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Notes
"In hand-made paper the right side is that which touches the wire cover of the mould . . . The 'wire' side . . . is, therefore, the right side . . ." E. J. Labarre, Dictionary and Encyclopaedia of Paper and Paper-Making (Amsterdam, 1952), p. 227.
It is difficult to generalize about seven hundred years of paper history. Some early paper has indistinct chains but clear wire marks; now and then both chains and laid lines are thin; but the grooves in some royal paper of the eighteenth century are irritatingly obvious; and this lush effect has sometimes been achieved in machine-made papers.
2a McKerrow remarks: "If one leaf has the smooth surface on the inner side and the other on the outer side, one is a cancel." To this he adds a curious note: "In the case of many kinds of paper it is, however, almost impossible to detect any difference between the two sides." Introduction to Bibliography (1927), p. 225.
"Flat papers are usually packed with the right side uppermost; if folded . . . the right side is outwards." Labarre, p. 227. That is, the quires are folded so that the grooves are outside the fold. But this rule may not have held general acceptance before the period of the machine. It is unlikely that any unopened reams of old paper exist, whose quires might serve as evidence. Yet more than occasionally a seventeenth-century book shows such a sequence of grooves in its outer formes (say) as to suggest the agreement is no accident; though other volumes show no consistency from sheet to sheet or within several copies of the same sheet.
In the sixteenth century the paper used in English books frequently has the initials of the papermaker reading normally from the unindented side (the inscription having read from left to right on the mould); whereas often in the seventeenth century a pair of moulds are so made that in one the inscription reads correctly from the unindented side, and in the other from the indented side (the letters or words having been reversed on the mould). See Allan H. Stevenson, "Watermarks Are Twins", SB, IV (1951), 65-66 et passim. These and other variations suggest that the "right" side was not regularly distinguished from the "wrong" side at the time.
Moxon's description of how quires were set out, opened, and wet for the press shows that the job was done in an orderly manner, and that homogeneity was possible or probable if the sheets and quires had been packed consistently at the mill. "Then taking the first Quire of the Heap . . ., he lays the Quire down upon the Waste Sheet, so, as that the back of the Quire lye upon the middle crease of the Waste Sheet . . . To place [the second] Quire in an even position, he lays the back of the Quire exactly upon the opening crease of the former Quire . . . In the same manner he wets [and lays down] all the Quires of his Dry Heap." Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, ed. De Vinne (1896), II, 303-306; and note 353-356.
Besides the useful diagrams in McKerrow and in various printers' manuals, there are now some handy ones in Paul S. Dunkin, How to Catalog a Rare Book (1951). Mr. Dunkin uses photographs of opened-out printed sheets in showing the folio, quarto, and octavo formats (plates IV-IX) and clear diagrams in describing twelvemo by cutting and without cutting (plates X-XIII).
However, he must not be deceived by the smallness of the watermark or the tightness of the binding. A small grape mark, especially one off center in its half of the mould, may appear wholly or mainly in one quarto leaf; and the greater part of a small pot may be lost in the fold.
R. W. Chapman, Cancels (1930), ch. VIII, "The Detection of Cancels". This book grew out of several articles on eighteenthcentury cancels published in the Library. McKerrow also lists the signs of cancels, pp. 223-224.
The initials are fairly small and appear (as ordinarily in octavos) at the top edge of the fold; and the leg appears (as often in paper made by Gambino of Genoa) in the lower outer corner of a leaf. For an illustration of legs used as corner marks see W. A. Churchill, Watermarks in Paper (Amsterdam, 1935), no. 551.
That is, six of the nine cancels checked violate the groove-pattern: an efficiency of 66% for one copy.
It is evident that Baskerville's workmen consciously selected "wrong" sides for hotpressing, missing a few; and equally evident that they paid little attention to sides while printing off cancels. But, indeed, a number of cancels would be printed off on one sheet.
Sometimes the watermark in a cancel appears in an unnatural position, as in the fore-edge of a quarto or the lower edge of an octavo. A curious example of such a quarto is a tract at the Newberry, The Necessity of Parliaments . . . By a True Protestant, and English Man (1689), from the fore-edge of the title page of which an exceedingly long-nosed fool looks mockingly upon the twentieth century. The title, if not certainly a cancel, is at least a leaf printed separately. Similarly, a University of Chicago octavo, Horace's Odes, Satyres, and Epistles (1684), printed on Norman demy (carré), has a title page with a piece of the Arms of France & Navarre in its lower inside corner. As the grooves in this title leaf do not match those of its pseudo-conjugate, the paper here furnishes two proofs of the cancel.
