misc: off-set

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.

Ames, Typographical antiquities, 1749 (4I4v)

This blank verso unsurprisingly shows bleed-through from the recto's errata list and binder instructions. But it also shows off-set ink from the index: notice the columns of text and the heading. If you look closely above the bleed-through of "Directions" you can see a series of numbers starting "263, 300, 304"; next to the bleed-through you can see a series of "S"s lined up vertically, suggesting that this is part of the "S" entries. If you turn to sig. 4I1r, you'll see an entry for John Skelton that matches these characteristics. In a quarto, pages 1r and 4v are both on the outer forme, and so when those sheets were hung to dry, the ink from one page could easily transfer to another, as we see here.

Donne, Juvenilia, 1633 (F1v)

This blank page is surprisingly busy. There's ink bleeding through from the other side (you can see the running title "PARADOXES" at the top and the signature mark "F" at the bottom of the page) but there's also offset from the facing page ("PROBLEMS", the title of the next section). It can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between bleed-through and offset in digital images if you can't also see the facing page, but one clue is to look for different colored ink. But if you look at this page under raking light, you'll see there's even more going on than is apparent in this image.