Problems of Attributing the Publications of the Old Believer Ovchinnikov Printer

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the problem of attributing the publications of illegal Old Believer printers in the second half of the nineteenth century: such publications do not have bibliographical data or have false information about the place of publication. At the centre of the author’s attention is the largest and longest-running printing company in the Old Believer market that belonged to the brothers Ovchinnikov. For publications from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the main element which allows us to attribute a book to this or that printer is decoration; however, this criterion is insufficient for books from the second half of the nineteenth century. Old Believer merchants were publishers of books in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; they placed their orders in rather large printing companies with an established set of decorations. Even in the printers they started at the end of the eighteenth century, they followed the tradition of using individual and distinctive ornamentation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, peasants or townsmen were publishers of books. Lacking sufficient funds and due to the illegal character of their activities, their printers were small and mobile, and they printed books on cheap paper in order to lower pro-duction costs. With only rare exceptions, the decoration of such books was not rich: either it was absent in general or there were only typeset decorations. If they did have headpieces, different printers used the same models. As such, ornamentation cannot be used as a universal indicator for attributing these publications, although it can be part of a set of such indicators. Fonts play the main role in defining an edition, but it is neces-sary to create a reference guide of fonts if this indicator is to be used practically. This article reflects the results of an analysis of fonts and decorative elements in publications from the Ovchinnikov printer. Very many such publications used a great variety of fonts simultaneously. According to indirect data, the books date from the 1860s. They might initially be taken for sammelbände since the type of paper changes along with the fonts. However, the integrity of the text during the transition from one font type to the next undermines this assumption. The article poses the question of how to explain the peculiarities of such publications. There is no one-dimensional answer. However, the author makes some suggestions: it is possible that at some point the printer was dispersed, with several printing presses placed in different houses. When a comparatively large volume was produced, the material was shared out and printed on these separate press-es. However, this hypothesis provokes the question: why do blocks of text printed in one font not follow each other in sequence? The article contains examples of the printer’s fonts and artistic elements the author identified.