Mechanized collation; a preliminary report.

J % two kinds of detailed textual comparison, or collation: the Acomparison of different editions of a given work and the comparison of different copies of the same edition. We shall here be concerned only with the second of these two kinds. The importance of the very detailed collation of different copies of the same edition is now widely recognized: such colla tion is our sole means of obtaining the fullest possible record of the variant readings which, particularly in books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, different copies of the same edition so frequently contain. These variants, and especially the variants which are the result of systematic stop-press correction (of changes deliberately introduced, that is, during the course of the printing), have two primary values as bibliographical evidence, a