It is a testament to Shakespeare’s unusual prestige that when his friends and colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, decided to publish the complete plays, they sprang for a folio. The lowly art of drama was usually published in cheap, disposable quartos. The folio, literally twice as big as a quarto, was reserved for serious works of poetry, philosophy, and theology. Folios were heirlooms. This was to be a book of quality, based on the “True Originall Copies” of Shakespeare’s plays, so that they might live on forever. And seeing as more than half of the plays survived only as part of the First Folio, Heminges, Condell, and their publishers performed an invaluable service for English literature.
The problem was, they didn’t do a very good job.
Folio-sized books require folio-sized budgets, and by most accounts, Heminges and Condell didn’t have those. Putting together 900 pages of double-columned writing, often going months between printing sessions in order to pursue more lucrative jobs, the 750 copies of the First Folio are riddled with errors, mistakes, and inconsistencies. Even worse, every copy seemed to have its own unique set of typos and alternative layouts.
“The First Folio,” wrote Dr. John Shroeder, “when proofread at all, as often it wasn’t, usually was proofed without reference to copy and with an eye to typographical comeliness only.” Although Heminges and Condell had tried to rescue Shakespeare’s work for all time, replacing “stol’n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors,” the publishers they trusted with Shakespeare’s materials read them shoddily, in spurts of frantic activity between other big printing jobs, spread out over at least two years of collating and printing.
One reason why the Folger Shakespeare Library started collecting First Folios—by 1945, they had 79—was to eventually produce a cleaned-up, error-free version of the book once and for all. This was a noble goal, but there was a catch: Charlton Kadio Hinman, working as a bibliographer at the Folger, calculated that checking all 900-plus pages of all 79 copies against each other to meet the editors’ exacting standards would take a single working man about 40 years of continuous work. The traditional method of line-by-line text collation just wasn’t going to work.
But Hinman had an idea, based on his service in World War II. While serving in the army as a cryptanalyst, Hinman had heard that intelligence officers had been straining their eyes staring at grainy, blurry aerial photo surveillance, trying to figure out what had changed between one day’s battlefield photographs and the next. They came up with a novel solution: project two photographs of the same site over each other, then rapidly alternate: “first one picture for a fraction of a second, then the other picture for the same brief period, then the first picture again, and so on,” Hinman later wrote. “The result was—or at any rate, was supposed to be—that wherever there had been no change in the target area since it had first been photographed the screen showed only a single, perfectly motionless picture of that area; but that wherever there had been a change the picture on the screen flickered or wobbled.”
As far as we can tell, there’s no evidence that the American military ever tried this tactic out—probably because it was simply impossible to get an airplane to take the exact same photo of the same place from the same altitude in the same lighting conditions from one week to the next. But Hinman thought it was true, and that was enough to inspire his own very real, very successful machine: the Hinman Collator.
The Collator is a bulky, fridge-sized contraption of mirrors, levers, and lamps, with trays on each side and a projector screen in the middle. By placing two nearly identical pages on each tray—say, two different copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio— you can see a superimposed projection of both pages. Wherever the typesetting differs, a ghostly afterimage hovers. These afterimages showed Hinman the difference between one edition of the First Folio and the next.
In this way, Hinman was able to look at dozens of First Folios, and publish a landmark study on its proofing and compilation. “The finding,” one adoring reviewer wrote, “is that the First Folio, when proofed at all, as often it wasn’t, usually was proofed without reference to copy and with an eye to typographical comeliness only.” Hinman also showed that the book had five compilers, and proved the theory that the Folio’s quires were never set sequentially from the front, but spread outward from the middle two pages of each one.
Most importantly, he fixed innumerable errors and typos in the text, using earlier versions of the Folio and other materials from Shakespeare’s hand and company as guides in cleaning up the text, coming as close to an original version of the Bard’s writing as any scholar had gotten in three centuries. It is the foundation of all Shakespeare publishing since: when you look at a facsimile of the First Folio, you are almost certainly seeing Hinman’s edition from Norton,1 a superbook made from the ghostly afterimages of dozens of other books—a more perfect copy of a book that had never actually been printed so neatly.
