Week 33: Who made these rules?
against my better judgement, I will now be introducing math.
preface
Welcome to Descriptive Bibliography! Where the formulas are made up and the rules don’t matter.
My friend Taliesin composed this meme some five weeks into our Descriptive Bibliography course when someone asked a question about the rules of expressing a particular idea and our lecturer responded, “I really need you to remember that all of these rules are made up.”
For the slim percentage of this newletter’s readership who are already familiar with descriptive bibliography, I hope that gave you a good chuckle. Before we begin, I know that I’m about to leave out a lot of stuff, and that’s fine. We’re gonna be okay.
For everyone else, I want you to keep this in mind: all of the rules I’m about to explain have been made up and can change. This is the takeaway from today’s issue and an important theme for the next few: the formulas are made up and the rules don’t matter.
who cares?
Descriptive Bibliography is concerned with describing the physical make-up of a book in the most succinct, unambiguous manner possible. This is the simplest, most straight-forward definition of this field of study. After this, everyone who cares about this stuff has argued the minutiae of every point you can fathom, and then some.
For the most part, bibliographic descriptions of hand-press books—meaning books that were printed on hand-operated presses—attempt to describe what a book looked like the moment it was pulled off the press, meaning that their descriptions ultimately try to reflect the elusive “ideal” copy. (You can already see how this is fraught, but we plow on!)
The press in the video above lives at the St. Bride Foundation, which I visited a few weeks before the pandemi lovato crashed into our lives. I played with molten lead there, which was quite fun.
Anyways, as anyone who has taken a look at two books from the hand-press period knows, there is no guarantee that two volumes of the same text are identical. As printers pull sheets off their press, a compositor or reviewer may notice that words are misspelled, pages have been misplaced, leaves mislabelled. If the errors are small enough, they’ll replace individual pieces of type on the press. If they’re large enough, they may replace an entire textblock. If they’re too pressed for time (heh), they’ll issue “errata” (not “erotica,” as I have explained to my parents) at the end of the text, compiling all of the errors for good measure in a single list rather than try to fix them midway through a run.
In sum, humans make errors, and those errors tell us about the printing process. Bibliographers spend lifetimes comparing dozens of copies of the same text printed at the same press to account for all of the differences, summarize their findings in a bibliographic description, and then opine about what those differences mean.
It’s a highly laborious occupation, and many bibliographers come to abhor what they study in the way many PhD students go through phases of loathing their life decisions. Such is the way of life-long dedication to a single project. I’ll note that not very many people do this anymore. Those that do pursue these bibliographic projects are not paid very much, because it’s hard to convince someone to pay you enough money to look at every single book by a single author or printed at a given press for 40-some-odd years to produce a reference work about the differences between all those versions that might only be read by six people, and not even your parents, who still don’t understand what it is you do with your time. This is why we tend to have such bibliographies about “important” books (whatever that might mean to you) and none for the rest.
And still, who cares? Or, at the very least, why do I? (And, by extension, why should you?)
I’m taking this class to overcome my (now dissipating) aversion to books printed before 1800 (which I have infamously said “give me hives”). It’s really difficult to parse a text printed in a language you don’t know and whose construction you don’t understand, which I’ve found to be the case when I encounter early printed books.
Bibliographic descriptions require an understanding of how hand-press books were constructed. Before we even get to the math (which is coming, I threaten), we have to understand how type is cast and set, how paper is made, how presses are built and operated. Bibliographic descriptions draw on this knowledge to express the output of one (1) item. It’s a distillation of an astounding amount of work. Six weeks into this class, the wickedly laborious birth of books that I once found daunting is suddenly legible and documentable.
paper
I think the easiest lead-in to understanding hand-press books is understanding paper. If you understand paper, you’ll understand the organization of the book.
One primary difference between hand-press and machine-press books is how the paper for either is made. We arbitrarily mark the switch from hand-press to machine-press books at 1800, which many people envision as the instantaneous shift from hand-presses to whirring metal monsters that looked like they could kill a man (and some of them did), but the main shift at the time was paper production.
The paper identifies the book: paper-makers drew a mould through a vat of broken-down rags mixed with water to form a layer of pulp (a process known as “couching,” pronounced “cooching.” You can’t make this up). Excess water was shaken off, and the paper was laid on felt or cloth to remove it from the mould. The mould itself was a wooden frame with thin wires running horizontally and thicker chains running vertically, which left a slight impression in the paper. Remember this.
If you want to watch this process in real time, I highly recommend watching the Chancery Papermaking video below from University of Iowa’s Center of the Book. Besides Timothy Barrett’s delightfully radio-ready narration, the video illustrates the degree of technique and artistry required to make thousands of sheets of paper a day. It made me quite emotional, and I imagine it will be, at the very least, informative to a person with a more reasonable level of investment in book production.
So when the dried paper was stacked and shipped off to the printing press, the pressmen did not simply use one sheet of paper for one page of the book. That is, the pages in a hand-press book were not printed one-by-one. Instead, sheets were printed multiple pages side-by-side. Once the ink dried, they flipped the sheets over and printed again on the verso. To get from the large flat sheet to consecutive leaves, the bookseller or binder folded the sheets into gatherings. This means that anywhere from two to sixteen (or more!) leaves of a book come from the same sheet of paper.
