Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800

A Practical Guide

Sarah Werner

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119049951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Part 1
Overview

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 ...