The Jerome presents to our eyes the ordinary signatures to which we are
accustomed in fifteenth-century books, that is to say the marks a j, a
ij, a iij, a iiij on the recto of each of the four leaves which form the
first half of the sections of eight leaves (sixteen pages) of which the
book is generally composed. These are placed just below the last letters
of the printed page, close under them. Now the earliest known book with
a date in which signatures elsewhere occur in this developed form is an
©Expositio Decalogi©, by Johannes Nider, printed at Cologne by Koelhoff
in 1472, the next being a Cologne book by F. de Platea in 1474. The
argument is that it is extremely unlikely that an isolated printer in a
provincial town in England should make such a discovery and advance, and
that the next similar book should be a German one four years later[9].
What may be called the common ground of the discussion on this point is
well explained in Blades’s ©Books in Chains© (Lond. 1892), pp. 85–122,
in a paper on Signatures. He shows that the idea of signatures in
manuscripts is as old as books themselves, but that in manuscripts the
marks, being in writing and intended for the binder’s eye alone, were
naturally, as a rule, at the foot or corner of the page, and often cut
off in the process of binding. When printing came in, the obvious
difficulty was to print marks so far from the rest of the printed page
as to be cut off in binding. This difficulty was met in two ways: either
the signatures were _written in_ at the extreme foot (from 1462?), or
the signatures were stamped on by hand with single types (from 1473?).
Some printers, however, did manage by care to print signatures far from
the text (1474 on?). Ultimately in a single case in 1472 and with
increasing frequency from 1474 printers found that the essential
ugliness of printed signatures close to the page was counterbalanced by
the utility and convenience of the change, and our modern system was
begun.
Now, it must be constantly remembered that the entire weight of disproof
lies with those who dispute the printed date. This is why it is simply
amusing to read Blades’s sage words on the subject of this 1472 book
with normal printed signatures. He is pledged to renounce the Oxford
date, but he finds it awkward that there _is_ an isolated book of 1472
in precisely the same category—with the same want of precedent, the same
absence of imitators, the same forlorn appearance. Observe how he deals
with it (p. 116 of the book above cited):—“This is a puzzling book, for
it is at least two years earlier than any other book so signed. In this
city, too. [i. e. Lübeck[10]] many works were issued with MS. signatures
with a later date than this. It is dangerous to assert that a book is
wrongly dated because you cannot make it fit into a bibliographical
theory; but I feel inclined, from the general aspect of the book, to
date it as 1482, rather than 1472.” And yet a very high authority on
typography assures me that the book is _undoubtedly_ of 1472! What then
prevents the tentative and isolated experiment of Cologne from having a
similar tentative and isolated forerunner, even at Oxford? We may
remember too that in the infancy of printing it was common to detect
errors as the book went through the press, and often the printer himself
corrected an error with his pen, as in the colophon of the Aegidius (see
p. 1). Or a reader would do the same. But it is believed that in no copy
of the Jerome is there any attempt to correct or even throw suspicion on
the date. There is the date, plain and detailed, and it is allowable to
wait for scientific proof before it is abandoned. _A priori_
considerations have force, but they are liable to sudden overthrow.
Clearly the consideration of signatures alone cannot avail to disprove
the date of the Jerome. But much more remains.