University of Virginia Library

§11. Phase I

Appendix 3 shows that eighteen of the nineteen copies surviving from Phase
I (about 95%) are homogeneous throughout (ignoring stop-press corrections).
In other words, they contain the earliest settings or impositions of all the sheets
including the preliminaries. The one exception is Huntington 69434, in which
quire D comes from the next printing. This is an example of the situation just
described in which one quire was evidently printed a bit short in one phase and
had to be completed from the next. There is nothing special about quire D that
might have led to a short printing; recall from our type analysis that it was prob-
ably printed third of the five quires in Phase I.

If quire D was printed short, it seems that quire "a" was printed long. In
addition to the nineteen complete copies from Phase I, four copies from the
second printing have Phase I preliminaries. This extrapolates to a 21% surplus
of first-printing quire "a"—an odd amount, being too little to represent an in-
tended second impression but too large to have resulted from a trifling accidental
overrun. The discrepancy persists in Phase II, in which each quire survives in
approximately equal numbers, but a residue of preliminaries is pushed over into
Phase III copies. In Phase III, Norton apparently shorted the run of quire "a"
by a number about equal to the initial overrun, so Phase IV copies are finally
homogeneous (if we disregard Okes' contribution)–all "third impression" title
pages come with text sheets from the last printing. The phase relationship of
quire "a" with the main text looks like this:

TABLE 40. Staggered distribution of production phases of quire "a"

The first two impressions of the preliminaries may occur with either of two
impressions of quires A-D, and the second and third printings of the main text
can each come with two possible variants of the title page. It was this ladder-like
asynchrony that led earlier bibliographers to believe that Norton had printed
simultaneous duplicate settings of the text.

In a given copy, we should not necessarily expect early stop-press variants of
any one sheet to sort with early states of the others, or later with later, though
there may be a tendency for this to happen. 37 Appendix 3 indeed shows an es-
sentially random pattern in this regard.