James Daunt is making a difference at Barnes & Noble. The Wall Street Journal of 29 July has a big article on the changes he’s putting in place, focussing on the Upper West Side store at Broadway and 82nd Street. The main thrust of the change is to give more discretion to the management of the store itself. The article includes this paragraph:
But the remodeled store is already seeing a sales uptick because of the shrewd decisions of its booksellers. By the front door is table of literary historical fiction that includes “The Weight of Ink” by Rachel Kadish and “People of the Book” by Geraldine Brooks, paperbacks that had been hiding upstairs because they were published several years ago. Harty [Assistant Manager, Victoria Harty] moved them downstairs. She knew they would interest highbrow Jewish readers on the Upper West Side more than the median shopper in the average market. She was right. They went from selling one copy a month to 20.
Noticeable to publishers is the reduction in returns rate. B&N returns used to run at over 25% of books ordered. It’s now down to 9% and Mr Daunt targets 5%. A big order from B&N used to present a problem — much of your inventory would be disappearing into the void, only to come back as some uncertain time in the future in a condition which might preclude the books being used again. Premature reprinting and wasting are costs publishers are relieved to be spared as much as possible. (Not yet enough however to start forbidding returns.)
Watch this mesmerizing video showing pencils being manufactured in Japan. (Thanks to David Crotty at The Scholarly Kitchen for this link.)
If you liked that, please click on the Scholarly Kitchen link (the orange words above) to find further links to videos about crayon making, highlighter making and another pencil-making video, this one from Faber-Castell in Germany.
If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.
I don’t plan any more pages of examination of this book. A Notes section, an Index of first lines, and a Chronological listing of poems don’t provide much room for debate, and won’t I think provide any more evidence about the book’s publication.
What seems clear now is that the contents of this book represent the 1904 Oxford Standard Authors text, in a 1926 reprint. The original OSA text had simply been a reprint of James Logie Robertson’s edition of Burns’ poems first published around 1895, maybe with some slight adjustment to the title page. I’m guessing that the binding of this volume is a special, fancier version, designed to sell to a different, tradier, audience than the main OSA series: but there’s no evidence to support this — it’s merely deduction guided by speculation. Just when that binding style was first issued is not recoverable from the evidence in front of us. I suppose it might have been in existence ever since the Oxford Standard Authors series was inaugurated in 1904 — no way of knowing from what we hold in our hand. I doubt if this was the standard Oxford Standard Authors’ livery — there’d surely be some reference to the series, and one might have found more uniformity in the wording of the title in a regular series. I wouldn’t be amazed if the frontispiece wasn’t added for this version: that might go some way to “explaining” the structural weakness of having two tips one after the other.
I wonder if Oxford University Press might have been holding unbound sheets from which they produced this edition. The title page tells us these sheets were printed in 1926, but it could be that in 1926 they printed say 5,000 copies, bound 2,000 as Oxford Standard Authors editions, and kept 3,000 sheets in storage. This was a very common practice back in letterpress days, when getting back on press was relatively expensive — though you’d probably be less likely to do this with established series like OSA where you had a sales pattern which allowed you greater confidence that your extra expenditure on the binding wouldn’t be wasted if the book didn’t sell out. But if they did have sheets on hand in Oxford it would have been really easy for Mr Milford to call up this item in order to fill a gap in their publishing program any year after 1926. In other words I’m not able to have confidence that the book was in fact bound in 1926 — all we know is that’s when it was printed. So maybe my father did in fact buy it as a new book, as a teenager.
I’ve inveighed along the way about past publishers’ fast and loose attitude to publication details and print history. Is it odd how we publishers have become so self-reflective nowadays? A century ago we just focussed on selling the damned books, with little concern for the niceties of this or that version and for informing librarians and scholars of any kind of publication history. I suspect the alteration from casual to formal is utterly commonplace and marks the changing of an industry from the buccaneering early days of wild, almost uncontrollable growth, into what we see today, a mature industry clicking along at a comfortable sales level — but an industry which has exchanged the vigor of innovation for the calmer pleasures of classification and order — and the joys of sales accounting. The energy we used to spend on the excitement is now directed into analytical channels. Exciting is good, but please reflect that mature industries are not necessarily to be written off as moribund industries.
Continuing our study of an Oxford University Press edition of The Poems of Robert Burns, here, apparently somewhat at random, is page 330.
