Unintentionally blank pages

Indeed, as a couple of people correctly guessed, the blank pages in last week’s post came about by accident when two sheets of paper stuck together in the print shop.

The book is Folger STC 14933, a 17th-century sermon (Samuel Kenrick, The tell-troth’s requitall. London: printed by Miles Flesher for Robert Mylbourne, 1627). Everything seems normal until you get to page 15 and discover that pages 16 and 17 aren’t next. Instead, there are two blank pages.

First “leaf” of gathering D is actually two leaves, each blank on one side. Folger STC 14933, photo by Erin Blake.

The pattern continues, with two blank pages between 17 and 18.

“Leaf” D2, blank in the middle. Folger STC 14933, photo by Erin Blake.

And two blank pages between 19 and 20, which is even more disorienting thanks to the typo in the next page number, which says “12”  instead of “21”.

“Leaf” D3, blank in the middle. Folger STC 14933, photo by Erin Blake.

Finally, there are two blank pages between 21 and 22.

“Leaf” D4, blank in the middle. Folger STC 14933, photo by Erin Blake.

From page 23 to the end, everything is normal again.

The book’s signature statement is A-E⁴, which indicates that a standard copy was printed on five sheets of paper (A, B, C, D, and E) in “quarto” format (each sheet folded in half, then in half again, making a total of four double-sided leaves per sheet) like this mock-up:

Five sheets of notepaper folded in quarto format.

In the Folger copy, though, gathering D was printed on two sheets of paper stuck together. Instead of front-and-back of a single sheet, the printing ended up on the front of one sheet and the back of another.

To make a more realistic mock-up (and to procrastinate) I printed out a screen-shot of the book’s thumbnail images in EEBO (Early English Books Online):

Then I cut up the pages, taped them back together again as fronts and backs of “sheets”, labeled them A through E, and used a photocopier to make double-sided sheets for A, B, C, and E, and two single-sided sheets for D.

Finally, I folded them, as if preparing to make a miniature book:

Even though the words were illegible, everything matched up nicely to the real thing, with blank pages in the right places of gathering D, shown here open to pages 18 and 19:

Although the blank pages in the Folger copy are all visible now, that wasn’t the case earlier. When the Folger acquired the sermon in 1937,  the pages of gathering G were pasted together, hiding the blank sides, and the whole thing was part of a single volume of nineteen religious texts bound together. The paste was removed when titles were rebound separately in the 1950s, an outdated practice that is a story for another day.