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To illustrate the principle that one must have a rather good idea of what he is looking for before he can see it, Darwin told this anecdote: While he was still a student, he and a companion carefully explored a Welsh valley for fossil remains. Intent on their search, they did not notice that all about them were scored rocks, perched boulders, and moraines, all such plain indications of glaciation that had the valley been filled by a glacier at the time the signs could not have been more conspicuous. But Agassiz had not as yet announced his theory of a glacial period in the earth's history, and such matters were far from the minds of the two fossil-hunters. They no doubt found some fossils, but they passed by evidence for one of the great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century because they were intent on other things.
Perhaps Darwin's story, with its implications that hypothesis is essential to observation, is known to bibliographers as well as to scientists. If not, it ought to be, for boulders and books are alike in that both exhibit phenomena that can be seen without being observed, that are meaningless, or virtually so, until we have a context in which they are meaningful. An instance is the reappearance within early printed books of recognizable rules, ornaments, and individual pieces of type. This phenomenon must have been seen quite often by bibliographers; McKerrow, for example, speaks of the reappearance of certain initials within the gatherings of a Bible printed by Barker in 1591 as proving the book to have been composed by formes.[1] But McKerrow thought that such reappearances could occur only in page-for-page reprints, as he evidently did not realize to what extent manuscript as well as printed matter could be cast off for setting by formes. From McKerrow's day until recently we have seen the use of evidence from recurring rules, ornaments, and types, but chiefly in connection with such matters as studies of skeleton formes, the identification of printers, or the determination of resetting. It was not, I think, until we learned something of the methods Professor Hinman had adopted for the examination of the Folger Folios and the results he was obtaining that bibliographers began to search for the reappearances within single books of type matter not a part of the skeleton formes and to use such reappearances as evidence
When the influence of this book is fully felt, we will probably see a much more extensive use of evidence from recurring type matter, for from it, in conjunction with more conventional evidence, one can precisely reconstruct, as Hinman has shown, many details of printing-house procedure that affected the transmission of texts and that on other evidence would remain obscure. Some of these details, ones of great concern to Hinman, are the identity of compositors, the extent of their work, and the order of composition and printing of various parts of books. To supplement what we now know about this new kind of evidence from the study of the Shakespeare Folio, I wish to discuss three instances of its usefulness in other and somewhat different situations.
Let me first describe briefly the first quarto of Albumazar, an academic play by Thomas Tomkis, which was printed in 1615 by Nicholas Okes. The book collates A2 B-L4; the text begins on B1 and ends on L3v, a short epilogue being printed on L4 and L4v being blank. One gets the impression that Okes strove in this book for an appearance of higher quality than that of most 17th-century play quartos: an almost prodigal amount of white space was left around the scene heads, of which there are many; and nearly every scene begins with a two- or three-line initial, three of the acts with four-line initials, and the first act with a handsome decorative block. Speech prefixes were set in roman caps and small caps flush with the left margin, except on B1 where a couple were indented. Stage directions were generally set in the caps and small caps of a roman font slightly larger than that employed for the speech prefixes. On each full page there are thirty-seven lines of type or the equivalent, three leaves in each gathering are signed, and what small variation there is in speech-prefix abbreviation appears to be random. Throughout there is substitution of roman for certain italic letters that were in short supply. The book as a whole has a typographical consistency which suggests that it was set up by one compositor.
When spellings are examined, this impression, although perhaps not confirmed, is not altogether destroyed. Chart I shows the incidence of six variant spelling forms, those which appear to be significant. (For the moment please disregard the lines of the chart labelled "A types" and "B types.") The A and B spellings do tend to cluster in various parts of the book, but there are conflicts which undercut an assumption that two compositors were at work — the occurrence on B3 of the B-form wee'le amidst A-forms, the occurrence on C3v of the A-form wee'l and the B-form maister, the occurrence on H2 of both A-forms and B-forms, and so on.
Please turn now to Charts IIa and IIb, which show the incidence throughout Albumazar Q1 of certain recognizable types. The numbers in the body of the chart are line numbers; thus one may see in Chart IIb that the "e" which is found in line 2 of B2v reappears in line 27 of D2, line 28 of E4, and so on. None of the types listed falls on any page not represented in the charts. Because the identifications were made from photostats, I should not want to trust them implicitly, but I think they are accurate enough for our present purposes. The point to be noticed is that the A-types and the B-types very definitely cluster in certain runs of pages: types found from D3 through E2v recur from F3 through G2v, from H3 through I2v, and from K3 through L2v; similarly, types found from C3 through D2v recur from E3 through F2v and so on. And when this information is taken together with the spelling evidence, that begins to make better sense. Looking again at Chart I (especially now the lines labelled "A types" and "B types"), we see that if we disregard Compositor A's use of wee'l (this spelling having been used by B in addition to wee'le) and Compositor A's use of sweet (this spelling too having been used by B in addition to sweete) we get perfect correlation except at B3. Thus we are able to assign the various parts of the book to their compositors with much greater confidence than we could on spelling evidence alone.
