How Do Printers Leave Their Mark?

The two books on display in this case  represent very different editions of Shakespeare’s plays: the Second Folio (1632) on the left and Pericles (1635) in octavo format on the right, both printed by Thomas Cotes. While scholars often focus on textual variations that reveal the long history of editing Shakespeare, this display invites you instead to step inside the 17th-century print house and consider these books as material objects.

The early modern print house was a busy, crowded space where many hands contributed to each stage of production—from setting and sorting type to folding printed sheets into gatherings and ultimately binding them into books. Tools clattered, workers moved constantly, and freshly printed pages hung overhead to dry. The image to the right, Impressio Librorum (Jan van der Straet, c.1580) shows the early modern printhouse. Held in the British Museum’s collection, we display this image here to give you a sense of the liveliness and movement involved in the business of bookmaking.

Printing was not yet a form of mass production performed at a distance as it is today. It was an artistic, deeply material process. Typesetters created each page by hand, touching every individual letter and making choices about layout that were both practical and aesthetic. 

Consider the printer’s ornament visible here: the same design appears in two texts published three years apart. Early modern print shops maintained their own stock of ornaments, reusing them both to break up the text visually and to fill empty space on a page. The ornament that links these two books invites us to imagine the labor behind the mark on the page and the connection it creates across works and across time.

We often credit actors and performers with bringing Shakespeare’s words to life, but I urge you to consider instead the many hands that brought life to the page itself.

Ayesha Mukherjee is a junior English major with interests in museum studies and bookbinding. This is the first in a series of small exhibitions that she will be creating as the inaugural Gillespie Curatorial Fellow.