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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A comprehensive resource to understanding the hand-press printing of early books
Studying Early Printed Books, 1450 - 1800 offers a guide to the fascinating process of how books were printed in the first centuries of the press and shows how the mechanics of making books shapes how we read and understand them. The author offers an insightful overview of how books were made in the hand-press period and then includes an in-depth review of the specific aspects of the printing process. She addresses questions such as: How was paper made? What were different book formats? How did the press work? In addition, the text is filled with illustrative examples that demonstrate how understanding the early processes can be helpful to today’s researchers.
Studying Early Printed Books shows the connections between the material form of a book (what it looks like and how it was made), how a book conveys its meaning and how it is used by readers. The author helps readers navigate books by explaining how to tell which parts of a book are the result of early printing practices and which are a result of later changes. The text also offers guidance on: how to approach a book; how to read a catalog record; the difference between using digital facsimiles and books in-hand. This important guide:
- Reveals how books were made with the advent of the printing press and how they are understood today
- Offers information on how to use digital reproductions of early printed books as well as how to work in a rare books library
- Contains a useful glossary and a detailed list of recommended readings
- Includes a companion website for further research
Written for students of book history, materiality of text and history of information, Studying Early Printed Books explores the many aspects of the early printing process of books and explains how their form is understood today.
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Table of Contents
Cover
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Overview
Getting Ready to Print
At the Press
Also at the Press
After Printing
The Economics of Printing
Part 2: Step‐by‐Step
Paper
Type
Format
Printing
Corrections and changes
Illustrations
Binding
Part 3: On the Page
Advertisements
Alphabet and Abbreviations
Blanks
Dates
Imprint Statements
Edition, Impression, Issue, State, Copy
Initial Letters
Marginal Notes
Music
Pagination and Foliation
Preliminary Leaves
Press Figures
Printer’s Devices
Printer’s Ornaments
Privileges, Approbations, and Imprimaturs
Signature marks
Title Pages
Volvelles and Movable Figures
Part 4: Looking at Books
Good Research Habits
Handling Books
Appearance
Contents
Page Features
Usage
Digitization
Part 5: The Afterlives of Books
Loss Rates
Catalog Records
Books in Hand
Books on screen
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Further Reading
General Bibliography
Printer’s Manuals
History of the Book
Book Trade
Manuscripts and Paleography
Handling Books
Catalogs of Early Hand‐press Books
Catalog and Imprint Resources
Paper
Type
Format
Printing
Corrections
Illustrations
Bindings
On the Page
Advertisements
Collation Formulas
Edition, Impression, Issue, State
Press Figures
Printer’s Devices
Printer’s Ornaments
Signature Marks
Title Pages
Volvelles
Afterlives
Digital Collections
Appendix 2: Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 1 The title page to a 1616 edition of
Colloquia et dictionariolum septem
...
Chapter 1
Figures 2–4 How a sheet of paper turns into eight pages.
Figure 5 A pair of type cases from Moxon’s 1683
Mechanick Exercises: or, the
...
Figure 9 Side view of a printing press, labeled with key parts; adapted from ...
Chapter 2
Figure 12 A piece of type for the ligature “ſi” labeled to show its parts. L...
Figure 16 This diagram shows how the sheet would be aligned as if you were f...
Figure 17 Folio imposition.
Figure 18 A folio gathered in sixes.
Figure 19 Quarto imposition.
Figure 20 A common octavo imposition.
Figure 21 A common duodecimo imposition.
Figure 22 A duodecimo set in 8 and 4.
