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Notes
Most of the novels in question have been examined in the Bodleian and/or the National Library of Scotland, and I should like to thank the reader-services staff in these libraries. Reader-services staff at St. Andrews University Library have also been very helpful. The greatest acknowledgement is due to my wife, without whose extensive research assistance this note could not have been compiled.
Figure based on a survey of Andrew Block, The English Novel 1740-1850: A Catalogue, new and rev. ed. (1961). Newby appears to have commenced publishing in 1842 in association with T. & W. Boone and to have become established in his own right in 1843. His output was by no means confined to fiction. (See further The Publishers' Circular and The English Catalogue of Books.)
Leaf size approx. 7 x 4¾ ins. in uncut copies. Gatherings are of twelve leaves, and unopened copies show that duodecimo with cutting was employed, the four central leaves of the gathering comprising the offcut. Contemporary trade sources (such as The Publishers' Circular and The English Catalogue) tend to describe these novels as "post 8vo."—true post octavos are in fact rather similar in leaf size to royal duodecimos but are of course differently produced.
Figures emerge from Block of about 130 for Colburn and about 110 for Bentley. Other noted publishers of fiction are well down on these figures for the period (Longman 55, Chapman & Hall 40, Saunders & Otley 35, Smith, Elder 25).
Wuthering Heights appeared as volumes I and II of a hybrid three-decker with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey as volume III, which also has the printer's imprint of Newby. Volume I has no printer's imprint—see below.
T. J. Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of the Members of the Brontë Family (1917; facsimile impression, Dawsons, 1965), p. 98; Albert Smith, in the Clarendon Edition of Wuthering Heights, ed. Hilda Marsden and Ian Jack (1976), p. xxxiv.
Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683-4), ed. Herbert Davis & Harry Carter, 2nd ed. (1962), pp. 211, 225(diagram); John Smith, The Printer's Grammar (1755; facsimile impression, Gregg Press, 1965), diagrams on pp. 236-237 (but the text, on p. 208, calls for only five signatures); Philip Luckombe, The History and Art of Printing (1771; facsimile impression, Gregg Press, 1965), pp. 382, 413(diagram); William Savage, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing (1841; facsimile impression, Gregg Press, 1966), p. 340(diagram)—Savage's diagram takes 'B' signatures for the example, as does the present note when not quoting manuals that use 'A' (these Newby novels do not normally have any 'A' signatures; typically they commence with an unsigned singleton—the title-leaf—followed by gathering B12).
Caleb Stower, The Printer's Grammar (1808; facsimile impression, Gregg Press 1965), pp. 163, 174(diagram). For twelves without cutting Stower gives signatures on the first, second, and third leaves ('B B2 B3')—p. 175(diagram).
John Johnson, Typographia (1824; facsimile impression, Gregg Press, 1966), II, 135, 158(diagram *14).
Wise, A Bibliography . . . of the Brontë Family, p. 109, notes under the first edition of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (3 vols. 1848): "In each volume the signature to the fifth leaf of each sheet is usually misnumbered 3" (see further on The Tenant below). R. B. McKerrow called it "a curious and very misleading method," in An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), p. 79. Mrs. C. G. F. Gore's The Man of Fortune (3 vols. [1842], printed by Charles Reynell for Colburn) has not merely the third signature (e.g. 'B3') on the fifth leaf but the second signature (e.g. 'B2') consistently on the third leaf.
Thomas MacKellar, The American Printer, 13th ed. (1882), p. 165(diagram); American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (1894; facsimile impression, Detroit, Gale, 1967), pp. 279(diagram), 509—this actually refers to half-sheet imposition for gathering in sixes, but the principle is the same.
