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Notes
An early version of this paper was presented at the Modern Language Association Convention, Methods of Literary Research Section, San Francisco, 1979. I wish to thank Craig S. Abbott, Peter L. Shillingsburg, and G. Thomas Tanselle for reading subsequent drafts and giving valuable advice.
Meriwether and Katz, "A Redefinition of 'Issue,'" Proof, 2 (1972), 61-70; Tanselle, "The Bibliographical Concepts of Issue and State," PBSA, 69 (1975), 17-66.
Bowers has made other comments on plates and multiple plating in "Old Wine in New Bottles: Problems of Machine Printing," Editing Nineteenth Century Texts, ed. John M. Robson (1967), pp. 11-12, and in the textual introduction to the Ohio State Centenary edition of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1965), pp. xxix-xxxiii. The final eight-page gathering of the first printing of the 1851 first edition of Hawthorne's novel was plated twice in order for the printer to impose these plates in a sixteen-page forme.
For a summary of the history of stereotype and electrotype plating, see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, corrected ed. (1974), pp. 201-206.
The latter two materials are used to make "flexographic" plates which are employed with quick-drying inks on rotary presses.
A "relief" plate is a plate from which the ink is transferred directly to the paper by raised letterforms made of metal, rubber, or plastic. Offset plates, by contrast, are chemically treated so that the areas one wishes to reproduce will pick up ink and the other areas will reject it. The offset plate is wrapped around a cylinder; it transfers the inked image to a rubber "blanket" cylinder which in turn "offsets" it on the paper carried by the impression cylinder.
The earliest literary text that I know to have been photo-offset for British publication is Faulkner's Sartoris, published in America by Harcourt, Brace in 1929 and in London by Chatto and Windus in 1932. The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary were both reset for British release the year before, but in both cases the English publisher probably reset the type in part to censor and otherwise tamper with Faulkner's text. In 1926 the original plates, or duplicates, for Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby were shipped to England where Chatto and Windus struck off its own impression. Tender is the Night was completely reset for English publication in 1934. James Gould Cozzens's novels through Guard of Honor (1949) were reset for British release, but his last three books were photo-offset in London by Longmans, Green. The turning point would seem to have come sometime in the late 1930s, but there is still no standard practice: as late as 1962 Chatto and Windus had the text of Reynolds Price's A Long and Happy Life completely reset; in 1967 the same firm published an offset replating of his novel A Generous Man; in 1971 they imported sewn gatherings of Permanent Errors from Price's American publisher (Atheneum) and had them case-bound in England, though the endpapers had been affixed in this country.
So far as I am aware my compilation William Styron: A Descriptive Bibliography (1977) was the first published bibliography to use the term plating, but I did not originate the concept. It was suggested to me in 1974 by Joseph Katz, and in that same year Katz showed me working drafts of David Farmer's bibliography of Flannery O'Connor in which Farmer was differentiating the platings of O'Connor's books.
See Kenneth Povey, "The Optical Identification of First Formes," Studies in Bibliography, 13 (1960), 189-190.
Peter L. Shillingsburg, "Detecting the Use of Stereotype Plates," Editorial Quarterly, 1 (1975), 2-3.
Sometimes a reduction in the dimensions of the type page was caused by printing on wet paper, which shrank as it dried. Such shrinkage had nothing to do with plating, but it might be a source of difficulty for the bibliographer looking for evidence of plating. One way of detecting this kind of shrinkage is to realize that it normally occurred most heavily along the grain of the paper. Thus the type page was reduced more in one dimension than in the other. See David J. Nordloh, "Plates and Publishing-Housekeeping: Some Aspects of Howells's Venetian Life," Serif, 8 (1971), 29-31.
Matthew J. Bruccoli describes one such occurrence in "Textual Variants in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt," SB, 11 (1958), 263-268. See also Bruccoli's "A Mirror for Bibliographers: Duplicate Plates in Modern Printing," PBSA, 54 (1960), 83-88.
But it can also sometimes indicate that early-printed sheets, at the bottom of the stacks, are only now being bound up.
Shillingsburg, "Stereotype Plates," p. 3. Shillingsburg has done much research into the bibliographical problems caused by relief plating; see his "The Printing, Proof-reading, and Publishing of Thackeray's Vanity Fair: The First Edition," SB, 34 (1981), 118-145; and his "Collating Machines and 19th-Century Printed Books," Direction Line, no. 10 (Winter 1980), 4-7.
For gutter measurement see Bruccoli, "Concealed Printings in Hawthorne," PBSA, 57 (1963), 42-49; for register measurement see Shillingsburg, "Register Measurement as a Method of Detecting Hidden Printings," PBSA, 73 (1979), 484-488.
When Scribner's reissued Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned in 1958 they made such repairs, correcting three misspellings and altering some seventy-five hyphens, mostly by opaquing them out on the repro copy. See Matthew J. Bruccoli, "Bibliographical Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned," SB, 13 (1960), 258-261.
Craig S. Abbott discovered the pattern in preparing his review of the Styron bibliography for Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, 2 (1978), 230-235. Mr. Abbott has very kindly sent his calculations to me.
The reader will note that the various offset replatings of Set This House on Fire and Nat Turner have all been used for only one impression. This may be because all but one of these replatings involve British publication. Styron's writings have never been especially popular in England, and there may have been no need to reprint. But it may also be true that printers do not save offset plates for later impressions in the same way that they once warehoused stereos and electros. Metal offset plates are difficult to store and can be damaged by scoring and scratching. The printers to whom I have talked tell me that the image of a text is often preserved in negatives, sometimes in a hanging file for large shots, sometimes on a roll that resembles microfilm. The bibliographer of modern offset books may therefore find that he needs to organize the printing history of his author's titles around photographic shootings, not offset platings. See John P. Dessauer, Book Publishing: What It Is, What It Does (1974), pp. 80-81.
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