Thomas Marshe Invents the Press Figure

摘要

I HAVE OCCASIONALLY ENJOYED THE GUILTY THOUGHT (born of a reprovable Schadenfreude) that one of the advantages of using the death of James I to define the upper limit of my bibliographical reach is that I never have to cope with the complexity of press figures. I did, of course, have to learn something about them as an undergraduate. Small symbols, letters, or numbers, distinct from signatures but sporadically found in some books in the direction lines below various pages (more often versos than rectos), press figures were often confusingly inconsistent but (I was happy to learn) almost unknown before the Interregnum.