type looks as if it has been repaired to restore the lower curve in aun, with signaling final n.The Folio is infamous for its plain and tatty appearance, for its supposed mix of languages and wayward composition and its slip-shod presswork. The opening initial presages the quality of the rest of the printing: it looks slightly tipsy with its smaller lower compartment and rocking base, and its position overshadows the opening type (h) of the third line. No organizing headings or text divisions that one finds in other contemporary printings — and in some efforts to edit the Letter — announce its contents. Margins may be more ragged than justified, and the types appear to come from different fonts of about the same body size. Spacing, punctuation, and the use of initials respond to no regular rationales, and words are broken, unannounced by hyphens at line-end. The effort to suppress a line set in error is only partly successful, and a good many lines waver along their courses. Inking is uneven, and types print awry. Other than the knocked-down line, no contemporary mark of correction, insertion, or suppression indicates that a fifteenth-century person holding a writing instrument took an interest in sorting out the reading. In contrast to the hidden grace of its watermark — the plumed helm of a knight crowned with a long-stemmed cross or a star — and the forthcoming prominence of its writer, the folio Letter presents itself as an utterly inconsequential piece of early printing.
Print-period scholar Theodore De Vinne could have had his eye on the Folio when he catalogued his complaints of the early compositor’s and pressman’s work:
No feature of early printing is more unworkmanlike than that of composition. Imitating the style of the manuscript copy, the compositor huddled together words and paragraphs in solid columns of dismal blackness, and sent his forms to press without title, running-titles, chapter-heads and paging-figures. The space for the ornamental borders and letters … seems extravagant when contrasted with the pinched spaces between lines and words…. Proper names were printed with or without capitals, apparently to suit the whim of the compositor. [Punctuation was …] employed capriciously and illogically. Crooked and unevenly spaced lines and errors of arrangement or making-up were common…. Words were mangled in division, and in the display of lines in capital letters, in a manner that seems inexcusable…. [H]e made the words fit, chopping them off on any letter or in any position indifferent to the wants of the reader or to the properties of language. (525)
De Vinne applies the printing standards of his time to early printed books, and however disconnected his understanding may appear from the context of the period it addresses, he provides a useful view of the distinctions between earlier and later norms.1When the Letter was printed, standards of practice for capitalization, spelling, and punctuation for vernacular languages did not exist in any sense that parallels those of De Vinne’s time, and what was essentially a read-and-recycle printing like the folio Letter is unlikely to have warranted great care in those respects in any case.
“Haste” seems to enter most discussions of the Letter’s provenance. Commentators cite “haste” in printing the folio Letter because of its supposed errors and poor appearance, and some theorize that “haste” was necessary because of the Letter’s urgent political role in securing Spain’s interests in the “Indies.”2 The idea that the Letter was ordered as a “rush” printing by the court to support Spain’s claims to geography fails to comport with the Letter’s appearance, even if nothing else were off. The nature, timing, and sophistication of Spain’s diplomatic efforts to secure its supposed rights of possession and Spain’s intimacy with the papal administration argue against the Letter’s value as an urgent or decisive element in those negotiations. That it might have been printed in the dead of night by tired — or tipsy — men working with insufficient light offers one plausible explanation for the appearance of the folio Letter.3
Due speed and competence were signal elements of the commercial printshop of the twentieth century as of the fifteenth, and together, these forces shaped an efficient shop environment and produced income. While working quickly under pressure may indeed multiply composing errors, even in “haste,” copy must be cast off, can be marked with paragraphs and white space worked in, and an experienced man could pick types with a high degree of accuracy — as the Folio’s compositor did in most instances. With no significant loss of time, a sober, experienced compositor can use initials or dress up a printing with borders or an in-stock woodcut. The small-folio format of the Letter allows for such ornamentation, and the printer’s observing these niceties would have taken a matter of minutes, but borders and woodcuts might have been perceived as narrowing the field of suspects if the printing were thought to be actionable. The significant investment in time that the Folio’s printer chose not to make was that of correction, and skipping that process, whether for the sake of getting it onto the street to be sold or into a commissioning agent’s hands, would work to explain some of the elements that mar the printing.4
The Roman Latin editions discussed in chapter 4 provide cases upon which to expand these points. The Roman printings focus on Fernando as king of “the Spains” in the opening and closing additions to the text, and they demonstrate higher — if not prestige — values in setting, correcting, and pointing the text, and their titles, preface, and epilogue comport with that idea. These elements demonstrate the diligence inherent in higher production values, and it is reasonable to assign those values to the job’s association with an elevated level of initiative. Perhaps this initiative arrived at the printer’s through the papal curia, as the connections of the Roman printers credited with the first Latin quartos suggest, and as the graces we see in the Roman Latin editions tend to confirm. 5
The reset line of 2r has been posed as evidence for two compositors on the Folio with the rationale that compositor A set 1v, and that through a misunderstanding, compositor B set the last line of 1v a second time to open 2r. It makes sense, however, to think that a new man coming to the work would check the marker on the fair copy against the previously set line with more care than the man who had placed the marker would do; the latter might have relied on his marker and his memory and so fallen into error. More significantly, it is usual to divide work between two compositors by formes, and the lines in question were composed for the same (inner) forme. The practical rationale for two compositors on the folio Letter is simply that two men could have set the formes about twice as fast as one might have done working alone, perhaps getting the second forme onto the press in a more timely way than otherwise.
