Correcting and Improving all the 15th Century Citations

One of the more interesting new features available in the electronic version of the bibliography is the ability to study items by the years in which they were published. From this we learn that currently there are 76 entries in the bibliography published in print between 1456 and 1500. As I reviewed some of those entries I realized that numerous errors had crept in over the century during which the bibliography evolved, and I decided to review and correct all of the 15th century entries. This process I completed today.

The convenient standard reference work that I used is the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) published by the British Library. This provides searchable descriptions of incunabula together with references to more detailed bibliographical studies of each title. My process was to compare the G-M entry with cataloguing provided by the ISTC, and typically to follow the title and author record of the ISTC. However in certain instances, when a digital facsimile was available, I would transliterate the title directly from the facsimile. In other instances, if I learned that there was an earlier edition than the one previously cited in G-M, I cited the earlier edition. Whenever I could locate the edition in the ISTC, and I believe that this was in all except one instance, I added the ISTC entry number to the annotation. Users will notice that many of the 15th century citations in the bibliography are now significantly revised and improved, in both their bibliographical citations and explanatory notes, and the notes often include links to digital facsimiles.