What does “ T—S.T.D.—B” mean in a book?

April 6, 2023 1:03 PM

The bottom of page 33—and only page 33 – in my 1966 Penguin edition of Saul Bellow’s “Seize the Day” has “T—S.T.D.—B” written on the bottom left, opposite the page number. What does it stand for?
posted by whitewall to Media & Arts (46 answers total)

Response by poster: (I’m assuming “S.T.D.” is an abbreviation for the title, but what’s the rest mean and why is it there?)
posted by whitewall at 1:04 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I would reckon it's just initials, like it's a note from one person "T" to another person "B"
posted by meemzi at 1:08 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maybe a signature mark that was supposed to be cut when the pages were trimmed.
posted by lapis at 1:08 PM on April 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Do you mean it is printed there, the same way the rest of the text is printed? Or is it a note someone scribbled?

Maybe post a photo?
posted by grouse at 1:14 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: It’s actually printed in the book. Here’s a photo.
posted by whitewall at 1:19 PM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

If it's printed, I bet it's a signature mark and the T and B stand for Top and Bottom (to orient how the thing would be fed into whatever they use to bind the book.
posted by Daily Alice at 1:20 PM on April 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

If it had a 32-page signature, as many mass-market paperbacks do, and no special page numbering for front matter, page 33 would be the first page of the second section. And maybe they wouldn't want to put weird marks at the beginning of the first section because it would stick out on a page that is mostly empty space like the half-title.
posted by grouse at 1:37 PM on April 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

Maybe I don't understand that kind of "section," but the pages in the image both begin and end in the middles of sentences.
posted by rhizome at 2:26 PM on April 6, 2023

I'd like to think of it, in meemzi's terms, as a secret but ardent romance between compositors.

I guess one question would be: can anyone who has any other Penguin literary publications from the late 60s check if there are comparable marks in those?
posted by Pallas Athena at 2:31 PM on April 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think the B at the end refers the sheaf of 16 pages: it’s an aid to the binding of the book and I expect you’d see similar marks on pages 49, 65, 81 etc. But Í am not sure about the T at the beginning.
posted by muhonnin at 2:41 PM on April 6, 2023

Is there anything in the book approximately 32 pages later? Like page 65 ish? (That might be the first page of the next section.

And - IS the 33rd page the front of a section? If you look closely at the inner spine and the edges of the outer spine, you might be able to see the folded sections that are glued together to create the paperback (like this but it would be all one colour of paper).
posted by nouvelle-personne at 2:42 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Maybe I don't understand that kind of "section," but the pages in the image both begin and end in the middles of sentences.

Books are printed in signatures, or huge sheets of paper with multiple printed pages on each one, that are then cut and bound. The number of pages on each signature depends on how the book its being bound. So it's not related to content at all -- purely page numbers.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:43 PM on April 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

rhizome: When a book is made it is printed in smaller sets of pages that are then glued together to form the book. Those sets are called a signature. As grouse noted, a common standard is to print 4 book 'pages' on one piece of paper which is stapled (or stitched) together in a bundle of 8 pieces of paper and then folded over. That fold gives you 16, and with a book page on each side of the paper, this portion of the book covers 32 pages.

A visual is most helpful: here's YouTube video of the process of assembling a book out of its signatures for a DIY journal.

The book pictured likely predates modern methods so a person would have oriented these sets of signatures, and that person wouldn't be interested in actually reading. Getting it wrong and the whole book gets pulped.
posted by zenon at 2:48 PM on April 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

... can anyone who has any other Penguin literary publications from the late 60s check if there are comparable marks in those?

The first three that came to hand all have slightly different variants on this:

• The Hugo Winners (1962) has "B" at the bottom of page 33, "C" on page 65, etc. up to "L" on page 321
• E. H. Carr's What Is History? (1964) has "T - B" on page 33, "T - C" on page 65 etc. up to "T - E" on page 129
• Lambda I and Other Stories (1965) has "L.O.S. - 2" on page 21, "L.O.S. - 3" on page 41, etc. up to "L.O.S. - 10" on page 189

posted by offog at 3:27 PM on April 6, 2023 [26 favorites]

Imposition for the win!!!!
posted by wenestvedt at 3:56 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

T could conceivably be thirtytwomo or trigesimo-secundo.
posted by zamboni at 4:08 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

That’s more for paper sizes than the number of pages, though.
posted by zamboni at 4:21 PM on April 6, 2023

Another data point:

Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1964, 4th reprint) has B on p. 33, C on p. 65, etc. up to G, p. 193. Printed by Cox and Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and Fakenham.

posted by zamboni at 5:13 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Production note should have been trimmed off. Bad placement and they shipped it rather than destroy the run. Follow the money.
posted by ptm at 7:33 PM on April 6, 2023

"Production note should have been trimmed off. Bad placement and they shipped it rather than destroy the run. Follow the money."

