Facsimile

From the Latin fac simile, "make a similar thing", a facsimile is a reproduction of an original that imitates its appearance. The earliest facsimiles were line engravings reproducing celebrated autographs at the end of the eighteenth century; lithography turned the facsimile into an editorial genre in the 1820s, with compilations such as the Isographie des hommes célèbres (1828–1830), and subsequently photography, photogravure and heliogravure made it possible, during the nineteenth century, to reproduce illuminated manuscripts and rare books. In the twentieth century, facsimile editions of writers' manuscripts, notebooks and incunabula became working tools, and sometimes objects of bibliophilia in their own right.

The bookseller encounters the facsimile in two forms. The facsimile edition, published and advertised as such, is described like any ordinary book, with its publisher, date and print run. The facsimile inserted within a copy — a title leaf, a plate, a final leaf, or a reproduced inscription — replaces a missing original: the collation must indicate this unambiguously, and the copy must be sold as incomplete. Recognition relies on the paper, on the absence of any impression from the type, on the regularity of the printing, and on comparison with a reliable copy; in the case of an autograph, the line of a facsimile shows neither the pen retouches nor the ink variations of genuine handwriting.

Confusion lies at the heart of the matter: a facsimile inscription presented as a genuine inscription, a remade leaf mistaken for an original, a facsimile edition sold as a first edition. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions inserted, as a frontispiece or at the end of the volume, a facsimile of a manuscript page or of the author's signature: these are elements of the edition, not autograph pieces. A copy from which a facsimile has subsequently been removed presents a gap, which must be described.