The history of English spelling is an eventful one, from Old English with an almost one‑to‑one sound‑to‑spelling relationship, to Modern English, notorious for its sound‑to‑spelling unpredictability. In between lies a vast period characterised by immense spelling variability, reflecting the cumulative effect of dialectal variation and lack of uniformity, additionally compounded by the mode of text transmission in the manuscript culture, whose characteristics were adopted in a wholesale fashion into the culture of early print. In effect, early printed books present a rich kaleidoscope of spelling variants, which – not infrequently – co‑occur on the same page or even in the same line of a printed text. This paper addresses the issue of this variability with a view to measuring in mathematical terms the degree of internal spelling variation within a text and showing that much of the spelling variation is associated with compositors as agents in the printing process. The analysis of internal spelling variation is based on George Joye’s 1534 English translation of the Psalms printed in Antwerp and aims at identifying parts of the text which are similar or different in terms of spellings by applying cosine similarity measurements performed on individual quires of the publication.

The holdings of the PAS Gdańsk Library include the so-called Schwarzwald set marked by its uniform provenance, which is composed of the private collection of books of Heinrich Schwarzwald IV (1619-1672) and items collected in the library of St. Peter and Paul’s Church in Gdańsk from the 15th to the beginning of the 19th century – largely purchased using funds from this patrician. The Schwarzwald set in an almost complete form found its way to the City Library in Gdańsk in 1832; only in 1872 were manuscripts and incunabula added.
The paper sketches the history of the Schwarzwald set, placing it in the context of the early modern collectorship in Gdańsk, and presents its five hand-written catalogues, inventories and tables of contents created in the City Library in the 19th century. A quantitative analysis and a thematic division of Schwarzwald’s book collection and the holdings of the church library are also presented. The paper also indicates the benefits of studying broadly-understood book culture, resulting from the examination of historic catalogues and inventories, as well as imperfections in the drawing of conclusions on the basis of library materials without detailed examination of the studied collections.

The Kórnik Library holds many early printed books from the former church of the Unity of the Brethren in Leszno, including an adligat, i.e. a volume combining three works: one by John Calvin and two by Matthias Flacius. This artefact was bound in recycled parchment inscribed with text by an eminent philosopher/scholastic logician, Gilbert de la Porrée; it is a fragment of Commentarius ad Epistolas S. Pauli.
The author of the article compares the text of the Commentary from the parchment cover to other hand-written copies of this work. On the sidelines of reflections concerning the authorship of the treatises attributed to Gilbert, he points out that the research in this scope has not yet taken into account an analysis of the rhythmics. The text which survived on the cover has the form of rhythmic prose – a different one than that in one of Gilbert’s letters.