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Notes
Hinman's terms, "centre rules" (which run vertically down the page center between two columns of text) and "box rules" (surrounding the running-titles and text), derive from James S. Streck's article, "Center Rules in Folio Printing: A New Kind of Bibliographical Evidence," SB, 1 (1948-49), 188-191. Streck proves that the "center lines," unlike the "box rules," are not an integral part of the skeleton-forme in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio; Hinman proves the same for the Shakespeare Folio. The Streck and Hinman terminology, however, is inappropriate for a general theory of marginal-rule evidence: it describes only a single arrangement of rules in works having some rules occasionally distributed with the type and others usually fixed in the skeleton, and the implication that rules surrounding the text were used differently from those in the body of the text could be seriously misleading—even in the two Folios, any given center rule usually appears with the same box rules, and the box rules are frequently not part of the skeleton-forme. In an effort to develop a more general approach, I shall treat all rules simultaneously and so have named them for their usual function, indicating a margin of some sort.
For example, Guy A. Battle, in "The Case of the Altered 'C'—A Bibliographical Problem in the Beaumont and Fletcher First Folio," PBSA, 42 (1948), 66-70, shows that marginal rules may be more reliable than running-titles in tracing skeletons and in "A Bibliographical Note from the Beaumont and Fletcher First Folio," SB, 1 (1948-49), 187-188, that in at least one instance rule evidence could determine the printing order of formes on a sheet.
Two issues of the first edition exist differentiated by a cancel title page. Copies with their sheets bound differently are listed in footnote 13.
Ordinarily, one would expect material identified as "THE PREFACE" to be part of the preliminaries, and, indeed, the compositor began at sig. D1 (see below) with "THE FIRST PART. OF LAW and Nature," showing that he initially considered "THE PREFACE" part of the preliminaries. The Table of Contents, however, lists "THE PREFACE" as the first part of the text. Furthermore, the unusual signing of the sheets in the Table of Contents (πA, A, B) and the pagination beginning on the second sheet of the Table of Contents at sig. A1 strongly suggest that the compositor realized that sheet C, containing "THE PREFACE," was not part of the preliminaries before he began setting the Table of Contents: when the compositor signed his first sheet 'D' and numbered its first page '25', he planned to sign and number the pages of three sheets (a perfect calculation for the Table of Contents) as part of the regular sequence of signatures and page numbers, but when he realized that "THE PREFACE" (which happened to fill exactly one sheet, C) began the text, he had to move the Table of Contents back one sheet, designating its first sheet 'A' (signed in italic) and beginning pagination on its ninth page. This initial confusion of the status of "THE PREFACE" also answers the query of Geoffrey Keynes as to why "The pagination begins very oddly on the fifth leaf of the Contents list" (A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, 4th ed. [1973], p. 119).
Two settings of sheet S exist: Compositor A set all of the sheets in the Library of Congress (DLC) copy ND 0332947 and every sheet except S in all other copies of Biathanatos with which I am familiar; Compositor B set only the S sheet found in all other copies. The available evidence strongly implies that Compositor A, using the printer's manuscript, totally reset Compositor B's setting of sheet S to make the quarto stylistically uniform. Compositor B, perhaps an apprentice, in an apparent attempt to reproduce the literal appearance of the printer's manuscript, failed to indicate its intentions with respect to quotations, punctuation, and capitalization in the manner conventional in printed books with the result that his pages differ greatly in appearance from those set by Compositor A. For a complete analysis of the two settings of sheet S, see pages 136-142 of my dissertation, "A Critical, Old-spelling Edition of John Donne's Biathanatos" (UCLA, 1973), University Microfilms order #73-16,704.
Willoughby sounds a further warning about evidence from bent rules: "owing to . . . the ease with which they could be both bent and straightened, rules cannot furnish evidence as conclusive as type" (p. 42). Hinman, on the other hand, is quite confident about inferring priority from the mere existence of two states: "Almost invariably, moreover, it is at once quite clear which is the earlier and which the later of any two states" (I, 155-156).
Pages containing the sig. T1v skeleton actually were imposed even later, after Compositor A reset sheet S; see the discussion of the order of composition of sheets S and T below.
