Ames, Typographical antiquities, 1749 ([A]1r)

This title page carefully uses a combination of gothic, roman, black, and red letters to evoke the earlier printing that is its subject while still looking enticingly contemporary.

Ames, Typographical antiquities, 1749 (4I3v)

Ames's history of English printing includes an alphabetical index of printers and other persons, followed by this single-page index of subjects. To our eye, this is curiously arranged---why is it not alphabetical? Perhaps because this organization allows the blocks of numbers for each subject heading to remain intact instead of being split over columns.

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.

Ames, Typographical antiquities, 1749 (a1r)

Appropriately for a book about the history of printing, this list of subscribers marks out the two Caslons as letter-founders.

Ames, Typographical antiquities, 1749 (frontis.)

Copies of early English printer's devices make up the frontispiece to Ames's history of English printing.