[DCRM-L] Help with collational formula

[Johnson-DeBaufre, Eric]

Hi everyone!

I am hoping that someone can help me with a small collation problem I am having.

We have in our collection an apparently somewhat uncommon 16th century Latin-German New Testament printed in Wittenberg in 1574 by Johan Krafft. NOTE: the book is incredibly tightly bound, making inspection of the sewing threads impossible.

My predecessor catalogued this bookand I am in the process of enhancing the record to include the collational formula of the two volumes. The OCLC number for this record  is # 25989593 for anyone who is interested.

Volume 1 is generally very regular in the printing of this quarto. Here (minus the preliminary gathering) is how it collates: 4to: A-Z8 2A-2X8 2Y4 3A-3M8 3N4. The two quarto gatherings are nested and signed half plus one.

The problem (for me) is in the preliminaries. This consists of a single gathering of 6 leaves (a title page [a1] followed by a preface). An examination of the leaves signed a3 and a4 suggests that they are a conjugate pair inserted at the center of a quarto gathering signed a1, a2, a5 and the unsigned [a6]. My conjecture is that this very economizing printer decided to print by half-sheet imposition a quarto sheet that contained two half-sheet gatherings signed a3 and a4-one to be used in one copy of the book and the other laid aside for another copy. This eliminated the waste that would have resulted had he printed the book as he had elsewhere, which would have necessitated the removal of the blanks a7 and a8.

So my question to all of you is this-am I simply describing this gathering as follows: a6 with perhaps the addition of a parenthetical (a3.4) to indicate the conjugacy of these leaves? Or is a6 alone sufficient?

Apologies for such a lengthy message and thanks in advance for the help.

Eric


Eric Johnson-DeBaufre, PhD, MLIS
Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian, Watkinson Library
Trinity College
300 Summit Street
Hartford, CT 06106
860-297-4219

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