But Hinman’s revolution in Shakespearean bibliography was only the beginning for his marvelous collator. Other universities, libraries, and archives clamored for their own Hinman Collators, and soon, with a little seed money, Hinman was able to manufacture dozens of the machines—59 in all by 1978—which were soon used to untangle all kinds of bibliographical knots in Western literature.
The most vigorous collector of Hinman machines was probably the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA), founded in the 1960s with government funding and a mandate to publish authoritative, uncorrupted editions of 15 canonical American writers. Using the Hinman, editors would be able to identify “non-authorial” changes to a typescript or manuscript, creating editions of Melville or Emerson that were closer to what the authors originally intended, rather than the cheap, ratty paperbacks that had flooded bookshelves since the paperback revolution of the 1940s and 50s. Many of these editions have since become definitive, forming the basis of, for example, much of the Library of America’s classic catalogue.
You can read much more about this CEAA project, along with a great deal of handwringing over its ties to American cultural imperialism and technocrat-dominated arts funding in Matthew Blackwell’s excellent essay at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
But what I kept thinking of, as I read through articles and histories of the Hinman Collator, is that besides being a crackerjack machine, it sounds like a mental extension.
I spent last week reading about mental extensions in Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (2022), though the original idea dates back to a 1998 essay of the same name by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. The theory is obvious: we use our bodies, environments, and tools to improve and expand our thinking. The implications are profound: our minds are, to a certain extent, “out there” in the world, and we need them as much as a golfer needs a golf club.
Our thinking is defined by the tools we have at hand. The device you are reading this on is a mind extension that lets your brain offload everything from your calendar to arithmetical skills to your memory. Languages are mind extenders, too, allowing us to give a common, expressible shape to our ideas; poetry and song made language easier to remember, and writing allowed us to store and preserve language in physical matter. Computers, of course, have extended our ability to think numerically in ways that were inconceivable a few centuries ago, and artificial intelligence might be extending our cognitive capabilities very quickly, and very soon.
There is a lot of pessimism over modern technologies that have colonized so much of our thinking. Much of it is deserved. I’m not entirely convinced that Google Calendar is superior to carving tally marks on a tortoise shell, and I much prefer ghosts and daemons to artificial intelligence.
But the Hinman Collator strikes me as a good example of a good mind extender: here is a device that changes our perception, and creates new ways of thinking about text. The operator of a Hinman Collator is a cyborg, using a complicated mechanical apparatus to create a new kind of vision—a kind extremely well-suited to collating Shakespeare’s First Folio—and produce a body of knowledge nearly impossible to obtain through ordinary means. Of course, we have computers to help us do the work even faster now, but we wouldn’t even know where to point our cursors if the Hinmanian cyborgs weren’t there to point the way decades ago.
And you can see the whole world around you in this way. The neat thing about the extended mind is that, if it’s true, it’s all around you in ways that you never suspected. Look at all the tools and props around you: the old pencil that imprints your thinking on matter in smudgy graphite, the coffee cup that provides a jolt of alertness in your morning, the traffic lights that whip a hodgepodge of drivers into a symphony of metal and fumes that (mostly) get where they’re going peacefully.
This might be the best test that we can ask of any new piece of technology, or any new intrusion into our lived environment: does this tool improve my capacity to know and perceive the world? Does it increase my capabilities? Will it help me as much as a Hinman Collator?
From the Archives
Something about the Hinman Collator seems remarkably Krzhizhanovskian to me. Maybe it’s because typos and writing mistakes tend to become characters in his wild, woolly, Soviet sci-fi stories. I wrote this one last year, and remain inordinately proud of it. Substack won’t format the header image properly, but hey, you get what you pay for.
And that’s it for this week. Happy reading!
Although I am salivating over the British Library’s upcoming facsimile.