[DCRM-L] xii, 17- pages

[Gemberling, Ted P]

I think I have some idea based on my course at Rare Book School. The book I'm working on now, A manual of practical surgery by Lewis A. Stimson from 1900, has "signatures" marking the various "gatherings" in the book. Since this is an ordinary size book, it's an octavo, meaning there are 8 leaves and 16 pages in each gathering. Gathering 2 starts on page 17 because gathering 1 would end at xvi (16) if it were the full number of pages. But often the preliminary part of a book turned out not to be that long, so there was a gap between the end of it and page 17. Perhaps I could be mistaken to think the ending page was xii so often. But I do think I've seen xii or xiii a lot more often than xiv, xv, or xvi.

Ted Gemberling
UAB Lister Hill Library

From: Gemberling, Ted P
Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2017 6:04 PM
To: AUTOCAT (AUTOCAT at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU); DCRM Revision Group List (dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu)
Subject: xii, 17- pages

It seems like I've seen this pattern many, many times in old books! There are preliminary pages up to xii, and the second series starts with 17. Anybody got an idea why that would be? It can't be an accident. It's a mysterious aspect of printing to me.

Ted P. Gemberling
Historical Collections Cataloger
UAB Lister Hill Library, rm. 234B
1720 Second Ave. South
Birmingham, Ala. 35294-0013
Phone: (205)934-2461
Fax: (205)934-3545
#uablibraries

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20170312/26556c95/attachment.html>