A spoke in the statistical wheel: the conundrum of evidence and the disruptive behaviour of the miscellany

Taking as its starting point a miscellany in the city library of Lille, which contains four early Sixteenth-century Italian editions, in three instances the only known copy, the essay surveys the history of the dispersal of Italian Renaissance books in collections all over the world. Recent bibliographical discussions of the destruction/survival of early printed books have employed copy-counts and zero-graphing to project the number of “lost editions”. In particular, articles by Goran Proot and Leo Egghe on Jesuit theatre programmes in Belgium and by Jonathan Green, together with Frank McIntyre and Paul Needham, on the ISTC, are described and analysed. In neither instance is account taken of the distinction between archive and library survival, nor of the possible impact of books bound up in miscellanies. Both factors, however, seriously impact the credibility of the final projection.