Books Before Typography: A Primer of Information About the Invention of the Alphabet and the History of Book-Making up to the Invention of Movable Types; Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 — John Shaqi
Books Before Typography: A Primer of Information About the Invention of the Alphabet and the History of Book-Making up to the Invention of Movable Types; Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49Hamilton, Frederick W. (Frederick William)
History
Books Before Typography: A Primer of Information About the Invention of the Alphabet and the History of Book-Making up to the Invention of Movable Types; Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49
Hamilton, Frederick W. (Frederick William)
Books -- History
It is difficult to tell where the use of punctuation begins. Some very
early manuscripts show the rudiments of it. The first punctuation mark
was the stop at the end of the period. This was originally two dots, or
our colon. When this became one dot it was at first the lower one that
was omitted so that the second form of the period is a dot level with
the top of the letter. The period, colon, and comma were each
represented by a single dot, the value depending upon whether it was on
a level with the top, the middle, or the bottom of the letter. During
the middle ages a system of punctuation was developed approximately as
we now have it.
Unfortunately words had the same tendency to refuse to fit the line that
bothers the modern compositor. The scribe, not being limited by the
resources of a font of type, did not hesitate to crowd his letters or
reduce them in size in order to get a word into a line. He also made use
of various devices of abbreviating words and combining letters to
produce the same result. These devices, however, were not very
satisfactory and division of words was always more or less practiced.
The Greeks usually divided after a vowel with no regard to syllables.
They even divided monosyllables in this way. The Romans, however, always
practiced syllabic division very much as we do to-day.
Another form of division of the text was what is called calometry, that
is to say, the breaking up of the text into short clauses or sense lines
to facilitate oral reading. This is done particularly in cases of
orations, the Bible, and similar compositions largely used for oral
reading. As in the papyrus, the title was ordinarily inserted at the end
and accompanied by some account of the work, place of copying, copyist,
date, or other information. This sort of appendix was called a colophon.
The practice of writing colophons was taken over by the early printers
and is the source of much of our most valuable information concerning
the early products of the press. Occasionally the title of the work was
given at the beginning although the custom of beginning the work with
the statement of its title, developing into the title page as we know
it, did not become general until some time after the invention of
printing. Occasionally a manuscript was even furnished with running
titles on the page heads. The pages were not numbered until after the
invention of printing.
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