Chapter 3
Figure 32 An account of the herb hepatica from
A Boke of the propreties of he
...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Studying Early Printed Books 1450–1800
A Practical Guide
Sarah Werner
This edition first published 2019© 2019 Sarah Werner.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Sarah Werner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of WarrantyWhile the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication data applied for
Hardback ISBN: 9781119049975Paperback ISBN: 9781119049968
Cover images: 1) Side view of a printing press from the 1769 Encyclopédie, from a public domain image made available by Smithsonian Libraries; 2) A blank leaf from Donne’s 1633 Juvenilia, provided by the Folger Shakespeare Library under a CC BY‐SA license.Cover design: Wiley
List of Illustrations
Figure 1
Title page of a 1616 Berlaimont
Colloquia et dictionariolum
Figures 2–4
How a sheet of paper turns into eight pages
Figure 5
Type case from Moxon’s 1683
Mechanick Exercises
Figure 6
Basic parts of letters
Figure 7
Compositor and composing sticks from the 1769
Encyclopédie
Figure 8
Locked chase with furniture and quoins
Figure 9
Side view of a printing press from the 1769
Encyclopédie
Figure 10
An opening of Spenser’s 1579
The shepheardes calender
labeled with some basic page elements
Figure 11
Paper mould and deckle from the 1769
Encyclopédie
Figure 12
Basic parts of a piece of type for a ligature
Figure 13
Examples of typefaces from Comenius’s 1685
Orbis sensualium pictus
Figures 14 and 15
Puller’s perspective of a quarto imposition on the press stone
Figure 16
Folding a quarto
Figure 17
Folio imposition
Figure 18
Folio in sixes
Figure 19
Quarto imposition
Figure 20
Octavo imposition
Figure 21
Duodecimo imposition
Figure 22
Duodecimo imposed as eight and four
Figure 23
Pressroom with puller and beater from the 1769
Encyclopédie
Figure 24
Diagram of cancels
Figure 25
Relief printing
Figure 26
Intaglio printing
Figures 27
–
28
Rolling press and detail showing plate mark from
Nova Reperta
(ca. 1600)
Figure 29
Stab‐stitch binding of a 1634
Richard II
Figure 30
Key binding elements
Figure 31
Dos‐à‐dos binding of a New Testament and Book of Psalms (ca 1610)
Figure 32
Blackletter account of hepatica from the 1542
Booke of the propreties of herbes
Figure 33
Four examples of initial letters
Figure 34
Text and commentary from a 1497
De consolatione philosophiae
Figure 35
Music printed on a common press from Dowland’s 1597
The First Booke of Songes
Figure 36
Press figure from the 1724 collected reports of Henry Hobart
Figure 37
Volvelle from Apian’s 1524
Cosmographicus libre
Figure 38
Comparison of a page lit by normal and raking light
Figure 39
Interior of a 1616 Berlaimont showing columns of text in different typefaces and a manuscript iteration of that layout added by a user
Acknowledgments
This book has been long in the making and my debts of gratitude are many. Deep thanks go to Adam Hooks and Dan Traister, who read the manuscript in full and provided many helpful comments throughout; this book is stronger for their generosity. I am thankful, too, for the advice of others who have read small and large chunks of this: Jason Dean, Sophie Defrance, Marieke van Delft, Rachel Donohue, Ian Gadd, Erik Geleijns, Shanti Graheli, Daryl Green, Whitney Trettien, and Steven Van Impe. A number of folks helped me track down resources and answer questions: thank you, Giles Bergel, Thony Christie, Heather Froelich, John Gallagher, Marian Lefferts, and Aaron Pratt. As I wrote this, I chatted about it a lot, particularly on Twitter, where I have found a community who help me think about the production and use of rare materials; so for assistance in pinning down details and for getting excited about the big picture, thank you #biblionerds, especially Mitch Fraas, Bob MacLean, Jay Moschella, John Overholt, and Shannon Supple. The cheering on of my friends, and their willingness to listen to me despair, kept me going (hi, snails and shoal). And my family learned more than they probably wanted to about all of this and they usually listened to my explaining all the ups and downs.
The origins of the idea for this book came from a long‐ago conversation with Emma Bennett, then acquisition editor at Wiley Blackwell, and her excitement for this persuaded me it was doable. I am grateful to her, Deirdre Illkson, and Rebecca Harkin for their conversations and support. Manish Luthra shepherded this book through production, copy editor Giles Flitney brought clarity to my thoughts, and Juliet Booker provided invaluable help in making the book look its best.
The images in this book come from libraries that provide high‐resolution and open‐access images of their collections. Not all institutions use public domain or share‐alike licensing, but it’s not only the legal choice, it’s the right choice: we are custodians of these objects not for our own benefit but for everyone’s. Thank you, Boston Public Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, Harry Ransom Center, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Library of Medicine, Smithsonian Libraries, the University and State Library of Cologne, and the University of Ghent Library.
