328-332), insofar as typographical facilities permit. Give these signature details according to the formula in Philip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography (see p. Make a note giving details of the signatures of a volume, if considered important.
Here’s the official word from Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books):ħB9.1. While signature statements form a standard part of a scholarly descriptive bibliography, they are an optional extra in library cataloging. If you do need to be succinct, and if the sheets are gathered and folded into leaves, there is an internationally recognized compressed form that describes the same arrangement of leaves in a neat little package: a 4 A-O 8 P 10 as seen in the second line of the “notes” section of the Hamnet record for this edition of Macrobius:Įxplained in words, that means gathering a is made up of 4 leaves, gatherings A through O have 8 leaves each, and gathering P has 10 leaves. The printer’s written description “a A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P” plus a note saying that each has four sheets except the first and last (which have two and five, respectively) makes sense if you don’t need to be succinct, and if you’re working with unfolded sheets. Once they’re folded and gathered into alphabetic groups, you can see why the last half of the leaves of a gathering also do not have signature marks: when four sheets are folded, the last four leaves inevitably follow the first four in the correct order. Notice that the title page doesn’t have a signature mark: it’s obviously the starting point, so no need to fiddle with extra pieces of type to put an a at the bottom.
The gathering of two sheets has become four leaves, and each gathering of four sheets has become eight leaves: Here’s my mock-up of the first three gatherings of the Macrobius after each has been folded. No need to guess how many sheets you’re supposed to start with.
How do I know I’ve got a full set of sheets ready for binding? In the Macrobius example, I know for certain that there should be more than just these three gatherings because the printer helpfully included a register at the end, spelling out the sequence of gatherings for the binder- a A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P-followed by a note (in Latin) to say that each gathering is made up of four sheets except for a, which has two, and P, which has five. Front left are the four A sheets, marked A, A2, A3, and A4 front right are the four B sheets, marked B, B2, B3, and B4. In the back, I’ve put the sheet with the title page on top of the sheet with the signature mark a2 in the lower right corner. Here’s my scrap-paper mock-up of the sheets at the start of the Macrobius volume as if they were freshly printed and being gathered for binding: These alphanumeric keys are known as signatures. In the case of a folio format like the 1513 Venetian edition of Macrobius we’ve been looking at, the folding is simple: each sheet that comes out of the print shop gets folded in half, creating two leaves of text (or four pages: each side of a leaf is a page).Ĭonventionally, printers included a key (usually letters of the alphabet) in the lower right of the sheet so that the binder could group all the unfolded sheets in order, and make sure nothing was missing. It records how the printed leaves were meant to be folded and gathered for binding. 31 cm (fol.) forms a complete physical description in a library catalog, then what’s up with a 4 A-O 8 P 10 and where does it fit in?Ī 4 A-O 8 P 10 is an example of a signature statement, sometimes also called a collation (one of the many meanings of “collation” for which this blog is named). Today’s post returns to the cliffhanger at the end of Tuesday’s Physical description in book cataloging overview: if, CXXII leaves : ill.