Agnieszka Franczyk-Cegła
Terminus, Volume 21, zeszyt 4 (53) 2019, 2019, pp. 437-457
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.19.013.11173The beginning of the 17th century in Cracow was a period when a number of books appeared on the market in which the title page only contained information about the place of publication, but not the name of the printer. These so-called anonymous imprints included mainly popular and occasional literature. The main reason for not publishing the name of printers was the fear of censorship, which was locally the responsibility of the University of Cracow and the Catholic Church. Nowadays, the identification of typographic anonyms, which until now has been the subject of causal studies usually conducted as bywork during other research projects, allows us to get to know the history of particular printing houses and the literary culture of a given area. The aim of this paper is to look at the issue of anonymous imprints from the methodological point of view, i.e. to present the most effective methods of discovering the printing houses that published the books and pamphlets in question. The emphasis is placed on describing the advantages and disadvantages of typographic and typographic-archival methods in the context of the changing realities in Cracow’s foundries and printing houses at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. Methodological problems will be discussed on the basis of a corpus of examples collected by the author, including anonymous publications from Cracow printing houses in the years 1601–1620 (about 800 titles) by Jan Szarfenberger, Szymon Kempini, and Wojciech Kobyliński, among others.