Size

The size is not about the actual physical size but about the bibliographical format. A book is not printed page by page of leaf by leaf. Several pages are printed together on a sheet of paper. Folded once a sheet would contain 4 pages and called in-2; folded twice it would contain 8 pages and called in-4; folded three times it would have 16 pages and called in-8. The number of possible ways to fold a sheet is enormous and some specialist books have been written on it. The most common formats were in-4, in-8 and in-12. In-2 was for luxurious books, the smaller formats were used for specific genres: cheap editions of the classics and songbooks.

Title page from an oblong edition of an emblembook.

There are two ways to look at front matter, body matter and end matter. A bibliographer would look at the way a the quires are signed and thus decide on bibliographical evidence which is which. But you can also look at the content and divide the different parts according to their content. The body contains the actual text - and of course the paratext that is directly related to it: notes, remarks in the margins, headers and footers. Front matter and end matter contain paratext with different functions: identification, recommendation, descroptions of the content, indexes and so on.

identifying the copy

For books from the hand-press period it is important to identify the edition but also the copy used. Early modern books are by definition individuals. Most of the work done on books was hand work. Typesetting and printing was manual labour and so was the gathering of the printed leaves and the cutting and binding of the quires. During it's long passage through time and space a book acquired the traces made by users: torn pages, scriblings, owner's notes and so on. To be able to trace these, we note which copy we used.

A short title here is not the short title that a specialist bibliographer would made.

- The name of the author is given in it's standard form that does not have to be the same that is found on the title page. We use the name Desiderius Erasmus in stead of Erasmus Roterodamus.

- The title is shortened and the impressum, the part that contains the place of publication, the name of the printer and the year of publication is normalized.

This book is: Desiderius Erasmus. Familiarum colloguiorum formulae. Deventer, A. Paffraet, 1519
The Shelfmark is important. This is the copy in the Dutch Royal Library: Den Haag KB 226 E 86.

The year of publication and the place are mentioned separately. This is to be able to trace changes in typographical vogues.