Transcription notebook, first quire

E. L. HARROW — TRANSCRIPTION, QUIRE I. RULES OF THE HAND.

I transcribe letter by letter and I do not normalise. Where the copy-text is ambiguous I give both readings and mark neither as preferred. Where I cannot read it I leave the space and give the measurement of the space in millimetres, which is a fact, rather than a conjecture, which is not.

Errors of my own are to be struck through once and left legible. An erasure is a lost datum. I have taught this for thirty-one years and have not been thanked for it.

Second rule. Every sitting is to be opened by re-transcribing the last three lines of the previous sitting, without consulting what I wrote then, and the two transcriptions are to be set side by side. Where they differ, the difference is entered in the right-hand column with the date.

Entry, 4 May. Lines 218 to 220. Second transcription differs from the first at three points, all of them in the ordering of clauses. Words identical. Spelling identical. Punctuation identical, and the punctuation of this hand is idiosyncratic enough that I would expect to err in it before I erred in the order.

Entry, 11 May. Lines 218 to 220, third transcription. Agrees with the first. Does not agree with the second.

Entry, 19 May. I have ruled a fourth column and shall record the sequence alone, since the sequence appears to be the variable and I would rather measure one thing well than four things badly.

Entry, 2 August. Ninety-one sittings. Words: no variance. Order: variance at thirty-one points, of which twenty-two have varied more than once. I set this down as an observation about my transcriptions. I do not set it down as an observation about the copy-text, which would require a second transcriber, and I have not got one.