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(ii)
William Ruff has already documented the extent of the cancels in Napoleon and discovered the reasons for implementing most of them. The major source of Ruff's information was a collection of 'leaves-to-be-cancelled' in the British Library (610.g.14) accompanied by a printed notice reading: 'The Publishers of the LIFE OF NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE, by the author of "Waverley", beg, in an especial manner, to direct your attention to the Cancels, about which the Binders have printed instructions in the book. 41, St Andrew Square, Edinburgh, 30th June 1827.' (Needless to say, a copy of the printed instructions would be an invaluable piece of evidence in reconstructing the early bibliographical history of Scott's Napoleon.) According to Ruff, 'This volume contains 131 leaves plus a few duplications; all but eight of the leaves have corrections in ink. The handwriting may be Robert Cadell's; it is not Scott's.' I take it that Ruff means that 123 [vere 124?—one cancellandum is not included in the collection] of the leaves are cancellanda with manuscript emendments to make them conform with the corresponding cancellantia and that the other eight are not emended and agree with the corresponding leaves in the volumes as published. Yet he goes on to say: 'If I could not find the cause of a cancel by looking in this volume, I have gone to the first American edition of the Life. In every case it shows the text before any passages were cancelled. . . . This American edition . . . was undoubtedly printed from proof sheets, not from the completed and bound volumes'. This use of the American edition would have been particularly ingenious in the absence of the British Library volume of cancellantia; it is not obvious, however, what it contributes to the enquiry that is not already clear from the other volume, and Ruff does not in fact claim that his looking was fruitful.
In the following notes I have not sought to repeat Ruff's investigation but, by examining two sets of the British edition in the Poynton Collection in the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, have attempted to shed some light on the printing-house management of the process of cancellation. The two sets are distinguishable by their binding: 'copy 1' is uncut in original boards; 'copy 2' is cut, in contemporary half calf, lacking all half-titles.
(1) Stop-press correction. Ruff records in the British Library collection of cancellanda six (not eight) aberrant leaves—i.e. leaves which agree with the corresponding leaves in all copies of the British and American editions with which he compared them. The explanation for the presence of these six leaves is that not all corrections were made after the printing of the sheet (or forme) containing them had been completed: some were effected in the course of the run by stopping the press, cancellantia being subsequently printed from the same setting of type for insertion only in those copies of the sheet containing the variant forme which had been worked off prior to the correction being made at press. The agreement of the American edition with the British in these six instances is to be explained simply by the American being set at these points from an exemplar of the British proof sheet which had already been corrected at press.
The two Poynton sets do not constitute a very large sample, but they do reveal a handful of examples of a correction being made at press in one copy and via cancellation in the other. The relative extent of stop-press correction is presumably suggested by the British Library collection of cancellanda, though since the collection is not absolutely complete and since there is a possibility that those corrections known hitherto only in the form of cancellantia may also exist made at press one might expect an examination of other sets to reveal further examples where the corrected reading is found variously on (a) an integral leaf (i.e. as a stop-press correction) or (b) a cancellans leaf.
Ninety per cent of the cancellans leaves contain a correction in only one of their two pages. One would therefore suppose that approximately half the corrections were made in a page forming part of the white-paper forme of the original impression, the other half in a page forming part of the reteration forme. A larger sample might therefore be expected to reveal—in instances where a correction was made first at press and then via a cancellans—two varieties of cancellantia: (b) (i) with both pages of the cancellans in the same setting as in (a), the correction having been made in the whitepaper forme; (b) (ii) with the page not containing the correction in a different setting from that in (a), the correction having been made in the reteration forme, thus requiring the page from the white-paper forme to be reset.