If you completed the Tam o’ Shanter assigned reading, you may have been struck by the nice couplet on the first page:
(Auld Ayr wham ne'er a town surpasses
For honest men and bonnie lasses)
Wikipedia assures me that the Ayr United football team is referred to as “The honest men”. I’ve never visited Ayr, so cannot confirm the honesty or beauty of its inhabitants, but I single out this Burnsian parenthetical compliment because of the presence in it of the word “wham”. Our English neighbours to the south have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that this word has nothing to do with cartoon fisticuffs — “Wham”, “Blam”, “Kapow” and so on. It is of course nothing more than the accusative form of the pronoun “who” or “wha” as it is in Scots, exactly analogous to the English “whom”. The main occasion for English sniggers about this formation tends to be the more familiar “Scots wha hae”, which also shows you the “wha” from which “wham” is formed. Most English people assume that this expression is some sort of rallying cry along the lines of “Cu’ ‘way the marones” which is what we shout to urge on our town’s rugby team — which rallying cry just means “Come away the maroons” [Gala wear maroon jerseys]. “Scots wha hae” has perhaps suffered from being used as the title of this poem: the period at the end of every title in this edition really doesn’t help here; an ellipsis would have been more appropriate. The full first line is a bit less odd: “Scots who have with Wallace bled . . .” makes for a perfectly reasonable invocation for a general on the eve of battle.
Of course folks have generally heard it as a song. Here’s stirring rendition by Kirsten Easdale (with a couple of embellishments toward the end).
Well, it obviously worked. Against all the odds the Scots prevailed at Bannockburn.
Page 330 also indicates another feature of the printing of this book. That shadow over stanza four is not any editorial shading indicating disapproval of nationalistic aspirations — it’s a shadow cast by the cockling of the paper. This suggests that the sheet may have been printed cross-grain, though it might just be water damage. The tear on the title page does hint at cross-grain printing too, but I’m not willing to experiment by tearing it any more!
Given what we know, we can speculate about what size of press the book was printed on. The trim size is 5″ x 7⅜”. Adding trim allowances and knowing that it prints eight-to-view we can figure out that the sheet on which it printed had to be at least 15¼” x 21″. This seems small. Maybe both halves of the sig printed on the same sheet which would make it 21″ x 30½” which sounds more likely to modern ears, though who knows what presses they had in Walton Street in the nineteenth century? But if it were printed on the larger press, why couldn’t they fold that sheet without cutting it in half and going in for that hand insertion of the inner 16pp? Did they not have a larger folder? Probably even an equipment list for the Press in 1926 (or 1895) wouldn’t provide the answer. It could just be loading in the folding department — but they had to know ahead of time in order to set these signature marks.
Another puzzle raised by this volume. But I bet it was printed on the smaller size sheet, at least at first. The cross-grain paper raises the possibility that in 1895 it was printed on the small sheet, but by 1926 they had doubled up, turning everything through 90º, and were in fact folding the entire 32-page sheet without need of that insertion. They’d just leave all those signature marks in situ; they would then be irrelevant but hard to remove, being cast in the stereos Mr Hart had made over to Mr Frowde.
Note here a second signature mark at the bottom of the text block. This second mark tells us more about how the book was made up.
The book is 636 pages long (plus 20pp front matter which make their own separate signature, sig A). We’d never make a book like this nowadays when the cost of handwork has risen so high. Somewhere in the book there has to be a second odd sig — a 28-pager: it turns out to be the last one, signature X. Nowadays we’d aim to place any shorter sigs not at the ends of the book, but further in — mainly because of strength considerations.
Back then it was not uncommon to treat the front matter separately from the main book, printing it last, as its own signature, just in case anything changed in the interim — which was pretty unlikely in this instance I think. Now we’d make that first sig 32 pages long and start signature B on page 13 (xx + 12 = 32). Actually we might rather throw in a half title or a couple of blanks at the front, to move the frontispiece tip away from the outside of the first signature, which would mean starting sig B on page 11. Then we’d run a pair of blanks at the end of the book to make it come out in even 32s, at 640 pages.
I find the function of the second signature mark B2 puzzling: though you do see them. In the end I think it must just have been there as an almost superfluous extra security check — if you flicked open sig F while it was waiting to be sewed you would be able to see at once that the folding had been done properly if F2 caught your eye. Maybe you really did have to mistrust your colleagues in the folding department that much! — though I begin to think it more likely that these signature marks might have been there as a help to the imposition folks.
