Mise en page and mise en texte for Euclid’s Geometry (1546) by Becka
For some reason, I am unable to add any photos to this blog post due to “not enough space to upload”, so I apologize for the descriptions of images that my readers cannot see and will have to rely on my previous blog post’s images. I am unsure if it is due to lack of space on this blog or is related to the internet problems and/or the mouse problems where I’m on dorm duty…
At first glance, you can tell that this book is not an original Euclidean text, as I learned in my geometry class in the 90s that Euclid lived around 300 BC and had a school in Alexandria, Egypt, which meant his book was written on papyrus in scrolls. This is a codex and was published in 1546, long after the death of Euclid.
This book is paper, not parchment or papyrus. When shining a light through the pages, you can easily see the chain lines, which means it is laid paper. The text is printed on the pages using moveable type, and when you look at the pages at the right angle, you can see the indentations created in the pages by the letters. I’m not quite sure if I could actually feel them or if I was imagining that I could feel them.
The text on the pages is in one column and is more in the style of a modern book than what we have been discussing in class so far. The text is not all one block and is divided into paragraphs. While some of the paragraphs begin with historiated initials, some of them begin with indentations.
The text blocks are not centered in the middle of each page. The margins in the gutter and at the top of the page are smaller than the margins on the outside edge and the bottom of the pages. On the top of the pages in the outside corner, there are page numbers! Some pages have writing in the outside margins, but that writing is always in Greek, so I don’t think it’s a correction to the Latin text.
While it is mostly just on the left-hand pages at the bottom inside corner, there are certain pages where it occurs on the right-hand pages to. There is a right-justified line of one word, which is the first word on the next page. This is a catch-word. Unfortunately, many of these are useless for this text, as the word is often “Euclid” as many pages start with the line “Euclid ex Camp. Propositio #.”
On the bottom right-hand side of the right-hand pages, there are numbers and letters. They go in a pattern, such as d, d2, d3, and then d4. The next two pages don’t have these, and then the next letter starts. After the alphabet runs out, then there are double letters. This order is shown at the end of the book. These are the signature statements. Based on the pattern, I conclude that each signature is made up of three sheets of paper that are folded in half. Why the statements stop at 4 and have two blank ones, I think must be because the 4 tells you to stop stacking sheets and fold the sheets of paper in half, and the 4 is what you see when sewing the signatures together, and that you wouldn’t probably see or worry about 5 and 6 as much. I practiced this with some scrap sheets of paper at home and these are my best guesses on the pattern of signature statements.
This book has multiple fonts in it, and the fonts are different sizes. All of the fonts have serifs, and some of them appear to be in italics. This book was made in the time period where they used the symbol that looks almost like an f for s’s that are the first or last letters in a word. The majority of the text in this book is in Latin, but there are some places where the writing is in Greek. The Greek all appears to be the same font and size throughout the text.
All of the images in this volume are in done in black, with no color, and are made via woodcuts. The images include historiated initials or varying sizes, and decorative images at section headings. There are also geometry diagrams scattered throughout the book. Some of the diagrams take up a wide line of space between paragraphs, while others have the text wrapped around them. I could go on about this now, but shall save it for my next post on word and image dynamics.