Incunabula
Bibliography
This Bibliography was initiated by Falk Eisermann of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke.
Needham's Ruler
Marco Palma's Archivio degli incunaboli in scrittura latina datati per anno
An excel sheet containing 12205 editions with indication of date in the colophon. It is a work in progress created by Gaetano Fascia, Marco Palma, Maria Alessia Piombino, Danilo Sciucco.
Incunabula: Price Index
The Glasgow Incunabula Project references prices of books as actually recorded in the books, and also prices from other sources such as marked up booksellers' catalogues etc. Listed chronologically (earliest first) and then in shelf-mark order, differentiating between currencies: http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/incunabula/prices/.
E. White Researching Print Runs
Many historians seeking to measure the impact of the ‘printing revolution’ in fifteenth century Europe have taken a quantitiative approach, multiplying the total of all editions by the number of copies in a typical edition. However, whereas the Incunable Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) lists more than 28,000 fifteenth-century editions that are represented by surviving specimens, the number of lost editions will always remain indeterminate. The second factor in the equation – the typical or ‘average’ fifteenth-century print run – is just as indeterminate as the first, if not more so. Inevitably, the ‘editions × copies’ formula has produced estimates of fifteenth-century press production that range anywhere from eight million to more than twenty million pieces of reading material. Such irreconcilable results (in which the margin for error may be larger than the answer itself) only serve to demonstrate that any effort to arrive at a meaningful quantification of fifteenth-century press production will require a much more systematic analysis of the available data on print runs.
Eric White has conducted a study; a census of print runs for fifteenth-century books, which takes a step in that direction by asking a much more basic question: what is the available data?
Download Eric White's full introduction and database of 15th century print runs of incunabula.
