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The Collation

So how do you find symbols in signature marks?

Sarah:

In my last post, I showed some examples of books that use symbols in signature marks. But how did I find these books and how might you find more examples? It’s one thing to search for books printed in the year 1542, since “publication year” is a standard search box and “1542” is written in standard typography. But you can’t really type “¶” into a search box and get useful results. (Okay, you might be able to type “¶” into your search box but you’ll get something like what Hamnet spits out: “The system could not interpret your search statement.”)

I got started on this path I saw this tweet from the digitization folks at University of Oklahoma: 

  1. See the comments on my last post for a conversation about using “fist” as opposed to “manicule” in this context.
  2. That’s a rough approximation of what’s included in the ESTC; full details can be found here.
  3. Actually, after another reading of Sayce, I was able to work out a vocabulary for some of these symbols, including an asterism.
  4. A search in “Folger Copy Notes” for “fists” [not] “fist” brings up 381 entries; a search for “fist” [not] “fists” brings up 28 entries.
  5. Note that although we can add just about any search imaginable, and name it anything we want, we can’t change the order of the list. It automatically sorts by popularity, so ISBN comes first thanks to automated searching that links on ISBN.

Comments

As well as the ¶ paragraph mark, early French printers regularly use a C-shaped paragraph mark. It is shown among “Other symbols” in Richard Sayce’s article in The Library (p. 15).
Is this also called a pilcrow? Should the two forms be distringuished?
I record them as P-pilcrow and C-pilcrow but obviously this is totally non-standard.

David Shaw — July 17, 2014

Hi, David,
I wondered the same thing, for I was taught to call that “C” mark the “capitulum.” But I was also taught, evidently wrongly, to call the pilcrow mark a “paraph.”

Checking the OED, s.v. pilcrow, yields:

1993 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 4 Nov. 17/3 The upright letter C, for capitulum, developed into the popular medieval paragraph symbol, called at times a pilcrow or a paraph.

And checking OED s.v. paraph: a paragraph mark, or the flourish after a signature used to prevent forgery. French etymology, as we’d expect. More interesting is that it was formerly used as a verb. So I’m going to try to paraph more carefully!

I like your non-standard distinction, by the way, and shall adopt it.

Anne Coldiron — July 18, 2014