An Explanation of Bibliographical Conventions Used in the Expanded Descriptions of Books Printed by William Stansby

The expanded descriptions of books printed by William Stansby follow the guidelines gathered and codified in Fredson Bowers' Principles of Bibliographical Description (Princeton: 1949) and refined by G. Thomas Tanselle over the past 25 years. Due to differences in the way Web browsers treat typographic material, I've modified certain bibliographical conventions for clarity:

1. Superscripts. I've used superscript characters in the following situations:
   1. An 'o' following a number in format identification, i.e., to indicate quarto, octavo, etc.;
   2. A digit following characters in a signature collation to indicate the number of leaves in a gathering;
   3. A digit preceeding repeated characters in a signature collation or when referring to a specific gathering, e.g., when the single letter 'A' is used by Stansby to sign more than one gathering.
   At present, only Mosaic supports superscript characters. For those viewing this project with other browsers, superscript characters will appear full-sized. This should not cause confusion in the first two instances, for format and signature collations use only superscripts, never full-sized characters [Note: In a statement of signing, references to single leaves use full-sized numbers. However, signing statements in this project do not contain any reference to gatherings and thus do not contain superscript characters]. A possible confusion does arise in the case of multiple gatherings signed identically. For clarity's sake I have used curly braces "{ }" to surround all superscript characters preceeding such gatherings. I have not used superscript "v" and "r" to indicate verso and recto; these appear full-sized in all page designations.
2. Small Caps. No browser offers the multiple underlines required to identify the use of small capitals on title-pages. Netscape does support relative font sizes, and I have tagged small capitals to appear two sizes smaller than the surrounding characters. For those using other browsers, there will be no differentiation between full-sized and small capitals.
3. Special Characters. No browser at present supports the set of special characters required for complete bibliographical description. When such characters are required, I have used bracketed names in their place, e.g., [pi], [chi] and [par].

Following is a brief explanation of each of the elements in the expanded descriptions:

Title-page: When available, this section contains a full quasi-facsimile title-page transcription.

• Vertical lines "|" indicate end-of-line;
• Angle brackets ">" indicate a tailed character;
• Swash characters are indicated within square brackets "[ ]";
• Ornaments refer to type ornaments discussed below;
• Special characters and superscripts are discussed above.

If a complete transcription is not available, a condensed version will appear in its place.

Collation: When available, this section includes a format and signature collation. In some instances a statement of signing will also appear.

Type: When available, this section lists the main types used in the volumes production, with a 20-line measurement and body identification.

Ornaments: Ornaments used by Stansby to produce the volume are listed in this section. Each entry employs the following format:

identifier-source: location1, location2, etc..

• The identifier is a short string indicating the type of ornament. A single letter refers to an ornamental letter, while the following identifiers are used for other pieces:
  • bor: border
  • fac: factotum
  • fl: fleur
  • hp: head-piece
  • misc: miscellaneous device
  • tp: tail-piece
• The source is an abbreviation of the author from whose work the digital image was taken.
• The location is the page or pages in the present volume containing the particular ornament.

For example, "hp-jon07: A1r" indicates a head-piece can be found on page A1 verso, and the catalogue image comes from Ben Jonson's folio Workes.

Linked items take you to an image and description of the ornament.

Paper: This section contains a gathering-by-gathering listing of the paper used in the volume, and each listing takes the form:

signature: identifier.

• The signature refers to the printer's identifying signature for the gathering in question;
• The identifier refers to the unique name given to each paper group. These names either take the form of a number, in the case of paper found in the Jonson folio, or a short name taken from the author whose book the paper image was taken from (e.g., "Cam01" refers to a a mark found in William Camden's Annales Rerum Anglicarum).

Linked images take you to watermark images and descriptions of the paper group.

Copies Examined: This section contains a list of the copies I examined in compiling the description. The library identifier comes from the National Union Catalogue naming scheme.

Catalogue Homepage

IATH WWW Server