Sir Sydney Lee has written[43]:--"As a specimen of typography, the First
Folio is not to be commended. There are a great many contemporary folios
of larger bulk far more neatly and correctly printed. It looks as though
Jaggard's printing office was undermanned. The misprints are numerous,
and are especially conspicuous in the pagination." In the same year was
published "The Theater of Honour and Knighthood," translated from the
French of Andreu Favine. William Jaggard was the printer. It is a large
folio volume containing about 1,200 pages, and is referred to as being
issued by Jaggard as an example of the printer's art to maintain his
reputation, which had suffered from the apparently careless manner in
which the Shakespeare Folio was turned out. Both books contain the same
emblematic head-pieces and tail-pieces. There are, however, some
considerable mispaginations in "The Theater of Honour." Mispaginations
were not infrequent in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, but it is
quite possible that they were not unintentional. The most glaring
instance is to be found in the first Edition of "The Two Bookes of
Francis Bacon--Of the Proficience and Advancement in Learning, Divine
and Humane," published by Henrie Tomes (1605). Each leaf (not page) is
numbered. The 45 leaves of the first book are correctly numbered. In the
second book there is no number on leaf 6. Leaf 9 is numbered 6, the
right figure being printed upside down; 30 is numbered 33; from 31 to
70 the numbering is correct, and then the leaves are numbered as
follows:--70, 70, 71, 70, 72, 74, 73, 74, 75, 69, 77, 78, 79, 80, 77,
74, 74, 69, 69, 82, 87, 79, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 97, 99, 94, 100,
99, 102, 103, 103, 93, 106, and on correctly until the last page, 118,
except that 115 is numbered 105.
It is impossible to attribute this mispagination to the printer's
carelessness. This was the first work published bearing Bacon's name,
excepting the trifle of essays published in 1597. There does not appear
to have been any hurry in its production. It is quite a small volume,
and yet the foregoing remarkable mispaginations occur. There must be
some purpose in this which has yet to be found out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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