Some Observations on the
Philadelphia 1794
Editions of
Jefferson's Notes
Coolie Verner
In his American Bibliography,[1] Charles Evans refers to the 1794
edition of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of
Virginia, printed in Philadelphia for Mathew Carey, as being
"In two states, printed on thick, and on ordinary book paper."
There are, however, other distinguishing features defining these
two states[2] that give some insight
into the printing-house practices of Mathew Carey's printer.[3]
Examination of copies[4] in the
two states shows that the printers had apparently run the first
three signatures (B, C, and D)[5] on
thin, or ordinary paper, before the decision to add some
thick-paper copies was made. The type from the six formes of these
three signatures had by then been distributed. The reason for the
decision to add thick-paper copies is not clear. The thick paper
(watermarked AL MASSO)[6] is
clearly
superior to the ordinary book paper, but it cannot be stated with
any finality whether the additional copies were for premium sale or
simply to augment the edition. Augmentation
of an edition by the use of a different stock of paper would, even
today,
[7] involve some attention to
the gathering of sheets for a given book from piles of similar
paper stocks.
[8] Disregarding the
reset run needed for B-D, the remaining sheets would, therefore,
have been run (whether for premium sale or simple augmentation)
with a proportion of each sheet in each stock, not some sheets
entirely in one stock and others entirely in another. Since both
states can be found in contemporary bindings very similar in
quality,
[9] the true explanation is
probably a combination of the premium sale and augmentation
theories.
From signature E forward, the thick paper was worked in
continuous printing with the ordinary paper, and interestingly
enough the point at which the first three signatures were re-run
can be determined with some nicety by an examination of the
brackets around the page numbers. These page brackets were left by
the imposer in the chase, skeleton fashion, though the numbers
were, of course, changed for each forme. The brackets themselves
are too uniform and were too frequently broken or pulled and
replaced during the running of the formes[10] to be of much use as timetables,
but
their distance apart varied with the two-digit page numbers, the
three-digit numbers in the 100's, and sometimes additionally with
the three-digit numbers above 200. Measurements of the distances
apart of the brackets show that all of the reset formes were run
after the two-digit bracket spreads. More specifically, reset D was
machined after outer O (pp. 97-104, the
last forme to contain a mixture of 2-and 3-digit spreads, such as
reset D has) and before P; and reset inner C (with an 18 mm. spread
on C2r) followed inner Cc (the first with an 18 mm.
spread; the
only others to contain a similar spread are Gg, Ll, and Uu, the
first two of these with the extra spread in the same position as
reset C and Cc).
The thick-paper B-D signatures were completely reset by a
different compositor from the one who set the original states of B,
C, and D. The compositor
of the second state re-appears at other points in the book,
[11] and seems to have been setting
from the
same cases
[12] as the first
compositor. The effort to find means of distinguishing special
characteristics of two compositors in a late 18th-century American
shop is instructive, but the evidence discovered is largely
negative. Variations in the measure are negligible and certainly
useless as distinguishing characteristics. This was, of course, in
part caused by the fact that the compositor was resetting the same
words in the same font
[13] from
probably the same case. Typographical variation in typesetting
habits is extremely difficult to spot, the use of ligatures and of
the long ſ being for all practical purposes identical between the
two. Indeed the only observed variation, other than orthographic
ones,
[14] is in the space
following a period at the end of a sentence. The spacing of the
second-state compositor is often measurably larger than that of the
first-state compositor. The first-state compositor justified his
lines containing sentence breaks more amply between words than
between sentences.
Proofreading before the presswork began seems to have been
reasonably good, although once the formes were locked, very few
changes seem to have been made.[15]
Outer P was unlocked[16] for
corrections in the tabular material on P2v (p. 108) and
P4v
(p. 112), where some states (NjP and NcD) have incorrect totals:
"106" for "109" on p. 108, and "21" for "421" on p. 112. Ordinarily
it would be assumed that such variations were clear evidence of
in-press proofing, but the incorrect states in their two located
occurrences appear on both thick and thin paper. Unless, therefore,
the two papers were run in a senselessly intermittent fashion, the
error arose not from pre-proofed pulls, but from a press accident
which straddled the paper change. This latter assumption is borne
out by the alignment on page 112 of the erroneous "21" under a
three-digit number, which clearly indicates that a "4" has dropped
out.
Neither the map nor the folding chart seems to have been
involved in the two-paper proposition. The map, however, has been
found printed on two stocks of paper: heavy and ordinary. Both map
stocks have been found with both paper stocks. This was probably
due to the map's having been re-used repeatedly in other
publications of Mathew Carey.[17]
Most
copies of the map with this edition are unwatermarked, although the
ViU ordinary paper copy has a map watermarked HONIG. The folding
table is found watermarked with (1) a crown, circle and bell, (2)
with letters F B, and (3) with letters S L. There is no consistency
in the way these watermarks appear in the several copies or in the
two states, and since the chart is a half-sheet, it is assumed that
of the two initial groups, one of them is a counter-mark.
For the sake of collectors interested in knowing the comparative
rarity of the two states of the copies examined, the proportion is
three[18] of the thick copies to
thirteen of the ordinary paper copies. The edition has no textual
importance, and it must be clear from the above discussion that
neither state has priority except in the first three signatures, in
which the ordinary paper was the earlier typesetting and
impression. One might judge from the surviving copies that there
were perhaps 1000 copies originally planned, and that perhaps this
was upped by several hundred with the addition of thick paper. It
is significant that three copies[19]
are known bound with the separately printed appendix of 1800. These
were evidently held in stock for 16 years by some bookseller who
took advantage of Jefferson's election to the presidency to dispose
of his remainder with newly-issued material.
