Kevin's Watch

Hey... this has probably been asked before... But while reading the covantents every few pages i come across a series of letters in the bottom left hand corner eg.

I.W.--D

Obvioulsy it stand for Illeart War and it does go through the alphabet from A - Z but does anyone know the purpose of these?

Thanks

Cam

Hey Cam, good to see you back. My copies of the books don't have those, sorry.

All mine and my freinds do... I have always wondered what it is... oh well

...or perhaps it's a grinning face with a flat head, pointy eyes and a long, flat nose

Are they book club editions?

extravirgin wrote:Hey... this has probably been asked before... But while reading the covantents every few pages i come across a series of letters in the bottom left hand corner eg.

I.W.--D

Obvioulsy it stand for Illeart War and it does go through the alphabet from A - Z but does anyone know the purpose of these?

Thanks

Cam

Those sound like signature marks. Books are most often bound in signatures of 16 or 32 pages, each of which is folded separately before being attached to the binding. Each signature is marked by an identifying label printed on one corner, such as your 'I.W.—D', to help the binder insert them in the correct order.

It's a common practice for publishers to keep a big inventory of unbound signatures on hand. Printing is only cheap when done in huge quantity, but binding is pretty expensive no matter how many books you do in one batch, so you can save a good deal of money by not binding the books till someone actually orders them. (There are also stupid tax reasons for keeping your inventory unbound, which I won't go into.) So even when the printing and binding are done in the same shop, it's necessary to have some quick and unambiguous way of telling the signatures apart.

Every so often, one hears of a run of books with a chunk of pages out of order, or even with a signature from a completely different book bound in. This happens because someone at the binding plant grabbed the wrong crate of unbound signatures from the press, and did not look at the signature marks.

Often these marks are printed in an area of the paper that is trimmed before binding, but sometimes they are visible in the finished book. That happens especially with cheap editions, which are designed to use as little paper as possible. It's mildly interesting to a printing wonk to spot these marks and see what method each publisher uses to identify signatures. For instance, my grandmother's Macmillan edition of Tennyson's Idylls of the King (printed very cheaply as a high-school textbook in 1919) is bound in 16-page signatures. Looking closely, I observe a small letter B at the bottom of page 1 (the introduction and table of contents being A), C on page 17, D on page 33, etc. Clearly this edition was bound in-house as soon as it came off the press, for there was no need to identify the book itself in the signature mark. Once all the books were bound, any leftover signatures would have been recycled before the next job came in.

HTH.

Disclaimer: Although I've been a customer of the printing industry from time to time for over 20 years, I myself am not a professional printer, so I may have made errors of detail.

I have learned something new today.

Thanks Variol Farseer!!

Earthblood

Thanks for the in depth explanation... much appreciated... I ahve always wondered and that makes a lot of sense...