Don’t panic—it’s still August, but rather than wait until the middle of September to share the new crocodile mystery, I’m going to share it now and Heather will discuss it next week. At initial glance, it’s pretty clear what’s illustrated below: an address leaf of a letter, in this case a newly acquired letter from Thomas Cromwell to Nicholas Wotton, 8 November [1539]. The question we’ve been asking ourselves, and now you, is, What is going on with the repair along the right side and upper half of the leaf? See that ghostly printing? Clicking on the picture will open it up in our digital image collection, where you’ll be able to zoom in to examine it in detail. We’ll look forward to any thoughts you have to share and Heather will discuss this more next week!
Month: August 2012
my syllabus is a quarto
As some of you know, I am the queen of folding exercises. ((I’m not really the queen of folding exercises. If I was, I’d do more than the easy formats. I’m more like the JV champion of folding, having mastered 4° and 8°. I still stumble over making my own 12°s and I aspire to 18°s. Then I’ll be the Empress of Folding.)) It’s the only way to understand early modern book formats, and I like puttering around coming up with better ways to demonstrate this to my students and even to my blog readers (see here and, most recently, here). Because it’s that time of year when I get my syllabus in order and because, thanks to my week at Rare Book School’s Introduction to the Principles of Bibliographical Description, I have format on my brain, it suddenly dawned on me that instead of just handing out my one-sheet syllabus…
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 new contributor’s contact!
In my last post, I discussed the contibutor’s contact I had been presented with for a chapter I have in a forthcoming collection. It was much more restrictive than I liked, including requiring that I ask them before I reuse my material in my own future publications and not allowing for any digital repository use at all. After emailing my editors and the publisher, and going through some back-and-forth, I’m happy to say that they presented an alternative contributor’s contract that I’m willing to sign! Here are the key details in how this happened for those of you who might be contemplating this sort of negotiation: I let my volume editors know that I intended to do this. I’m not sure they entirely understood my objections (one pointed out that he’d already put his contribution on his institutional repository; I didn’t counter that that didn’t seem permissible according to the terms we…
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: August edition
Like last month’s crocodile mystery, this one has two levels of answers. The first, of course, is to identify what genre of thing this is. The second is to offer explanations for why this genre and this instance might be worth discussing. I will clarify that what I’m focused on here is the last line of type on the page; I’ve cropped the image down so that we’re seeing only the bottom few inches of the entire page. As always, click on the image to enlarge it in a new window, and leave your thoughts below!