that thei they thnt

My students are in the process of choosing the books they're going to work with this semester, so I've been looking at lots of books I haven't seen before. One of them is an English translation of Nicholas Monardes's Historia medicinal, a 1577 book with one of those glorious long titles: Ioyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde, wherein is declared the rare and singuler vertues of diuerse and sundrie hearbes, trees, oyles, plantes, and stones, with their aplications, aswell for phisicke as chirurgerie, the saied beyng well applied bryngeth suche present remedie for all deseases, as maie seme altogether incredible: notwithstandyng by practize founde out, to bee true: also the portrature of the saied hearbes, very aptly discribed: Englished by Ihon Frampton marchaunt. (Want more info? Check out the record on Hamnet.)


In doing her description of the book, my student noticed something funny about the headlines. They are set up to do something fairly typical: the book is divided into three parts, and the headlines tell you which part you are reading, as shown here:

"The first parte of the thynges that" is on the left-hand side of the opening, with the conclusion of the phrase on the other side of the gutter: "thei bryng from the West Indias."

The fun part is what happens on the left. On most of the pages, this part of the phrase appears as you would expect:

But sometimes, it goes a bit askew:

 or:

or even:

All these mistakes happen only in the first part of the book (although there are other errors in the headlines in the second and third parts). "Thei" is obviously a slip from the phrase's continuation and appears on signatures A1v, D1v, and F1v. "They" is a similar mistake; it appears on D3v and F3v. It's not connected to "thei"--by which I mean, it's not some sort of correction of "thei", which wouldn't make sense anyway, because "thei" is spelled perfectly acceptably according to early modern standards, as evidenced by the fact that it's spelled that way on the other side of the gutter. No, I know it's not a correction of "thei" because both mistakes appear on the outer formes of the D and the G gatherings: "thei" on D1v/G3v with "they" on D3v/G3v. In other words, they were both in use at the same time. (If this doesn't make sense, go back and practice your quarto folding again.)

My favorite, though, is the last one--"thnt"--which appears with the greatest frequency, on signatures B2v, C1v, G2v, and H2v. What in the world is "thnt"? It's "that" when someone has accidentally put an "n" in with the "a"s when he was redistributing the type. A good compositor would touch-set, just as a good typist touch-types. You don't look at where your fingers are on the keyboard; you look at what it is you are typing. If you're copying something (typing notes up from a book, for instance), you're looking at the book, not at your fingers or your typewriter computer screen. When you're grabbing type from the case and reading the manuscript that you're setting, you're not only not looking at each letter as you put it in the composing stick, even if you were to glance at it, it'd be a mirror image.

And that, my friends, is one of the reasons you proof your work.

the small joys of looking at books

Take a gander at this book I was looking at today:

Boyer's The compleat French-master, 1699, Folger Shakespeare Library, Call Number: 263- 520q

Can you see what's going on here? It looks at first glance like the top page has been folded back, revealing the text of the previous leaf. But that's not it. You're looking at the verso side of sig. H4 and nothing else.

Can you see now that it's only one leaf?

Here's an image of what this leaf looks like in other copies of this book:

The Huntington's copy, as in EEBO

And now do you see what's happened? During printing, this leaf got folded over in the press, and the inside of the fold missed the type (that's the blank streak) and the outer part of the fold was, once unfolded, misaligned. Print the image off and fold it to see for yourself!

Here's the recto side of the leaf:

Boyer's The compleat French-master, Folger Shakespeare Library, Call Number: 263- 520q

You can see the crease from the fold, but since this side was already printed, there's no misalignment of the text.

I love this detail in this book. It's not really significant, it's just a tiny reminder that the book is a made objects, and that in making objects, things happen and sometimes leave their traces. It's one of the tiny joys I find in looking at books--not reading them, but looking at them.

That's it for my post. My new theory is to stick with the short and sweet. Now that the Folger allows readers (and staff) to snap their own photos, I'm determined to share more of the tidbits that I come across. I'll still do the longer posts, but at least this way I won't have such long periods of silence in between!

(A shout-out here to the cataloger who created the entry for this book. As with many items in the Folger's collections, this has a wonderfully detailed record, including the information that this fold was to be found. You can see the record for yourself--you'll notice that the book is full of other nice details. And the next time you encounter a cataloger, make sure you buy them a drink. Or chocolate. Or both.)

DIY newsbook

No, I don't mean it's time to write your own news sheet newsbook. It's time to fold your own newsbook! Why would you want to do this? Well, for one thing, it's a handy way to understand and demonstrate to others the general principle of early modern format: multiple pages are printed onto a single sheet in the correct order so that when folded, they appear sequentially. It's like magic! Or, um, folding.

Above is a numbered example of the same newsbook that I used as an image in my last post. The red numbers are page numbers: folded in the right way, you'd get an 8-page booklet in the order indicated. But if you look closely, you'll see that the actual news sheet doesn't have page numbers. Instead, there are signatures: at the bottom of the first page is a tiny, blotted "L"; at the bottom of the 5th page is a tiny "L3" (the "L2" has been cut off at some point when the page was trimmed). These are signature marks that count off by leaves. What's a leaf, you ask? It's a physical unit of paper: when you turn the page in a book, you are actually turning a leaf of paper. Early modern printers would have thought in terms of sheets and leaves, not pages, when they were figuring out how to print a work. Depending on the imposition (how the text is laid out on the sheet), you could end up with different numbers of leaves: 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 24. A quarto imposition results in a sheet of paper being turned into 4 leaves; there are 2 pages to each leaf (a recto side and a verso side), so there are 8 pages in all. The blue letters and numbers show the signatures. One thing that throws off beginners is understanding how recto and verso relate to each other. They do not mean right and left but front and back. When this pamphlet is open so that the 5th page is on the right-hand side of the opening, and the 4th page is on the left-hand side, the 5th page is the recto side of the third leaf in this gathering (L5r, for short), and the 4th page is the verso side of the second leaf in this gathering (L4v). Gatherings are numbered (well, lettered) in order so that the printed sheets of paper can be assembled in the right order in the final book. This is the "L" gathering, and it would be preceded by the "K" gathering and followed by the "M." Once you start thinking in terms of leaves and gatherings, which are the units that are most helpful for printers, rather than pages, which are primarily useful for readers, it's pretty easy to keep it all straight.