This quarto is not listed in Wing, though there is said to be a copy in the British Museum. Wing does list, E 920, an octavo edition of the same year, of which I have seen the copy at Columbia University. Both quarto and octavo were printed for Lawrence Blaiklock.
The pillar mark is a common type with single balls atop the posts and the letters IDB between them, as can be seen in sheets A, B, E. Cf. Heawood 3492 and 3532, which are larger. The pot top has a small crescent of a sort not found elsewhere in this book. As the pillar mark with its mate is the common mark in the volume, the pot top is suspect, though in itself insufficient as evidence.
The center fold, G4.5, would seem the natural pair of leaves to print for removal and transference. Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949), p. 233, cites aberrant copies of Sir William Killigrew's Three Plays (1665) 8° in which a cancel fold printed as 3G4.5 and intended to replace leaf 1D7 remains in place, untransfered. On the other hand, Chapman cites a different treatment in Dodsley's Collection of Poems, IV (1755) 8°, in which it is an outermost fold that is removed. For at the foot of Z6v is printed: "Directions to the Binder. The first and last leaves of this sheet are to supply the cancels in sheets H and K." R. W. Chapman, "Notes on Cancel Leaves", Library, 4th ser., V (1924-25), 258. It will be noted that whichever fold becomes the transferred leaves the effect is the same. In Lawrence's Interest of Ireland, Newberry copy, 2g is compatible with G whether it was printed as the innermost or the outermost fold, for the grooves fit the sheet-pattern either way.
Except for the six fleurs-de-lis it has the general form of Heawood 644. It is not like Briquet 1860, an Italian mark with six lilies but no crown above the shield.
Allen Hazen has kindly examined the Columbia University copy and reports that in it all the indicated cancels have been carried out. I am grateful to Mr. Hazen for this and other helpful information on particular cancels.
In his Bibliography of the English Printed Drama (1939-—). See e.g. nos. 78, 116, 148, 172, 210, 224, 231, 232, 245, 246, 260, and so on. Of these, no. 246, Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois (1641) is notable in having had its title twice canceled (1641, 1646).
Mr. Bowers notes these title-page cancels from work-in-progress: Woodward & McManaway nos. 90, 173, 195, 278, 458, 477, 484, 493, 537, 656, 724, 805, 1079; and he has kindly listed other cancels for my investigation.
The most interesting title-page cancel that I have examined recently occurs in the Newberry copy of James Shirley's Honoria and Mammon (n.d.) 8°. (Greg 473b1, W & M 1145, Wing S 3475.) The imprint reads merely "LONDON, Printed for the uſe of the Author." The leaf is a cancel, with the stub not visible but with its indentations not matching those of halfsheet A. The special interest of this cancel arises from the fact that, as Greg points out, it seems to represent the first issue of the edition of 1658-59, and the further fact that this copy contains a few alterations of speeches and directions, apparently in the hand of the author, which suggest production in the summer of 1658. The only other recorded copy is at the Bodleian.
English paper was being made at this time by a considerable number of mills. This is of a poorer quality than much of that made by the Company of White Paper Makers from 1691 on.
Any slight discrepancy in paper or print may serve as a clue: an intrusive watermark, wider chains, weaker tranchefiles (end-chains), heavier sewing marks, thicker paper, off-color paper, foxing; new headlines, type including new sorts, peculiarities of composition, a wider printer's measure: anything that bibliographical ingenuity can hit upon. For the want of such clues or such ingenuity, no doubt numerous cancel-folds remain undetected.
T. J. Wise shows no concern over matching paper, when, for instance, he makes up "perfect" copies of Dryden's Marriage a-la-mode, and Nash's Have With You to Saffron Walden. That is, he uses the leaves, as they come, from whatever other copy he has at hand or can procure. See Letters of Thomas J. Wise to John Henry Wrenn, ed. Fannie E. Ratchford (1944), pp. 396, 458.
See Philip Gaskell, The First Editions of William Mason (Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1951), p. viii. He says: "'Outset' is a bookbinder's term meaning a gathering, usually of two or four conjugate leaves, folded round the one or more sections that make up the body of a book, just as the wrapper encloses a pamphlet."
Consider e.g Greg nos. 563 (Fletcher's Wit without Money), 527 (Luminalia), 568b11 (Mayne's City Match), 584 (Goffe's Strange Discovery), 761 (Goffe's Careless Shepherdess). In the Newberry copy of each of these, except perhaps The Strange Discovery, there seems to be evidence that a leaf was folded around and not detached.
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