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III. Letterpress Sheets

Patterns may also appear in the sheets of a book, on the same pages as letterpress. The most common location for such decoration is the title page, where there may be a border or a design separating the major elements of the page; but patterns occur frequently in other places, such as the beginnings and endings of chapters or principal divisions. They may be reproduced by means of wood-blocks, typographical ornaments, or various other processes.[28] The nature of these patterns, therefore, is not similar to that of cloth grains or marbled papers, with their relatively small number of standard designs; obviously, from the point of view of the difficulty of classification, patterns in letterpress sheets are analogous to those of cloth ornamentation or of printed, embossed, or paste papers. A publisher can use a different border on every title page if he chooses, and no limited selection of illustrations of these borders could do more than offer characteristic examples; it could not serve as a guide to the identification and description of any given border. Generally, then, verbal descriptions of patterns in letterpress sheets must be keyed to specific illustrations of individual patterns.

There are exceptions, however. Whereas binding cloths and decorated papers are of interest to the descriptive bibliographer chiefly in the period since the advent of publishers' bindings, when the output of books has been enormous, the patterns in letterpress sheets are the descriptive bibliographer's concern in all books since the beginning of printing. For the earlier periods, when the number of books was smaller, the supply of types and woodcuts more restricted, and the technology less advanced, the task of cataloguing all the patterns in particular categories, though not an easy one, is at least feasible. As a result, a few excellent reference works of this kind exist, particularly those issued by the Bibliographical Society in its series of "Illustrated Monographs" and "Facsimiles and Illustrations." R. B. McKerrow and F. S. Ferguson's Title-page Borders Used in England and Scotland,

1485-1640 (1932)[29] provides a model of a pattern-reference which bibliographers can hope may eventually be repeated in other areas. Within its self-imposed limits (borders designed specifically as borders, not those made up of typographical ornaments), it illustrates each border and records the books in which each appeared. When a bibliographer is describing a book that includes one of these borders, he can identify the border precisely by simply appending to his brief verbal description the appropriate McKerrow-Ferguson number. Besides serving as a standard of visual reference, the McKerrow-Ferguson work, in listing all the occurrences of a border, provides in effect a history of each pattern; this information about the course of a pattern through the hands of several printers may be important for the bibliographer's analysis of the dating and printing of a particular work. A. F. Johnson's German Renaissance Title-Borders (1929) and A Catalogue of Engraved and Etched English Title-Pages down to . . . 1691 (1934) are other examples of title-page reference works for the same period.

Woodcut illustrations are frequently not "patterns" in the sense employed here, but some patterns are woodcuts, and any reference book which comprehensively catalogues the woodcuts of a period should be consulted in connection with the identification of patterns; for early English books, the chief work is Edward Hodnett's English Woodcuts, 1480-1535 (1935). Publishers' devices constitute a similar category: not patterns themselves, they can form the basis of patterns and are repeated from one book to another. Verbal descriptions of devices in early English books should be keyed to R. B. McKerrow's Printers' & Publishers' Devices in England & Scotland, 1485-1640 (1913).[30] While it is possible to survey all the borders, woodcuts, and devices used in particular countries during the first two or three centuries of printing and produce catalogues for precise identification, it is clearly impossible to attain such comprehensiveness for later periods, when the output of the press reached staggering proportions.

A workable approach for later periods is to organize the study of patterns by publisher. The task of recording the borders and other patterns (and devices) used by a particular publisher, even a prolific one of the nineteenth or twentieth century, is manageable; indeed, it should be a regular part of any full-scale study of a publishing house. Publishing histories could then become the standard reference works

for the descriptive bibliographer in his specification of the patterns in letterpress sheets. Some histories of publishers already exist which serve this function in regard to devices. Geoffrey Keynes's William Pickering Publisher (1924) and Sidney Kramer's A History of Stone & Kimball and Herbert S. Stone & Company (1940) bring together at one place reproductions of all the devices used by these firms; each is numbered and can be referred to by number in the description of any title page (or spine) bearing it. A Coleridge bibliographer, when he comes to the 1844 Pickering Poems, can thus refer in his title-page transcription to "[dolphin and anchor device within oval scrollwork frame (Keynes ix)]." As more studies of major publishers become available, recording not only devices but all patterns used by these publishers, the task of specifying such patterns in bibliographies will become increasingly more simple and more exact. In the meantime, most descriptions of patterns occurring in letterpress sheets will have to be accompanied by specific illustrations.

Greater standardization in the specification of patterns in descriptive bibliographies is desirable in order to make verbal descriptions more precise. After all, any rendering in words of visual characteristics depends for its meaning on conventions, and the more detailed the conventions the more exact the verbal reference can be. Standardization should not, however, be carried to the point where it restricts rather than facilitates; and the infinite variety of possible patterns in books raises this problem in an acute form. In the case of certain patterns — cloth grains and marbled designs — a comprehensive standard and generic scheme of classification can be devised without becoming so involved or cumbersome as to defeat the purpose; and other patterns which by their nature must be illustrated specifically rather than generically can still be covered comprehensively for certain periods without becoming unmanageable. But in some cases the attempt to bring together all patterns falling within a given category (such as all stamped patterns on nineteenth-century publishers' casings) might not be worth the effort, if the result was so unwieldy that reference to it was more time-consuming and less meaningful than reference to a limited set of illustrations provided for the specific purposes of one bibliography.

Whenever a comprehensive standard set of photographs is possible, it is to be preferred to separate photographs in individual bibliographies, for two reasons: since terms become precise to the extent that everyone uses them to refer to the same things, widespread reference to a single set of photographs serves to encourage this precision;

in addition, reference to a standard more comprehensive than is possible on the basis of a single author-bibliography places the individual pattern in a larger context and provides a more meaningful form of description. Whether or not a comprehensive standard is possible — or presently available — in a given area, the general principle is the same: a bibliographical description must remain a verbal construction, but its descriptive phrases can have exact meanings only if they are supported by reference to pictorial representations. This double approach lays the groundwork for a generally understood terminology and therefore, however clumsily, bridges the gap between the verbal and the visual.