Philobiblon

I’m old enough, just, to have worked with compositors in the back room of a newspaper, marking up copy for them to typeset, directing the paste-down process, and signing pages off “the stone”.

It was the comps at the Cootamundra Herald who taught me a range of (fairly) standard correction marks: the stroke through a letter to delete, the upward-pointing arrow at the relevant spot for insert, # for a space, a circle around a dot for a full point (full stop).

But I hadn’t realised, until reading Phillip Gaskell’s New Introduction to Bibliography: The Classic Manual of Bibliography, which covers EVERYTHING you could conceivably want to know about the actual production of books through the past 500 years or so, that these all date back to the 16th century. (I also learnt that the arrow is called a “caret”.)

Nice to think that through so much change some things stay the same. Whether this will survive the age of Word “track-changes” I’m not sure. Would be nice to think they would – one small piece of continuity…