The standard test for multiple compositors is to examine separate formes for distinctions — setting and spelling preferences or habits and the like. The most notable visual difference between the pages of the inner (1v, 2r) and outer (1r, 2v) formes is that the pages of the inner forme have generally tidier margins (justified left and right), and types have not fallen or jumped up as has happened at 2v, but this result may mean that the inner forme was locked up — not composed — under better conditions or by a more alert or competent workman than the outer. Spelling and setting preferences between the inner and outer formes argue against two compositors as well.
A comparative study of y- and i-types, representing graphemes that are possible variants in Spain at this time, reveals that i as the copulative [and] appears with much greater frequency on 1r (at least twelve times) than elsewhere, though y as the copulative still appears more often (at least thirty times) on 1r than i, and e also appears on 1r as the copulative at least six times. No phonological rationale or spelling convention or need for space seems to determine the choice, and the vacillations appear practically next to each other. At 1v (inner forme), whose justification is superior to that of 1r, i as copulative never appears; on 2r (inner forme), it appears only once, and on 2v (outer forme), not at all, though the final page allows for few opportunities. Folio 1v, however, uses e at least three times and features i in io and iuntar, along with y for yo (four times).6 Folio 1r shows a preference for yo and ya over io (one instance) and ia (one instance) but vacillates between islas and yslas, as is also the case at 1v and 2r in the inner forme.
Variations between b, v, and u (enbiar, boluieron, embreue, andaua, seruo, saluo, vmana, nauio) provide no pattern of composing either. The implied prothesis of h- (the aspiration /h/) to certain words opening with a vowel appears on each leaf except the last (2v) in examples like hoffender, haun, and hedificio, and vacillations (vmana, onbres, ovo, fechura) are distributed throughout. Typographical agglutinations of prepositions (a, de, con) with following nouns, articles, pronouns, and adverbs, as well as agglutinations of articles with nouns, occur regularly, without any apparent pattern by forme or folio. One can only speculate about whether and to what degree these vacillations reflect the copy text, to what degree the copy text reflects the original from which it was drawn, or to what degree some of these settings arise from the compositor’s choices.
Surveying the initials in the Folio suggests, rather than two compositors, a matter of printing practice that still privileges the outer pages of folio printings as those likely to fall first under the reader’s eye. The compositor locates the Folio’s sole ornament (its framed initial S) and twenty small initials at 1r, where he sets thirteen small initials in the first nine lines. In the inner forme at 1v, the compositor set not a single initial though the last ten lines present several candidates for initials (altezas, iuana, and several toponyms). These words represent no revealing pattern, however, in that they and their fellows in the same categories open with lower-case types on other pages.
In the first thirteen lines of 2r (inner forme), three words (Reynos and two instances of Rey) get initials, and about twenty lines further on, En begins a sentence (2r.32). In the last seven lines of 2r (41–47), nine initials appear — as if the compositor were deliberately setting the tone for 2v where small initials abound,7 but the initials in the last lines of 2r follow no particular rationale: Redemtor, Anuestros, Illustrisimos, Famosos, O (conjunction), and A (preposition) get initials, while rey, reyna, and reynos open with lower-case types.8 At 2v, twenty-eight small initials appear in sixteen lines, about one-third the number of lines set on each of the first three pages.
No pattern exists either between the compositor’s placing an initial to open a sentence and a punctus set before it to mark the close of the previous thought. See contradicho Ala at 1r.6 and numero La at 1r.35, and in contrast, see metales. La at 1r.40; the virtual stream-of-consciousness setting in the inner forme at 1v has no examples either way and uses : (two points, set one over the other) to indicate pauses. 2r.41–44 gives three initial-E types and one O, at least two of which appear to open a new line of thought, but no foregoing punctus appears. At 2r.32, both punctus and capital appear (cabello. En), and in 2v.10, a punctus is set (altezas. entodaslas), but no initial follows.
