T - V - W

- Talking Heads. Early printers were remarkably ingenious in designing and cutting multi-purpose woodcuts, which allowed them to maximize the use obtained from a particular block of wood. One especially clever device consists in cutting a human figure with an interchangeable head on a slot. For example in Venice in the 1490s the androgynous body of a warrior can be adapted to picture a male hero or a warrior queen ; see Neil Harris, ‘’Il Guerino o l’Ancroia a scelta in una silografia quattrocentesca’, La Bibliofilìa , vol. 91 (1989), pp. 95-100. Other substitutions of heads or of other parts of the body can transform saints into sinners and handmaidens into princesses.

- Unidentified Falling Objects. It sometimes happens that in the bustle of the printing an object falls on the forme and, unnoticed by the press-men for a sheet or two, leaves its impression on the sheet as an inked object. In this way it was noticed that early type sometimes had the base filed to a point and a hole drilled through the shank, presumably to run a wire through and give greater stability to the setting of type in the forme; see Marius Audin, Somme typographique (Paris, Audin, 1948-49, I, pp. 144-147); Victor Scholderer, ‘The Shape of Early Type’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1927), pp. 24-25, reprinted in Idem, Fifty Essays in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Bibliography, edited D. E. Rhodes (Amsterdam, Menno Hertzberger, 1966), pp. 106-107; James Mosley, ‘The Enigma of the Early Lyonnaise Printing Types’, in La Lumitype-Photon. René Higonnet, Louis Moyroud et l’invention de la photocomposition moderne. Actes de colloque. Musée de l’Imprimere et de la Banque, Lyon, le 20, 21 octobre 1994 mso-bidi-font-style:italic">, textes réunis et présentés par Alan Marshall (Lyon, Ville de Lyon: Musée de l’Imprimerie et de la Banque, 1995), pp. 13-28. A fairly exhaustive bibliography (i.e. all the references to the problem I managed to find) relating to UFOs can be found in Neil Harris, ‘A mysterious UFO in the Venetian Dama Rovenza [c. 1482]’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch (2003), pp. 22-30.

- Vellum (Printing on) . Again a problem to which Bowers and friends paid no attention whatsoever, since items of the kind were encountered once in a blue moon. Bibliographers however used to Fifteenth century printing and in particular the outputs of Nicholas Jenson, Aldus Manutius, or Antoine Verard, are aware that printing books on vellum was part and parcel of the attempt by early printers to disguise the ars artificialiter scribendi as a non innovative way of making manuscripts, though the technical problems were considerable, since under the platen skin behaves quite differently to paper. One interesting question is the extent to which printers were aware of Gregory’s rule or the fact that scribes would match the leaves in a codex so that in any opening both pages come either from the hair-side or the flesh-side of the skins. Though it is not difficult for a printer to observe this norm in small and medium formats, a folio requires a certain amount of calculation. A thesis done by Ivana Lorandi at the University of Udine (‘Incunaboli pergamenacei stampati in Italia: censimento’, Udine, aa. 1996-1997, relatore prof. Neil Harris), based on the study of exemplars belonging to fifty-three Italian editions of the Fifteenth century, shows that printers were certainly aware of the need to organise the distinction between hair/flesh side of the vellum, but sometimes got themselves into difficulty. The classic studies of printing on vellum remain Joseph Van Praet, Catalogue de livres imprimés sur vèlin de la Bibliothèque du Roi (Paris, De Bure, 1822-28) and Catalogue des livres imprimés sur vélin qui se trouvent dans des bibliothèques tant publiques que particulières, pour servir de suite au catalogue des livres imprimés sur vélin de la Bibliothèque du Roi (Paris, De Bure, 1824-28), to which can be added in recent times Robin Alston, Books Printed on Vellum in the Collections of the British Library (London, The British Library, 1996).

- Wormholes. Bibliographers and worms have always been good friends and the former usually follow the activities of the latter with professional curiosity; see The Library , s. 4, vol. 18 (1937), pp. 463-464. For instance, if in a copy of a quarto edition gathered in eights we find a hole neatly drilled through the first and third leaves in a sequence of gatherings, we deduce that the worm in question paid its visit before the copy was folded up and bound. Likewise wormholes can be precious in spotting leaves interpolated in facsimile, though I know a case of a superb imitation in which they have been scrupulously imitated, or changes in the arrangement of gatherings during rebinding.