But my two largest debts of gratitude are to people without whom I would not have been able to even think about the questions that this book asks, let alone begin to explain how to answer them. My former colleagues in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Central Library are a font of wisdom and generosity. I have learned more than I can express not only from their conversations with me but from their catalog and acquisitions records and conservation work and reading guidelines—in other words, from all aspects of the work they do, too often unrecognized, every day. Thank you Julie Ainsworth, Ron Bogdan, Erin Blake, Melissa Cook, William Davis, LuEllen DeHaven, Rhea DeStefano, Steve Galbraith, Jim Kuhn, Rosalind Larry, Caryn Lazzuri, Deborah Leslie, Renate Mesmer, Camille Seerattan, Carrie Smith, Heather Wolfe, and Georgianna Ziegler, and my thanks to Nadia Seiler and Betsy Walsh, may their memories be a blessing.
Finally, it is to the students I taught in the Folger Undergraduate Program’s “Books and Early Modern Culture” seminar that I owe my biggest debt of gratitude. Their enthusiasm for and openness to working with all aspects of bibliography and book history drove me to learn more and share more with them. We asked questions together and learned together. It’s in their honor that I hope this book inspires more people to look at their books with open eyes and open hearts.
Introduction
If you buy a book today at your local book store and enjoy it so much you want to share it with your globe‐trotting Aunt Sadie, you’d expect that the copy you buy online and have shipped to her will be the same book that you own. It’d have the same cover, the same number of pages, the same text on all those pages. But if you lived in 1573, and you bought a book at a bookstall near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and then met up to discuss that book with a friend who had also bought a copy at the same stall, you might discover that your books looked very different. They might have different bindings, they might have different words on some of the pages, they might even not have the same number of leaves.
That difference between books then and books today is why this book exists. Everything that we assume about print today—that it is fixed, easily replicated, identical in mass quantities—are features that were gradually established during the first centuries of printing. In order to understand what an early modern book is and how printed conventions came to be what they are, we need to understand how early printed books were made. And so this guide describes the technologies and practices of hand‐press printing in order to help us identify how the mechanics of making books shapes how we read and understand them.
When Johannes Gutenberg created movable type and the printing press in the late 1440s and early 1450s, he was drawing on existing practices and technologies in metalworking and wine making and tapping into an established market for manuscript books and for woodcut prints. What Gutenberg set into motion was the ability to create a large variety of texts printed in large quantities; a 400‐page work didn’t need 400 different woodblocks to print it, but a font of type that could be arranged into different words and rearranged into different words for corrections and other books.
The technologies associated with Gutenberg—type cast from metal matrices, wooden press operated by hand, and black ink from oil and soot—remained largely the same until machines were introduced to the process in the early 1800s. The practices of how books were made and how they were sold changed over time, especially in the first 50 years of printing when many of the conventions we take for granted, like title pages, were still being developed. But how type was cast and books were printed remained essentially consistent until machines entered the picture. And so, although the period of hand‐press printing in the West stretches over 250 years and across Europe and North America, we can study its practices as a rough continuum. What you learn about how a book was printed in Leipzig in 1502 will be relevant for a pamphlet printed in Boston in 1784.
The focus of this guide is on printed works, but the distinction between print and manuscript is less strict than we have come to assume today. The development of the printing press happened alongside a growth in manuscript production; the increased availability of paper made both printing and writing on paper easier. The earliest printed books often depended on manuscript completion; the addition of initial letters and rubrication to mark the start of passages blur the line between printed books and hand‐written ones. Even later printed books worked hand in hand with manuscript practices, encouraging readers to write in corrections for print errors and users to copy out printed passages in their manuscript miscellanies (compilations of miscellaneous texts). The rise of print also meant an increase in printed forms designed to be completed by hand; indeed the earliest surviving printed works were not books but indulgences with blank spaces left for the purchaser’s name. David McKitterick’s Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450‐1830 provides illuminating details and a historical framework for understanding why print and manuscript should be considered alongside each other. But an introductory book can only cover so much material. Since more readers encounter early modern works in their printed form, rather than in manuscript, and since reading early modern handwriting is a skill unto itself, this guide keeps its focus on understanding printed books. (If you’re interested in learning more about early modern manuscripts and paleography, see Appendix 1, “Further Reading,” for some resources.)
