Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 by Sarah Werner

Author:Sarah Werner [Werner, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119049951
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Signature marks

Signature marks indicate the order of sheets and their leaves. If a book is to be made up of eight sheets in a quarto imposition, then each sheet is marked to indicate its place in the order so they are assembled in the correct order. The most frequently used indication of order is the 23‐letter Latin alphabet (A to Z, omitting either I or J, either U or V, and W; see “Alphabet” in this part for more detail). If it is a long book, the series might have to be run through multiple times, with A–Z followed by AA–ZZ, AAA–ZZZ, etc. (In the 18th century, English printers often represented such signatures as 2A, 3A, etc., a practice that is usually used by bibliographers today.) Because the preliminaries of a book were usually printed last, they were often signed differently. If the main text began with a gathering signed “A,” then the preliminaries might be signed “a” or with symbols like “*” or “¶.”

Not only did the sheets need to be gathered in the correct order, they needed to folded so that the leaves were in the correct sequence. And so in addition to indicating the gathering order, signature marks also indicate the sequence of leaves with either arabic or roman numerals. For our hypothetical quarto, you’ll need to know, at a minimum, which are the first and second leaves so that you can fold the sheet correctly; for an octavo, you’ll need to know the first, second, third, and fourth leaves. (In both, once you have the first half of the leaves in the correct order, the remaining leaves fall into place.)

We tend, today, to use signature marks primarily as page numbers—a way of identifying what page or leaf we are looking at. If, for instance, I was working with an English book in which a poem appeared on the fourth page of the main text, I would identify that as “sig. B2v”: it’s in the “B” gathering on the second leaf on the verso side. (The two sides of a leaf are described as its “recto” and its “verso”—the front and back.) Even if a leaf isn’t signed (that is, printed with a signature mark) you can still identify it this way—just count forward from the last printed signature and you’ll work out which leaf it is.

While we focus on signature marks as a method of location within a book, they can also identify where a work was printed. Although signature marks all follow the same basic formula of identifying gathering and leaf, within that basic structure are variations. Are leaf numbers indicated with roman or arabic numerals? Are the preliminaries signed with letters of the alphabet or with symbols? Is the first half of the gathering’s leaves signed or the first half plus one?

In 1966, R. A. Sayce published the results of his examination of over 2,800 books printed in 10 different countries, an effort to determine whether compositors followed local practices in signing books printed between 1530 and 1800.

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