Manuscript copies of printed books

[Manu Francis]

Now that the thread seems dried up, let me thank all of you for these
useful information and insight.
With best wishes.

-- 
Emmanuel Francis
Researcher, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Culture, Universität Hamburg
Associate member, Centre d'étude de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud
(EHESS-CNRS), Paris


On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 12:34 PM, Andrea Acri <andreaacri at mac.com> wrote:
>
> Analogous considerations could be made with respect to the Balinese
> tradition. I have come across a few texts, (type)written and published in
> either Balinese, Indonesian, or Old Javanese, by early 20th-century authors
> that were copied/reproduced (subsequently, or perhaps even by the author
> himself)  in the form of palm-leaf manuscripts (a process described in
> modern Indonesian as dilontarkan ‘turned into a lontar’ [i.e. palm-leaf
> ms]). In 2007 I myself have witnessed my Balinese informant, the man of
> letters Ida Dewa Gede Catra (who still spends the best part of his days
> typing into Roman script Balinese and Old Javanese texts on lontars),
> transcribing on a lontar (obviously in Balinese script) my Latex-typeset and
> romanized draft edition of the Dharma Pātañjala–a Śaiva text that survived
> only in Java, but which is very relevant to Balinese Śaivism. He somehow
> felt that the text should be part of the mss. heritage of Bali–certainly not
> for ‘ritual’ purposes. He also added a nice colophon, mentioning that he
> copied the text from a transcription of a Javanese ms. handed to him by
> Andrea Acri, who found it in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek.
>
> Andrea Acri
>
>
> On Mar 24, 2012, at 9:20 PM, Judit Torzsok wrote:
>
> Just another example (on what is not the same thing again) and reflections
> on the subject as to why printed editions are collated in manuscripts --
> I have also come across manuscripts that contained, it seems, collations of
> printed editions. For instance, one of the sāradā manuscripts of the
> Paramārthasāra with Yogarāja's commentary has marginal annotations (by a
> third hand perhaps) and it appears to have the same readings there as the
> KSTS edition, even / especially when the KSTS has some peculiar readings or
> conjectures. I think it is ms N (see Bansat-Boudon -- Tripathi for the
> description), but I have not got a full collation. In any case, I think it
> must have been a fairly common practice to copy and / or collate editions,
> at least in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. But the practice
> may not be motivated by the idea that mss are more "sacred"; rather, printed
> editions were perhaps considered to be like manuscripts, so they were
> collated and recopied. I imagine that printed editions were still rare at
> that time (must have been expensive too, but certainly rare in many cases,
> like the grantha editions mentioned by Dominic Goodall), so people wanted to
> save and / or transmit / collate them by making manuscript copies. It also
> makes me think of people who, fifteen or twenty years ago, printed their
> documents to save them in a hard copy, because they did not trust computers
> and disks to do the job. So old ways of saving and transmitting things may
> survive longer, even if, retrospectively, it seems to be absurd to save or
> transmit a printed edition by recopying it in a manuscript. Also, the
> scribes may not have known that (at least in some cases) there were actually
> a lot of copies of the printed edition out there.
>
> Judit Törzsök
>
>



-- 
Emmanuel Francis
Researcher, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Culture, Universität Hamburg
Associate member, Centre d'étude de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud
(EHESS-CNRS), Paris