Skip to main content
The Collation

The symbols of signature marks

I’ve written before about what sort of information we can learn from studying signature marks, and Goran wrote recently about the use of Latin abbreviations to indicate the gathering. So I thought the time has come to look at some of the other types of marks we find in signature marks.

What comes before A?

title page of Foure Sermons of Maister John Calvin

title page of Foure Sermons of Maister John Calvin

This 1579 translation of Jean Calvin’s Quatre sermons avec exposition du Pseaume 87 (STC 4439) begins with a dedicatory epistle from the translator John Field and a letter to the reader from Calvin. The sermons themselves follow, beginning on A1r and continuing through H3v. But if the main text starts with A, how are the preliminaries signed? With symbols, obviously!

signing the opening leaves of Calvin's Four Sermons

signing the opening leaves of Calvin’s Foure Sermons

  1. For a full account of the different methods of signing gatherings, see R. A. Sayce, “Compositorial Practices and the Localization of Printed Books 1530-1800″ The Library, Fifth Series, 21 (March 1966), 1-45. Reprinted, with corrections and additions, by the Oxford Bibliographical Society, Oxford, 1977.
  2. That is, a complete 23-gathering run from A to Z, then a run from AA to ZZ, then AAA through GGG). It’s a 23-letter series, of course, since as is typical, J, V, and W are omitted only one letter of the I/J and U/V pairs was used and since W was not part of the Latin alphabet.

Comments

I believe the correct term is ‘manicule’

See the Keith Houston’s Shady Characters quiz :

Shady Characters, the quiz

jane haslam — July 15, 2014

Reply

While I—and others at the Folger—do use the term “manicule” to refer to hand-drawn fists like the ones found in the margins of books, printers and catalogers refer to these as fists, especially when they are printed, rather than manuscript. See, for instance, its entry on RBMS’s controlled vocabulary list. But as William H. Sherman (who is responsible for the term’s popularity now) explores, the vocabulary for describing these marks is indeed unstable. (He’s got a chapter on the subject in his book Used Hands and there’s a pdf of an early version that he gave as a talk at the Center for Editing Lives and Letters that makes for a good read on the subject.)

Sarah Werner — July 15, 2014

Reply

Thanks for that update, Erin. I’ll confess I have mixed feelings about it—“fist” makes a lot of sense to me as a term referring to the printed marks, but I would love to see “manicule” adopted for the manuscript versions. (It confuses my students to no end to have the same word refer both to printed marginalia and manuscript marginalia—marginalia being another term that tends to throw them off….)

Sarah Werner — July 15, 2014

Reply

Belatedly following up to say that the RBMS Controlled Vocabularies did, indeed, change the preferred term from “fists” to “manicules” in RBMS Controlled Vocabularies: Provenance Evidence Terms, and Hamnet has been updated accordingly. Search for “Manicules (Provenance)” under “Form/Genre” to find examples of hand-drawn pointing-finger hands.

Also note that Sarah got her wish: by definition, RBMS Controlled Vocabularies: Provenance Evidence only covers hand-drawn pointing-fingers, so “fist” remains the preferred term for the piece of type.

Erin Blake — May 24, 2016

Reply

Many thanks Sarah for your enlightened answer and, of course, I bow to RBMS controlled vocabulary. However I am delighted to learn from Erin that there are moves afoot to replace what is, as you must surely agree, an unwieldy and unstable, piece of, in Sherman’s words, ‘printer’s slang’. Let us hope that the proposal is adopted in order that I will never again be guilty of breaking the rules, by locally implementing the term ‘manicule’, for the sake of a more accessible, more presentable and certainly more stylish record.

jane haslam — July 15, 2014

Reply

More evidence that the term is unstable: there’s a pending change request to replace “fists” with “manicules” waiting to be reviewed by the RBMS Controlled Vocabularies subcommittee. See http://rbmsthesauri.pbworks.com/w/page/81207749/Fists%20change%20request for details.

Erin Blake — July 15, 2014

Reply

You say in your second footnote: ” since as is typical, J, V, and W are omitted.” This is the second time,in as many days, that I have read this in scholarly writing and it is not quite accurate. In the Latin alphabet J and I, and U and V were treated as the same letter and, at least in English, their use was determined by position in a word. So a printer could use J or he could use I for signing, but not both–same for U and V. I am pained to say, given my name, that W was not a letter in the Latin alphabet so it was not omitted, it just was not there.

William Proctor Williams — July 15, 2014

Reply

You are entirely correct. I was being more lazy than I should have been in writing that footnote. I’ll update it with a better explanation!

Sarah Werner — July 15, 2014

Reply

For those of you wondering how you can find more examples of books using symbols in signature marks, Erin and I wrote a post with some search tips: “So how do you find symbols in signature marks?”

Sarah Werner — July 17, 2014

Reply

We need to organize! When I learned in 2009 that the OED has no entry for “manicule,” I wrote to correct this omission. They replied that it is not yet used enough. Here’s where having been an activist in college in the late 1960s kicked in. I wrote back,
“The May 21 TLS uses ‘manicule’ in a review by James Carley. I use it myself as often as I can: manicule, manicule, manicule… I am planning to organize a rally on behalf of this word. Press releases will be distributed.”

I successfully recruited Ohio University’s Beth Quitslund as a fellow manicule supporter. She suggested manicule placards for the rally. I replied,
“Yes, a manicule placard sounds fine. But we have to be prepared for the more radical elements that are drawn to any rally. We really have to take some preemptive action, so they don’t replace the index finger we’re championing with a middle finger. That will only bring disrepute to our cause.”

A month later, I wrote again to the OED,
“I see ‘maniculae,’ the plural, appeared in Fred Shurink’s article in the February 2008 issue of Review of English Studies. It’s definitely catching on! Maybe the rally won’t be needed. I don’t really care for confrontations.”

So, don’t just wait for the OED– lobby them! (Do professional lobbyists ever lobby the OED? There’s a scary thought.)

Richard M. Waugaman — July 17, 2014

Reply

[…] Shakespeare Library’s Collation, the archivists walked us through the cerebral puzzle of early print signatures–the markers that printers used when putting […]

Cabinet of Curiosities, vol. ix — August 2, 2014

Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *