waste tabs

My last post was about the use of printed or manuscript waste in making new books; earlier posts were about the finding tabs and other tools used to help users find their way through the 1527 Vulgate Bible. Here's a combination of those two interests: manuscript waste used to make a finding tab.

This is from a 1508 Missal for the Salisbury rites of Mass, printed in Paris by Thielmannus Keruer. Notice the tab carefully sewn on--you can see other tabs sticking out of the book's foreedge as well. And you'll see that the gothic lettering and abbreviations system look like those of the French 1527 Vulgate Bible. Unlike that book, however, this one is printed in both black and red ink--a process that would require two separate pulls of the lever to make two differently colored impressions. If you look closely, you can see that the red text isn't quite exactly aligned with the black, though it's impressively close to being lined up.

You can learn more about this particular volume by looking at its catalogue entry in Hamnet.