O reprintach uwag kilka

Abstract

The article presents the history of facsimile editions in Poland, their importance and position in the history of books and publishing. The examples presented and discussed in the paper allow us to distinguish a number of types of edition – reprints: 1. Scientific facsimile edition, apart from the re-edition of a given work (a manuscript, print, or document) also containing its transcription and elaborate scientific methodology, while the copy of the old edition is only a part of a wider-scale project; 2. Reprint, merely enriched with a shorter or longer commentary, preface, or glosses; 3. Reprint which is an exact copy of the original, without any additional elements; 4. Re-edition, produced by means of photo-offset, with a new title page and cover; 5. Hybrid edition, uniting reproductions of old editions and texts, set together anew, joined by continued pagination and index. The crucial element that determines how a given work is classified is the scope and form of all new, added elements, which gives the text a new value, making it more than just a copy (which could be called „clear reprint”, following Rulykowski). The closer the text is to the original, the higher its bibliophile value and typographic level is. In the other cases, evaluation to a greater extent applies to the subject-matter value of the work: the text itself, the commentary and the methodological workshop.