Future

Coming out was quite a step, but starting all over has many advantages. All forms of traces of use will remain my point of interest. As annotations could not exist without the text they refer to and in view of the fact that my decision to leave the Lyonese publications was instigated by my frustration at not being able to fully grasp the Latin texts, I have decided to switch to books in a language I do understand. Since my passive Portuguese is more or less fluent, I have chosen Lisbon editions as a starting point and postpone further decisions on expansion or limitation of the corpus until the size and content of this new corpus becomes clear. Interestingly an initial survey reveals almost all Lisbon titles in the collection of the University of Amsterdam to be in Portuguese, most of the Lyon books being in Latin.

In addition to the obvious traces of use I will look for any publishing information for the contemporary reader in the preliminary leaves and colophon, i.e. on content, price of the book, reason for publishing, and also make a cursory inventory of illustrations on the title pages, decorated initials (P.D. will surely appreciate that), head- and tail-pieces.

These past months have not been in vain as there is a bulk of material lying dormant in my computer for future reference.