(2) Printing the cancellantia. Given the existence of form (a) of at least some leaves, the printing of the cancellantia cannot have been a straightforward business, in that in such instances the numbers required must have varied according to the stage within the impression at which the stop-press correction
(a) Sheet numbers. Whatever the precise purpose of the British Library collection of cancellanda, and in the absence of the instructions to the printer, it can nonetheless be confidently asserted that up to 120 of the cancellantia were printed together (or in conjunction with part sheets constituting preliminary or final gatherings) as fifteen sheets. This assertion rests on the fact that in printing them Ballantyne used a device first employed by him in 1823 in a rather different context but for essentially the same purpose. Beginning with the twelve-volume Novels and tales of the Author of Waverley, and consistently thereafter when printing eighteenmos, Ballantyne inserted in the direction line of the first recto of the first gathering contained in the sheet what I have chosen to call a 'sheet number'—an arabic number from the sequence 1, 2, 3, etc. Since Ballantyne's eighteenmos were imposed for gathering sometimes in sixes, sometimes in alternating twelves and sixes (i.e. respectively three and two gatherings to a sheet) sheet numbers were inserted in order to provide the warehouseman and binder with confirmation that they had a complete set of sheets, a function which the signatures less clearly performed.
In Napoleon the same device was used to indicate that the set of sheets comprising the cancellantia was complete; in this instance, of course, signatures were of no use whatsoever. From the bound volumes it cannot on the whole be determined which cancellantia were imposed with which, but the following is a record of the cancellantia on which the sheet numbers appear:
- 1 ----
- 2 vol. 2, E1
- 3 vol. 2, K7
- 4 vol. 3, A4
- 5 vol. 4, R8
- 6 vol. 4, E2
- 7 vol. 5, A2
- 8 vol. 5, I5
- 9 vol. 5, T8
- 10 vol. 6, C7
- 11 vol. 6, A2
- 12 vol. 7, H3
- 13 vol. 7, C1
- 14 vol. 8, A4
- 15 vol. 7, A2
(b) Conjugacy of cancellantia. Occasionally two consecutive leaves were required to be replaced, and in at least some instances the two cancellantia
(c) Duplicate settings. In the Poynton copies three cancellantia exist each in two settings: * 1 in vol. 1, R6 in vol. 8 and Y1 in vol. 9. The possible explanations for the duplicate settings are no doubt many, including the repairing of accident and initial setting in duplicate for convenience in machining. However, in the instance in vol. 1 one of the settings is from a fount different from that employed for setting the surrounding text, so that the simplest explanation for the existence of this duplicate setting is that the run of the fifteen sheets (assuming that the earlier setting formed part of one of them) did not contain enough copies of this cancellans and therefore that extra copies had to be produced, probably not by Ballantyne and possibly in London at Longman's bidding. In the other two instances—where the duplicate setting may well be 'original'—one might assume that the need for cancellation was recognized only after the fifteen sheets of cancellantia had been printed off, or alternatively that the cancellation was made so early in the run that the cancellans was set in duplicate as part of the fifteen sheets in order to produce the required number. One might also assume that those sheets common to the first and second editions are more likely to contain cancellantia in variant settings in the second edition, those two thousand sets of sheets being identifiably the last 25% of the print run to be bound up and issued. There is the likelihood, too, that a comparison of other sets would reveal further examples of duplicate settings of cancellantia. Again, though the phenomenon is observable the explanation for it may not be at all obvious. (That the vast bulk of the cancellantia—on the evidence of the Poynton sets—do not exist in duplicate settings may be taken to suggest that the corrections that they embody were effected, for the most part, after the printing of the particular sheets was complete.)
(3) The second edition. As Ruff reports, the second edition of Napoleon comprises vol. 3 from gathering F onwards and vols. 4-9 in their entirety in new settings, vols. 1 and 2 and the beginning of vol. 3 being made up of sheets of the first edition. The presence of re-issued sheets is accounted for by the decision to reduce the first edition total from 8000 to 6000, a decision made, in April 1826, when printing had already started on vol. 3 (Journal 318, 21 June 1827). The two additional cancellantia reported by Ruff in the re-issued sheets of vol. 1 (T3 and X4) presumably resulted from Scott's reaction to the
(4) Notes on individual volumes. In the following notes attention is drawn to points in which one or both of the Poynton copies differ from Ruff's record or are otherwise noteworthy (all references to leaves are to cancellantia unless otherwise stated; any cancellans not explicitly mentioned is found in the same setting, disjunct, in both copies).