Another use of the punctus, to disambiguate Roman numerals from the surrounding text, is employed erratically in the Folio and does not follow the formes or the pages. This punctus may appear at line end on 1r.22 and is followed, at the beginning of the next line, by the Roman numeral it may have been intended to separate from its fellows, but no mark follows the numeral. The mark at the end of 1r.22 could also be a punctus elevatus, having nothing to do with the following Roman numeral. At 1v.43, punctu-s are present (.l.), but the next numeral lacks the opening punctus (lx.), and at 1v.45, neither is visible (clxxxviii). At 2v, none of the three Roman numerals of lines 11–12 is set off; the example in line 5 has the first punctus set a space apart from the numeral, but the closing punctus immediately follows it.
Patterns of composing miscues like inverted letters and abbreviatura used inappropriately in place of plain types might suggest two compositors of different ability working on the Folio, but that is not the case. Folio 1r shows a scattering of such settings distributed over the page, more of them occur at 1v, and incidence peaks at 2r of the inner forme with one or more intervening in every few lines. Types for n and u, excellent candidates for setting amiss — and the recipients of inversion in the Folio on a good many occasions, especially on 2r — are, nevertheless, accurately set more often than not. As a conservative count of miscues, consider the following: 1r has six or fewer of these missteps, all as possibly inverted types; 1v has perhaps as many as eleven inverted types and two other kinds of setting errors; 2r may have as many as twenty-one inverted types (h, n, u) and as many as five additional settings that are faulty in some respect, due to possible misreading of the fair copy or setting an abbreviatura unnecessarily; and 2v, which may have been set immediately following 1r, is comparatively clean in these respects, but its reading is marred by crowded types that have fallen or sprung up.9The pattern of turned types and other small blunders suggests, if anything, a single compositor, given to the occasional turned type but increasingly apt to turn his letters and to err in other ways as the hours passed. The pattern appears to intensify around the last fourteen lines of 1v, where the knocked-down line appears, and through most of 2r, the compositor appears to grow less rigorous in picking types and/or checking his stick before emptying it.
Folios 1r and 2v (the outer forme) exhibit poorly executed right justification in that 1r has visibly undulating text, and 2v shows instances of extra characters and fallen types along the right margin. Right-hand justification at 1v and 2r (the inner forme) appears more competently done on the whole, but at 1v, line length varies somewhat, and at 2r, line length varies by several millimeters, the left margin meanders, and lines undulate.10 Left margins at 1r and 1v (different formes) are the best justified of the four, and the right justification of 1v is visually the most competent of the four pages. At 2v, however, the indented blocks of text and generous spacing leave significant “white” space, making 2v a bit more accessible and appealing to the reader, where the foregoing, crowded pages put one in mind of De Vinne’s complaints about early printing.
The semi-obliterated line at the foot of 1v (48) reset as 2r.1 is indeed one of the notable features of the folio Letter. The first editor to make a critical comment on the line was Kerney, who wrote, “It is curious that the words from ‘have skill’ down to ‘as com[pletely]’ are printed twice,” and he remarks that the “extra-regular [line] at the bottom of page 2 … is so blurred and broken that its duplicate presentation (with a slight variant) at the top of page 3, seems to be a deliberate repetition.”11
Through the years, critical views concerning the line may have changed, but its presence still calls for rationales. That the line is set twice, that the second setting is different from its fellow, that the first setting may have been inked before being suppressed or else was carelessly inked in spite of it, and that the suppression takes the form of a quick fix suggest three separate events. The first two events are, of course, that the compositor set the line at 1v and set it again at 2r, tasks that were presumably separated by some space of time, and the third event, the effort to repair the miscue by knocking down the line, betrays the lack of value attached to this piece and/or the printer’s general lack of production values in such jobs.
After the last line at 1v was set, then, the compositor turned to something else that drew his attention and later returned to set the line at the head of 2r forgetting or losing his place and resetting the line with certain differences.12 A comparison of his settings shows that while the measurement from the left margin to the middle of d in the word todas is approximately the same (about 35 mm.) in both lines, the legible portions of the lines then show two variant readings within a few words. While 1v.48 reads, todas las tengo por sus altezas que dellas, the resetting at 2r.1 reads, todas las tengo por de sus altezas qual dellas, with underscoring to indicate the distinctions. The spacing and text of the obliterated line (1v.48) may present a slightly more straightforward reading than that of the reset line with its morphemes added (de) and altered (que to qual), but the Quarto and Simancas manuscript have the second reading.
Absent a corrector, the discrepancy in page length might have become obvious as the inner forme was being locked up, and in that event, the compositor and the pressman might have collaborated in deciding how to address the problem. Given that 1v.48 probably contains, in a barely legible fashion, at least the second syllable and possibly the third (shown underscored) of complidamente, both of which fall on 2r.2, options other than knocking down the erring line apparently presented too tedious a solution to pursue. Removing the superfluous line of type and setting in the appropriate furniture might not have taken much time had the duplicated line had the same reading, or had the hour not been late, the men tired, and the job close to completion. Whatever the reason for the printer’s taking the path of least resistance, his knocked-down line suggests that things had gone a bit far to warrant a full-scale correction on this job.
