page forty-four

The Press

Forty-three rooms, and not one of them has made a book. Today's number puts one sheet of an eighteenth-century book on the imposing stone: its pages set, made up and tied, and two empty chases. Lay the pages so that when the sheet is printed both sides, folded the way the folder always folds it and cut, it reads in order with every page head up.

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The pages, made up and tied. Pick one, then click a place in a forme

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Click an empty place to lay the chosen page head up. Click a laid page to turn it head down, and again to lift it off.

The folding table

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The gathering

Pull a proof to see how the folded sheet reads.

Press
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The arrow keys walk to other days. Every day is a different house, a different book and a different folder's habit.

What is real here and what is not

The formats, the formes, the folding and the binder's marks are real. The printing houses, the books and the folders are the day's number.

  1. 01

    One sheet, many pages

    A hand press printed one side of a whole sheet at a pull. To make a book the sheet was folded: once for a folio, twice for a quarto, three times for an octavo, four for a sixteenmo, giving four, eight, sixteen or thirty-two pages. The pages therefore have to be set on the sheet in an order that looks scrambled flat and comes right only when it is folded. Laying them out is imposition, and it was the compositor's job.

  2. 02

    The stone and the formes

    The pages were laid on a flat imposing stone and locked into an iron frame, the chase, with wooden furniture and quoins. One side of the sheet came from the outer forme, which held the first and last pages; the back came from the inner forme. Type is a mirror image of the print, so the forme on the stone is laid the mirror way round to the sheet. The page lets you look at it either way.

  3. 03

    Heads and tails

    Every fold across the sheet turns half the pages round, so some rows go into the forme head down and the heads meet at the fold, to be cut open later. Pages folded against each other at the back of the book are conjugate leaves, and a recto and the verso of its conjugate always add up to the first page plus the last: on a sheet of pages 1 to 16 they make 17. Joseph Moxon set the schemes out in his Mechanick Exercises of 1683, and compositors were told to fold a piece of paper when in doubt, which is what the scrap of waste here does.

  4. 04

    What this page simplifies

    A real quarto and sixteenmo lie sideways on the sheet; here every sheet is drawn so the pages stand upright, which is the same scheme turned a quarter round. The page always prints the back by turning the sheet left to right. The fold is computed, not looked up: each part of the sheet is carried through every fold as a half-turn in three dimensions and the leaves are read off the pile, so a folder with a different habit gets a different, and still correct, scheme. The catchwords and signatures on the proof are the marks real books carried for the binder.

Forty-four rooms, and one number doing all the work. Today it sets up a printing house, puts a book in the press, teaches a folder her habit and leaves you one sheet of it on the stone.