Ian Christie-Miller: Dickens discovered, Tyndale traced and Cyrillic Sacraments compared: All by back lighting.

This presentation reports some practical research benefits of combining front lit and back lit images of paper.

The following three groups of items are concerned:

The first is a group of manuscripts by Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Pages of his manuscripts had been mounted and bound into volumes. Now images taken by back lighting have been so combined with images taken by conventional front lighting that hidden words have been revealed. It is hoped that these previously hidden texts will be of good use to scholars in this bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens.

The second group is books by William Tyndale (d. 1536) author of the first printed English New Testament. This is the Tyndale New Testament (TNT) of which there are three extant copies. (The celebrated ‘King James’ or Authorised version of the Bible of 1611 relied very heavily on TNT). Although neither of the two copies of the first edition of TNT held in London were made available to the author, the Wuerttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart kindly, immediately and readily made their copy available.

There is uncertainty about the place of printing of the TNT. The British Library catalogue record shows: Publisher/year [Worms? printed by Peter Schoeffer? 1526?]

The watermarks in the Stuttgart copy are a heart shape, a Basle crozier and a crown.

The third item under discussion are the two copies of the 1657 Cyrillic book Treatise on the Sacraments which are bound in one volume in the Marsh Library in Dublin. There are no other known copies in the UK and Ireland. Every page of both books has been imaged using front lighting and back lighting. The images are available interactively in a Filemaker Pro database file and may be viewed in a variety of forms. One form shows the whole sheet as originally printed, so that the complete distribution of chain lines and watermarks is visible.