Pièce 6 - Letter from W. W. Greg to R. B. McKerrow

1 single sheet

Park Lodge, Wimbledon Common, S.W.19.—Responds to McKerrow’s inquiry about a book in an unusual format.

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Transcript

Park Lodge, Wimbledon Common, S.W.19
near Tibbets Corner
24 Apr. 1929

Dear McKerrow

Yes. I see your difficulty & I am not sure whether the case can be made to fit into any of our formal categories. After all in bibliography we are dealing with a human element which presents infinite capacity for variation. All we can hope to do is to group normal behaviour into types.

I suppose what really constitutes an xo is that there are x pages in a forme, not primarily anything to do with the folding of a sheet. This seems to follow when we consider printing on vellum, in which case sheet has no real meaning. (From this it would follow of course that a folio printed a page at a time is not a folio at all.)

In that case your book would be an 8o not a 12o. But since we can as a rule tell more or less how a sheet was folded & not how the pages were arranged in the forme I should still prefer for practical purposes to call it a 12o. Something else may have been printed on the other third sheet at the same time as the 8 pp. of the book!

Yrs
W.W.G.

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The ‘o’s in the expressions ‘xo’, ‘8o’, and ‘12o’ are superscript in the original.