There are a further two analogous marks in each signature. B3 falls on page 9 and B5 on page 11. The mark B5 I guess is fulfilling the same folding check function I suggested for B2. (But why 5 not 4? There’s no B4, C4 etc. anywhere in the book.) B3 however shows us that though the book was bound as 32 page signatures, it was printed on a sheet which would only accommodate 16 pages, 8 on each side. Fold B into a 16-pager, open it at the top which the bolts of the fold would enable you easily to do, and insert the 16-pager with B3 on the front into the middle of that first section — bingo, 32 pages off a press that was only big enough for 16. This sort of shenanigans was only possible however in a world where bindery assistants were paid very little. They were almost certainly female, or very young, or both.
For your continued edification, here’s the rest of Tam o’ Shanter:
Logie Robertson, our editor, informs us
“The occasion of the poem was an arrangement with Grose, the antiquary, who promised to include, in his collection of the pictured Antiquities of Scotland, the primitive Kirk of Alloway, near Ayr, if Burns on his part furnished a witch story to accompany the engraving.”
Kirk of Alloway from Francis Grose’s The Antiquities of Scotland
All those periods at the end of display lines hit the twenty-first century eye as rather odd. I wonder if Burns put a period/full stop after the heading of all his poems? Well, of course not; it’s an editorial decision. The ampersand + c is old-fashioned, but of course the book is old too.
The most interesting thing on this page (from the book-making point of view) is that little B centered at the bottom of the page. This is the signature mark. The B tells us it’s the second signature in the book, and counting pages and looking for the sewing thread tells us that each signature was 32 pages long. These signature marks are there to make sure that when the book is put together it has all the signatures in the right order. Belt and braces security leads to the development of an additional system of marks down the spine fold. You can see them running diagonally down the spine of this bible book block. If one sig were out of sequence it’d be pretty obvious. This system has taken over from the letter/number on the page system which is reminiscent of letterpress days. It was more usual I think for the signature mark to be flush right rather than centered, but either way it worked in the slower-paced, smaller-scale world of old-world book manufacturing.
So here you are with page one of Tam o’ Shanter*. Everyone should read a little Burns and where better to begin than with this classic which the editor assures us “Burns thought . . . his best”. Striving perhaps to buttress his decision to put this poem first in his edition, Mr Robertson continues “. . . and Sir Walter Scott, no bad judge of a tale of diablerie, approved his judgement.”
Of course, now that I think about it, you all no doubt pay at least stumbling tribute to Burns every New Year’s when you embark upon “Auld lang syne”. (“Syne” just means since; which is pretty self-evident once you know it.) For American readers: let me point out that “syne” is a homophone of “sign”. The American urge to make this word begin with a “z” is nothing more than misplaced exoticism and cultural insecurity.
To keep you going on the poem, here’s the second page. The third page will be the subject of my next post.
May I draw your attention to the quatrain beginning at line 59. Nice! One vocab. item that strikes me: in line 64, the word flit doesn’t mean what it is that bats do, though it might be used in that context too as a contraction of flitter. To flit is the word all Scots will use to denote moving house, changing one’s address. So the stars should be thought of as moving away rather than as flickering, though there may be a bit of that lurking there too.
_______________
* By the way — Tam O’Shanter isn’t to be thought of as a descendant of Irish immigrants: his is not a name along the lines of Paul O’Neill. It’s Tom of Shanter. In a note at the end of this volume Mr Robertson informs me that “Shanter is a farm near Kirkoswald, in the Carrick, or southern division of Ayrshire, and its tenant, Douglas Graham, may have been the prototype of Tam. Burns, who took lessons in land-surveying at Kirkoswald in his seventeenth year, was well acquainted with the neighbourhood.” In southern Scotland this is an entirely conventional way of referring to a farmer. Logan of Whytbank would be the way others in the farming community would have referred to the man (my cousin, as it happens) who farmed Whytbank.
Well, I do like a comprehensive contents list in a poetry book. All too often publishers seem to assume that poems are too short to deserve listing in a contents page. Then there ends up only being an index of first lines, so that you have to remember “The Jolly Beggars” is actually not that but is hiding under “When lyart leaves bestrow the yird”* — surely one of the most beautiful lines ever written in English poetry. This Contents list goes on for fourteen pages — and the book also contains an Index of first lines, and a Chronological list. No getting lost in this volume. Thank you OUP.
