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Notes
The authors would like to thank B. W. Ife, Cervantes Professor of Spanish at King's College London, for reading and commenting on the article in draft.
In England, Caslon's, Baskerville's, and Martin's designs all used an asymmetrical form of rounded 's'. The same is true of the major French, Dutch and Italian typefaces.
For bibliographical descriptions of the two issues, and a discussion of priority, see the catalogue for the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library: English Literature 1475-1700 (1940), 619-621.
Four examples—from Dodsley's Collection (1758), Odes on Several Subjects (1745), and two from The Pleasures of Imagination (3rd and 4th editions, 1744)—are discussed in this article. Others include 'A British Philippic', Gentleman's Magazine viii (1738), 428 (terminal 's' of 'sons', line 102); The Pleasures of Imagination (first edition, 1744, Foxon A139), iii. 621 (terminal 's' of 'sun's'); op. cit. (Dodsley's seventh edition, 1765), ii. 241 ('s' of 'thunders'); op. cit. (Dodsley's eighth edition, 1769), iii. 504 ('s' of 'feels'); and The Pleasures of Imagination ii. 621 ('s' of 'eyes') in the posthumous The Poems of Mark Akenside, M.D. (quarto edition, 1772).
R. W. Chapman, 'Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands', Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings & Papers iii (1931-33), 272, lists A3 as a cancel, but does not mention the existence of the variant, uncancelled state. Michael Suarez and I (RD) were working on Dodsley's Collection at the British Library on the same day. I found the variant readings, and he found that the variants depended on whether or not there was a cancel. He generously told me about his discovery. The British Library has three copies of the 1758 edition of volume vi; of these, C.107.dg.28 and C117.aa.16 are in the cancelled state; 992.d.17 in the uncancelled.
W. B. Todd analyses the printing schedules of Dodsley's Collection in 'Concurrent Printing: An Analysis of Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands', PBSA xlvi (1952), 45-57, and it is clear that various opportunities for such adjustment would have arisen during the rather halting start to the printing of volume vi.
For discussion of the various possible explanations for this error, and their respective probability, see R. Dix, 'Akenside's Odes on Several Subjects', The Library VI xiv (1992) 51-59.
See 'things' (G4v, 13th line of note), and 'this' (H3r, 5th line of note). On H4r, another page where the note is of the same setting in both the third and fourth editions, an inverted 's' in 'species' (12th line of note) in the third edition is corrected in the fourth; but a misprint only four lines further on (accute) was being corrected here, and the opportunity was apparently taken to correct the turned letter at the same time.
For Todd's discussion of 'featherbedding', see his A Bibliography of Edmund Burke (1964), pp. 146-147. Among Akenside's works, featherbedding occurred between the two folio texts of A British Philippic (1738), and the two 'editions' of An Ode to the Country Gentlemen of England (1758). There are two other possible cases. First, as D. F. Foxon noted in 'Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination', The Book Collector v (1956), 77-78, the two 1744 quartos of The Pleasures of Imagination, O-Q, together with the prelims and some of both formes of N, are shared between the editions. Changes were introduced into the standing type between the printings, though, so this is no simple case of overprinting the final formes in preparation for the second edition. Second, in An Ode to the Right Honourable the Earl of Huntingdon (1748) the two editions share the same setting of B outer and the half-sheet D. In the case of the octavo editions of The Pleasures of Imagination, the six-month gap between them would normally ensure that the type was distributed. But this poem was so much in demand—there were four 'official' editions and several piracies in 1744 alone—that standing type may well have been stored in case it could be re-used at some stage.
Changes introduced into the standing type, such as those introduced into the quarto editions of The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and mentioned in the previous note, can be ascribed to the author with reasonable confidence. The eccentric typography of Akenside's later works reflects his practice in manuscript, and must demonstrate his involvement in decisions affecting the appearance of the printed book.
P. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972; repr. with corr. 1974), pp. 110-116; J. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, ed. H. Davis and H. Carter (2nd ed., 1962), pp. 233-239, 246-250.
This play has been fully collated: see T. L. Darby, A Critical, Old-Spelling Edition of William Rowley's 'A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext' (New York, 1988) and G. Cheetham, 'A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext: a Critical Old-Spelling Edition' (Tennessee Univ. Ph.D., 1983).
Thus 'Iockeye's' becomes 'Iockey's', 'laughes' becomes 'laughs', 'devided' becomes 'divided', and 'devision' is changed to 'division'.
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