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Notes
For particulars, see Alphonse Willems, Les Elzevier, Historie et annales typographiques, Bruxelles, 1880, p. 375, no. 1462. These copies do not appear to have been known to Charles Pieters, Annales de l'imprimerie Elsevirienne, Gand, 1851, p. 235, but apparently came to light shortly after that date.
See Gustaf Berghman, Catalogue raisonné des impressions Elzeviriennes de la Bibliothèque Royale de Stockholm, Stockholm, 1911, p. 314, no. 2162. The copy of the 1671 edition actually printed by Daniel Elzevir (Berghman 2161) found in the New York Public Library also has leaf K3 mis-signed C3; the corresponding leaf in the Blaeu edition is correctly signed.
Nouvelles études sur la bibliographie Elzevirienne, Stockholm, 1897, p. 109, no. 388- see also Edouard Rahir, Catalogue d'une collection unique de volumes imprimés par les Elzevier, Paris, 1896, p. 397, no. 3336.
An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, Oxford, 1928, p. 173 and (especially) Appendix Five.
McKerrow adds that the printer "could easily do this by cutting off one- third of each sheet and using the remainder exactly as a normal sheet for his octavo formes, making up every third gathering out of the two cut-off pieces placed one inside the other." Though our "Elzevir" is a 24mo in form and manner of printing, the method of cutting and folding is just this. Oddly, Pieters (loc. cit) refers to our book as a I6mo, as does Jean Graesse, Trésor de livres rares et précieux, Dresden, 1859-69, VI2: 245.
According to Willems, the 1671 Valerius Maximus is a page-for-page reprint of the 1650 Elzevir printing so that the compositor was well aware of what each page would contain; thus his task for this somewhat complicated imposition was considerably simplified.
Gathering * comprises the title-page two biographies of Valerius Maximus, and the table of contents; the leaves are unnumbered. In the NYPL copy this quire is bound at the beginning, in the Morgan copy (of the reprint) the title is, of course, bound as the first leaf but the other three leaves have been inserted at the end. It is naturally impossible to determine what Blaeu had in mind for the unbound sheets.
Because of the rough (untrimmed and consequently uneven) edges of the paper, the measurements are necessarily approximate but are sufficiently accurate for our purposes.
These two quires were doubtless printed as gathering H in our figure but were not folded together as the other gatherings in this group.
Despite the great variety of his illustrations, John Johnson (Typographia or the Printers' Instructor, London, 1824, vol. II, chap. vii) gives no lay-out for "A Sheet of Twenty-fours, with Three Signatures" though he gives a number for the same "with Two Signatures."
For a discussion of this practice and for the literature on this subject, see Paul S. Dunkin, "The Ghost of the Turned Sheet," PBSA, XLV (1951), 246-250.
Introduction, Part 1, Chapter 8. I have also looked through the following books without finding any mention of a sheet of this exact size: Charles M. Briquet, Les filigranes, Paris, 1907; William A. Churchill, Watermarks in Paper in Holland, England, France, etc., in the XVII and XVIII Centuries and their Interconnection, Amsterdam, 1935; and Edward Heawood, Watermarks Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries Hilversum, 1950.
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