Since the correction reveals no obliteration of damning or incorrect prose, the error, one may safely conclude, owes merely to one of the omnipresent human factors connected with early printshops: fatigue, frustration, indifference, inebriation, or inexperience. The last possibility, we may be able to discount because printing details suggest the Folio compositor as an experienced man, even a master printer, though perhaps one with a somewhat checkered reputation,13 who would probably have been called upon to do the job through his connections and because of his experience.
Perhaps this printer was itinerant, perhaps he printed in another city and merely happened to be in Barcelona on some other business, or possibly he was someone we would know and his contemporaries would have known as a “Barcelona printer.” It is certain only that he was in the right place at the right time to get the job. His time in the trade is indicated in the number and nature of word compressions and suspensions he employs, in his having in his power a variety of ligatures and initials, in the many Folio types showing wear and breakage, and, more broadly, in what serves him as a set of types cobbled together from what appear to be several different gothic fonts similar enough in size and style to be used as a set.
The physical Folio tends to confirm a few matters only: the production values that inform it were fairly low in spite of some notable touches in the use of initials in the opening and closing sections; the final verso features competent and aesthetically pleasing blocked text and white space; some sort of disconnect probably occurred in the work between setting the two pages of the inner forme; the remedy for the resulting misstep is consistent with the holistic visual of the printing; and in the more than half a page left to him for a colophon, its printer did not claim the printing or date the work. In these matters, the Folio speaks for itself though the signs have occasionally been misconstrued.
In order to obtain a graphic idea of salient readings between the Spanish Quarto (Q.) and Folio (F.), the following comparisons, suppressing editorial extensions and doubtful readings except where they are central to the question, may be useful.
Among the positive distinctions between the two, corrida (Q. 4r.12) is considered an improvement over the Folio’s corida (2r.34), as is the Quarto’s occidente (3r.20) over the Folio’s apocopated occident (1v.46), and, likewise, the Quarto’s mugeres (2v.24) over the Folio’s mugers (1v.29).14The Quarto breaks up some agglutinations set in the Folio,15 but these modifications constitute “distinctions” rather than “corrections” in that no set of rules dictated those matters — or the matter of spelling — in the vernacular languages, and practice in joining and separating morphemes in writing continued to vary over subsequent centuries. A few examples will indicate the quality of these differences. Where the Folio (1r.40) reads metales. Lagente, for example, with an odd space following L, the Quarto adopts the punctus and breaks up the morphemes of lagente but suppresses the initial following the punctus, arriving at metales.la gente (1v.32). In an opposite kind of alteration, the Quarto assembles adelante (1r.19) where the Folio reads a de lante (1r.12–13). What one might call the Quarto’s “semi-emendation” (according to modern standards) of the Folio’s lege (1v.23) with legue (Q 2v.15), as the first person preterit (Mod. Sp., llegué), is also interesting.
Notwithstanding the Spanish Quarto’s reputation for being a cleaner printing than the Folio, the edition reveals instances where the Quarto reading is perceived as inferior to that of the Folio:
While tenian auer que (Q. 2r.31) might be argued as an effort to create a logical reading, most of the differences shown above may reasonably be perceived as lapses.16 Various other small miscues occur in the Quarto, such as the setting of the ss (double long-s) ligature rather than the sl (long s + l) ligature for isla (set as issa) at Quarto 1r.32.
Perhaps the most telling group of comparisons between the Quarto and Folio are those where the Quarto compositor duplicates the Folio’s setting in places where other options were available, some of which would have served as correctives. These coincidences include the following examples:
In the matter of toponyms, the Quarto adopts the Folio’s spelling in xio, sant salvador, guanaham, sta. maria de concepcion, ferrandina, matremonio, and iuana. The Quarto and Folio’s convergence on guanaham, ferrandina, and matremonio is especially noteworthy since those names were previously unknown. A noteworthy difference is that between the Quarto’s ysabella (1r.13) and the Folio’s isla bella (1r.8).23 The Folio and Quarto give the same numbers in the text in over ninety percent of instances, disagreeing only on the first number given for the outward passage to the Indies.
