ABSTRACT
Professor Hinman asks: What plan would ensure the most satisfactory ratio between the time necessary to set one forme of the contemplated book into type and the time needed to print off the desired number of copies of such a forme? - for an efficient balance between composition and presswork was one of the prime requirements of successful printing house operations in the earlier seventeenth century. (Printing and Proof-Reading, I, 45n.) This last is a quite different and seriously distorting assumption: that an economic relationship between composition and presswork is necessary on anyone book for the business as a whole to be successful. The position is really so much more complex; indeed the more variables a printer has to juggle - in numbers of compositors and full or half press-crews, in their individual capacities, in edition sizes, in the num-
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The pioneer study in the use of headlines, as in much else, was written by Professor Bowers over thirty years ago.34 The association of sets of headlines with skeleton formes is now so well evidenced that it may be taken for granted, and, as Professor Bowers has also remarked, "the basic principles of the printer's use of headlines did not differ markedly in any period when books were printed by hand."35 Where a single skeleton was used for both formes of a sheet, the press was idle while the forme just off the press was being washed and stripped and its skeleton was being transferred to the type pages which were next to be printed .... Some printers used two skeletons, each with its own set of headlines. Thus while one forme was on the press, the skeleton was being stripped from an already printed forme and imposed about the type pages next to be printed. Since the transfer of this second skeleton could take place while the press was printing the first, there was no delay at all between the time a forme was removed from the press and the time the new one was planked down on the bed (pp. 188-g).