If print and manuscript are blurred categories, so is that of books. We tend to think of printing as making books and of books as printed objects. But there are plenty of printed works that are not in the form of a codex (the technical term for a gathering of leaves secured along one side—that is, the form of the book as we are used to it). Forms, pamphlets, playbills, proclamations, and news sheets are examples of early printed objects that are not books, but that are an integral part of the print trade. And there are plenty of codices that are not printed, in medieval and earlier periods and continuing through the early modern and modern periods. Manuscript bibles, books of poems, account books, miscellanies, and diaries are usually in the form of a codex. For simplicity’s sake, this guide describes our object of study as printed books, but the printing processes discussed here are true for any printed work in the hand‐press period, codex or not.
It’s also important to remember from the outset that we base our knowledge of early printed books on what has survived, but those survivors aren’t necessarily representative of what was being printed and read. Collectors have long had a bias toward books they deemed important and so literary works were saved at a much greater rate than almanacs. Some printed works were built for survival—those heavy bound bibles. Others were barely intended to last through the week—printed broadsides pasted to walls would disappear as soon as it rained, if not before. We work with what we have, but we can try to remember there’s a lot we don’t have. (For more on what survived and what’s missing, see “Loss Rates” in Part 5.)
But why do you need to know how hand‐press books are made or how to read them? Can’t you just pick up an edition of Utopia and be done with it? You certainly could. There are plenty of modern editions not only of Utopia but of many of Thomas More’s other works as well. But an interest in Utopia can easily lead to an interest in the humanist circles through which it moved and the various letters and poems and other material that preceded and followed early editions of the book. Such paratextual material, however, is usually appended to the end of a modern edition, if it’s included at all, while the early editions published some material before the main text and some after, and the first four Latin editions varied in what material was included and where it appeared. In other words, modern editions of this text don’t include all the information that an early reader would have seen and a modern researcher might want. And, of course, many other early printed books don’t exist in any modern edition.
There’s also information to be found in looking at a book’s original printing that can help us understand how it was used. Take a look at the title page in Figure 1, for example.
Figure 1 The title page to a 1616 edition of Colloquia et dictionariolum septem linguarum, often referred to as a Berlaimont (or Berlemont) after the original traveler’s vocabularies created by Noël de Berlaimont. Image made available by the Folger Shakespeare Library under a CC BY‐SA 4.0 license (STC 1431.86).
What strikes you about it? One of the questions you might ask—though it’s easier to notice when you’re holding it in your hand, rather than looking at a picture—is why it’s shaped so oddly. Books generally are vertical rectangles, taller than they are wide. This title page, however, is decidedly squat, perhaps one‐and‐a‐half times as wide as it is tall. Why does it look like this? And why is the title page so dense? You might also notice that there are three blocks of text on the page, rather than a clearly identified title and author as is usual today.
If you could hold it in your hand, you would see that it’s in an old leather binding with what look like broken clasps attached. The first couple of leaves of the book come before the title page and have handwritten notes on them, as do the last leaves of the book. And the printed text, which makes up the bulk of the 400 or so pages of the volume, is made up of seven columns of text in varying styles of print.
It’s a funny, repetitive little book, at first glance. But why is it so? If you can read the Latin, French, or Dutch on the title page, you will have already started to work out what this book is: it’s a dictionary with dialogues and vocabulary lists in seven languages. It’s squat in part because it has to fit seven columns of text across the page openings, one each for Flemish, German, English, French, Latin, Spanish, and Italian. It’s also squat because it’s meant to be a size you can easily carry with you and refer to as needed; that’s in part why it has clasps across the fore‐edge, to keep it closed and secure from damage when being carried. Imagine reading this in a modern edition (were a modern edition to exist): Would it be the same if it was shaped like our books usually are?
This Berlaimont (so‐called because the first of its type was created by a schoolmaster named Noël de Berlaimont [or Berlemont] in the 1520s) offers all sorts of information to those willing to look. How do you make a book this shape? What’s the audience for it? What were the geographies and politics of the 16th through the 18th centuries that created such a demand that it continued to be expanded and reprinted for all that time? What sort of cultural values could we learn from reading these everyday dialogues?
But first you need to learn that these are questions you can and should ask. You need to understand how early printed books are made and that their making shapes their use and our study of them. That’s where this book comes in.
The aim of this guide is to show you how to think about the connections between the material form of a book (what it looks like and how it was made) and how that book conveys its meaning and how it is used by readers. The questions that we just asked of the Berlaimont—about how it was made and what its effect is on users—are questions that bibliographers ask. Up to this point, you might have thought of bibliography as the making of lists of books; it’s what you are taught to do as students, and it’s an important aspect of research. But bibliography can also be the study of how books are made, and that’s our focus here. That study, I think, can be the most compelling when it is connected to how books are used—how people handled them, how they were marketed, how they were read, how they were shared and shaped by the people who owned them. That is why I try to ask throughout this book how aspects of a book’s making can shape our understanding of it.
This focus on bibliography is also why I refer to a book’s users rather than to its readers. Books are certainly read, but there are many types of reading—browsing, memorizing, reading for pleasure, reading for work. And there are many things you can do with books other than read them—you can write in them, take them apart, display them, share them, and throw them away. All of these uses are part of how we experience books and part of what we should consider when we study them. The way a book is made shapes how it is used and how it gets passed down to us. To think like a bibliographer is to notice a book’s features and to ask how and why. And it is, I hope, a way of valuing books and being excited to work with them.
Studying Early Printed Books 1450–1800: A Practical Guide is divided into parts that can be read sequentially or not, depending on your needs. Part 1, “Overview,” takes you through the steps of making a book from a stack of plain paper through a (maybe, maybe not!) bound book. If this is your first time learning about hand‐press books, you will want to start here. Part 2, “Step‐by‐Step,” is a closer look at the different processes that together make a book. It’s divided into discrete sections that roughly follow the order of book making. “Paper” therefore comes before “Printing,” and “Binding” comes at the end. Each of these sections concludes with a piece on “Why does it matter?” which seeks to give examples of how understanding these processes can help us study early printed books. You might not need to read all of these sections in depth—perhaps you don’t need to learn about the entire process of making paper, but you do need a more detailed account of formats. You can jump back and forth between Part 1 and Part 2, or you can read 1 first and then 2, but not all of the overview that is provided in 1 is in 2. It might be best to think of 1 and 2 as making up a spiral in which 2 circles back to material introduced in 1 and covers it in greater detail. Part 3, “On the Page,” examines some of the typographic elements you’ll see on early printed pages. If you’re confused about the purpose of signature marks or curious about different types of title pages, this is where you’ll find out more.
Although this whole guide is designed to be used alongside reading early printed books, the next two parts focus explicitly on a plan of action for using early books. Part 4, “Looking at Books,” explains how you can learn to look at a book in order to see the clues it offers about its making and use. Organized around a series of questions to prompt your examination, it will start to train you to act as a bibliographer, looking at material evidence and drawing conclusions about what it means. Part 5, “The Afterlives of Books,” helps you differentiate between early modern elements and the parts of books that have been subsequently altered. Any book that you see today, whether in person in a library or on your computer screen at home, has passed through multiple hands to get to you, and in that passage of time, it has been altered. Part 5 will take you through the process of thinking about a book as a time capsule and considers the value of studying it as such.
Studying Early Printed Books concludes with two appendices. The first provides a list of accessible readings that can help you continue your bibliographic studies; any works I refer to in the course of the book are included there, as well as additional readings that can guide your further research. It’s not an exhaustive list, but one focused on works that are significant to the field and engaging for beginners to it. It’s organized by topic, roughly in the order in which the book addresses them, so that you can quickly find additional information on the subject you’re curious about. Any works that I cite will be in this appendix; in many regards, this guide serves as an introduction to Philip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography, and if you are curious to learn more about how hand‐press books were made, that is the best source to turn to next. When I am discussing examples of hand‐press books, those are given a standard bibliographic citation—like STC 22273 or EDIT16 26111—so that you can look them up; a list and description of those references is in the appendix as well, in the section on catalogs.
The second appendix is a glossary of terms that I and other bibliographers use frequently, gathered together for quick reference. While I define such terms the first time I use them, the glossary will be a resource for you when you encounter bibliographic language not only here but in your further research.
I have tried to include helpful illustrations throughout the book, especially in the first parts. But you can best learn about books by looking at plenty of examples. If you have access to a nearby library that collects rare books, you should visit it regularly and explore its holdings. If finding hand‐press books is hard to do, or if you’re curious to see further examples and resources, you might wish to browse the accompanying website, Early Printed Books (http://www.earlyprintedbooks.com).