Vol. 1 * 1 exists in two settings. In copy 1 the leaf is not signed and is set from the same fount as the rest of the Advertisement; the first line ends 'Work, have,'. In copy 2 the leaf is signed '*' and is set from a different fount from the rest of the Advertisement; the first line ends 'Work,' (thereafter the two settings are out of step for the whole of the first paragraph). Given that the copy 2 setting is from a different fount it is probably the later, and the 'signature' * is probably no more than one of the conventional methods of denoting a cancellans. If such is the case, the volume should properly collate i 2 2i 4 (-2i4) . . . , not i 2 * 1 2i 2. . . . 'VOL. I.' in direction line, A8r. Press figures: T6v-15, Y5r-18.
Vol. 2. F5 and F6 are conjugate in copy 1, disjunct in copy 2. There is an additional cancellans, Z1, in copy 2; it is in the same setting as Z1 in copy 1 (where Z1 and Z8 are conjugate). In copy 1 cancellandum K3 is intact; the slash made to mark it for replacement has been carefully repaired. Q7 (one of Ruff's aberrant leaves) is a cancellans in copy 2; it agrees in setting with Q7 in copy 1, where it is conjugate with Q2. The other aberrant leaf, b1, is in the same setting in both copies (it is a singleton, and the verso is blank). 'VOL. II.' in direction line, E1r, K3r (copy 2), K7r, R3r, S4r, Z2r, 2A5r, 2B6r. Press figures: F6r-20, O5v-10, S4v-6, Z2v-1.
Vol. 3. In copy 1, i2 (title leaf) is conjugate with i1 (i1 lacking in copy 2). B2 in copy 1, though the cancellans, has been salshed (presumably in error) and the slash carefully repaired. In both copies K5 is not a cancellans, but contains the corrected reading. M6 and M7 are conjugate in copy 1, disjunct in copy 2. Y3 and Y4 are conjugate in both copies. T2 (one of Ruff's aberrant leaves) is conjugate with T7 in both copies. Copy 1 contains a 6-line errata slip. Sheet number, 4, missing from A4 in copy 1, though the leaf is in the same setting as A4 in copy 2. 'VOL. III.' in direction line, A4r, L2r, M6r, M7r, R5r (leaf lacking in copy 1), X8r. Press figures: G4v-2, L2v-9.
Vol. 4. 'VOL. IV.' in direction line, E2r (leaf lacking in copy 1), R8r. Press figures: P3v-9, R1v-3, R8v-16, S6v-2.
Vol. 5. P8 and Q1 are conjugate in copy 1, disjunct in copy 2. X2 (one of Ruff's aberrant leaves) is in the same setting in both copies; though X7 is a cancellans in both copies, X2 almost certainly formed part of the original sheet. 'VOL. V.' in direction line, A2r, I5r, T8r. Press figures: F3v-8, N7v-14, Q1v-2, S3v-10, 2C7v-4.
Vol. 6. A2 and A3 and R8 and S1 are conjugate in both copies. In copy 1 Y8 is in fact the cancellans for volume 5, Y8 (where the cancellation has also been made). 'VOL. VI.' in direction line, A2r, C7r. Press figures: M6v-5, Q7v-6, U4r-13 in copy 1, 14 in copy 2 (U4 in same setting in both copies).
Vol. 7. H3 and H4 and 2A5 and 2A6 are conjugate in copy 1, disjunct in copy 2. A4, C3 and E3 (among Ruff's aberrant leaves) are in the same setting in both copies; all form an integral part of their sheet. Copy 1 contains a 3-line errata slip. In copy 2 B7 is attached to a stub, but the inner margin is narrower than usual, suggesting perhaps that the leaf was excised in error and then reinserted (it is in the same setting as B7 in copy 1, and B7 is not included in the British Library collection of cancellanda). 'VOL. VII.' in direction line, A2r, B8r, C1r, H3r. Press figures: 2A7r-14, 2A7v-12, 2G3v-7.
Vol. 8. R6 is set in duplicate. 'VOL. VIII.' in direction line, A4r ('VOL. VII.' in copy 2), L1r, R6r (both settings). Press figure: R6r (copy 2)-10.
Vol. 9. Y1 exists in two settings, distinguishable by lines 13 and 14 of Y1v ending respectively 'have' and 'to' in copy 1 and 'steps' and 'life,' in copy 2.
The evidence afforded by the Poynton sets of Scott's Napoleon may have helped shed some light on the process of cancellation in that publication, but it does not allow a resolution of all the problems associated with that process. Clearly further sets need to be examined before the printing history of the work can be reconstructed with some certainty.
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