University of Virginia Library

"a"

Preparation for printing: "of Grayes Inne ," is removed from the title; motto re-
spaced to two lines to compensate; spacing of imprint slightly disturbed. a2v loses
the rule below the signature, which may therefore have been treated as part of
the skeleton. The headline, however, is unchanged. On a2r, leading is adjusted

around l.5 of the heading, moving the line closer to the succeeding one. In the
process, the loss of a spacer after "and" in l.3 causes a gradual rightward drift
of the first two words in the line.

The forme is printed off by work-and-turn.

Pauses for correction: none.

After printing: on a2v, "The humblest ... Shirley." stripped; all pages otherwise
kept standing unaltered.

On the evidence of surviving copies, quire "a" has a print run sufficient to
supply all copies from Phase III. The remainder of the third printing of ToP can
now be collated and shipped.

D. PHASE IV

Products of this last phase of work are the most uniform. All copies have "The
third impression" on the title page. Although most of the formes underwent ex-
tensive alteration, or even resetting, before printing began on each, there were no
stop-press alterations thereafter. The only complication is the existence, carried
over from Phase III, of the two settings of quire D printed by Norton and Okes.
These occur in eight and six surviving copies respectively.

In light of the evidence that there were four main work phases, and B(o) and
all of quire A seem to have had five printings each, we need to take Norton's final
claim of three "impressions" with a grain of salt. We cannot know whether Nor-
ton actually believed this, whether the various starts and stops in the work cycle
caused him to lose count, or even what he understood as an "impression". In the
period 1600–40, the word was used on title pages essentially synonymously with
"edition", but only one-fifth as often. One finds it most commonly on title pages
of devotional works that went into many settings, like Arthur Dent's Plaine Mans
Path-Way to Heaven; but the title pages of Shakespeare's second and third folios
also identify them as later "impressions". Norton himself used the term in 1624
(STC 25090a, in a collaboration with Augustine Mathewes), 1633 (23503), 1634
(twice, 3129a and 22459b [ToP]), and 1637 (20274); all of these except Triumph
of Peace were completely new settings. It is likely that, in the case of ToP, Norton
was basing his count of impressions on the changes of title-page wordings which
would have been noticeable to contemporary readers: states 1a1 and 2, which
contained "of Grayes Inne"; 1b, lacking those words; and ici and 2, the avowed
third impression.

Phase IV seems to have followed Phase III rather closely, as some types from
distributed portions of III turn up in IV. These types evidently remained near
the top of their compartments in the type case without moving off to other jobs.
The recurring types within this phase (see §9D) show that quire B inner forme
(which had been distributed after Phase III) was reset after the last copies of quire
A outer forme came off the press; and D(o) contributed one type to B(o). For the
account below I have followed the order A-C-D-B-a.

In this phase, a new paragraph added to A2r causes a change of page breaks
through the rest of the quire.