main printed feature: correction

It was not unusual for hand-press books to have mistakes in them, and a variety of methods could be used to correct those mistakes, including printing new leaves, pasting in corrected slips of paper, or printing up a list of errors and adding it to the book. These items feature these and other types of corrections.

Ames, Typographical antiquities, 1749 (4I4r)

Since intaglio plates were printed separately from letterpress sheets, books often included notes to the binder describing where the illustrations should go. As is typical, these instructions appear on the very last printed page of the book, here facing the subject index; you can see the ink from the index text off-set in the blank areas of this page.

Fletcher, Thierry, 1621 (C1v corr.)

This page shows the corrected version with all of the proofreader's indicated changes on the proofsheet made. This copy of the play provides a useful comparison of this process since a former owner has, unusually, bound in the proofsheet immediately following this correctly printed page (reversing the leaf so that the two versos face each other).

Fletcher, Thierry, 1621 (C1v uncorr.)

This page survives from one of the playbook's original proofsheets. The corrector has written marks down the margin indicating where the text needs to be reset. In the tenth line, the last word is struck out and a "d" for "deleted" is placed in the margin; in the very last line, a caret after "Martell" indicates where the comma needs to be added. If you compare this proof with the corrected version, you'll see the compositor has made the requested changes.

Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 1683 (pl. 24)

This entire page is made by engraving lines into a copper plate. When the engraver noticed that a letter had accidentally been dropped from "Emptying" in the caption, he used a caret to insert the "p" in its proper place.

Vincent, Discouerie, 1622 (4C1r)

A cancel slip has been pasted over the top coat of arms to correct it; in this copy, the slip is slightly askew, making it easy to spot.

Vincent, Discouerie, 1622 (4O2v)

The cancel slip pasted over one of the marginal notes here is nearly invisible in this digital image. But if you look at the recto of this leaf, you can clearly see the ink bleed-through from the covered up note.

Vincent, Discouerie, 1622 (4O3v)

At first glance, this page looks free from error and correction. But on a closer look, you can see that the last line of text has been added after the main text was printed---the last word of the line is printed over the original catchword and the ink is a slightly different color.

Whitney, Choice of emblemes, 1586 (3*2v)

This errata list, squeezed in small font at the bottom of the page, warns that while most of the mistakes were corrected during printing, there are still many leaves that have the errors.

Whole Booke of Psalmes 1640 (2L4r)

This list of "faults escaped" invites the reader to correct not only these but any other errors that aren't noted here.