[DCRM-L] Non-Roman Signatures

[Deborah J. Leslie]

Joe, DCRM-L cannot handle attachments. Would you send them directly to
the email accounts of the editors, including (I suppose) anyone else who
asks you. Sorry for the extra inconvenience after all this work!

djleslie at folger.edu
manon.theroux at yale.edu
jxa16 at psulias.psu.edu
robert_maxwell at byu.edu
joeas at goshen.edu


________________________
Deborah J. Leslie
Folger Library
djleslie at folger.edu



-----Original Message-----
From: dcrm-l-admin at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-admin at lib.byu.edu] On
Behalf Of Joseph Ross
Sent: Thursday, 19 May, 2005 14:22
To: dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu
Subject: [DCRM-L] Non-Roman Signatures


Deborah and others,

I am sorry it has taken so long to give you examples of registers of 
non-Roman alphabet signatures.  I have had to rely on interlibrary loan
for 
most of the material, and I was hoping to be able to get more microfilm
and 
facsimiles, but I do not want to delay this any longer so I will give
you 
what I have.

I have looked at some microfilm of seventeenth and eighteenth-century
books 
with signatures using the Cyrillic alphabet as well as several 
facsimiles.  I have also examined some facsimiles of books with Hebrew 
numeric signatures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  For 
Greek signatures, I had material in the Notre Dame library that I could 
use.  After initially thinking that Hebrew language imprints used only 
numeric signatures or Latin alphabet signatures, I looked up some Hebrew

titles in Adams and discovered a number of examples of signatures 
using  Hebrew alphabetic sequences.  I was unable to look at the books 
themselves, but I did not think there would be any surprises with the 
Hebrew alphabet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  I checked
my 
reconstruction of the registers by comparing leaf counts with my
register 
and the leaf count recorded in other bibliographic descriptions of the
title.

I have included numeric signatures in this list because Russian imprints

use a lot of numeric signatures using the Church Slavic numerals and
Hebrew 
language imprints also makes a great deal of use of Hebrew numerals for 
their signatures.  To my great surprise, I also came across a register 
of  Arabic numerals (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4 not as in numerals used in the
Arabic 
language) in a book published by Antonio Blado in Rome in 1542.  I have 
never seen a signature using Arabic numerals, and I thought it might be 
good to include this as well.  The earlier volumes of Eustathius. 
Parekbolai eis ten Homerou Odysseian used Greek alphabet signatures,
which 
is how I came upon it.

I have included some history of the Russian alphabet and its revisions
in 
the eighteenth century as well as some scans of material I found in an 
alphabet book of the seventeenth century and an eighteenth century 
discussion of Russian orthography.  I hope this material will be 
understandable to others, but I do not feel I have really come to a firm

understanding of the issues surrounding  Russian orthography from the 
sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.  I am still waiting for some 
secondary materials in Russian that may give me some additional insights

into the situation, but, as I said before, I do not want to delay
sending 
this any longer.

I am sending the file as a Microsoft Word attachment.  Let me know if it

does not come through ok.

I hope this will be sufficient for the needs of those who will be 
establishing rules for recording non-Roman alphabet signatures.  I look 
forward to participating in any further discussion of this issue, which
I 
think needs to be addressed.

I welcome any comments or questions for clarification or correction.

Joe Ross
University of Notre Dame