NIDPAS BA-IR HA-MEHULALA BRIN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE BRNO HEBREW PRINTING HOUSE AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRINTED BOOKS FROM 1754–1760
NIDPAS BA-IR HA-MEHULALA BRIN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE BRNO HEBREW PRINTING HOUSE AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRINTED BOOKS FROM 1754–1760

Summary/Abstract: Even topics that have seemingly been fully explored can bring remarkable new findings, if they are seen from various perspectives or with a combination of methodological approaches. My research into Hebrew books printed by the Neumann family’s printing house in Brno before 1760 was based partly on a comparison of bibliographical lists, including electronic catalogues, but mainly on an examination of preserved copies. Only by this apparently conservative and surpassed approach, i.e. studying printed books de visu, is it possible – in the digital age – to discover a fragment of a book that has not previously been described, or to compare two various volumes of books and subsequently to find that they in fact differ only with regard to their title page, but not in terms of content. Another dimension is achieved by research that involves comparing extant or bibliographically recorded copies with relevant archival materials, such as period lists of printed books. However distorted or imprecisely transliterated the titles of books may be – which is often the case for Hebrew books – it is surprising how much of the book production has not been preserved; archival documents can only provide a partial explanation for this.

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