Another convergence between the Folio and Quarto where one might anticipate a difference is the narration of the natives’ repeated calls to their neighbors to “come see” the Spaniards: the Folio reads, venit : venit auer lagente del cielo (1v.28), and the Quarto, venid venid a ver la gente del cielo. [punctus] (2v.23–24). The Simancas manuscript has no repeated command, but the Latin translation adopts it, suggesting that the basis for the Latin translation was like the Folio text in this respect.24
Other differences between the Folio and Quarto suggest a master, compositor, or corrector who was at least occasionally attentive to the text, and in touches like the setting off of Roman numerals by punctu-s and his use of other marks of punctuation, the Quarto’s compositor appears to have slightly higher standards of practice. In an example of the Quarto’s reading being more logical than the Folio’s, the compositor has set mandaran cargar /y (4r.15), with a pause (as a virgula) before the conjunction where the Folio’s mandaran cargar e: (2r.36) makes the pause (as a punctus elevatus in the form of the modern colon) follow the conjunction. Elsewhere, the Quarto mends a grammatical disconnect making the adjective todas accord with its noun phrase, las islas (3r.16), from the Folio’s todos (1v.43).
Dating in the Folio and Quarto asserts that Columbus concluded his letter by March 14 and implies that he sent it to Barcelona where the king and queen were then holding court and where Santángel resided with the court. Echoing Martín Fernández de Navarrete’s view, Varnhagen affirmed “no abrigamos ninguna duda” that this date must correctly be March 4, based on the date of Columbus’s arrival in Lisbon recorded in the Diario.25With the same rationale, Samuel Eliot Morison, who translated the Diario, affirmed March 4 as the correct dating of the postscript.26 J. B. Thacher considered the dateline geography of the Letter as las yslas de canaria (F. 2v.5) to have been “a slip of the pen” – lapsus pennae – on the part of Columbus (III 11) though others have assigned a darker motive to this reading in the Letter. Varnhagen had called attention to Canaria as an error by the mid-nineteenth century, noting that Fernández de Navarrete’s text of the Simancas manuscript also read sobre las Islas de Canaria (I 174) while Varnhagen asserted that his manuscript read sobre la Isla de Santa María, in concert with the Journal entry for 18 February.27 What is taken for the c of canarya in the Simancas manuscript (2v.155) looks enough like a tiny loop that it could be read as a crabbed execution of s, and the following a is generously formed and lies over the upper right portion of the foregoing grapheme (s or c), obscuring its detail a bit. Following a space (i.e., ma or ca + a space), an n that is made of two or even three minims might be read as n or m, and –arya is common to marya and canarya.28
Beyond this apparently erring dateline that belongs to the Letter proper and that is reflected in the Quarto and Folio, both close with three brief, add-on texts that are telling in several ways. The first identifies the nature of the postscript text and its relationship to the Letter proper, the second is the postscript that stipulates and justifies a date later than and a geography different from those found in the last words of the Letter proper, and the third identifies the Letter’s writer and recipient and affirms that the packet containing the Santángel Letter came with a letter for the sovereigns.
The notes to the edition and these comparative readings work to clarify the relationship between the Quarto and Folio in an informed way in the light of historical critical perspectives. In the mid-nineteenth century, Richard Henry Major (Select) noted that Gerolamo d’Adda considered the Quarto to have been printed from the Simancas manuscript or a text very like it.29 At the time, no Spanish printing of the Letter other than the Quarto was known, but D’Adda’s noting correspondences had merit, and the Simancas manuscript is still regarded as a close relative of the Quarto and the Folio, as the variorum demonstrates. Following his study of the Folio, Kerney remarked in 1891 on the Quarto compositor’s supposedly studied suppression of the Folio’s “Catalanisms,” but he also counted nineteen “absurd blunders” shared by the Folio and Quarto and deduced that the Quarto was a corrected version of the Folio based on their “many common errors.”30
Cesare de Lollis in the 1892 Raccolta avers that he cannot disagree with Kerney (“il critico anonimo dell’edizione Quaritch”) that B is substantially a corrected version of A (Raccolta li). De Lollis adds, however, that the printer of B (the Quarto) had recourse to another text, probably a manuscript — by which he does not mean a Columbus autograph manuscript but a copy at some distance from it. This “manuscript,” then, served as a corrective to the Folio, De Lollis’s A, for the printing of the Quarto: “tuttavia, il trovarsi in B rettificato qualche errore sostanziale contenuto in A, ci obbliga a concludere che nella ristampa si ebbe modo e cura di controllare la lezione di A con quella di qualche altro testo (probabilmente manoscritto)” [Nonetheless, finding in B corrections to substantial errors contained in A forces us to conclude that in the reprinting there was found a way and means to revise the reading with that of some other text (probably in manuscript)] (li).
