[DCRM-L] Smudges, palmprints, and offsets (but no cat prints)

[Robert Maxwell]

Those of you on sharp-l might remember a message last July about a copy of a Mentelin incunable that had the shop's 15th century cat's paw prints (in ink) walking across one of the leaves. The e-mail noted that Mentelin is known to have been a sloppy printer. I thought I'd check our 2 Mentelin books to see if the cat visited them, too. Alas, I didn't find any paw prints but I did find lots of evidence of sloppiness-ink smudges every dozen pages or so, one page has a spectacular palm print in ink in the margin-perhaps Mr. Mentelin's own!-and another has major offsetting in the margin. I looked through the Printing thesaurus and didn't find anything for messy printing, but I'd like to bring this out somehow with a genre/form term-any ideas? Not that I expected "palm prints" but something like ink smudges or offsetting I would have expected-but maybe I just wasn't checking under the right term? Anyway, any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Bob

Robert L. Maxwell
Head, Special Collections and Metadata Catalog Dept.
6728 Harold B. Lee Library
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801)422-5568

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