This month’s crocodile mystery was a bit more challenging than recent ones (perhaps not helped by my cryptic “suitable for April” introduction), but Aaron Pratt guessed the gist of it: the image was a detail of a page printed in black, usually referred to as a mourning page. Here is the full context, with the bit we were looking at taken from the middle of the left-hand page:
Tag: printing
Deciphering signature marks
So, as those of you who have spent any time working with early modern printed books probably recognized, this month’s crocodile mystery focuses on signature marks. Below is the photo I posted last week, now with the signature mark circled in red: Signature marks are those letters, numbers, and sometimes symbols at the bottom of the first portion of gatherings to help binders assemble the sheets of a book into the right order. For those of you who’ve been reading along with our various earlier posts on impositions, you’ll remember that books in the handpress era were printed not as single leaves, but as sheets with varying numbers of pages per side. (It’s certainly much less labor- and material-intensive than printing one page at a time.) What this means is that one sheet of paper might contain, once properly folded, 2 leaves (a folio), 4 leaves (a quarto), 8 leaves…
A book’s fingerprints
Last week’s crocodile mystery may have been a bit too mysterious, but I hope that today’s post will inspire you to look for similar mysteries on your own. Here’s a close-up detail of what I was asking about: As with nearly all photographs shared on this blog, if you click the image, a larger version will open in a new window. What might have looked like a smudge if you hadn’t enlarged the image, is now clearly a smudge worth paying attention to! More specifically, it’s a smudge made up of individual lines and whorls, a smudge made by an inky printer’s fingers. One of the reasons that I didn’t share only this detail in last week’s post is that I wanted the whole context for the fingerprint to be visible. The assistants in a print shop have long been known as printer’s devils, a name assumed to stem from…
modern adventures in printing
In keeping with the spirit of my last couple of posts, this one is also about printing, but this time as an activity that my students and I did in our Books and Early Modern Culture seminar. The Folger is lucky to have a small-scale replica hand press, thanks to the resourcefulness of Steve Galbraith, our former Curator of Books, who tracked down the work of a group of engineering students from Bucknell who had designed and built the press for a senior project, and who then built a second one for us. The Library’s used the press as part of exhibits, in demonstrations for Shakespeare’s Birthday celebration, and with students. Usually there’s only time for students to set their names in type and to print off a single broadside. But this time, I decided that there was room in the syllabus to try a bigger experiment: choosing a text,…
correcting mistakes
In my last post, I wrote about my joy in finding printer’s errors and what we might learn from them about early modern printing. In this one, I want to look at some examples of what printers do to correct their errors. Mistakes happen, as I tell my kids; it’s what you do about your mistakes that matters. So, what do you do when you make a mistake? You fix it! In most cases, you’d hope that the error came to light during a proof stage so that you can correct it before you start your print run. Sometimes, however, you find mistakes during a print run; in that case, you can stop the press to replace the incorrect type with correct type. (“Stop the presses!”) The petition I wrote about in the last post, where I was focused on the curious shadow-type, is also a good example of the different…