This “manuscript,” he writes, must be a copy of the autograph because none of the named potential recipients would be willing to give up an autograph Letter from Columbus, so he supposes an autograph and “a copy of a copy” (x) — that he refers to as “questo originale” (xl) and “un capostipite (non certo autografo)” (xlix) — produced because of the “curiosity” that the discovery aroused: “Non è supponibile che il Sanchez o il Santangel, e meno ancora i re di Spagna si privassero dell’autografo di Colombo: l’originale x quindi sarà stato una copia di copia, poichè la curiosità che destò la scoperta dovè essere immensa” (xl, italics added).31 De Lollis’s “original that must have been a copy of a copy” — and not an “original” in the sense of an autograph — informs the thinking of later scholars on this question, and his “copy-of-a-copy original” (De Lollis’s x) used to set the Folio becomes Cecil Jane’s X1 (cxxvi).32 De Lollis and Jane (who never adopted Haebler’s 1497 Valladolid data) theorized the printed Folio and its fair copy (De Lollis’s “a manuscript”) as the source for the Quarto printing (Jane cxxvi).33 Jane writes that while the Quarto is “an edition” of the Folio, the Quarto printer had “reference to the source” of the Folio in setting the Quarto (ibid.).
Juan Gil sets his Folio printer’s copy (X’ “el hiparquetipo”) at one remove from the Columbus autograph (X, “el arquetipo”) and proposes that X’ alone served as the fair copy for the Folio (A, “de Barcelona”) in 1493, as well as for the Quarto (B, “de Valladolid”) in 1497.34 The printed Folio has no role in printing the Quarto in Gil’s theory. Gil notes that X’presents “typically Columbian forms” (from X) that maintain their character more clearly in the Folio (A) than in the Quarto (B). If one accepts Haebler’s dateline for the Quarto (Valladolid 1497), as Gil may imply in labeling the Quarto “Valladolid (B),” a reconstructed scenario accommodating the details of the theory requires that the Quarto be printed using the printer’s fair copy preserved three to four years after the Folio was produced. Some other copy of X made at the same time would not do — for De Lollis’s theory or anyone else’s — because that copy would show variants (from the “master” text, presumably X) that were distinct from the variants in the printer’s fair copy because that is the nature of scribal work. The difficulty of who might have preserved a printer’s fair copy from the folio Letter until the Quarto could be printed in 1497, however, requires a plausible, practical scenario that would respond to these requirements. That the correctives applied to the Quarto suggest that Columbus was responsible for the Quarto printing, as Sanz theorizes (Secreto 227–229), or that the Folio’s fair copy solely informed the Quarto setting, or that it was present in company with the Folio and used as a corrective at the Quarto’s printing is unlikely considering the comparative settings. That where the Quarto was printed, the Folio was present and in exclusive use by the compositor, however, is virtually certain.
Notes
1 To the point is Cañizares-Esguerra’s appraisal: the printing is “a poorly crafted document … full of Catalan idioms, typographical errors, ill-separated words, and poorly justified margins” (298).
2 Advocates of a rushed and/or courtly authorship and/or printing for the Letter include Jane (“not the work of Columbus himself” cxxxiv); and Ramos (esp. 1986), who is followed by Henige (1991, 1994), Zamora (1993), Fernández Armesto (1992, 2006), and others. Ramos refers to the Letter’s physical printing as “esa rápida impresión” (105), and Cañizares-Esguerra calls it “hastily put together” (298). Fernández Armesto, in 1992 (Himself), described one of the “attractive theories” explaining “the [Letter’s] textual problems”: the Letter was “a pastiche concocted at court from Columbus’s papers and printed hurriedly to establish the priority of the claims of the Castilian crown to the lands discovered” (102). Cañizares-Esguerra writes, in agreement with Fernández Armesto’s 2006 essay, “Agents of the crown rushed to print thousands of copies of a letter allegedly written by Columbus to an anonymous ‘escribano de ración,’ an officer in the treasury of the crown of Aragon” (298). Henige uses Ramos’s “variorum edition” of the Letter as his text and affirms (1991) that both the Letter and the Diario demonstrate “the lengths to which Spanish officialdom was willing and able to go, and with great dispatch, to fabricate sources by manipulating other sources” in order “to foster and legitimize Spain’s undisputed claim to the new discoveries” (see 49–53, esp. 52–53 and notes). Zamora also finds a royal hand behind the Santángel Letter and writes of the “active promotion of the Santángel version” versus the “suppression” of the “royal version” of “Columbus’s announcement” (20) that she finds in the libro copiador as edited by Rumeu de Armas (10–20), validating, she notes, Ramos’s theory that “the version of 15 February was composed as propaganda,” though Rumeu de Armas’s edition, she asserts, undermines other aspects of Ramos’s idea (11). Kathy Pelta’s children’s book on Columbus records, “Before Columbus reached Barcelona, the sovereigns had already sent the letter he wrote to them to a printer” (23).
