Offset Evidence in Edward Young's The Centaur Not Fabulous (1755) by James E. May (review)

When the Scriblerian editors received from James McLaverty an extensive and detailed review of one of Jim May's latest essays, we thought it might well serve as our overdue tribute to Jim's many contributions to the journal, most useful his "Scribleriana Transferred" column, which he has provided since Autumn 1991, twenty-seven years of tracking listings and acquisitions of materials important to our readers. His bibliographical expertise has often been displayed in that section of the journal, as well as in the laudatory reviews of his essays that we have published and in his meticulous reviewing of the work of others, beautifully exemplified in the present issue by his review of The Collected Poems of Laurence Whyte. As Mr. McLaverty demonstrates, Jim's bibliographical virtuosity demands a reviewer willing to provide a reflective virtuosity to do it full justice; it is a measure of his value to the profession that Jim May has challenged so many of us over the past three decades to rise to the occasion when encountering his writings.

May, James E. "Offset Evidence in Edward Young's The Centaur Not Fabulous (1755)," SB, 59 (2015), 197–223.

Mr. May's technically brilliant essay, fluently written, will be of most interest to descriptive bibliographers (his first note thanks two particularly distinguished ones), but it also holds interest for historians of the book trade and for those who are more broadly interested in the make-up of the books they read.

Offset is when the ink from one page makes an impression on a page that has faced it. At a casual glance it can be difficult to distinguish offset from bleed-through, which is when the print shows through from the page on the reverse of the leaf. Bleed-through is more common, but offset can sometimes be a very graphic reminder of the way a book has been produced. The final page of Johnson's Shakespeare in the Bodleian's Malone copy, for example, bears an entirely distinct image of the first page of the preface, dramatically witnessing to haste in completing the writing and printing of the book.

The offset that interests Mr. May in this essay is in the cancels of Young's The Centaur Not Fabulous, a canceling brought about, at least in part, by the reaction to the text of its printer, Samuel Richardson. The text is both satire and homily, and Richardson's preference was for homily, as he made clear. In an earlier essay, "Interrelating the Cancellantia and Partial Gatherings in the First Edition of Edward Young's The Centaur Not Fabulous" (SB, 53 [2000], 241–263), Mr. May presented the relevant correspondence between Richardson and Young, and explained how the groups of cancels had been printed. Gathering B was rather messy, with four canceled leaves and five replacements in a complex order. They were printed (except for B3), he showed, in a half-sheet, divided in the usual way, folding at the short axis and cutting the long sides in half. A mixed group of singletons (the title A 1, the last leaf Dd1, B3, and U1) was also printed as a half-sheet, alongside another canceling half-sheet, Cc⁴, from late in the volume. Four cancels from the middle of the volume, N1 conjugate with N2 and R1 conjugate with R2, were also printed together, but not through a usual method of half-sheet imposition. Mr. May thinks they ran along the long side of the sheet; they occupied a half-sheet but a rather unusual long half. This original essay offers a valuable introduction to bibliographical method. On the basis of an investigation of fifty-eight copies, it uses evidence of press figures, point holes, watermarks, tranchefiles, and chain lines to understand the make-up and printing of the book. That essay is the basis of this, which finds supporting evidence through a close examination of offset, while at...