A note about gender
I’m primarily using “he” as a pronoun for printers because the book trade in the hand‐press period was overwhelmingly male. But I also use the occasional “she” because there certainly were women working in the printing trades, as publishers and as printers. The work of Helen Smith and others helps to illuminate their too‐often hidden presence in printing history.
Part 1Overview
The process of making a book is the transformation of blank sheets of paper into sequential pages of printed text. It’s a process that moves through many steps, the details of which shape not only the final object but its distribution and use.
This part of the guide will provide an overview of printing a book, first describing the processes of making a book and then considering some of their consequences for the economics of book production. The second part of this guide will give more detailed information on these processes; readers might wish to read both parts simultaneously, moving from overview to detail as needed, or to read the overview and then proceed to details. I explain the technical terms being used as they come up, but there is also a glossary in Appendix 2 that will be of assistance.
A note about roles
The terms that we use today to think of the different roles in making books are not the terms that were used in the hand‐press period. “Printer” referred to the person whose business was to operate the printing press. But a “printer” could also be the person who caused the book to come into print and who supplied the money for the venture, a role that today we would identify as the publisher. The person doing the printing might or might not have been the same person acting as publisher. (The demarcation between those roles changed over the hand‐press period, with publishers gradually differentiating themselves from printers and becoming wealthier and more dominant in the trade.) The third step in the process—getting the book into the hands of readers—was handled by booksellers, who may or may not also have been publishers. Although “publisher” is not a term contemporary with the period, it is a helpful way of understanding the different functions in making and selling books.
Getting Ready to Print
The first step in printing an early modern book—assuming you have something you want to print—starts with a pile of blank paper. (Technically, it starts with the stuff that makes paper; for more on that, see “Paper” in Part 2.) Paper was usually the responsibility of the person paying for the book to be printed, not the person printing the book. Given the sheer volume of paper needed to print a book, it was easily the most expensive element of making one—nearly half the cost. Although individual sheets of paper weren’t necessarily expensive, even a small print run of a small book meant thousands of sheets of paper, and so the cost rapidly added up.
Printing on vellum
Although hand‐press books were overwhelmingly printed on paper, some early books were printed on parchment (sheep skin) or vellum (calf skin). But the cost of procuring enough skin to print even small print runs of books was expensive. And vellum, which shrank and expanded depending on humidity, was not ideally suited for working with presses.
The printer’s responsibility was turning those blank sheets into a sequentially ordered text. In hand‐press printing, and in machine printing, sheets of paper are printed with multiple pages of text; after both sides of a sheet are printed, folded, gathered, and cut open, the resulting leaves can be read in order. Figures 2–4 provide a quick illustration. Take a sheet of paper and fold it once in half: now you have a sheet that’s been divided into two leaves, or four pages; we would call this format a folio. Fold that sheet of paper again: now your sheet has been turned into four leaves, or eight pages; this is a quarto.
Figures 2–4 How a sheet of paper turns into eight pages.
Based on a sketch by the author.
If you number the pages 1 through 8, and then unfold your booklet, you’ll see how a text would need to be imposed, or laid out on the sheet of paper in order to make sense when it is folded. That is how a printer would want to lay out the type to be printed, with multiple pages for one sheet. (“Format” in Part 2 provides a more detailed explanation of the concepts of imposition and format.)
If you look at your unfolded quarto, you’ll see that pages 1, 4, 5, and 8 are on one side of the sheet of paper, and pages 2, 3, 6, and 7 are on the other side. You could, if you were a printer working from a manuscript, set the first page in type, then the second page, then the third, on through the eighth, and then print the first side of the sheet and then the second. (Indeed, setting serially like this was one way printers worked.) But proceeding this way would mean that the press is sitting idle while the entire booklet is being set. A more efficient operation (albeit a confusing one to the uninitiated) would be to print by forme: the first side of the sheet is printed while the second side is being set.
The trick to this, however, is that the printer needs to know where the fourth page starts even though the second and third pages haven’t yet been set in type. And so, even before the type for the first page is set, someone in the print shop needs to read through the manuscript, marking off where each page starts so that the person setting the type (the compositor) knows where to start and stop each page. This process, called casting off, requires knowing what size the pages will be and a sense of the book’s typography (e.g. what size type will be used, how many illustrations, whether the book is in prose or verse), factors that will affect how many lines fit on a page and how much text fits on each line. But an experienced compositor will be able to estimate how much manuscript text will convert to a printed page so that setting the type will usually proceed smoothly.