Based chiefly on a survey of the substantial holdings of nineteenth-century novels in St. Andrews University Library. 'B'-'B6' occurs in Theodore Hook's Fathers and Sons (3 vols. 1842, printed by Gilbert & Rivington for Colburn)—this also appears to have residual press-figures, the latest I have seen and another relatively out-of-date feature of Savage's 1841 manual (p. 814); see also note 19 below. 'B B2' was used by James Ballantyne in Edinburgh for e.g. Scott's Waverley (3 vols. 1814), Guy Mannering (3 vols. 1815) and The Antiquary (3 vols. 1816), as was noticed by R. W. Chapman in The Library, 4th ser., 4 (1924), 180 note; in the eighteen-forties it occurs in Trollope's The Macdermots of Ballycloran (see below).
See Kathleen Tillotson, in the Clarendon Dickens edition of Oliver Twist, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (1966), p. xlix.
T. C. Hansard, Typographia (1825; facsimile impression, Gregg Press, 1966), pp. 498, 508(diagram).
C. H. Timperley, The Printers' Manual (1838; facsimile impression, Gregg Press, 1965), pp. 18, 26(diagram).
A rightward tendency appears to be usual up to c. 1700; from c. 1725-c. 1825 a preference for central placement is evident, with a return to a rightward tendency c. 1825-c. 1900. In modern British practice, however, signatures (if used at all) tend to be placed on the extreme left.
Errors of this kind may not, of course, persist through an entire edition, though five copies of C. F. Henningsen's Sixty Years Hence (3 vols. 1847), including what appear to be two copies of a second issue—calling itself "second edition"—1847 and one of a third issue 1848, do show some such anomalies in common (my thanks for information to Ms. Jessica S. Owaroff of the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Mr. Thomas D. Burney of the Library of Congress; and Mr. Douglas Matthews of the London Library); but see note 20 below. Some hints can be found of the distraction these errors must have caused in warehouse and bindery: the National Library of Scotland copy of volume I of Sixty Years Hence (second issue, original cloth) has no fewer than ten of the offcuts inserted in the wrong gatherings.
See the textual footnotes in the Clarendon Edition of Jane Eyre, ed. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (1969), esp. p. 408.
The strict legal sanctions against this introduced in an Act of 1799 had been considerably reduced by Acts of 1811 and 1839—see W. B. Todd, "London Printers' Imprints, 1800-1840," The Library, 5th ser., 21 (1966), 46-59.
The combination factor must be stressed: a few examples of '---' for '—' occur in volume III of Lady Charlotte Bury's Family Records (3 vols. 1841, printed by B. Bensley for Saunders and Otley), though the signatures are on the right and normal (except that volume I has 'B'-'B6' but volumes II and III use 'B B2 B5', in spite of the fact that all have the same printer's imprint); again, the anonymous Roland Percie (2 vols. 1846), a novel published by Newby but with the printer's imprint of G. Paul, Bury St. Edmunds, in both volumes, has the 'B B3 B5' system with some signatures placed on the left, though the dashes are normal throughout.
Albert Smith, in the Clarendon Edition of Wuthering Heights, p. xxxiv, indicates that the inverted signature ('B3' on B2) does not occur in all copies. It may be significant that '. . .' for '—' proliferates in a section of volume I where one might particularly expect the copy to have employed heavy use of the dash—the delirious assertions of Catherine in chapter 12 (some modern editions—e.g. Clarendon, World's Classics, Penguin English Library—commendably, but I believe wrongly, retain '. . .' here).
Like some novels printed by Newby, this first edition of The Tenant may well retain a relatively high proportion of dashes from the lost MS. copy—the printed punctuation, especially in dialogue, is often very informal.
This is not to say that volume III of Azeth is generally well printed—like Wuthering Heights its text shows numerous disfigurements attributable to case and press, among the more striking of which are several instances of '!' for 'l' (e.g. 'credu!ity') and the occurrence of 'Thy no sojourn' for 'Thy sojourn on'. In spite of this, it is possible that, in some respects, shops like Newby's and Judd's, by their very lack of sophistication, may have preserved features of lost MS. copy to a greater extent than more competent establishments.
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