The number of times that sheet of paper was folded determines a book’s format. So if you take that sheet of paper (go ahead, take a sheet of paper, this can be interactive, for your sake and mine), and fold it just once along the short edge, you get two leaves, or a folio. If you fold it again, you’ll have a creased edge along the top, and if you snipped through that (don’t, we’re still in the middle of our activity), you get four leaves, or a quarto. Fold it again, get eight leaves, that’s an octavo.
But paper sheets arrived in different sizes, and the relative size of a leaf depending on the overall size of the sheet. This means you could have a teeny folio or a large quarto: this is why we double check those chain-line marks, which change orientation depending on how many times you folded the sheet.
To keep track of these leaves when they were printing, printers marked (or “signed”) the bottom margins of the sheets with different symbols. These symbols were more consistent than pagination, which appear erratically or not at all through the early press period. These “signatures,” a way of keeping track of the leaves, tell us how the book was put together.
finally, the point
Which finally brings us to the collation formula, which aims to describe succinctly and unambiguously the make-up of a book. An example:
The above formula means this: this book is an octavo, meaning each sheet of paper was folded three (3) times to make eight (8) leaves. The first gathering of leaves is unsigned, which is why it’s labeled “π” (pi for placeholder). It’s also an exception to what I just told you: that gathering has four (4) leaves, not eight, hence the superscript “4,” and oh, by the way, that fourth leaf? It’s actually been removed, or was never inserted in the first place, as indicated by the (-π4). So that unsigned signature ultimately has 3 leaves.
The next bit, “A-2H superscript 8” (Substack won’t let me include superscripts), tells me that there are 31 gatherings of eight (8) leaves each, labeled A-Z, then AA-HH (or 2A-2H or Aa-Hh). What matters is that after the printer got through A-Z, he started doubling the letters in some way to distinguish between the first “A” and the second “A.” You also might be wondering, “Wait, there are 26 letters in the alphabet, shouldn’t there be 34 gatherings?” Jokes on you, bub, we only use 23 letters for the signatures, dropping I or J, U or V, and W.
That last section is actually somewhat similar to the first: a signature labeled “2I superscript 4” (or II or Ii) has 4 leaves, but leaves 3 and 4 were removed. The statement of signing, “($4 signed),” tells us that leaves 1-4 of each gathering are signed with their letters in the lower margins (e.g. A1, A2, A3, A4), while leaves 5-8 remain unsigned.
And that’s why we use collational formulas: to describe everything I just explained to you (and then some) in the most succinct, unambiguous way possible. It takes what book workers understand about paper, presswork, and all this folding and removing and expresses it in a single string of letters, numbers, and symbols.
This is the closest that book work gets to nuclear rocket science. I would describe it as the single thing most removed from pure math. Some people describe the political spectrum as a circle. I would describe the knowledge spectrum as the same. At one point is pure math, the basis of all other subjects of study, and right next to it is bibliographic description, the most extrapolated expression of ideas using the same damn characters.
There are more parts to a bibliographic description, by the way. We also compose a pagination statement, a contents note, and then technical notes about illustrations and pressmarks and a bunch of other stuff: errors, inserts, all the rest. We use superscripts after a letter to express the gatherings, and superscripts before a letter to indicate that it’s been repeated. Leaf numbers are expressed as in-line numbers. Presumptions are in italics. Misnumbered pages are indicated in ‘single quotes,’ not “double.” And so on.
All of these rules have been argued over time and again. The other day I asked my lecturer whether I should make the italicized symbols consistent—that is, if my A is italicized in one place, should it be so elsewhere? His response: you might as well, though bibliographers have argued over it.
The important thing is that someone versed in descriptive bibliography can look at these formulas and understand the make-up of a book. Which means they can compare their copy to this aggregate formula (remember, bibliographers spend years comparing copies to devise an “ideal” expression) and determine where their version may differ. These formulas tell us where printers may have intervened in their own production and added or removed leaves. These formulas help librarians, booksellers, and collectors know if their book is complete, or identify an undiscovered version where any number of variations may occur.
Most of the people reading this newsletter will likely never have to collate a book—a confusing term, as it means both to create a collational formula itself and to check that all the leaves that should be present are indeed present.
So for you, as you sit here with your head spinning about all that you’ve just read, I want you to understand that there are rules to where things go and when and for what purpose and they are all made up. Everything in these guides has been argued over time and again, and eventually some guy just said, “Let’s put an end to this. We’re doing it this way,” and all the other men were so tuckered out from their bibliographic tiffs that they threw up their hands in agreement and moved on (or nursed their bitterness and disagreement for years). You could argue—and people have—that the way we do it now is the best way, or the most logical way, or the easiest way, but that’s contestable. Bibliography itself is a deeply contested field. That’s another issue.
I cannot emphasize enough what my lecturer said in response to my question, “You might as well, though bibliographers have argued over it.” This statement applies to nearly every single thing about books. If you take away nothing else from this issue, let it be that the rules we use to express and represent ideas, whether about something seemingly so straightforward as the construction of a book or its placement on a shelf, are entirely, totally, wholly, and completely made up. Which means they can be changed.
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
Correction: in Issue 32, I wrote that the librarian-bookseller duo who scavenged the holdings of the Carnegie Library were imprisoned. This was incorrect, though they both lost their jobs. Thanks to Heather O for catching that error!
What I read this week: Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath
What I’m currently reading: These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card
bird
On my drive to the airport this Friday, I saw an eagle perched on one of the rails alongside the highway.
More later.
If people were able to read those formulas and still want to keep reading, this gives me hope that one day I could actually write a newsletter about medicine and maybe a select few wouldn't have their eyes glaze over.