10 Publishing Words You Don’t Know (Webisode 2) #6 Is The Best
Continued from Webisode 1 …
3 — Incunabulum (also incunable)
An incunabulum is a book printed prior to 1501. In Latin the word refers to the bands or swaddling clothes that surround a baby in a cradle, so the sense of the word is “of the infant days” of printing, after the birth of the printing press.
the Why 1501? That’s just happens to be the beginning of the 16th century and we like to think in centuries. The first incunabulum was the Gutenberg Bible of 1455, and it’s the most valuable — even a page of it being worth a tidy sum.
There ought to be quite a few incunabula because the print industry took off like a rocket. In 1470 there were 14 printing houses in Europe. By 1480 there were more than 100, churning out incunabula like fury. Unfortunately very very few incunabula survived intact, not so much because of fire, flood and wanton destruction, but simply because nobody thought to vacuum seal them and keep them away from sunlight.
4 — Colothon
Nearly all incunabula include a colothon. It’s an inscription placed at the end of the incunabula, which gives the title or subject of the work, the author’s name, the name and brand of the printer or publisher, and the date and place of publication.
The word comes from the Greek kolophon, which means a summit or completion. You are probably thinking it makes much more sense to put such details on an “imprint page” at the front of the book as we do nowadays — adding the copyright notice, edition details, ISBN number and all the other items that few people care to read or even look at.
All of that’s fine, but the tradition of the colothon wasn’t invented by book publishers. It dates back to the time when God was a boy and aspiring authors wrote their novels on clay tablets. The colothon was then what we would think of now as a signature, except that it was a very long one containing other information like who commissioned the tablet and, most importantly, a structured summary of the contents, so that the owner could classify the tablet and put it in the right order on the right tablet-shelf in the right row of their tablet library.
There was no standard to colothons, but it was an accepted practice.
Colophons have consequences. The Old Testament, in its early form, included colothons, but the convention was usually completely misunderstood by translators. For example, Numbers 3:1 to 3:4 in most translations of the Bible, from the Torah or from previous versions of the Bible, is actually a colophon for Chapters 1 and 2 of Numbers.
It reads: “These are the generations of Aaron and Moses in the day that the Lord spoke to Moses on mount Sinai. And these the names of the sons of Aaron; Nadab the firstborn,”etc.
There are other places in the Old Testament where colophons have been absorbed into the text, including Genesis 2:4, Genesis 37:2 and the final sentences of Leviticus. There are believed to be 11 colophons in Genesis, 8 in Leviticus, 4 in Numbers and 2 in Deuteronomy.
If the ancients had thought to put their colophons at the front like we non-ancients do, these translation anomalies would never have occurred.
5 — Imprimatur
This is a word that you just might have run into. I thought I recognized it when I encountered it, but I never knew its meaning, so I’m including it. Imprimatur comes direct from the Latin and means “let it be published.” So, technically, an imprimatur is a permission to proceed to publication. However, it doesn’t refer to the joyous acceptance letter that an author might receive, it refers to the Catholic Church’s attitude to a given text.
In the early days of printing, in many countries, the refusal of an imprimatur for a specific book amounted to complete censorship, and hence suppression of “First Amendment Rights.” However, when the Catholic Church eventually ceded that it wasn’t the universal authority on everything, the imprimatur simply became a seal of approval, which meant that a given work was free from errors of Roman Catholic doctrine and, hence, acceptable reading for the faithful.
It didn’t imply that the book was necessarily correct or even recommended reading, only that it wasn’t “misleading to Catholics.” The Catholic Church still issues imprimaturs, but in recent times the word has acquired a broader meaning and is used to indicate pretty much any official stamp of approval.
6 — Keming
This is easily the cleverest word in this collection of ten, and whoever coined it deserves an award. It is attractively self-referential. Kerning is the act of adjusting the space between consecutive letters so that they read well. So a keming is a typographical error caused by poor kerning — something that you can easily achieve in the word kerning by reducing the space between the r and the n.
7 — Diplasiasmus
Diplasiasmus is a problem that occurs in inocculation. So what does inocculation have to do with publishing, you ask? Well, the thing is I’ve spelt inocculation wrong. It should be spelt with a single c thus: inoculation. Diplasiasmus is the incorrect doubling of a letter when spelling a word. Diplasiasmi abound on the web. For example, if you Google inocculation you get 18,500 results.
8 — Grangerism
Commenting on grangerism, Laurence Hutton, the American essayist and critic wrote:
“That a certain class of bibliomaniacs and bibliolaters should be denounced as biblioclasts and bibliophobians by all the great community of bibliocists, bibliophilists, bibliographers, bibliopolists, bibliologists, bibliopegists, bibliotaphists, bibliothecarys and bibliognostes would seem, to the lay mind, to imply a very serious condition of affairs.”
Indeed so, and I’m sure you are concerned. But what on earth is Laurence trying to tell us, aside from the fact that he knows a large number of words that begin with biblio?
He’s trying to tell us that James Granger, the Vicar of Shiplock and author of “A Biographical History of England” invented something radical and, to many minds, antisocial and destructive.
Granger published his popular history book with blank pages strategically placed throughout so that it was extensible. The buyer of the book could augment it by adding further illustrative content not included in the original. This led to a widespread outbreak of grangerizing — people mutilating other books to get illustrative material to add to Granger’s book.
It’s not hard to understand why that would upset hordes of bibliocists, bibliophilists, bibliographers, bibliopolists, bibliologists, bibliopegists, bibliotaphists, bibliothecarys and bibliognostes.
Nevertheless, Granger was well ahead of his time. In hindsight we can recognize Granger’s much criticized book as the first do-it-yourself history wiki.
The next post in this series: Webisode 3
If you’re interested in other obscure words you don’t know, click here.
Robin Bloor is the author of Words You Don’t Know. For the record, he is also the author of The “Common Sense” of Crypto Currency, runs the website TheDataRightsofMan.com, is a founder of TurtleIslandCoin.io and a member of the advisory board for Permission.io.
