A Dry Discourse on Wet Paper (and Ink)

Part I: Concurrent Perfecting

In his 1923 article on Massinger’s Duke of Milan (1623), W. W. Greg observed that in what he believed to be the first sheet of the book, the playwright’s name was misprinted ‘Messenger’ both on one copy of the title page (in the inner forme) and in a different copy below the dedication (outer forme). In all other copies he had seen, the name had been corrected at press in both places.¹ Acknowledging that his theory could be disproved by the discovery of a copy with both readings uncorrected (209), he suggested that

it seems more natural to suppose that the corrections were made in both places at the same time. In that case we must suppose that the printer … used two presses and began machining the two formes simultaneously. To obtain definite evidence of this practice would not be without critical importance.

What he was suggesting was the practice now usually known as concurrent perfecting, in which each press takes one of the formes of a sheet and prints half the desired number of copies. At that point the two half-heaps of paper are exchanged, and each press perfects the sheets first printed by the other. He duly searched for some ‘definite evidence of this practice’, and the following year reported that he had found it in sheet C of an octavo of 1657, whose signatures were originally misprinted as if it were sheet D but corrected at press. In one copy

it is the signatures of the inner forme (C2, C4) that are misprinted, those of the outer forme being correct, while in the [other] copy it is the signatures of the outer forme (C1, C3) that are misprinted, those of the inner forme being correct.²

With unconscious prescience, in his final sentence he acknowledged that ‘of course, the same result would follow from so-called “half-sheet imposition”’. The 1657 quire in question was a complete sheet, but in 1926 A. K. McIlwraith pointed out that the first four leaves of The Duke of Milan were in fact a pair of separately printed halfsheets, with the variant names respectively on A1^r (title page, outer forme) and A2^r (dedication, inner forme).³ In halfsheet imposition all four pages are imposed as a single forme, and when half the required number of copies have been printed on one side, the heap is turned end to end and perfected with the same forme. Once dried, each sheet is cut into two essentially identical halfsheets. But if corrections are made at any time before the perfecting begins, any page in the uncorrected state must necessarily be backed by the corrected state.

Sheet C of the 1657 octavo was, however, a complete sheet, and therefore still showed that concurrent perfecting was sometimes practised. Whether or not that example was known to R. B. McKerrow, in 1927 he seems to have assumed that it may have been a perfectly normal practice for any printer with more than one press.

Our printer has now a sheet printed on one side only and bearing the pages of one forme. …To complete it, the four pages of the other forme must be printed on the other side of the paper. Now if he has two presses, he may have placed the other forme on the second press; but he cannot at once proceed to ‘perfect’ the sheet … for if he does so … the result will be that the still wet ink of the first side printed will ‘set off’ on the tympan of the second press and thence will be transferred to the next sheet printed, and will spoil it. He must let the ink of the first printing dry before he attempts to print the sheet on the other side.⁴

At this point he inserted the footnote: ‘There are ways of avoiding this trouble by the use of “setting-off sheets,” but it is unlikely that sixteenth-century printers were often sufficiently pressed for time to make such expedients worth while’. I shall return...