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The Order of Composition and Distribution
It is reasonable to assume that a temporal relationship held between composition, presswork, and distribution — that, in general, the first forme set was the first forme machined and the first distributed. As soon as this is said, however, qualification must be made. If the press
Composition (in which term I include all the compositor's duties) seems, in fact, to have been governed by presswork. When the press stood idle, the printer could not profit; hence, when local conditions permitted it, an effort evidently was made so to regulate the speed of composition that the press would be supplied with a steady flow of material to be printed off. The rate of printing was chiefly a function of the size of the edition, and the rate of composition was chiefly a function of the nature and amount of the text to be set up for each forme. The speed of printing was a constant, but the speed of composition could be varied by several means, a favorite among them being the employment of more than one compositor to set type for a single forme or some other kind of collaboration to accomplish the same purpose, such as the composition by one workman of a complete forme while his companion set another forme or the employment of one workman in distributing and performing other chores while his companion set type. Flexibility was desirable, of course, and these basic techniques may have been modified in many different ways in order to adjust for the effect that particular circumstances had upon the progress of a specific printing job. However, because a folio forme contained a considerable amount of material and because a folio forme could be machined in about the same time as one containing much less (say a quarto forme) if the same number of copies of both were to be made, it seems generally true that two compositors were required to work simultaneously in folio printing.[7] When two compositors collaborated
Proof of the order in which the pages of a particular quire were set can usually be made on the following evidence:
1. Reappearing types. As Hinman has shown in detail, it is possible to identify individual pieces of type which are distinctively broken, bent, or otherwise marked and to trace their reappearances in quire after quire.[8] There are, to be sure, differences in the reliability of the identifications. Some types are battered in so readily discernible a way that they can be recognized with no difficulty. Others, however, are so deformed that the characteristic which makes them distinctive can be obscured by variations in inking, in the surface of the paper, or in the force of the impression. Still others are virtually worthless as evidence because either through accident or through some weakness inherent in the design of the letter two or more types will have been damaged in such a way as to make them practically indistinguishable; the ascenders of d's and the descenders of p's, for instance, were very often bent or broken in almost exactly the same way. Sometimes a letter which can be recognized in one copy of the Folio cannot be recognized in another, and sometimes a pattern of recurrences will indicate that a type must have been used on a certain page on which it cannot be found.[9] Furthermore, a compositor was rarely obliged to use
To find in Quire Y a type which had earlier appeared in Quire X is generally to find that the part of Quire X containing the type had been distributed in the ordinary way. But this conclusion is not always correct, for some types moved into new positions not as a result of distribution but as a consequence of an accident or irregularity, having been pulled during inking, separated from other types when the skeleton was stripped from the wrought-off forme or the center rule removed, or dropped during distribution.[10] If one finds ten types from X3a in Y4b, it is clear that X3a was distributed before the Y-column was set and that Y4b was composed at the case[11] into which X3a type was distributed, if the column rather than the part-column was the unit of distribution. If, however, one finds one type from X3a in Y4b, these matters are by no means so clear; the one X3a type may be aberrant, having made its way into the case from which Y4b was set through accident rather than regular distribution, or it may be quite genuine, being merely the only recognizable type from X3a that happens to appear in Y4b. Thus when recognizable types are few, it is necessary to use the evidence they provide with caution, and, if possible, to confirm it by evaluating its consistency with other evidence. Nevertheless, in spite of minor ambiguities, distribution is usually not hard to prove, and it then follows that "whenever a number of types are distributed into a certain case these types will necessarily next be used in material set from that case."[12] Evidence of case in conjunction with spelling evidence, as Hinman has shown, is of major importance in establishing the limits of a compositor's work in a particular forme,
Whether type drawn from one case was distributed into the same case by the man who set it is a matter of some consequence. What little information there is about this aspect of Elizabethan printing practice indicates that sometimes, perhaps generally, compositors may be said to have "owned" their types, so that if Compositor A set X3a from a certain case, the reappearance of X3a type on Y4b will indicate that Compositor A set that column as well from the same case.[14] In William Wilson's section of the Folio, however, this practice was not followed with any consistency; hence, the concept of case as a category of bibliographical evidence is severely restricted. It is not, however, invalidated. If one observes that X3a type reappears in Y4b, Y4va, and Y4vb, it is evident that the three Y-columns were set from the same case regardless of which compositor set or distributed X3a. But it does become necessary when there is a likelihood of one workman distributing another's type to distinguish between the testimony of types which reappear immediately and those which do not — which are, so to speak, latent — the former being much more trustworthy as evidence than the latter. Suppose that a type found in Y4b was last seen in W2a, a column known to have been distributed during the composition of Quire X into Compositor B's case. The implication would be that the Y4b type in question was not used in Quire X and that its appearance on Y4b is evidence for the setting of that column by Compositor B. It is always possible, however, that the type actually was used in Quire X but was unobserved there, and if it happened to be used in an X-column that was distributed into Compositor A's case, its appearance on Y4b means that that column was set by A, not B. The special treatment accorded latent types (discussed more fully below) is thus a protective measure adopted to guard against one's inability always to see or to recognize the types being used as evidence. The chief value of latent types lies in the confirmation they can lend to the implications of other evidence.
2. Reappearing rules, display types, heads, and other typographical matter not a part of the skeleton forme. In the Shakespeare Folio it was
3. Type shortages. Because double-column folio formes contained a relatively large amount of type and because the repetition of proper names or abbreviations of them demanded the same letter again and again, type shortages sometimes occurred, particularly in the italics used for speech-prefixes and stage-directions. These shortages caused the compositors to substitute letter of a different sort, usually roman for the customary italic, so that a speech-prefix for the character Zenocia in The Custome of the Countrey, for example, sometimes appears as Zen. rather than as Zen. Deliberate substitutions of this kind can be distinguished from errors arising from such causes as foul case by the frequency and consistency of the occurrence of the wrong-font letter. It seems reasonable to suppose that, in general, the compositor would use up his supply of regular type before he would begin to substitute and would continue to substitute until his supply of regular type was renewed by the distribution of a wrought-off forme containing type of the required sort. On this supposition inferences can be made about the priority of composition of certain columns or pages within a compositor's stint. But workmen apparently did not always wait until their regular supply was completely exhausted before they began to substitute, and perhaps they occasionally raided other cases or broke new supplies out of storage rather than obtaining types from distribution.
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