james weatherups great find
The book was clearly missing a title page, and since the pages were unnumbered James was unsure how many preliminary leaves should have been present in the volume. Four leaves of the Preface survived – ** ** 2 ** 3 and ** 4 . Although his note omits ** 4 this is because the leaf was the only one unsigned in the gather and he confirmed a total of 4 leaves in brackets afterwards. His initial assumption was that there were ‘6 leaves?’ of preliminaries, comprising signature ** preceded by a signature * of two leaves to include the title page and start of the Preface. When Weatherup wrote to Rosenbach this quandary was restated as ‘a few leaves missing’ suggesting he was unsure whether the first gather contained two or four leaves. The other group of missing pages was signature D. The initial comment ‘Signature D wanting pp8’ had, by the time of the letter to Rosenbach (and presumably after a closer examination of the bind- ing) become the more confident statement that the missing leaves of signature D ‘do not ever seem to have been in this copy’. The sheet D hiatus is one of the few documented anomalies in surviving copies of the Bay Psalm Book . At least two of the copies have sheet D turned the wrong way in reiteration. Hugh Amory argues that the printer Steven Day’s indenture terminated with the printing of sheet D, after which he was able to charge for the remaining thirty-three sheets of the Bay Psalm Book . 6 If this sheet had never been bound into the Weatherup copy it would strengthen the supposition that there was a break in the continuity at the time of printing sheet D. A third aspect, the tick marks on the card against the running title spelling psalm on the verso and psalme on the recto pages, strongly suggest Weatherup was double checking this curious anomaly. These ticks were omitted in the letter to Rosenbach. Fourthly he began recording the page numbers with ‘pp1’ only to score it out and write ‘unpaged’ instead. The final comment on the card confirms the missing text was sixteen verses of Psalm 18 (commencing with verse 35), all of Psalms 19, 20 and 21, and up to the first two lines of verse 15 Psalm 22. The collation formula for a complete copy of the Bay Psalm Book is *-** 4 , A-Ll 4 (24 letter register omitting J and U) 6 . Hugh Amory, “Gods Altar Needs Not our Pollishings’: Revisiting the Bay Psalm Book” in Printing History the Journal of the American Printing History Association vol. XIII no 2 (1990) p. 9.
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