3 Kerney suggested the Folio as an unauthorized printing, and Sanz asserted that it must have been “clandestine” (Secreto 246–247). While “clandestine” printings were produced, it is good to remember that printing is a repetitively noisy task that is apt to create unexpected noise when it is done carelessly or in semi-darkness, and it is a process rather than an instantaneous trick to carry off. As masters and their families lived together with the workers, “clandestine” could not have meant that the process was secret, but the material may have been. In the sense that like hundreds or thousands of others, the Folio bears no marks of its maker, it may or may not have been an unlicensed printing.
It has been suggested to me that the surviving folio Letter is a proof sheet (galley) preserved by chance while all its betters — so far as is known — have perished; this possibility appears unlikely in that no mark on the Folio suggests it, and the Folio’s preservation with manuscript papers concerning Spain’s political and cultural affairs, suggesting ownership by one residing at or connected with the Court and perhaps also connected with Toledo, does not support that idea either.
4 See John Johnson’s 1824 list of notices to the printshop “reader” (i.e., the proofreader or corrector) with the following “minutiae” as “imperfections of workmanship” that one might be “apt to overlook” and into which even the “most careful compositor” might occasionally slip: “imperfect and wrong-founted, or inverted letters, particularly the lower-case s, the n, and the u; awkward and irregular spacing; uneven pages or columns; a false disposition of the reference marks; crookedness in words and lines; bad making-up of matter, erroneous indention, &c.” (228–229).
My printshop experience in the 1970s and 1980s did not confirm that a “rush job” produced poor printing. A job might be “rushed” into the queue, but once it was there, certain processes were followed as with any printing job, including proofs and correction — which do not appear to have affected the Folio; it must have been run without that process, for whatever reason, low prestige, potential profit, or someone’s — who was not the king or his minister — being in a hurry. Had the Folio been printed for Fernando to pass among his courtiers or to send to the pope, he would have been heartily disappointed to see a printing –– and a text –– that flattered neither his vanity nor his pride in recent events.
5 See Gaskell on corrections of various kinds (115–116, 134–136, for example). See D. F. McKenzie on views of time, delays, and efficiency in early printing, a few comments on stop-press correction methods, and his references to views of Charlton Hinman and others (esp. 24–26 and notes).
6 Ayuntar is also possible at the time, but it is not attested in this spelling in the Folio.
7 One might guess that the compositor had redistributed initials from another forme at that point, but these impressions (at 2r.41–47) do not appear to be made by the types used in 1r and 2v.
8 Rey and reyno, are given with initials elsewhere; see 1r.3, 17; 2r.2 [Reynos]; and 2r.8, 13.
9 Some of the readings suggested in the edition as possible miscues take their uncertainty from what may be factors of wear, inking, or debris. The following references are telling: at 1r, see l. 6, noubre (nombre); l. 44, dispnesta (dispuesta); l. 43, the first instance of ni (in ni azero) may be ui or merely a bad type or faulty inking. At 1v, n/u types are inverted or ambiguous in a good number of instances: l. 28 cercauas (cercanas); l. 30 maranilloso (marauilloso); l. 32, hña (h +una), and a bad type or faulty inking gives auchas (anchas); l. 35 cauoas (canoas) and vuo (uno); l. 38, dispnestos (dispuestos); and l. 39 aorieute (a oriente). At 2r, see l. 1 taucõ (tan con); l. 2 eu (en); l. 5, a poor u type or an n, in p[u]se and yeu (y en); l. 12 person/uas (personas) and sabieudo (sabiendo); l. 14 ui (ni); l. 16 peusauan (pensaban); l. 18 graud (grand); l. 22 eutrada (entrada); l. 23 (first example) teuien (tienen); l. 27 eutre (entre); l. 30 ninguuo (ninguno) and uo (no); l. 32 euque (enque); l. 36 a poor type or inversion in quauta (quanta); l. 37 in ligunnaloe, u- signals n or m, which may or may not be a setting error; l. 38 caue[-] (canela) and l. 41 mncho (mucho), like quauta (quanta), above at l. 36, show n or u types that appear worn and that are difficult to distinguish; and at l. 40 eu (en) may be another worn type, but it looks to be a u in this case. At 2r.44 (though it seems that it would have been more trouble than it was worth), a type looks as if it has been repaired to restore the lower curve in aun, with signaling final n.
10 Line measurements may vary by several millimeters at each page and between pages.
11 The bracketed form is in the original. See Kerney (25 n. 3).
12 It is useful to note that the compositor did not stumble into setting an extra line at 1v by crowding his lines into the space; the line spacing at the foot of 1v is the same as that for other pages, meaning that the Folio could have been set with forty-eight lines per page in the first three pages, but its 47-line count allows for more white space around the text of the first three pages and still leaves room for the more elaborately formatted conclusion of the Letter at 2v.