That Gothic type hits us in the eye right away, and it is used (smaller of course) for the running heads throughout the book. Given the fact that as the dedicatee turned me on to the fact that this book must first have been published in the first half of the eighteen-nineties, maybe these gothic headings tell us a bit more of the story of the book’s history. I’m thinking now that the book may have been published in 1895 or whatever, in Oxford, and that to make it available for Humphrey Milford’s expansion of the London trade publishing programme, it was reissued (maybe in 1926) with new some front matter, (frontispiece, title page and imprints page) where the designers have managed to eschew the gothic look. Perhaps the original Oxford edition had the gothic type on the title page too — given that it’s there at the top of almost every page, someone must have loved it! Well of course it doesn’t really matter, since, with this trade book, all we are looking for is a handy Burns collection.
The book begins to look like a late season’s addition to the list, perhaps to make up for some other delayed books. “Get me some of those damn poetry books” you can hear Milford screaming. Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History tells us that “In 1905 the Delegates instructed Horace Hart [the Printer] to make over to Frowde [London manager before Milford] all the plates for The Oxford Poets”. Now I don’t know for sure that Robertson’s edition of Burns had been part of the series Oxford Poets, but I bet it was. I wouldn’t be surprised either to discover that The Oxford Poets series featured that Gothic type. The bulk of this book would be standing in the Oxford print works as stereos (the plates that had been made over to Henry Frowde), and jamming them on press with a quick switch of front matter would yield quick books for quick sale. No doubt Burns wasn’t the only poet favored with this livery that year.
There’s no way, short of serious bibliographical research, to be sure whether the object I am holding in my hands, which appears to have been cobbled together from a previously published more academic edition, is the first printing in this format or is itself a reprint of a trade edition published a year or two earlier. In some ways, who cares?
Going back to the initials OSA at the foot of the imprints page — it occurs to me to take a look at the Oxford Standard Authors edition of Burns, which I happen also to own. Immediately the copy on the front flap of the jacket takes us further down the rabbit hole: “This volume in the Oxford Standard Authors (replacing the 1904 Logie Robertson edition) is based on . . . “. So there was a 1904 edition of the Robertson text? This cannot be the edition reprinted in my father’s book, or the dedication to Richard Vary Campbell would surely have been changed — after all he’d died in 1901. Yet our book includes the initials OSA on its imprints page, so presumably was the Oxford Standard Authors text even before the 1904 edition came out: yet the site SeriesofSeries tells us that the Oxford Standard Authors series was only created in 1904! What would be the relationship between the series Oxford Poets and the Oxford Standard Authors? They can’t be synonymous since OSA contains prose texts too. Why when you published a new edition in 1904 would you keep the stereos of the original 1895(?) edition of Logie Robertson’s work? It’s all a bit chaotic. The only explanation is that the person writing the blurb for that jacket was focussed only on the OSA aspects of the series: Robertson’s 1904 “edition” is in fact just a reprint of his 1895(?) edition in the inaugural release of the OSA series. This means that the first OSA edition did indeed include the un-updated Campbell dedication — rather shoddy for a university press I think. (And to go back to that chestnut of the make-up of the first sig, just dropping that dedication would indeed have provided them with a leaf which was part of the sig and came before the frontispiece, thus rendering the binding more secure.)
__________________
* The primary meaning of “lyart” is grey as applied to hair. By extension it also refers to the withered colors of autumn leaves. The “yard” is just the yard. “Bestrow” will rhyme with cow.
Now we get into less successful design territory. The Preface is headed by a pretty ghastly gothic title. Why did Burns merit this backhander? The Scots were never particular aficionados of gothic types were they? The period following the word increases the damage: it is superfluous, and just makes the whole thing uglier.
It’s a pity no date is provided at the bottom of the preface, as is usually done nowadays. Whereas now the aim of the publisher is usually to make it as plain as possible to librarians and other interested customers just what the publication status of a particular book might be, before WWII it was not unusual to conceal this sort of information. After all, I dare say Mr Milford would have thought “If someone who buys this book finds that they also bought it thirty years ago under a different look — well, more fool them”; he had budgets to meet after all!
Our editor, James Logie Robertson was born in Milnathort in 1846 and worked as a school teacher at George Heriot’s School, George Watson’s College, both important Edinburgh boys’ secondary schools, and he ended his career at Edinburgh Ladies’ College, where he worked from 1876 till 1913. Edinburgh Ladies College was founded in 1694 by Mary Erskine, after whom the school was renamed in 1944. Robertson wrote poetry, much of it in Scots under the pen-name Hugh Haliburton. Here’s a sample of his work:
In Praise of Balgeddie*
I.
