printing
Detective Work: The Dutch Fingerprint (Part I)
Previous Collation posts may convince even the most skeptical reader that bibliographic work often requires detective work. In some cases, this may involve bibliographers to take fingerprints. Fingerprints are regularly used by bibliographers to find out whether or not two…
Printer's waste or endleaf?
Last week’s crocodile mystery concerned the nature of a fragment of paper used to repair a letter from Thomas Cromwell to Nicholas Wotton written in 1539. This mystery is probably not the first, or the last, time that our answers…
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…
A book's fingerprints
Last week’s crocodile mystery may have been a bit too mysterious, but I hope that today’s post will inspire you to look for similar mysteries on your own. Here’s a close-up detail of what I was asking about: As with…
modern adventures in printing
In keeping with the spirit of my last couple of posts, this one is also about printing, but this time as an activity that my students and I did in our Books and Early Modern Culture seminar. The Folger is…
correcting mistakes
In my last post, I wrote about my joy in finding printer’s errors and what we might learn from them about early modern printing. In this one, I want to look at some examples of what printers do to correct…
learning from mistakes
One of my favorite categories of early modern books are those that show errors, small mistakes made in the process of printing them. a leaf that was folded when it was printed I don’t love them because I like to…
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Did you think that “reduce, reuse, recycle” was just a modern slogan? Check out this early modern book: That’s an image of the front inside cover and front endleaf of a 1636 edition of Charles Fitz-Geffrey’s The blessed birth-day, which…
Guyot's speciman sheet
If you’re a type designer (or a type caster, to be more appropriate to the early modern period), how do you show people examples of your wares? You use a specimen sheet: On this sheet, we see a matched set…
Welcome to The Collation
For many people, the copier is probably the first place they first encounter the idea of collating. Do you want the copier to collate your 50 copies of that 3-page document? Or do you want to turn your 3 piles…