Skip to main content
The Collation

A briefing on brevigraphs, those strange shapes in early printed texts

Posted
Author
th[us] passy[n]g [the] tyme
th[us] passy[n]g [the] tyme

Erin Blake

is currently the Senior Cataloger responsible for art and manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. From 2000 to 2014, Erin served as the Folger's Curator of Art and Special Collections. In 2014, she became Head of Collection Information Services. After a four-year tour of duty in senior management, she happily returned to working hands-on with the collection in 2018. In addition to her Folger work, Erin teaches The History of Printed Book Illustration in the West at Rare Book School, and is a member of the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee. — View all posts by Erin Blake

Comments

Fabulous post, Erin! I have one small question, though: Is there a particular reason why the ‘ser’ brevigraph isn’t used for English texts in early printed books even though it’s relatively common in manuscript?

Elisabeth Chaghafi — September 14, 2021

Excellent question! When I first went looking for brevigraphs in the wild, I was only looking for Latin ones, so maybe there are examples of the ser brevigraph in printed English, and I just didn’t see them because I’d already stopped looking? Or is it widely known that it’s only used in manuscript in English, so my search would have been fruitless? (Full disclosure: I catalog art and manuscripts, so dealing with moveable type isn’t part of my normal routine).

Erin Blake — September 14, 2021

Thank you, Erin! For those who don’t know, there’s a wonderful story about the etymology of “ampersand.” In the old days, reciting the alphabet didn’t stop at Z [or zed]. After Z was the ampersand, and students would pronounce it “and, per se, and.”

Richard Waugaman — September 14, 2021

I should (or perhaps shouldn’t) add that “ampersand” was routinely said aloud by Folger staff when the institution’s current logo and tag line first came out: “Folger Shakespeare Library Advancing knowledge ampersand the arts.” I still can’t pick up a Folger-branded red pencil without hearing “knowledge ampersand the arts” in my head.

Erin Blake — September 14, 2021

Great post, thank you! While the inclusion of brevigraphs may be understandable in most cases, I remain puzzled as to why it was necessary to substitute a single letter, as in nu[m]ber or mo[n]de.

Asta Becket — September 14, 2021

I was about to write out a long and detailed answer, but happily for me, Andrew Cook already did so in his comment on the post. I love it when time zones work in my favor. Does it count as answering reference questions in my sleep when someone on the other side of the Atlantic takes care of it before I even turn on my computer in the morning?

Erin Blake — September 16, 2021

Wonderful post bringing together lots of information on the various abbreviations and brevigraphs.
One question I have is why ampersands and Tironian notes are treated the same. To me they are separate symbols and ampersands should be transcribed as “&” while Tironian notes should be transcribed as “[et]”. Am I being overly pedantic about something which hardly anyone cares about?

Julie Kemper — September 15, 2021

You’re being exactly the right amount of pedantic. I posed the same question to DCRM-L, the Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials listserv back in September 2013:

How large a sample set was used for determining that “what catalogers thought was the Tironian ‘et’ was really just an ampersand in black-letter typefaces”? People cataloging Scottish and Irish Gaelic imprints, for example, would see that an et-ligature glyph and a Tironian-et glyph are different (especially if they’re using a font set or typewriter that has both, such as the Royal typewriter here: http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/type-keys.html, or Unicode).

Note that DCRM 0G8.2 doesn’t say *why* “&” is the exception to the rule about supplying the word in square brackets. … [I]s it because they are variant forms of the same thing, and “&” is the modern version, same as how both the long-s and the short-s can be represented in Unicode, but we transcribe both with the modern version, a short-s? If this is the case, would a modern Gaelic translation of DCRM(B) say to transcribe both the et-ligature form and the Tironian-et form as a Tironian et? See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pay_and_Display_sign_with_Tironian_et_for_Irish_agus.jpg for a modern Irish street sign with a Tironian-et.

See http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/amperagus.pdf for excerpts from documents that show both forms.

Erin.

And now that I’ve gone back to the listserv archives, I see that people were coming around to the consensus that the Tironian symbol ⁊ ought to be expanded in square brackets in the language of the source material, and that the instruction to use “&” should be reconsidered when the manual was next being revised, which is now. I’m going to link to this comment on DCRM-L and see what happens.

Erin Blake — September 16, 2021

Erin – Surely your brevigraphs are just the lineal descendants of the abbreviations and contractions in medieval manuscripts, the analysis of which stimulates so much of medieval codicological studies? A scribe in a monastic scriptorium, faced with fitting a religious text to a vellum page blind-ruled with drypoint into two lined columns, and filling each line precisely, would employ many such expedient abbreviations and contractions. Incunabula printers, whether Mainz or Venice, followed manuscript models in page layout. (Imitation of outward form is the surest way of gaining public acceptance of technical innovation, such as moveable type: lithographic map engravers in the 1800s began by following slavishly the style of predecessor copper-engraved maps, before branching out.) Printers designed special sorts to match the brevigraphs of their predecessor manuscript scribes, partly for effect, partly because it was easier to lock up a forme of right-justified type than one with ragged line ends. Word division at line ends, with variable word spacing (and letter spacing), became standard expedients for print only much later, and so each line of text had to be made comfortably tight on its own.

Another expedient to get a precise ‘fit’ to a line of type, which also produced what might be called brevigraphs, was the practice of filing down the leading face of certain individual types to narrow them. Lower-case ‘c’, ‘r’ and ‘i’ in black letter could be thus reduced quite considerably without losing their ‘character’. It was only fractions of a millimetre, but worked cumulatively. Elizabeth Harris of the Smithsonian demonstrated this in her analysis of the Waldseemueller world map, where captions and labels in moveable type had to be mortised into pre-cut slots in the type-high woodblocks (‘The Waldseemuller World Map: a Typographic Appraisal’, Imago Mundi 37 (1985), 30-53). Subsequent careless diss-ing of types thus filed down led to their accidental re-appearance in subsequent unrelated publications.

You’ve given us Part 2 of a fascinating study of an aspect of early printing house practice: please can we now have Part 1 on the medieval manuscript codex origins of brevigraphs, and their transmission to print?

Andrew Cook — September 16, 2021

Indeed! That’s exactly what they are, and why they appeared in early printed texts. Your enthusiasm for printing history caused you to skip straight to the images, missing the reference to “Short-cuts like the ones in the phrase shown here had been common for centuries in European hand-written texts, so it’s not surprising that they carried over into printing. That’s just what words on a page were supposed to look like.” See also footnote 1.

Your punishment for skipping straight to the pictures is that I’m going to write Part 3 next, which will be all about what catalogers do when transcribing moveable type that contains approximated letters, such as a W made from two Vs where the left-hand V has had its right-hand serif filed off.

Your reward is the knowledge that your enthusiasm for printing history was so contagious that I caught the bug from you 20+ years ago, at a Warbug Maps and Society Lecture in London, and lived happily ever after.

Erin Blake — September 16, 2021