Years ago I bought an antique book from 1652 - Seneca's works from Antwerp's Officina Plantiniana (triple XXX on the cover). A few days ago I noticed a loose word at the end of every page. AI, do explain.
The lone word is not a 'widow'/'orphan' but a deliberate convention called a 'catchword'. It reprises the first word (or syllables) of the text on the next page. Its purpose in the 1600s was industrial:
- misassembly: books were printed on large paper sheets folded into multi-page booklets ("quires" or "gatherings") then sewn together.
- as pages were laid out in iron frames and handled in loose bundles, it was easy to lose a page, print them out of order, or bind a sheet upside down.
- the bookbinder could glance at the bottom right of a page, and check that the catchword matched the next page's first word.
Medieval scribes used catchwords in manuscripts as early as the year 1000. Early printers adopted it and from mid-1500s thru late 1700s became standard. The practice faded out in the 1800s as industrial printing made it obsolete.
Also, see in the image that last word 'fapiens'. That "f"-like character in 1600s books is actually the long s (ſ), an archaic lowercase variant of the letter "s":
- it looks like an "f", but its crossbar is just a nub on the left side
- it appeared only at the start or middle of a word ("sound" as ſound, "rest" as reſt).
- it was never used at the end of a word, or before an "f" or an apostrophe.
- a double "s" was often written as a long s followed by a round s (ſs, like in proceſses).
The long s is from Roman cursive carried into early European typography and printers who used it alongside the round s as a positional variant, like some alphabets that have different forms based on where a letter sits in a word. The practice died out in late 18th / early 19th centuries as the long ſ was frequently confused with f.
(also, check nickmalandrino.work - he's good. #nepotism)
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You're welcome.
for Design & Type nerds
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