You can follow this link and print off the two images as a single sheet of paper (or print separately, of course, and then run them through a copier to make it two-sided) and practice folding it as a quarto yourself. When you're done, you can try folding it into a tiny little pressman's cap, following the instructions that appear in this lovely piece, "The Newspaper Man is Defunct," from The Cape Cod today.

By the way, my syllabus is now done(ish) and can be found online in pdf form.

Correction: The spelling of recto has been changed to reflect its actual spelling. Oops.
Correction 2: I have corrected my usage of "news sheet" to reflect the more accurate term "newsbook" throughout the post. See the comments below for an explanation of the difference between the two!

the primer in englishe and latine

Last year, at the start of each semester, I gave you something from a school book to celebrate the return of classes: in the fall it was Lily's Latin grammar; in the spring, Comenius's picture book. This semester, I think I'll give you something slightly different to celebrate the return of students: a look at some of the books my students worked with last spring.

First up, this 1557 English book of hours:


The student who was working on this book was a theology major and chose it, I think, to have a chance to think about Catholic liturgy and print. There's a lot to be learned about liturgy in studying it. The title of the book signals some of the basic issues at play: The primer in Englishe and Latine, set out along, after the use of Sa[rum]: with many godlie and devoute praiers: as it apeareth in the table. A brief history of primers in encapsulated in that title. There's the reference to "Sarum use", specifying this book of hours as following the Salisbury rite, the form that dominated England Catholic liturgy. Most notable is the identification that this includes a translation of the Latin prayers into English, an increasingly popular approach to the prayers after the Reformation, and one that was strictly regulated. That this is in both Latin and English links it to a specific historical moment. It wasn't until after Henry VIII's split with the Catholic Church that books of hours in English (usually referred to as "primers") began to be published in England--and Henry, after 1545, promulgated his Royal Primer. With Mary's reign, the Sarum rite again became the sanctioned form of the primer, though the popularity of English translations continued. The imprint of this book hints at the Sarum primer's popularity: "Imprinted at London, by Jhon Kyngston, and Henry Sutton. 1557. Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum." You could assume correctly from the "cum privilegio" that printing primers was a lucrative business that was awarded to a specific printer. You could correctly assume, too, that we would see a rise of English Sarum primers printed during Mary's reign.

That's a brief outline of some of what we can learn from the title page--a sort of cultural/political/religious history that can be gathered from studying this book. But we can do something fun, too, with the mise-en-page of this book:


This opening is mostly fairly typical: there's the English translation in the large columns closest to the gutter in a nice blackletter font, and the Latin text in the outer columns in a smaller font. The decorated initials are printed woodcuts (that is, not hand-rubricated or illuminated). And the running titles and other directive texts are printed in red ink to guide the reader. All of these details can lead you into a study of how this book was designed to be used.

But there's something else we can learn from this book, too. Here's a close-up showing the text in more detail, including my favorite moment:


Did you notice it? Take a look again.

What is the title given to this prayer, which begins "Rejoyce O virgine Christes mother deare"? Is it "Of the five corporall joyes of our Ladie."? But why is "Ladie" printed in black? Look underneath--it was first printed "of our lorde." Ooops. Well, anyone can make a mistake, right? At least they corrected it. And that's what I love about this page. Here's the thing--printers did not typically print red and black ink at the same time. Think about it--it would be pretty hard to dab black ink only on the black bits and red ink on the red bits. You wouldn't be able to do it with your standard ink balls.

Instead, you'd follow a much more complicated series of steps. First, you'd set the type for the whole form (that is, not just one single page, but all the pages on that side of the sheet). Then you'd determine which words were to be printed in red, take those letters out and replace them with blanks. You'd ink the whole thing with black, using those ink balls that have been keeping nice and moist by soaking in urine, and run it through the press once with black ink. After you'd run through the entire run's worth of copies of that form, it would be time to do the red ink. You'd cut a new frisket (the protective sheet that covers over what you don't want to get inked) that would have holes for the red text but keep the black text covered. You'd replace the blanks with the red text, which has been raised slightly above the black text so that when you pull the press, only the raised type will print. And then you would run the entire set of sheets through the press again. If you've done it all right, the red text will print in the holes that were left behind after the black ink run. As you can see from this book, sometimes the red and black ink printed a bit more askew. (You can find a tidier example of two-color printing at this earlier blog post.)

So here's where I really love this: the printers, after making this mistake, recognize it, and want, understandably, to fix it--which means running the entire thing through the press for a third time! Oh, the labor of it all!

That's what I'm going to think of at the start of the fall: sometimes learning and teaching doesn't happen on the first try, or even the second. But that's no reason to stop working! This is also a good reminder of how much of what we do is serendipitous--looking up this book in the catalogue, there was no sign of this cool printing tidbit. It was only because Caitlin looked through every single page in this book with her eyes wide open that she found it. What a nice reward for her curiosity! And that feels like another excellent piece of advice for all of us: don't forget to be curious along the way and to be open to discovering something new.

Happy learning!

(Want to read about printing with red ink in more detail? Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, as always, is your not-to-be-beat source about early printing; for the section on two-color printing, see pages 328-30. This lovely primer can be found in our catalogue here; a set of zoomable images from it are here.)