Skip to main content
The Collation

Itty-bitty tab dividers

The main trick with November’s “crocodile” was having to figure out the scale. It looks at first glance like a woolly button on a pin-striped shirt:

The November ‘Crocodile’

But when a ruler is included in the shot, you can see that the colorful bobble is only 3 mm in diameter: 

  1. http://collation.folger.edu/2012/11/what-manner-o-thing-is-your-crocodile-november-edition/#comment-19475
  2. Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospel-writers in the Christian Bible
  3. The roll has all three Theological Virtues—Hope, Charity, and Faith, in that order—but just Fortitude from the Cardinal Virtues. Did Lietz’s workshop have a second “Virtues” roll, with Prudence, Justice, and Temperance? The answer might be in Konrad Haebler’s Rollen- und Plattenstempel des XVI. Jahrhunderts, but if I went and looked it up, I’d just find some other tangent and never finish this post.
  4. The call number derives from the volume’s accession number, 212796. In other words, the item that was added to the collection immediately before it has accession number 212795, and the item immediately after has number 212797. Once a book is cataloged, the accession number gets turned into a call number, with a dash and a space after the first three digits (a hold-over from card catalog days, since adding the dash and the space made the number wrap to a second line in the upper left of the card, ensuring that it would fit in the corner) and a suffix indicating whether it is shelved upright with small books (“q” for “quarto”), upright with big books (“f” for “folio”) or flat (“b” for “broadside”). Note that the use of “quarto” and “folio” to designate size rather than format is a 19th-century abomination development. At the Folger, “quarto” shelving is for bindings up to and including 30 cm; “folio” shelving is for books 30.1 cm to 50 cm high, or oblong books wider than 23 cm; and “broadside” or “flat” shelving is for anything over 50 cm or whose housing cannot safely hold its weight upright on the shelf. If you really love digressions of this kind, see Sarah’s post on the books that are in our header image.

Comments

Thanks for the additional information. I’m a little surprised to see only two of these here, but the low number of course makes sense in a sammelband of only a few of works. Did the fourth title actually get short shrift? Any indication of adhesive residue?

Aaron Pratt — November 5, 2012

Yes, the fourth title page did originally have a tab. Now, unfortunately, it just has a tab-shaped rectangle of paper missing from the fore-edge.

Erin Blake — November 5, 2012

It makes some sense that the final tab would be–if any–the one missing in a volume like this. The book is a rather thick folio, so if a reader relied on the tab to lift up the rest of the text block, the paper surrounding it would be under a good deal of stress, increasing the likelihood of tearing.

Aaron Pratt — November 6, 2012

Exactly. Sadly, the damage seems to be fairly recent: there’s an un-faded dot on the fore-edge where the now-lost bobble protected the coloring from light. The tab was already missing when the Folger acquired it in 1975, though.

Erin Blake — November 6, 2012