Methods of attribution of defective copies printed with Roman type

All information and elements, which help in attribution of a defective copy, are contained in the copy. Information needed for attribution of a defective copy may be contained in such components of an edition: title of main text, other subtitles, by-line of the author or editor at dedication or preface, colophon or information on publisher’s imprint at the last page, page header and footer, censor permission and its different forms etc. Frequently these components fail to give enough information for efficient search of bibliographic data or sometimes they are just absent. In such cases the main source of information needed for attribution is the text of the book: its content, genre, persons or events that are mentioned and so on. An attempt of attribution of a defective copy printed with Roman letters may give no result. Due to substantial diversity of genres and themes of old-printed editions printed with Roman letters, usage of great amount of sources for its artistic decoration, there are no unified scheme for attribution of such editions. The experience of work with them enables to build up relevant approaches and methods of attribution.