Where does the text come from?
Nearly anywhere! A text could be supplied by its author, by a publisher, by a third party who might or might not have been authorized by the author to share it; it could be newly written, an edition or translation of an already existing work, or nearly any other permutation. The text the compositors set from (known as the “copy text”) could be in manuscript, in print, or in print marked up with manuscript annotations. For our purposes, the source of the text doesn’t matter, since the process it will go through in being printed will be the same regardless.
Once the compositors know what they’re working from, and where the pages of set type start and stop, the work of transforming the text into print begins.
A compositor works standing in front of a single or pair of type cases with the text he’s working from hanging in front of him. Each case has compartments, one for each sort (letter, punctuation, or space), with larger compartments for the more frequently used characters and smaller compartments for those used less frequently. For instance, if you look at the illustration in Figure 5 from Joseph Moxon’s 1683 Mechanick Exercises: or, the doctrine of handy‐works. Applied to the art of Printing (Wing M3014), you’ll see that the letter “e” has a huge compartment, while “x” has a small one; “e” is the most frequently used letter in English, while “x” is of course used only rarely.
Figure 5 A pair of type cases from Moxon’s 1683 Mechanick Exercises: or, the doctrine of handy‐works. Applied to the art of Printing (Wing M3014). Public domain image made available by the Boston Public Library (G.676.M87R v.2, plate 1).
You’ll also notice in looking at Moxon that two boxes below the “e” is a box marked with what we think of as a hash mark. In typography, # is used to indicate a space (proofreaders still use the symbol this way in correcting text). In this diagram, the box marked with # is the box storing the spaces. We might not think of spaces as pieces of type, since the point of a space is that it doesn’t leave a mark, but letterpress printing requires the surface of what’s to be printed to be absolutely steady—any wobbling or moving about will mean that the type won’t print clearly. And so the entire text area needs to be firmly locked into place, with no gaps even where the white spaces are. If the sentence you are now reading were to have been set in type in the hand‐press era, it would have consisted of 145 separate pieces of metal. There would be 112 individual letters, 3 numbers, 3 pieces of punctuation, and 27 spaces to be picked out of the type case to form that sentence.
That count assumes that every letter in that sentence is a piece of type. But just as it’s important to remember that spaces are pieces of type, we need to remember that a piece of type might be made up of multiple letters. On the far right of the lower case in Moxon’s diagram are compartments for ligatures, letters that are joined together to form one piece of type. The most common ligatures in English involved the long‐s (ſ) and f, letters that curved over at the top and that would hit the adjacent letter if it had a tall ascender. And so ſl, ſh, ſſ, fl, and ff are each made as single sorts, rather than two sorts placed next to each other. (See “Type” in Part 2 for more information on how type is made.)
Figure 6 The basic parts of letters.
Illustration by the author.
Standing in front of the type cases, a compositor holds in his left hand a composing stick adjusted to the width of the text he is setting, with a thin piece of metal (a setting rule) placed in the bottom of the stick. Looking at the text he is setting, which is hanging on the type cases, he chooses each piece of type, one by one, from the appropriate box and places it in the composing stick with his right hand. Since the arrangement of the cases is familiar to him, the compositor doesn’t need to search for each box, but rather his hand can quickly go to where it is needed. (Think about touch typing and how adept typists don’t need to look at their fingers in order to be able to type out their text, or about how fluent pianists know where the keys are.) Each piece of metal type has near its base an indentation, or nick, to indicate its correct orientation: if all the nicks are aligned, then all of the letters, numbers, or symbols will be facing the correct direction. The face of the piece of type (where the letter is) would be immediately differentiated from its base by touch as well, since it would have the raised letter on it. Spaces would have blank faces and they would be a bit shorter than those with characters, since you wouldn’t want them to be inked and accidentally print marks.
Figure 7 Compositors and composing sticks from the 1769 Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. The pieces of type show the nicks near the bottom are all facing the same way, so that the faces of the letters are oriented correctly. Public domain image made available by the Smithsonian Libraries (AE25.E53X 1751 Plates, t. 7, “Imprimerie en caracteres,” plate 1).
