This is a translation (with AI assistance) of an article about quire signatures that I wrote for the magazine of the bookbinding association of the Netherlands. I’m publishing it on my blog because it is of interest to the subject of scribing manuscripts and because I want to publish pictures that weren’t included in the magazine due to space constraints.
The work of creating a book was divided between scribes and bookbinders. But how would a scribe ensure that a bookbinder, who is unfamiliar with the content, keeps the loose gatherings in the correct order? It seems that in the Middle Ages, they faced the same challenge. They devised two methods to indicate the correct sequence of gatherings.
The first method involves the use of catchwords, while the second employs a system of numbering known as quire signatures.
The first method involves the use of catchwords, while the second employs a system of numbering known as quire signatures. In this article, we explore these methods: how they function, when they originated, and what evolution they underwent during the Middle Ages. Finally, I briefly conclude with how the invention of printing eventually displaced these methods by the end of the nineteenth century.
Quire marks
The earliest known method to indicate the order of loose gatherings for an unbound manuscript involves the use of quire signatures (Dutch: ‘katernsignaturen’). In their simplest form, these are nothing more than counting each quire with a number or a letter from the alphabet, such as i-ii-iii-iiii or a-b-c-d. The first signatures appeared in the fourth century AD in Greece. After a period of disuse, they reappeared in Western manuscripts from the eighth century AD.
When looking for quire signatures in a medieval manuscript, you can find them on the front or back side of its quires. They are usually on the front, often in the middle at the bottom of the page. Since this system uses the Latin alphabet, letters [j], [u], and [w] are not used. Although the sounds existed, these letters were officially added to our alphabet in the seventeenth century.
Sometimes, a quire signature may partially disappear from the page. This is caused by trimming a book during binding. The more it is rebound, the more the signature may gradually vanish. It’s not uncommon for quire signatures and/or catchwords to be lost due to the rebinding of books.
As the Middle Ages progressed, we see the quire signature system evolving further. People began numbering the leaves within a quire by adding a Roman numeral after the letters, such as aI-aII-aIII-aIV-bI-bII-bIII-bIV-cI-cII-cIII-cIV. This became especially common from the thirteenth century onwards.
If I may speculate why, personally, I suspect that the significantly increased book production also necessitated numbering the individual leaves within a quire. Additionally, this development coincides with the flourishing of universities and the use of the ‘pecia’ system. The latter is a system where quires of a book were rented, allowing one to make a personal copy.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, books grew in size. It became more common to encounter manuscripts with more quires than letters in the alphabet. The solution was simple: add an extra letter to your quire signature and start counting again. In larger books, you might find signatures with two letters, such as: …zI-zII-zIII-zIV-AaI-AaII-AaIII-AaIV-BbI-BbII-BbIII-BbIV-CcI-CcII-…
Authors note: Interestingly, one of two exemplars for my manuscript project, the Aberdeen bestiary, uses a variation on quire marks which consists of symbols instead of a numbering. These symbols are either drawn multiple times, or in a specific way to denote the number of the leaf in their respective quires. You can read more about it on the page regarding the codicology of the Aberdeen bestiary.
Catchwords
The catchword (Dutch: ‘custode’) is another way to keep your quires in order. A catchword is a word found on the back side of a quire (usually at the bottom of the page, toward the spine). This word corresponds to the very first word you read on the next quire. If every first word of a quire matches the catchword of the previous one, you know that all the quires for a book are in the correct sequence.
For catchwords, it’s not uncommon to find deviations and variations from the explanation given above. For example, it’s not unusual for the catchword to consist of two words instead of one. This is useful if there is a risk that two or more quires begin with the same word. Additionally, it’s not necessary to use the entire words, but only the first syllables of them. This is evident in many of the examples.
According to Dr. Ana Belen Sanchez, the earliest known catchwords were found in a South-French manuscript from the ninth century. In the tenth century, catchwords became common in many Spanish manuscripts, and then they spread to France and Italy. Around the thirteenth century, catchwords appeared in various Western European manuscripts.
Foliation
In the system of foliation, the leaves of a manuscript are numbered (not the pages). This numbering is typically found in the upper right corner of the leaf (the recto side) in a codex. When encountering foliation, it’s important to consider that it may not have been added during the creation of the book.
Sometimes, foliation is added later, after the book is bound. It is not uncommon to find errors in foliation in a manuscript. These errors can occur accidentally when pages are skipped or numbering is inadvertently repeated during the addition.
Dr. Ana Belen Sanchez explains that the system of foliation first appears (in a very limited way) in combination with catchwords in manuscripts from the ninth or tenth century. With the rise of universities around the thirteenth century, foliation becomes more popular. It is challenging to determine when foliation was added, although the handwriting style of the numbers sometimes provides some indication. The fact that foliations are written in pencil does not necessarily mean they are modern: the first pencils with graphite date back to 1560.
Printing
Eventually, foliation is replaced by the pagination of individual pages, a shift that began in the fifteenth century and gradually became more common. In pagination, individual leaves are no longer numbered; instead, the individual pages themselves are numbered. The use of catchwords and quire signatures starts to decline with this transition.
Catchwords and signatures begin to vanish more rapidly due to the mechanization and automation of the production process. As less manual labor is involved, there is less need for these markings. Consequently, you see them gradually disappearing from books during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
Based on my own experience working in a large printing company, I can confirm that catchwords and quire signatures have indeed fallen out of use. In printer’s marks, you might still see the leaf number, similar to foliation. However, in the modern production process, these are eventually trimmed away so that they are not visible to the customer.
Post-face
With this article, I hope that readers unfamiliar with this topic have gained insight into how quires were historically kept in order. Although there is more to tell and show, I have chosen to limit the information in this article for readability. I would like to thank Astrid Beckers for providing access to and use of her library and visual materials.
For any questions or comments about the content of this article, don’t hesitate to reach out via the contact form.
References
Clemens R. & Graham T. (2007). Introduction to manuscript studies. Cornell University Press.
DBNL. (2012). Inhoudsopgave van Algemeen letterkundig lexicon – DBNL. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01
Kwakkel, E. (z.d.). The work of the scribe. https://smarthistory.org/the-work-of-the-scribe/
Sanchez-Prieto, A. B. (2019). Codex Architecture 3. Working with Quires. Ucm. https://www.academia.edu/28727236/Codex_Architecture_3_Working_with_Quires