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Imposition
Meanwhile the work of imposition continued concurrently, and the clicker made ink annotations in the manuscript as the lines were imposed. He recorded alternate galleys, plus slip numbers and (as explained above) chapter numbers and compositors' names. It is evident that these entries do
As the compositors delivered the lines of type to the clicker, he probably made them up into the correct lengths for the galley-trays ready for imposition then headed and numbered each column or slip. But he entered in ink in the manuscript both slip and galley numbers. These ink entries contain irregularities which make the sequence hard to follow simply by turning the pages of the manuscript, so they are summarised in the next three paragraphs.
Since there are four slips to a galley proof, the number of the first slip of each proof is one more than four times the previous proof-number, e.g. galley proof 3 should start with slip 9. The first entry, however, is "Slip 9 Gal 2", but the "2" may simply be an error for "3". The next entry records only the slip number, 17, and omits a galley number, presumably 5. Thereafter the entries in ink consistently note alternate galleys, such that galley 7 starts at slip 25 and so on, until galley 19, at which point some confusion occurs.
On reaching galley 19, which started with slip 73, the clicker omitted the galley number from his entry. He next entered galley 22, instead of 21, as starting with slip 81; and then galley 24 also as starting with slip 81. This latter must have been a simple error for 89, and the net effect was the loss of galley number 21. Then from galley 26 nearly to the end of the book, all the even-numbered galleys are consistently recorded, but the slip number for the start of each is now lower than it should be by a difference of four, such that the first slip of galley 26 is numbered not 101 but 97, and so on. This was apparently rectified at galley 43 by the insertion of subdivisions 43A and 43B; for thereafter odd-numbered galleys are recorded and the slip numbers are as one would expect at four to a galley.
What in fact happened at galleys 21 and 43 was that the casting off turned out, as the lines of type were imposed, to be significantly inaccurate. When the lines are counted[11] it is clear that too little copy had been cast off up to galley 21 and 22, and too much for galleys 38-43. Therefore the clicker first omitted the number 21 from his ink marks and then he rearranged cast-off galley 39 and subdivided 40 and 43 in his pencil marks, and finally as the matter was imposed he noted the new galley numbers in his ink marks.
From this it becomes clear that the clicker's ink marks actually combine two separate records: the slip number refers to the proofs, while the galley number refers back to the cast-off galleys as pencilled and adjusted in the
Two observations can be made about this pair of entries. First, the pencil entry had occurred at a new paragraph five lines from the top of p. 75, and therefore the most likely procedure would be that when L. Bristow had set from there to the bottom of the page, he handed the leaf of MS back to Rendell, so that Rendell could complete the remaining four lines of the preceding paragraph when he reached the end of his stint. Second, although L. Bristow had begun setting at p. 75, it was not until p. 79 that the clicker was able to mark up the first proof imposed by him. The intervening text that he had set amounts to about eighty-six lines of type, nearly a whole slip. These lines were needed to complete slip 24 of the previous proof, set by Rendell, and probably imposed by him. Therefore L. Bristow must have passed these lines of type set by himself back to Rendell, or to the clicker. This suggests that the inclusion of names in the ink entries may indicate the compositor who imposed the proofs, most of which had been set by him, but not all.
Thus in general the compositors began setting the takings given them at the new paragraph where their name was pencilled, and had set on average as many as 177 lines of type before the part of their taking they actually imposed began. Then, because only alternate proofs were noted, the next pair of proofs appears to be marked in ink as imposed by them, whether or not they had in fact set both. Thus, on MS p. 109 "L. Bris (9) slip 33." indicates that L. Bristow was responsible for galley 9 slip 33, and it is followed on p. 130 by "Notley (11) slip 41 l.c. IV", so that there is no record in these ink annotations that Rendell set cast-off galley 10, allocated to him, of course, in pencil.
If therefore the clicker kept a debit and profit account of the lines passed backwards in this way between compositors so as to pay them fairly, he must have done so in a line-book, for his pencil and ink marks in the copy are widely discrepant from the evidence of the proofs. If one supposes that the compositors set all the text allocated to them in pencil, and compares that with the lines of type which that amounted to in the page proofs, the following figures emerge.[12] Wright's total work of c. 1865 lines set (62 MS pages) is
The ink entries may have had one further purpose. The fact that the clicker noted only alternate galley proofs indicates that he was thinking in terms of the 16-page signatures of the next round of proofs. His ink annotations may indicate which compositors would be responsible for which pairs of galley proofs when it came to incorporating the author's corrections and revisions, and imposing the revised type into page-proofs.
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