It's on the same line as the page number, so trimming it off would also trim off the page number.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:08 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Lambda I and Other Stories (1965) has "L.O.S. - 2" on page 21, "L.O.S. - 3" on page 41, etc. up to "L.O.S. - 10" on page 189

My Penguins from the 50's and 60's all have similar marks but my copy of Plutarch's Moral Essays (1971) and all later Penguin books lack them.
posted by vacapinta at 4:45 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I should add that I have Aeschylus The Oresteian Trilogy (1969) which does have 'O.T.' and then 'B' at the bottom of page 33.

I'll search a bit more to see if I have one between 1969 and 1971...

BTW, Penguin used different publishers but that doesn't seem to make a difference. The 1969 is by Whitefriars Press and the 1971 is by The Chaucer Press. But earlier titles from the Chaucer Press also have the marks.
posted by vacapinta at 5:21 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Never mind, all bets are off..

Work Suspended and other Stories by Evelyn Waugh (1978)! has 'T - w.s. -B' on page 33.

My spouse is into books/selling/binding and her only comment was "This is ridiculous. It is all done by machine. Is this some kind of affectation?"
posted by vacapinta at 6:28 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Do the signature markings go all the way through the book on that one? While it seems highly impractical, there are previous Penguins that include Work Suspended, and it would be entertaining if they had concatenated previously typeset work with new material.
posted by zamboni at 6:55 AM on April 7, 2023

I feel like this is something that the Penguin Collectors Society would have a meticulous research article on, but I’m not turning up anything.
posted by zamboni at 7:00 AM on April 7, 2023

Do the signature markings go all the way through the book on that one?

Yep! p33, 66, 97, 129, 161, 193, 225, 257.

There are 284 pages.
posted by vacapinta at 7:01 AM on April 7, 2023

Response by poster: Guess I really kicked something off here… looking more closely, page 65 has “T—S.T.D.—C and page 96 has “T—S.T.D.—D” in the same spot. All printed in line with the page number, so definitely meant (or at least accepted) to be seen by the reader.
posted by whitewall at 7:26 AM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

As others have noted, those look like signature marks, and since they're every 32 pages, the book is in sextodecimo (16mo) format. Each printed sheet was folded 4 times, to produce 16 leaves, or 32 pages.

I don't have any older Penguins at home, but my 1947 impression of Charles Raven's English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray, which is an octavo, has signatures every 16 pages.

I'm not sure what kind of binding machinery the printers Penguin used would have had in the 1960s and early 1970s, but I've definitely seen mass-marketed books with the sections in the wrong order, so I imagine the signature marks weren't simply an affectation. This video, c. 1961, shows sections/signatures being assembled by hand before binding (start around 5:30).
posted by brianogilvie at 11:25 AM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Even if the sigs weren't hand-assembled, it's useful to have a mark if you end up with strays. Mass-market paperbacks are meant to be large-run and cheap, with small margins, so preventing waste is more important than impressively clean book design.
posted by rikschell at 5:16 AM on April 9, 2023

I feel like this is something that the Penguin Collectors Society would have a meticulous research article on

Thanks to my local library, I can now consult the PCS' The Penguin Companion:

The Penguin Companion is an essential work of reference with over 700 'A to Z' entries and 20 extended accounts of significant parts of the Penguin story (Lady Chatterley, Puffin Books etc.).

