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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,
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
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;
Sources of Photographs
In order not to multiply unnecessarily the number of individual photographs of grains and patterns in print, the photographs presented here have been selected from those previously published (and therefore already used by a number of people). The following seventeen are reprinted, by kind permission of Yale University Press, from Jacob Blanck's Bibliography of American Literature (1955- ): 102, 110, 112ae, 118, 122, 202, 202b, 302, 304, 304c, 306, 306c, 402, 404, 404b, 408c, 412. From Michael Sadleir's XIX Century Fiction (1951), by kind permission of the University of California Press, come the following nineteen: 102bd, 102be, 104, 106, 106ae, 108, 108c, 116, 120, 124b, 124c, 204, 206, 208, 210, 402b, 406, 408, 410. Those reprinted from Bernard C. Middleton's A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique (1963), by kind permission of Mr. Middleton and Hafner Publishing Company, Ltd., are as follows: 1102, 1106, 1108, 1204. From Josef Halfer's The Progress of the Marbling Art (1893) are taken 1202, 1210, and 1212; and from James B. Nicholson's A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding (1856) come 1104, 1110, 1112ad, 1206, and 1208.
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