If, as with Albumazar Q1, we use types to differentiate between the work of two or more compositors, we should be aware of our assumption that the types set by each workman were distributed only into his type cases. I think in the instance of Albumazar Q1, because of the correlation of the typographical and spelling evidence, this assumption is in general justified. But it is not true of all the types in the book: the italic act head on B1, A's page, reappears with numerals changed on C4v, E4v, G4, and K1v, all B's pages; and I think the apparent conflict of spelling and typographical evidence on B3 can be explained on the supposition that all of Sheet B was set by Compositor A but that B2v and B3 were distributed into B's cases — that is, that the B types were not actually in use by Compositor B until he began work at C3.
In one book with which I am familiar the types were not regularly returned to the cases from which they originated, but even in it typographical evidence can be of use in compositor determination. Let us consider three quires in the second section of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of
Charts IIIa and IIIb summarize the evidence relating to the three quires. The information given here is based on a preliminary survey and is probably incomplete; moreover, for the sake of clarity, I have suppressed not only the number of types being represented but also some conflicts in the evidence which I think are minor or capable of an explanation too involved to be presented here. I am concerned only to illustrate a principle, and the information given is, I believe, accurate enough for that purpose. On the charts themselves the horizontal headings represent parts of the text, usually columns, such as 2K3a and 2K3b, but entire pages in the case of 2K1 and 2M4v, which contain little text. The order in which these headings appear, incidentally, is the probable order of composition as suggested by evidence relating to the order of the formes through the press. Among the spellings indicated, "wee'l, etc." and "wee'll, etc." include other related variants such as shee'l/shee'll or shee'le and hee'l/hee'll or hee'le; "2 noun" and "2. noun" refer to any numeral in a speech prefix or stage direction followed by any noun (e.g., 3. Merchant), the presence of the point being the crucial matter; and "Florez/Floriz" and "Hemskirk(e) /Hemskirck" refer to characters' names. The notations for "Floriz" include a couple of occurrences of Floris and those for" Hemskirck," of Hemskirick. The rubric "odd s.d." among Compositor B's characteristics is used to designate stage directions whose internal elements are separated by periods rather than the more usual commas. Because both compositors spelled heart, hart only is included among B's characteristics. In the parts of the charts labelled "Type from" we find the source of the recognizable types which reappear in the designated parts of each quire. Thus in Chart IIIa one or more types from 2I2va are found in 2K3a, 2K3vb, and 2K4a. In
In contrast with the practice of the compositors of Albumazar Q1, Wilson's workmen did not always maintain control of the same types. We see that although Compositor A set 2L2va, this column was distributed into B's case and that although Compositor B set 2L4a, this column was distributed into A's case. This feature of the compositors' work, illustrated in small here, is more prominent in other quires of this section of the Folio. It restricts the validity of the typographical evidence for compositor determination, but, as we see, does not render it useless, for one can still reason as follows: that as 2I2va types reappear in 2K3a, 2K3vb, and 2K4a, these columns were set from the same case, the one into which 2I2va was distributed; that as his spelling characteristics occur in 2K3a and 2K3vb, Compositor A was using that case; hence, that 2K4a, in which spelling evidence is lacking, was also set by Compositor A, evidence to the contrary being absent. We see how the columns in each compositor's stint are linked to one another by the reappearing types and how these correlate with the spelling evidence in a way which permits assignment of columns in which the spelling evidence is weak or non-existent.
Thus we understand that the types used in the texts of early books can sometimes repay close scrutiny because, among other things, they may help in compositor determination, but the types of the text are not all we have to work with. Some books, like the Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher Folios, have on each page such typographical appurtenances as box and center rules which, as Schroeder and Hinman have shown,[4] can be put to good bibliographical use, and even lowly quartos ordinarily have running titles, which, as Professor Bowers has often reminded us, can be tracked through the book and made to tell some of the secrets of the printing. But even running titles, with which many of us are used to working, cannot be taken for granted, as the following example is meant to show.
Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy first appeared in a quarto of 1619, which collates A2 B-L4. The text, as Greg noted, was printed in two sections, B-G and H-L, the first, and the one with which we are now concerned, being the work of Nicholas Okes.[5] The running titles in this section (and indeed the second also) were set in rather large italic type and read The Maydes Tragedy., on both recto and verso. A glance reveals that the sheets were machined in two skeleton formes which alternately imposed the inner and outer formes of succeeding sheets, and the same glance suggests that there is no very great problem about the identification
Of course, as you have doubtless noticed, that is not exactly so. There seem to have been, it is true, lower-case types in sufficient numbers to set
What I am chiefly interested in showing here is that the types can be traced with some precision if one looks for them and that the information thus gathered is more than a mere curiosity, for it furnishes evidence of the order of the imposition of the formes. On three occasions capitals were moved from one page into precisely the same relative position in another page. The first two of these occasions, the transfers between C2 and C1 and D3 and D1v tell us little because either the inner or the outer forms of either sheet could have preceded the other forme of that sheet, but the reappearance of the E3 capitals in identical positions in F4v almost certainly means the precedence of F(o) over F(i) and this taken together with the alternation of the lower case groups indicates the order of formes shown on Chart V.
These three examples show how evidence from types may facilitate compositor determination and reveal other matters of more than cursory interest. Such advantages can often justify the patience and eyestrain necessary to identify and trace the types, but, in addition, on their testimony, inference about the relationship between composition and presswork, a matter not considered here, frequently becomes possible. Some precautions which should be observed have been mentioned, and we shall doubtless learn of others as more experience in the use of this kind of evidence is gained. It seems clear to me, however, that bibliographers and textual critics who want to know how their books were printed will have to search out broken types as one of the quite routine procedures of bibliographical investigation.
B(o) | B(i) | C(i) | C(o) | D(o) | D(i) | E(i) | E(o) | F(o) | F(i) | G(i) | G(o) | ||||||||||||
1 | HT | 1v | LC5 | 1v | LC2 | 1 | LC6 | 1 | LC4 | 1v | LC5 | 1v | LC2 | 1 | LC7 | 1 | LC1 | 1v | LC6 | 1v | LC3 | 1 | LC7 |
M4 | M4 | M2 | M1 | M5 | M4 | M2 | M3 | M4 | M5 | M1 | |||||||||||||
T6 | T5 | T4 | T1 | T9 | T3 | T1 | T8 | T8 | T3 | T3 | |||||||||||||
T9 | T9 | T6 | T2 | T3 | T7 | T3 | T4 | T10 | T8 | T7 | |||||||||||||
2v | LC2 | 2 | LC6 | 2 | LC4 | 2v | LC5 | 2v | LC2 | 2 | LC6 | 2 | LC4 | 2v | LC6 | 2v | LC3 | 2 | LC7 | 2 | LC1 | 2v | LC6 |
M2 | M2 | M2 | M5 | M4 | M1 | M5 | M4 | M2 | M1 | M3 | M4 | ||||||||||||
T5 | T2 | T4 | T10 | T10 | T2 | T10 | T4 | T5 | T3 | T4 | T8 | ||||||||||||
T3 | T10 | T6 | T2 | T6 | T7 | T6 | T8 | T9 | T7 | T10 | T10 | ||||||||||||
3 | LC3 | 3v | LC7 | 3v | LC3 | 3 | LC8 | 3 | LC1 | 3v | LC7 | 3v | LC3 | 3 | LC8 | 3 | LC4 | 3v | LC5 | 3v | LC2 | 3 | LC8 |
M5 | M1 | M5 | M3 | M5 | M2 | M1 | M1 | M5 | M5 | M4 | M2 | ||||||||||||
T1 | T3 | T2 | T3 | T9 | T5 | T2 | T2 | T1 | T6 | T6 | T2 | ||||||||||||
T4 | T8 | T10 | T7 | T3 | T4 | T9 | T10 | T3 | T4 | T2 | T9 | ||||||||||||
4v | LC4 | 4 | LC8 | 4 | LC1 | 4v | LC7 | 4v | LC3 | 4 | LC8 | 4 | LC1 | 4v | LC5 | 4v | LC2 | 4 | LC8 | 4 | LC4 | 4v | LC5 |
M3 | M3 | M3 | M1 | M2 | M3 | M3 | M5 | M1 | M2 | M2 | M5 | ||||||||||||
T9 | T4 | T1 | T9 | T4 | T10 | T4 | T6 | T2 | T2 | T5 | T6 | ||||||||||||
T2 | T7 | T3 | T8 | T8 | T6 | T8 | T9 | T10 | T9 | T9 | T4 |
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