13 To understand how a poorly executed artifact of an earlier century came to exist, one can attempt to approximate the result by giving the task of producing the same item — whether a tool, a bucket, a piece of ironwork, the hemming of a petticoat, a bit of decorative painting, or piece of printing — to the least experienced apprentice and have him or her begin the work at dusk after a long day’s work under the lighting of a previous century. I borrow this method of trying to understand the production of low quality artifacts at second hand from an insightful master tradesman at a location where trades from previous centuries are practiced. The reputation of printers for drunkenness and brawling in the shop also enters into my thinking about the Folio print job.
14 MS 1v.98: oçidente.
15 Examples of these settings include quesea fecho este (F. 2r.33) > que sea fecho este (Q. 4r.12); queyo (F. 2r.34) > que yo (Q. 4r.13); and versus altezas (F. 2r.34) > ver sus altezas (Q. 4r.12–13).
16 The Quarto compositor may have intentionally suppressed h- of haun (h- is printed a space away from the rest of the word), and he extended the Folio’s compression, signaled over -u-, as er rather than as n, setting auer.
17 This instance may represent a slip because the Quarto generally suppresses the Folio’s h- except with honbres. See for example, creancia (Q. 1v.28) for the Folio’s crehencia (1r.37), where an h is attached at the opening of a syllable where two vowels were understood to be in contact; aun (Q. 2r.2) for the Folio’s haun (2r.9); and una (Q. 2v.30) for the Folio’s huna (1v.33).
18 The Quarto suppresses the Folio’s initial L (in La) and sets copulative variants with i/y and y/&. See also the note to the edition for F. 1r.41.
19 The Folio gives mayores at 1v.32, its pluralizing morpheme probably perceived as preferable, but the Quarto again reads mayoras (2v.29–30).
20 Prob. rdg. for the MS 1v.68 is acatamyento.
21 Kerney: noticia. MS 1v.73: notiçia.
22 This commonality is one of the enticing features shared between the Folio and Simancas manuscript, too, where the “correct” spelling of caravela, probably anticipated by the scribe, is recorded and stricken, and calavera is then written as a “correction” to conform with the copy text (MS 2v.155). In one of several instances that does not involve sailing culture, the manuscript “corrects” the Folio (and Quarto) at MS 2r.21: distynta for didistincta in the Folio (2r.18–19) and Quarto (3v.20), supposed by editors to be an error for distante.
23 Plannck F: Hysabellam, very similar to the Quarto’s solution.
24 Plannck F: Uenite venite et videbitis gentes aethereas (2v.4). Repetition of excited utterances is often found in medieval narrative.
25 See Varnhagen/Volafan’s notes to his edition of his Sanfelices manuscript (25). Varnhagen knew Fernández de Navarrete’s work intimately through his comparison of his Sanfelices manuscript text with that of Simancas transcribed by Fernández de Navarrete and refers often to Fernández de Navarrete’s transcript.
26 See Morison (Journals 180, 187 n. 24). Other scholars of the Letter adopt this objection to the date on the same basis.
27 See Varnhagen/Volafan’s edition of the Sanfelices manuscript, referred to in chapter 5 (118–120), available in reduced facsimile in Sanz (Secreto 485 ff.).
28 It is also possible that the autograph or its copy had a part of the reading compromised by some accident to the text or because the words were written in a disfigured way due to the writing surface or a failure of the nib or ink.
29 See Major (cxxv); the statement is somewhat unclear.
30 Kerney found forty-six “Catalonianisms” in the Folio, reduced to “twenty-two” in the Quarto — with twenty-four of them having been eliminated in favor of “proper Castilian forms.” See Kerney’s notes (31–32). Thacher concurs with Kerney’s assessment (III 43).
31 Trans: “One cannot suppose that Sánchez or Santángel, much less the king of Spain, would be deprived of the Columbus autograph (Letter). Then the original x must have been a copy of a copy, given that the discovery would have aroused a great deal of interest.” This interest, we are asked to conclude, would have inspired many copies of the Letter.
32 Jane writes that De Lollis “has shown that while B [the Quarto] is an edition of A [the Folio], it is an edition made with reference to the source of A” (cxxvi). See Jane’s 1930 summary essay (“Announcing”) and his Four Voyages for details of De Lollis’s theory as adopted by Jane (cxxvi). De Lollis’s inclusion of the already-discredited manuscript and the Italian translation fragments of uncertain date tends to over-complicate his comparative text studies.
33 Jane writes (in the 1930s) that the printing year of the Quarto, “it is agreed must be 1493” (Voyages cxxiv).
34 Gil designates the Folio as the basis for the German translation printed in 1497 and proposes that the Columbus autograph was used for the Latin translation reflected in the Roman quartos. See Gil (esp. 20–21).