Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Submitted by Gary Frost
There can be confusion regarding description of paper books; the given book needs description of how it was made as well as how it appears now, and either perspective can unfairly dominate. Makers best describe their own work, but, perhaps, they will not or cannot. Papermakers, printers and bookbinders also prefer their own exclusive explanations. Bibliographers and book conservators can bring the description up to date, but some estimation will be needed for missing information.
Book imposition and format provide a good example of this descriptive challenge. Imposition, or the print shop choice of paper dimension and arrangements of type on the press bed are decisions of makers alone. Format conveys cutting and folding sequences for assembly of the book gatherings. The formats have traditional names such as folio, quarto, octavo or various other explanations such as twelves from sheet and a half. A format designation can be assigned during examination of a book, but format alone will not fully describe the book makeup.
If you wish a tutorial on identification method of book imposition and format you will not be disappointed. Two admirable narrations are the description of imposition by Gabriel Rummons[1] and the description of format by Thomas Tanselle.[2] Gabriel, the printer, describes print shop methods and Thomas, the bibliographer, describes the format description methods. Both are aware of each other’s practice and perspectives. Still, there is a curious feeling of difference in perspectives of these two narrative types.
Let’s relate the knowledge presented by Gabriel and Thomas and, at the same time, also examine the difference of their perspectives. Imposition and format are complements of page assembly method and ultimately they reflect expedients needed to convey book content in a physical object. Imposition and format comprise a practical origami constrained by decisive, economic choices of a sheet dimension and production management. Practicality must also follow implications of font size, line length and number of lines per page. Such reality will dominate all book production from the beginning to the present.
In most paper book production, the cost of paper directly determines imprint investment and risk. In the hand sheet era, “[p]aper could claim over two-thirds of the total production costs, and in some cases three quarters of cost.”[3] Book printing paper was also premium stock, and each sheet would need to count, run through and, ultimately, fold to full use without waste. Print shop masters knew all the options of imposition and format choice and used these for greatest expedition, expedience and error avoidance.[4] Book designers, compositors and pressmen knew accuracy of every cast-off of content, form lock-up and production move. Such focus should also convey to description of the products of such work.
Returning to description, distractions and displacements are not needed! Features such as laid pattern orientation, commercial sizes of sheets, grain direction or options of self-backing impositions or page casting-off strategies can obscure a descriptive narrative of imposition and format. We should consider description of the relation of the various features. I would offer that book shape can be a good starting point. All through history the general shapes of various books are apparent. The squat shape of the parchment book, derived from a quartered skin, contrasts with a more elongated rectangle, an echo of the ergonomic shape of the hand paper mold and of later conventions for cut machine-made paper. The squat shape of the quartered parchment book is reflected by the two-fold quarto paper format, while a more elongated proportion is produced by a three-fold octavo paper gathering. The extreme shape of the papyrus book is visualized as a folded square.
With the advent of machine-made paper and larger, more powerful iron presses the options of sheet size multiplied. The basic two-, three- and four-fold (folio, quarto, octavo) gatherings can be multiplied or tiled over a larger area, both doubled, quadrupled and multiplied to fill the press bed. Here the ¼ portions of the sheet can be imposed as miniatures of the starting proportion. Likewise any starting sheet can be multiplied into impositions times four. Options of a one-third proportion cut from a sheet enable impositions in twelves and these can compound to simplified folded gatherings based on third sheet cuts.
Imposition, seemingly inscrutable at first, was quickly assimilated into the print shop routines that, after all, were based on handling intricate arrays of assembled types. More daunting were risks of chaos and confusion as various jobs progressed simultaneously among various compositors, pressmen, correctors and printed sheet inventories. It is fairly miraculous to consider the achievements of early book printing in conditions that multiplied risks, uncertainties and experiments, including exasperations such as unintended disproportional productions of book gatherings.
Shape, meaning page proportion or aspect ratio, can also project bookbinding conventions. There, we need to remember that the head to tail height represents a double trim, while the width is only diminished by a single foredge trim. Another factor of book product shape is book thickness. Letterpress monographs range from a single gathering to almost one hundred gatherings in thickness. Blank and ruled paper stationery binding, by contrast, will feature a standard number of gatherings, including a consistent number of gatherings in the earliest long-stitch books. Finally, book shape is itself optimized for various handling and manipulation actions, and this is ultimately the most relevant feature for the reader. The reader is at work after the process of imposition and format decisions that define a physical book. In opening and closing actions of reading, the infinite possibilities of three-dimensional book shapes are revealed. The paper book is a complex product.
[1] Rummonds, Richard-Gabriel, Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress, vol.1, Chapter Eight, Imposition, Oak Knoll Press, 2004.
[2] Tanselle, G. Thomas, “The Concept of Format”, Studies in Bibliography, Bibliographic Society of the University of Virginia, vol.53(2000), p.67-115.
[3] Raven, James, The Business of Books, Yale University Press, 2007, p.50.
[4] For a reference in English, there is great reward and insight presented in the four volumes on printing practice by John Johnson, which he self-published in 1824. His chapter on imposition is magnificent, including clear diagrams. Johnson, who would know the most complex job options, also mentions that all content “should be divided into fours, eights, twelves and sixteens, which is the ground work of all impositions.” True to form, (is that another expression from a historical trade?!) his book is a sampler of such basic impositions.