeenth-century sources, Nicolaes Witsen’s Aeloude en He dendaegsche Scheeps-bouw en Bes tier (Ancient and Modern Shipbuilding and Man agement) of 1671. But no m atter how muc h information we can glean from contemporary sources on seventeenth-century shipbuilding, our knowledge of the subject will never be complete. Shipbuilding of that time was a craf t in which the master shipwrights did not entrust the details of their knowledge and methods to paper. The ships they built were no st andard prod- uct, either. At present, only through underwater archaeology can we gain direct access to the practices of shipbuilding and compare, supplement, and, in some cases, correct the written and printed sources.
Nowadays we regard books as a standard product. If we have a certain edi- tion of a text, we t ake for gr anted that every other c opy is exactly the s ame. This is not the case for books from the preindustrial age. Like shipbuilding, the printing and publishing of books in the seventeenth c entury had many aspects of a craft. By looking at original copies we can learn much about the history of a text. The “archaeology” of books can reveal surprising information about their production and sometimes even their use.
Introduction
In the seventeenth century if a small error was discovered in the text during the printing process, it was corrected in the type. But paper was an expensive com- modity, so the already printed, uncorrected pages were often still used to make the book. Sometimes the author or pub lisher wanted to add or c orrect entire passages or pages after the book was printed, or the authorities wanted to have certain passages removed. In that c ase, no new edition was printed, but pages were cut out and new ones inserted. These practices explain why even book s with identical title pag es can contain significant differences. These variations
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