Filed under: Book Conservation, Humor, University of Missouri | Tags: blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, humor, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Marsilii Ficini Florentini, MU, printing, University of Missouri
I’m currently working on a two-volume set of a 1641 book, and noticed something interesting which I thought I’d share.
It’s fairly common to find minor errors in page numeration in books from this time period, and normally I don’t pay them much attention. They’re usually just a transposed number or something simple like that, a simple error made by a type-setter in a hurry or suffering from a hangover. But when I have to take a book apart for resewing (and usually other minor repairs to allow that), I try to be careful to make sure that I am putting them back together in the proper order, and that means checking and double-checking the order of the signatures.
A printing convention from this time period was to note the sequence of each section with an alphabet code at the bottom of the printed pages. The first section would be “A”, the second “B” and so forth. Then they’d go from “Z” to “AA” (or sometimes “Aa”) for as many cycles through the alphabet as necessary. This made it easy to make sure that the sections were in order when a bookbinder got involved, since oftentimes several different printers would be involved in the creation of a book, each one responsible for producing a set number of different sections (say section A through section FF, with another printer doing GG through CCC, etc).
Anyway, take a look at these two images:
Sections ZZz and AAaa
And:
The back page of ZZz and the front page of AAaa.
Note the page numbers jump from 828 on the back of ZZz to 889 on the front page of AAaa.
Now, look at these two images from the second volume of the book:
Sections Zzz and AAaa.
And:
Back page of Zzz on top of the front of AAaa.
Note the page numbers jump from 816 on the back of Zzz to 807 on the front page of AAaa.
There are other minor errors in the printing (which I’ve noted, since the book is in Latin I can’t speak to the text), but it is very interesting to find this kind of numeration problem at exactly the same break in sections in both books. I certainly can’t prove it, but my guess is that two different printers had the responsibility for the sections leading up to ZZz/Zzz and those starting with AAaa, and someone screwed up in telling them what the proper numbering was supposed to be for the pages they were to do.
Kinda fun, eh?
Have a good Easter weekend.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Brave New World, Connections, Emergency, General Musings, Health, New Horizons, Science, Survival, tech | Tags: atherosclerosis, birthday, blogging, echocardiography, electrocardiography, health, heart attack, jim downey, luck, masculinity, miracles, myocardial infarction, science, Science Fiction, stent, technology, Wikipedia
A year ago yesterday, I met my cardiologist for the first time. After looking over the results of my stress echo-cardiogram and discussing what it possibly meant with me, he said that I needed to have a cardiac cath procedure sooner rather than later. Since he’s one of the premier heart surgeons in the mid-west, and always in demand, I expected that this meant I’d get put on a waiting list and have it done sometime in the next month or so when there was an opening in his schedule.
I nodded. “OK, when?”
He looked down at my chart, then back at me. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
Good thing I don’t panic easily.
* * *
Well, as I recounted a few days later, the procedure went smoothly, though longer than usual, with the end result that I had a couple of stents placed to correct a congenital heart defect. It took a while for all the ramifications of what I had lived with, and what it meant to have it corrected, to really sink in. Part of that was coming to full understanding of just how close to death I had come, because even the slightest amount of atherosclerosis, even the tiniest little blood clot, would have triggered a massive heart attack.
But now it’s been a year. I saw the cardiologist several times over that year, most recently a few weeks ago. And, basically, I’m now past it all. I’m no longer taking any blood thinners, I don’t need to take any real precautions, I only need to check in with the cardiologist once a year or if I notice a problem. If I’m smart, I’ll continue to get regular exercise (I now walk three miles each morning, and get in plenty of additional exercise doing yard work and such) and be a little careful about my diet, but those are things which any man my age should probably do.
So, basically, today’s the first anniversary of my rebirth.
And it feels good.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 