Signatures & Signature Marks - Bibliographica

Bibliographica

SECTION II: SIGNATURES & SIGNATURE MARKS

Leave the folded sheets on the bench for a moment and look at what we have actually assembled: a heap of little folded booklets, our gatherings, every one of them looking exactly like its counterpart. Worse, inside each gathering, the leaves are a nested set of near-identical folds, and a sheet folded to octavo does not carry its pages in reading order on the flat. Now imagine the folder (the person, not the stationery), and the binder (once again, the person), who are very often not the printer, and who are handed a great unsorted drift of these things and told to make a book. Which gathering comes first? Which direction does each sheet fold? Even considering these concepts, if one is not geometrically inclined, it becomes tricky to visualise these folds and gatherings. The text itself will not always tell us, and it will certainly not tell the folder: in the early decades printed page numbers were unreliable, frequently absent, and in any case useless to a man holding an unfolded sheet who cannot yet see a single page in sequence. Thus, the printer leaves instructions, not for the readers who were never meant to notice them, but for the workshop. That instruction is the signature, and once you understand that it is a piece of assembly hardware rather than anything literary, the whole system falls open.

What the mark is and where it hides

A signature is a small set of letters, or a combination of letters and numbers, printed at the bottom of a page, below the last line of text, in an area that compositors refer to as the direction line. One might often notice these tiny letters at the bottom of pages and wonder why they are there. Most readers never notice these tiny letters at the foot of the page, which was precisely the intention.

Antique book that has a signature on bottom right corner: a.iiii.

A book with a signature reading 'a.iiii.' in the bottom right corner, and faint but visible chain lines.

It is type, set and inked with everything else in the forme, which is why an over-enthusiastic binder with a sharp plough can shave it clean off, though we should hope this is not the case. It sits on the recto, in the lower margin, and its job is twofold: to tell the folder how to fold this particular sheet, and to tell the binder where this gathering falls in the queue.

The first leaf of a gathering carries the bare letter. Turn the leaf, and the next signed leaf carries the letter with a numeral. So the opening octavo gathering runs A on its first leaf, then A2, A3, A4 on the following rectos, and there the signing usually stops. This brings it all to the one rule that does all the intuitive work.

The rule of a little over half

The printer does not sign every leaf, because there is no need to do so. Once the folder has been shown the correct order for the first half of a gathering, the second half is forced already: it is the same sheet's other end, folded to match. So the convention is to sign a little over half the leaves, in practice the first n/2 +1 leaves of a gathering of n. An octavo of eight leaves gets four or five signatures, a quarto of four gets two or three, and a folio gathered in twos gets its one, the formula breaking down at the smallest gathering. The back half rides along unsigned.

This is a gift, because it runs in reverse also. Pick up an unfamiliar book, find a gathering, and see how far the signing climbs before it stops. If the numerals run up to about 4, we are almost certainly holding eights; if they stop at 2, we are in fours. Care is needed here: the signatures give us the gathering, not the format. Eights are usually an octavo, but a quarto gathered in eights signs the same way, and only the paper tells the two apart. We have just deduced the gathering, and usually the format, from nothing but the little letters at the foot of the page, without invoking the chain lines at all. Two independent witnesses, the paper and the signatures, and when they agree we may relax; when they disagree, something interesting has happened, and those disagreements will be explained later.

The alphabet

The sequence looks like the alphabet, but misbehaves. The signing alphabet is the old Latin one of twenty-three letters. There is no J, because I does the work of both. There is no U, because V does. And there is no W at all. So the run is A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z, and anyone who goes looking for gathering J in an early book will look a long time, since we are not typesetting a modern paperback and ought not expect modern letters.

A closer photograph of the signatures a.ii. and a.iiii. respectively. Here, chainlines are prominent.

Twenty-three gatherings is a short book. When the printer exhausts the alphabet he does not stop; he doubles it. After Z comes Aa, Bb, Cc, and after that trebles, Aaa and onward, which bibliographers tidy into 2A, 2B and 3A, 3B so that nobody has to count lowercase a's by candlelight. This rule, however is not universal, and different publishers may opt in for a different lettering system. The preliminaries, the title and dedication and prefatory matter that were usually printed last once the final page count was known, tend to sit outside this alphabet entirely, marked with asterisks, daggers, section marks, or a parallel lowercase run of a, b, c, or simply left unsigned to be sorted by other means. That last habit, of signing the body of the book confidently and the front matter sloppily or not at all, is itself a tell worth filing away.

How to write one down

Two people mean two different things by 'signature,' and it is worth keeping them apart. The physical booklet (gathering or quire) is properly the unit; the mark is the signature, but everyone will cheerfully say 'signatures A to M' when they mean the gatherings. We ought to live with the ambiguity; it is universal.

To point at a single spot in the book, we name the gathering, the leaf within it, and the side. So the fourth leaf, front side, of gathering B is B4r, and its back is B4v, r and v for recto and verso. That is the whole address system, and it is far steadier than page numbers, which lie, drop out, and restart. When we write a full collation in Section III we will meet the dollar sign, a stand-in for 'any gathering one likes,' which lets us describe the signing pattern without promising it holds letter by letter through the whole book.

Why the errors are informative

Printers were human, working fast, at the ends of long alphabets, in dim rooms. They repeated a signature, or skipped a letter, or set B3 where B2 belonged, or signed a cancel with the letter of the leaf it replaced and forgot to alter the figure. Every such slip is a fingerprint. Two copies that share the same eccentric missigning came off the same setting of type; a leaf whose signature does not fit its neighbours is very often a leaf that does not belong, a substitution or an insertion. So while the signature was designed as dull workshop bookkeeping, its lapses are among the sharpest tools we have for telling one edition from its counterfeit and one honest copy from a doctored one. The mark meant to make the book was never meant to unmask it, and does so anyway.

A tiny exercise, and the bridge

Take any old book to hand. Ignore the printed page numbers entirely, as though they were graffiti. Find the foot of a recto near the front, read off the letter, then leaf forward watching the numerals climb, 2, 3, 4, until they stop, and note where they stop. We have just measured the gathering. Do it for the next lettered run and confirm the alphabet is marching A, B, C with the right letters missing. If somewhere the march stumbles, a letter doubled or a figure out of place, we have found our first piece of evidence that something is not as it should be.

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