From the June 2006 edition, p136:

Section
A folded printed sheet made up ready for gathering. In Penguins a section is normally of 32 pages and the length of the book therefore a multiple of that number. In early Penguins the first page of each section is marked by a small signature (A, B, etc.) in the bottom left-hand corner to ensure gathering in the correct sequence. Later, pagination was used instead. [PC 2:24]

PC 2:24 indicates there's further information in The Penguin Collector Newsletter 2, page 24, likely the article More about early paperbacks by Alec Atchison.
posted by zamboni at 1:04 PM on April 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Re-reading the contents page, the pertinent article may be Some notes on ‘Gathering’ by S.E. Robertson, in the same issue. However, the listed page count is 20, so it’s quite unclear what “24” might refer to.
posted by zamboni at 5:31 AM on April 12, 2023

Ah! If you look at the scanned front page of PC 2, the original ToC goes up to p 31, and Some notes on Gathering is on page 24. The listed page count on the PCS site is either wrong, or sections are omitted in the archived version, such as the New Members List. I might email the editor and see if they’ll send me a copy of the article.
posted by zamboni at 7:23 AM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Reading helps! The scanned front page also explains that they started using consecutive pagination - PC 1 is pages 1-14, the first page of PC 2 is page 15.)
posted by zamboni at 7:50 AM on April 12, 2023

I've heard back from the PCS Editor, who was kind enough to send me the article in question. It's quite brief, mostly focusing on gathering and binding, with only a brief mention of signature marks.

One helpful fact it does mention is that the alphabet for labelling signatures typically omits the J, V, and W due to character ambiguity.

From offog's examples:

"B" at the bottom of page 33, "C" on page 65, etc. up to "L" on page 321

If A=1, B=2, L would ordinarily be 12. This would mean you'd expect it to be numbered

32*12-31=353

However, if J is omitted, L is 11, and

32*11-31=321

just as in offog's example. (offog, can you check p289 of The Hugo Winners to confirm that it's labelled K, not J?)

I may see if I can get hold of some 1950s printing manuals to see if they shed any further light on the mysterious T prefix.
posted by zamboni at 1:49 PM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just to confuse things further my copy of the Journals of Arnold Bennet 3/6 (1954?) has blocks of 32 and 16!

33-B
+32=65-C
+32=97-D
+32=129-E
+32=161-F
+32=193-G
+32=225-H

+16=241-I
+16=257-K
+16=273-L

+32=305-M
+32=337-N
+32=369-O
+32=401-P
+32=433-Q
+32=465-R
posted by vacapinta at 12:55 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Some notes on Gathering actually covers this, using the 1946 Sea Adventures as an example. Basically, if the number of pages in a Penguin is not closely divisible by 32, they add some 16s instead to make the numbers work - this turns out to be pretty common in book assembly.

For bibliophiles, this assembly of pages is called a collation, and is one of the ways you can identify or describe a particular book, and has its own shorthand.

From ABC for Book Collectors:

(Quire is an older word for section/gathering/signature.)

But collation has acquired a further, and to most collectors more familiar, connotation: the bibliographical description of the physical composition of a book, expressed in a more or less standardised formula. This recites the sequence of letters printed or written on the first page of a quire, originally intended for the guidance of the binder. The collation, in this sense, consists of three parts: an indication of the format, the register of signatures, and a record of the number of leaves. Thus ‘8vo A–L⁸ M⁴’ means an octavo volume of 92 leaves, gathered in eleven quires of eight leaves and one of four: there is no J (or U or W) in the European signature alphabet, though these letters are sometimes found in 19th-century American books. This is an extremely simple example; and in order to show what a collation can look like, here is a notional one published in The Book Collector (vol. 1, no. 4) as a test for its bibliographical readers: ‘Quarto: π⁴ ﹡² A⁴ B–C⁴ (C³  χ² ) D–G⁴ (G²) H⁴ (–H2.3, ﹡² ).’ Dr Gaskell’s expansion of this formula is as follows: ‘An unsigned four-leaf section, the first leaf conjugate with the fourth and the second with the third (henceforth a “quarto section”); followed by a conjugate pair of leaves signed with an asterisk; followed by an unsigned quarto section (given the inferential signature A); followed by two quarto sections signed “B” and “C” respectively, in the second of which the third leaf is followed by an inserted unsigned conjugate pair; followed by four quarto sections signed “D”, “E”, “F” and “G” respectively, in the last of which the second leaf has been removed and replaced with a can- cellans; followed by a quarto section signed “H”, the central conjugate pair of which (i.e. H2.3) was signed with an asterisk, and removed to become the second section of the preliminaries, noted above. (It is assumed that this state of affairs can be proved by the existence of a copy with H2.3 in its original position).’

