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Notes
T. H. Howard-Hill, in Compositors B and E in the Shakespeare First Folio and Some Recent Studies (Columbia, S.C., 1976) and in "The Compositors of Shakespeare's Folio Comedies," Studies in Bibliography, 26 (1973), 61-106, used evidence of "compositors' various habits of spacing after commas in short lines, and at the end of lines." He had earlier applied such a test in "Ralph Crane and five Shakespearian First Folio comedies," D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1970. Gary Taylor, "The Shrinking Compositor A of the Shakespeare First Folio," SB, 34 (1981), 96-117, describes terminal spaced commas as a 'near-infallible indicator' of compositor C at one point. MacD. P. Jackson, "Two Shakespeare Quartos: Richard III (1597) and I Henry IV (1598)," SB, 35 (1982), 173-190, also uses their evidence. I must in fairness to those writers absolve them at once from any imputation of having reduced their own practice to tests as simple and unsupported as my formulation of the two propositions might suggest. Without committing them in any way to my general argument, I should like to record my gratitude to several friends from whom I sought informed comment on historical aspects of the present article. I think particularly of Nicolas Barker, Peter Blayney, Philip Gaskell, Lotte Hellinga, Mervyn Jannetta, David McKitterick, James Mosley and David Shaw.
J.D. Fleeman examined printers' widows for signs of correction in a not unrelated way: see "Concealed Proofs and the Editor," Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Canberra, 1979), 207-221. A Dutch printing manual of the late eighteenth century, David Wardenaar's, Beschrijving der Boekdrukkunst, also refers to the spacing of punctuation and its advantages when correcting: see Zetten en Drukken in De Achttiende Eeuw, ed. Frans A. Janssen (Haarlem, 1982), pp. 323, 378-379.
See R. A. Sayce, Compositorial Practices and the Localization of Printed Books 1530-1800. Occasional Publications No. 13 (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1979); and Robert Darnton's work on surreptitious printing and publishing in "Un commerce de livres 'sous le manteau' en Province à la fin de l'Ancien Régime," Revue française de l'histoire du livre, n.s. 9 (1975), 5-29; "L'imprimerie de Pancoucke en l'An II," ibid., n.s. 23 (1979), 359-369; as well as in The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the 'Encyclopédie', 1775-1800 (1979).
'Spaces as they come up': see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (rev. ed., 1979), p. 46: 'nowhere during the hand-press period were spaces of different widths kept apart in separate boxes of the case'.
Howard-Hill, "The Compositors of Shakespeare's Folio Comedies," p. 66, notes: "If there were reason to doubt this [i.e. that a space did or did not follow a comma], perhaps on the ground that different sorts were irregularly centered on the body of the type, the instances of inked spaces and quads . . . would confirm that internal spacing in short lines is a real and not an imaginary phenomenon."
The comments of two distinguished computer scientists are not impertinent. See John Von Neumann, 'Can We Survive Technology?', Fortune, June 1955. One point made by Von Neumann is that computer technology is prodigiously generative: instead of performing the same tasks in less time, we now perform more in the same time. Computer output therefore rapidly pre-empts space; a wrong programme (i.e. a mistaken assumption in the programme) will, with a mad logic, be more prodigal of error; and that prodigality crowds out the more severely disciplined evidence of other kinds of analysis. Massed statistics might therefore be seen as an ominous symptom. One is reminded of the story of the Staff Officer who, when promised another man for his unit, replied: 'Send me one who is brilliant and energetic. If you can't do that, send me one who is brilliant and lazy. If you can't do that, send me one who is stupid and lazy. But for God's sake don't send me one who is stupid and energetic.' Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason (1976), is also highly relevant here.
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