I sing of a spot,
Tho’ the warld knows it not,
And it’s nae great attraction to lord or to leddy;
There’s nae railway near it,
Nor devil hae ʼt to steer it –
It’s a canny country toun wi’ the name o’ Balgeddie.
(Chorus)
Set me at liberty, and let me gang,
On my ain shank’s-naig, or the back o’ a neddy;
I’ll never be mysel’, and I’ll never sing a sang
Till I see the sun sklent aff the ruifs o’ Balgeddie!
II.
It sleeps amang trees
To the bummin’ o’ its bees
Frae the sawin’ o’ the seed till the barley’s ready;
Then it waukens to a strife
For the dear staff o’ life,
An sleeps a’ the winter again, does Balgeddie.
III.
Wi’ the blue loch before it,
An the simmer bending o’er it,
An’ the Bishop hill ahint it, wi’ never a sheddie –
O whaur will ye find
Country quarters to your mind,
Or an auld cottar-toun wi a kirk, like Balgeddie?
IV.
Auld Reekie’s fu’ o’ stour,
An’ I’m deaved every hour
Frae the time I get up till I gang to my beddie:
But the loch’s cauler gleam,
I see it in my dream,
And I hear the bees bummin’ on the braes o’ Balgeddie.
…
(Chorus)
Set him at liberty, an’ let him gang,
On his ain shank’s-naig, or the back o’ a neddy;
He’ll never be himself’, and he’ll never sing a sang,
Till he tastes the barley-brew on the rigs o’ Balgeddie.
In my home town of Galashiels we have an annual civic celebration involving quaint medievalesque rituals at which one of Robert Burns’ songs is sung — “Braw, braw lads”, entitled in 1793, Galla Water. Do the inhabitants of Balgeddie remember Mr Robertson’s song in like manner?
___________
* Balgeddie is a village on the eastern shore of Loch Leven, while Milnathort, the poet’s birthplace, is at the northern end of the loch.
The next page in the book, the dedication page provides fascinating stimulus for thought.
Richard Vary Campbell (1840–1901) was Sheriff of Dumfries and Galloway from 1890 to 1896, when he became Sheriff of Roxburgh, Berwick and Selkirk — a promotion? Certainly nearer the metropolis. He was the author of three books, but they are strictly legal treatises. So why does he get an edition of Burns’ poems dedicated to him? Was he a friend of J. Logie Robertson, M.A.? I guess so. His responsibilities in Dumfries and Galloway did bring him into Burns country.
Significantly, it’s as Sheriff of Dumfries and Galloway that the dedication styles him, which means the book must have first been published between the years 1890 and 1896. In other words, what we are looking at here is not a first printing at all, but an umpteenth reprint. My animadversions on the practice of old time publishers when it came to printing history and other details of publication didn’t go nearly far enough!
More grist to this mill is provided by the fact that James Logie Robertson died in 1922. My assumption now is that everything prior to this page was typeset specifically for this trade edition, and that the guts of the book come from an academic version of Burns published in the previous century. The fact that a different typeface has been used on the title page and imprints page rather supports this view.
Still, everything on this dedication page is handsomely typeset and well letterspaced. The back of the page is blank — as the back of a display page such as a dedication ought to be.
The impressive list of branches includes two in Scotland. This would almost certainly be a consequence of Bible publishing. The Authorized Version of the Bible (KJV) provided the silver bullet, or do I mean golden egg, for both Oxford and Cambridge University Presses. The two presses had ancient licences to print the book, which is subject to Crown Copyright and may only be printed in England by the two university printers, or the King’s (or Queen’s) printer — in my day this was the late lamented Eyre & Spottiswoode. Both university presses made large sales of their bibles starting in the nineteenth century. Indeed both were able to leverage their biblical success to establish offices in New York. According to Wikipedia the current King’s printer is Cambridge University Press — I wonder where they are doing the work since their printing works have been closed for years!
“Printed in England” this book says, not Great Britain as we’d now expect — I wonder if this means anything. Papyrological scholar John Johnson was Printer to the University from 1925 to 1946 — so this was one of his early books. And just in case you failed to notice him on the title page, here comes Humphrey Milford again, tipping his hat to you.
Not sure what O.S.A. means. It seems unlikely that the Order of St. Augustine had anything to do with the book. Might it mean Oxford Standard Authors? I think so, although publishers do occasionally go in for cryptic coding systems to do things like identify the binder of a book without doing anything as crass as actually crediting them by name, but that seems unlikely in this case where the book would most likely be bound in the same Walton Street works where it was printed.
Making Book 