So, collation-wise, I think you'd denote Journals of Arnold Bennet as 16vo A¹⁶B-H¹⁶I-L⁸M-R¹⁶.
posted by zamboni at 8:55 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

zamboni, yes - p257 is I, p289 is K, and there's no J on any of the intermediate pages.
posted by offog at 9:00 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

So we've got the section thing pretty much nailed, leaving only the mysterious T prefix. My theory is that it has to do with Thirty-two, and that somewhere there is a mixed signature Penguin (like Journals of Arnold Bennet) that identifies the Thirty-two page sections with T, and the Sixteen page sections with an S prefix.
posted by zamboni at 9:10 AM on April 13, 2023

Or maybe T indicates that the book is only composed of 32 page sections.
posted by zamboni at 9:16 AM on April 13, 2023

Errata:
The example collation should read

Quarto: π⁴ ﹡² A⁴B–C⁴ (C3 + χ²) D–G⁴ (±G2) H⁴ (–H2.3, =﹡²)

and the correct abbreviation for The Journals of Andrew Bennet is 16mo (sextodecimo), not 16vo.
posted by zamboni at 11:02 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've just gone through most of the older UK paperbacks on my shelves looking for more examples across all publishers. The signature labelling scheme appears to be correlated to the printer, rather than to the publisher. Let's suppose we've got a book called "The Early Years", and we're looking at the 5th signature - the different printers would label it as:

• T.E.Y.-5 - Hazell Watson & Viney (16 books), Clays (1 book, looks like a reprint of an older edition)
• T.E.Y.-E - Anchor (5 books)
• 5 - Hunt Barnard (6 books)
• TEY-5 - Hunt Barnard (5 books)
• E - Cox and Wyman, Love and Malcolmson (1 each)
• T-E - Cox and Wyman (2 books)
• T-TEY-E - Cox and Wyman (2 books)
• T-T.E.Y.-E - Cox and Wyman (2 books)
• T.E.Y. (page number) E - William Collins, Whitefriars (1 each)

So the T- prefix seems to be a Cox and Wyman thing. I went through all the C&W books and all only have 32-page signatures. The only oddity was in "The Return of Hyman Kaplan", where p33 is labelled 🞶T - R.H.K. - B (which might just be the typesetter playing along with Kaplan's writing style in the stories!).
posted by offog at 11:51 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

A cursory look at about 10 books I have shows that indeed only Cox and Wyman have the T- prefix and like offog has above, they don't always have it.

In addition the two books I could find that have 16-page signatures in the middle are both Whitefriars Press.

E - Cox and Wyman, Love and Malcolmson (1 each)

Also have books printed by Clays and by Clark that have this format.
All my Hunt Barnards are TEY-5
posted by vacapinta at 12:37 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

What's the date of the Cox & Wymans that lack a T-prefix?

where p33 is labelled 🞶T - R.H.K. - B

For folks on platforms where 🞶 is not supported, I think it's MEDIUM SIX SPOKED ASTERISK.
posted by zamboni at 12:57 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, full-height asterisk. I didn't bother noting the books that didn't have signature markers, but lots of them were Clays too. The Cox and Wyman books were:

• E - The Hugo Winners - 1964 / Penguin / Cox and Wyman
• T-T.E.Y.-E - Casino Royale - 1965 / Pan / Cox and Wyman
• T-T.E.Y.-E - The Return of Hyman Kaplan - 1968 / Penguin / Cox and Wyman
• T-E - The Peculiar Triumph of Professor Branestawm - 1970 / Puffin / Cox and Wyman
• T-TEY-E - Night of Masks - 1970 / Knight / Cox and Wyman
• T-E - What is History - 1974 / Pelican / Cox and Wyman
• T-TEY-E - The Simulacra - 1977 / Magnum / Cox and Wyman

posted by offog at 1:19 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

(Year printed, rather than year first published - I think the latter is what I listed above.)
posted by offog at 1:28 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can contribute that Tragedy of King Lear (Penguin Shakespeare) (1966) is a Cox and Wyman without the T.
It is in the single letter 'E' format above like The Hugo Winners.

It might be worth noting that it was first published in 1937 and 1966 is the latest reprint date. Perhaps as speculated earlier, reprints kept the signature marks from earlier publications.
posted by vacapinta at 1:34 AM on April 14, 2023