 | |  |
The study of press figures in recent years has provided an important tool for the bibliographical investigation of eighteenth-century books. Though it has long been known that these figures appeared in English books as early as 1680 and as late as 1823,[1] their significance has not even yet been fully explored; in the studies that have appeared, volumes printed in England have been drawn upon for illustration, and nothing has been said about American practice. Indeed, I have talked with bibliographers who assumed that press figures were not used in America at all, since printing shops in the colonies rarely had more than two presses[2] and their record of work would thus not be difficult to keep in other ways. The matter is less simple, however, and press figures certainly were used, at least by the end of the eighteenth century. An examination of these figures should prove of interest both for what they reveal about American printing practice and for the additional evidence they may hopefully furnish toward clarifying the exact nature of press figures in general.
In the course of examining well over a thousand books printed in America between 1775 and 1825,[3] I discovered, first of all, that press figures are in fact quite rare in American books and do not occur with anything like their frequency in English books of the same period. But beyond that, I found that certain printers at certain times did use figures extensively and regularly. Two clusters began to emerge within
In addition, certain procedures made the search somewhat less random than at first appeared. For one thing, when a figured volume was located, other books issued by the same printer were specifically sought out. In some cases (as with Isaac Riley) many figured books were found in this way; in others (as with John Thompson and Jacob Berriman) no further figured books turned up. Second, eighty-one Bibles were examined, representing forty-seven of the printers of English Bibles in America before 1820, on the theory that (1) if a particular printer ever used press figures, he would have been likely to use them in such a long book,[5] and (2) this type of survey would provide a quick index to the practices of a large number of printers. As it turned out, eighteen of these Bibles, the work of seven printers, did contain figures.[6]
It should also be pointed out that various kinds of numbers other than press figures may appear in the lower margins of printed pages during these years. This is not the place to survey American practice in using numerals as signatures, but it is of course true that numerals, rather than letters, were increasingly employed as signatures in the early nineteenth century. At the turn of the century numerals were occasionally used in conjunction with letters to register a consecutive count of the quires: Mathew Carey's Bibles, for example, generally have, on the first recto of every gathering, a number in parentheses to the left of the signature—as "(23) Z" followed by "(24) AA".[7] Another kind of figure is the numeral identifying each section of a work to be issued and sold in parts. In John Payne's New and Complete System of Universal Geography (Evans 34316), printed in 1798-1799 by John Low of New York, the fourth verso of each of the first ten gatherings of the text is labeled "No. 1"; quires L through U are marked "No. 2" on $4v; X through Gg "No. 3"; and so on—indicating that the work was issued in ten-quire sections.[8] A third kind of figure is that which records the use of standing type: Mathew Carey's early Bibles from standing type sometimes give the number of the impression on $1r and $3r (the seventh, 19 August 1805, is an illustration); later a more complicated system is used, with a double figure in parentheses on $1va (as 26-3 in 1808, 39-1 in 1811, 47-8 or 48-1 in 1813, 83-2 in 1818).[9]
Leaving aside all these figures (however intriguing, as those of Mathew Carey undoubtedly are), I shall record in the following pages some of the press figures which I have thus far discovered in American books. The first section will take up a sampling of the work of several printers (all but one from Philadelphia) in the 1790's, giving a more detailed examination of the work of one of them, Thomas Dobson, and of one of his products, the great eighteen-volume Encyclopaedia. The Bibles enter into this section because, with the exception of some of Mathew Carey's Bibles, none of the sixty-nine post-1800 Bibles I examined contained figures. The second section deals with some of the works printed in the 1810's by Isaac Riley of New York (and the related printer Charles Wiley) and again concentrates on one large project, in this case Riley's important series of state supreme court reports.
The evidence provided by all these volumes does not, unfortunately, solve the most vexing questions about press figures: the significance of unfigured formes in otherwise figured works,[10] and the identification of the figures as designating machines or men.[11] But the aims
| | |