Failure to consider marginal-rule evidence probably played a part in Charles Mark's incorrect ordering of these very settings in his dissertation, "John Donne: Biathanatos: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary" (Princeton, 1969), pp. clxxxix-cxc.
The following pairs of skeletons are identical: S2v and S1v, S3 and S4, and S4v and S3v. S1 and S2 have the same rules but not in the same arrangement.
The one difference does not affect the validity of the analysis: the sig. S1 bottom horizontal line appears turned end for end and upside down on sig. T1, an arrangement maintained in the rest of the sheets.
If Compositor A had finished sheet T before resetting sheet S, these rules would have been available from sig. T4v however, had he already finished sheet T, Compositor A surely would have used its skeleton-formes rather than introduced a new skeleton-forme with several new rules in addition to the two obtained by partially dismantling the sig. T4v skeleton, tearing apart the new skeleton-forme after printing sheet S, and exactly rebuilding the sig. T4v skeleton for use on sig. V4v. Compositor A could not have returned to reset sheet S after finishing the rest of the sheets: marked deterioration in later sheets of the top horizontal rule used on sigs. S1 and S2 and longer middle horizontal rule on sigs. S1v and S2v eliminates any possibility that sheet S was reset after they had been printed.
See Fredson Bowers' article, "Running-Title Evidence for Determining Half-Sheet Imposition," SB, 1 (1948), 199-202, reprinted in Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (1975), pp. 254-257.
Geoffrey Keynes's copy preserves stubs proving that sigs. (*)1-(*)2v and Ee1-Ee2v were imposed on the same sheet (A Bibliography of Dr John Donne, 3rd ed. [1958], p. 93), and the following copies retain the quarto sheet intact with signatures running Ee1, Ee1v, (*)1, (*)1v, (*)2, (*)2v, Ee2, Ee2v: British Museum (George Thomason's copy), Folger Shakespeare Library, Harvard University Library (Augustus Jessopp's copy), and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. In many cases, however, such evidence may not exist, the available copies may have been rebound, the bibliographer may not know about or have access to the necessary copies, he may have to work from photographic reproductions, or he must forego unbinding the available volumes, leaving him no recourse but marginal-rule evidence. Even in our case, marginal-rule evidence is necessary to reconstruct completely the processing of this sheet.
Biathanatos demonstrates this ubiquity: even though its preliminaries do not require skeletons (pagination does not even begin until sig. A1, and the preliminaries lack marginalia), they appear on every printed page except the title page.
Since the break does not appear in the top horizontal line on sig. A2, the marginal-rule evidence does not prove that the inner forme of A could not have been printed before sheet C, but this possibility seems rather remote: the compositor would have had to stop in the middle of the Table of Contents, arrange the sheet A skeletons plus four other skeletons into the sheet C skeleton-formes, compose and print the Preface, dismantle the sheet C skeleton-formes, rebuild the skeleton-forme for sheet A, and return to composing the Table of Contents, all for no reason.
With ¶1, ¶1v, and ¶2v blank and ¶2 unsigned, one might think that the title page was printed on a separate sheet, but the rules prove that it and the Epistle Dedicatory were printed on a single sheet in the first issue of Biathanatos (which has the undated title page—the second issue carries a 1648 date). Significantly, the presence of the rules from sigs. πA3v and πA4 on the undated title page and the absence of any rules from other pages of Biathanatos on the 1648 title page establishes the priority of the undated title page and the order of the issues. As in the case of the Ee-(*) sheet, proof that the undated title page was printed as a single sheet with the Epistle Dedicatory is simple, given access to appropriate copies, but for a bibliographer working with rebound copies or photographic reproductions, the marginal-rule evidence is essential.
Marginal rules tend to become fixed for the same reasons running-titles do: "The convenience of using the same skeleton in different formes for speed and for consistency of register (instead of constructing a new skeleton for each forme of the book) made the running-title in effect a part of the furniture" (Fredson Bowers, "Notes on Running-Titles as Bibliographical Evidence," The Library, 4th ser., 19 [1938], 316).
Hinman concludes that the Shakespeare Folio box rules were part of the skeletons (I, 153) and that these skeletons were unaffected by composition and distribution, so that the box rules were fixed: "The components of this skeleton were not only then transferred directly from the old forme to the new but were placed in exactly the same relative positions in the new forme that they had occupied in the old" (I, 156).
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