Catchword and the Press Figure - Bibliographica

Bibliographica

SECTION IV: CATCHWORD AND THE PRESS FIGURE

Let us return to the foot of the page, that narrow strip below the last line of text which the compositor called the direction line. We have already met one tenant of that strip, the signature, and learned it was assembly hardware for the folder and binder. But the signature does not live there in solitude. It shares the bottom margin with two other marks and often gets mistaken for them, or for each other, and the whole of what we are doing is learning to tell three strangers apart by the company they keep and the corner they sit in. The good news, and it is the organising idea for everything later on, is that each of the three answers a different question and sits in a different place; therefore, once we know which question a mark is answering, its identity is settled.

Let us name the three before we separate them. There is the signature, which we know. There is the catchword, a whole word. And there is the press figure, a bare little number. To an untrained eye, they resemble a small jumble of type that might all be doing one job. They are doing three.

The catchword: a handrail down the stairs

Begin with the friendliest of the three, because its logic is the most tender. At the very foot of a page, usually flush to the right, the printer often set the first word of the next page. That word is the catchword, and its single purpose is continuity. It let the reader, and more importantly the person reading aloud in a household or a pulpit, glide over the turn of the leaf without a stumble, since the eye caught the coming word before the hand had finished turning. Say the last line ends 'and the whole of the', and floating alone at the bottom right sits the word 'kingdom'; turn the page, and the first word overleaf is indeed 'kingdom'. The handrail held.

Catchword: "madem." Catchwords are commonly found in Elzevir's pocket editions.

That is the reader's use, and it is practical, but it is not why the catchword matters to us. To us the catchword is a proofreading and gathering check that the printshop performed on itself. If the catchword at the foot of one page does not match the first word of the next, something has gone wrong: a leaf is misplaced, a gathering is bound out of order, a cancel has been slipped in and the substitute does not quite align, or the compositor simply erred. So the catchword is a tiny promise printed at the bottom of nearly every page, and a broken promise is a signal. When we flip through a book and the catchwords chain smoothly, page to page, gathering to gathering, we are watching the book vouch for its own continuity. When one fails to chain, we have found the exact leaf where the trouble begins, and we did it, as ever, without reading the sense of a single sentence.

A small tangent worth the detour, because it dates things. Catchwords were not used in every period. They spread widely in the sixteenth century, became near ubiquitous through the seventeenth and eighteenth, and then faded in the nineteenth as printing industrialised and the reader's handrail came to be seen as clutter. So the mere presence or absence of catchwords is itself soft dating evidence. Indeed, a book claiming an early date but carrying no catchwords anywhere invites a raised eyebrow, though it does not by itself convict. Therefore, we reach this principle: to advance an educated verdict is not to look at a single piece of evidence and proclaim, but to look at the collective evidence and infer.

The press figure: the mark that names a workman

Scattered through some books, on some pages but not others, sits a single small figure in the direction line, a bare 1, or 4, or 7, with no letter beside it and no word near it. It is not a signature, because signatures carry a letter or run in an orderly sequence tied to the gathering. It is not a page number, because it does not climb page by page and often sits in the wrong margin for pagination. It is not the leaf's position in the gathering. It is a press figure, and it is one of the most useful marks in the whole book.

Here is what it records. A printing house ran several presses at once, each worked by its own crew, and the master needed to know which crew had machined which sheets, most likely so that piecework wages could be reckoned, or so that a botched forme could be traced back to the men who pulled it. So a workman would drop a small identifying figure into the direction line of a forme his press had worked, a signature in the other sense of the word, the mark of a hand rather than the name of a gathering. The figure identifies the press, or the pressman, not the page.

Why should a collector care about a wage-clerk's tally mark? Because it is accidental evidence, and accidental evidence is the most honest kind, since nobody set it there to be read by us and nobody thought to forge it. Press figures let us do things the title page cannot. They help distinguish one edition, or one impression, from another that looks identical, because a resetting run through different presses will carry a different scatter of figures. They can reveal that a book was shared out among several shops, or printed in two stints far apart. They can expose a cancel, when a single leaf carries a press figure that belongs to a different campaign of work than its neighbours. And crucially they are English almost to the point of being a national fingerprint: press figures are overwhelmingly a feature of British printing from roughly the late seventeenth century into the nineteenth, and largely absent from continental work, so their very presence is a hint about where a book was made.

Telling the three apart

Confronted with a mark at the foot of a page, ask what question it answers.

If it is a letter, or a letter with a number in an orderly climbing sequence, tied to the start of a gathering, it is a signature, and it answers 'where does this bundle belong in the queue'. If it is a whole word, sitting alone at the bottom right, matching the first word overleaf, it is a catchword, and it answers 'what comes next'. If it is a bare number, unaccompanied, scattered rather than sequential, indifferent to the gathering's structure, it is a press figure, and it answers 'whose press pulled this sheet'.

When the little numbers disagree, and what that is worth

The reason to hold these three apart is that each becomes evidence the moment it misbehaves, and it misbehaves in its own characteristic way. A signature out of sequence points to a gathering disordered or a leaf transplanted. A catchword that fails to meet its next word points to the precise seam where a leaf was misplaced, cancelled, or wrongly bound. A press figure that sits oddly, a lone leaf carrying a figure from a different campaign of work among neighbours that carry another or none, points to a cancel or a shared printing. The marks were all made to serve the workshop, and all of them betray the workshop's mistakes. That is the recurring gift, that the humblest and most functional marks, made with no thought of posterity, are the ones that cannot lie.