The Devil's Details (3 page)

Could Jugge have managed it, greater separation between notes would have been even more pleasing; (f) and (g) jostle each other inappropriately. Those reservations aside, Jugge stands in the streets of London as a plausible candidate for the person who first conceived the idea of a footnote.
*
Much work must be done, however, before the
idea
of (f) could become a physical object in the world of men and books and London smog. Let us follow it into the pressure cooker of a sixteenth-century printing house.

The typefoundry would be the place where the (f) got its start. A 1568 illustration of a typefoundry shows a cube of a furnace perhaps two feet by four feet, and perhaps four feet high.
¹³
An open hole on its side invites logs to be tossed into it. A large bellows leans against the wall, looking a bit worn—as if it had been used too often and wanted simply to slide to the floor, stretch out, and rest. A basket for wood is nearly empty. A rather uncomfortably dressed man sits on a hard-looking metal block in front of the furnace. At his feet is a basket of finished type. Large windows strike a pleasant note but, remarkably, no chimney can be seen.

The typefounder appears calm and unworried, though we know any fire was a lurking hazard. Houses were built close together, combustible materials collected in homes and were tossed out into the alleys, chimneys—when there were chimneys—were often wood! Fire-fighting techniques were primitive. A bucket brigade might form. Snow, manure, vinegar, damp cloths, urine were all used to squelch the flames.
¹⁴
A Nehemiah Wellington reported that in 1626 a small blaze was discovered in his home; his apprentice and servant quickly “pissed out the fire.”
¹⁵
A more effective measure for large conflagrations was to pull down the houses in its path in hopes of starving the fire; but “the rapid demolition of any building was no easy or quick task, and careful calculation had to be made regarding the speed and direction of the fire, inevitably provoking the antagonism of any whose house was condemned as a result.”
¹⁶
The response to London's Great Fire of 1666 was slow perhaps because the Lord Mayor was reluctant to offend wealthy homeowners. (He reportedly minimized the fire, saying “Pish, a woman might piss it out.”
¹⁷
) The foundry furnace would not be a welcome addition to the neighborhood, presumably. In Troyes, France, in fact, a furbisher tried to get a printer evicted because “for the last two weeks fires had been lit at night.”
¹⁸

It is unlikely the (f) was made as a single piece of type; instead, the (, the f, and the ) would have been made separately so as to allow their use in other combinations.
¹⁹
The typefounder thus has his work cut out for him. A hair-thin sliver of moon, the (, is dug into the end of a bar of steel. The steel is heated to cherry-red, then plunged into water or oil to harden it; the steaming and hissing must have turned heads. Heated a second time, its tip a bright straw color now, the steel is tempered, cooled, and driven hard into a bar of copper, imprinting the tiny right parenthesis. This imprint, or matrix, as it is called, is fixed firmly to a mold. The typefounder now holds it upside down. The mold has a funnel-like entrance into which he can pour the hot type metal. This entrance will leave a telltale protrusion attached to the finished type that came to be known as the tang.

An odd-shaped ladle of lead compound has been sitting on the top of the furnace long enough for the lead to become a dangerously hot liquid. As we watch, our typefounder lifts and twists and thrusts the ladle toward the mold, a practiced gesture requiring agility and timing. A gob of hot lead slides along the tang, floods through a tiny hole, and enters the body of the mold. The lead splashes into the copper (. Enough force has been imparted to the lead by the curious motion of the typefounder that every bit of the minute line of curve is filled. Cooling is almost instantaneous for the small type. The mold is opened; a new piece of type drops out into the basket.

A small girl, eight or nine, enters the picture.
*
We ought to let such a youngster daydream a bit, though her dreams will not be those our own children would have.
Witches
: she has grown up with stories about “cunning men” and “wise women,” “conjurors”
(sic)
and “sorcerers,” “blessers” and “charmers.” They were people to treasure as well as fear. They could charm away a toothache, find a lost purse or a straying sheep, make corn grow tall, a man fall in love, a hoarse voice warble like a bird. They could predict the weather or the sex of a yet-to-be-born child, cure a disease or exorcise a demon by measuring a girdle or by releasing a live bat in the sickroom or by boiling a lock of the afflicted's hair.
²⁰
It was an era when Harry Potter lived next door and the Wicked Witch of the West was down the street. A child did not need Saturday-morning television to find magic and adventure; she simply needed to listen to the adults talk. Let's require of history that she has heard the instructions of Thomas Ross: “How to walk on the water, a proper secret: … take two little timbrels and bind them under the soles of thy feet, and at a stave's end fasten another, and with these you may safely walk on the water unto the wonder of all … if … you … exercise the same with a certain boldness and lightness of the body.”
²¹
With those instructions in her head, she scoops up the basket of type. As she carries it over to her seat, she is tiptoeing across a gentle stream (not the dangerous Thames) while a brother stranded on the bank stamps his foot with envy. The water and timbrels splash and thrum in a common rhythm.

Seated, she must take a piece of type between her fingers and snap off the tang—a motion repeated again and again. She does not notice the slight prick the tang gives her,
*
for now she is sitting on the far side of the stream watching her brother struggle to wade across.

The type ( is soon deposited in a type case, a box of compartments within which the type, segregated by kind, waits to be plucked out by a compositor. Composing type requires speed and accuracy of a high order; it is skilled labor. This day the compositor plucks with tweezers
*
the piece of type on which rests the parenthesis. His fingers grab it; they feel for a notch that tells them the type is right-side up. The wrist flicks the ( into position on the composing stick, a nifty handheld device, the size of a very large comb, which nestles lines of type and keeps them secure. The wrist tweezers pluck again instantly, the fingers squeeze, the wrist flicks, and (f appears in the composing stick. Then (f). The reference mark for the first footnote has been assembled. But the job is not yet done.

Our composer works in a very busy and noisy room. Ten workers are shown in a 1590 illustration.
²²
The printing press is banging away, the printer straining. A dignified, worried man points a finger at some copy and instructs one of the two compositors, who ignores him and continues with his work. A ladder leans against the wall near a window as if someone had just been up it fixing a leak. A couple of proofreaders are peering suspiciously, one scanning a proof, another redoing some set type. Someone comes in with additional type balanced on his head. Someone else spreads ink across type. And off in one corner the head of the establishment extends an open hand, like the patron in a religious painting whose money has bought him the chance to be included in the picture as the one pointing to a miracle—or martyrdom.

The miracle is our compositor's concentration as he slides in tiny lead spacers. They ensure that the (f) is at the right height above and distance from the larger t that proceeds it and the a that follows it. (The sentence in the text in which (f) appears is: “And when the dayes of their banquetting were gone about, Job sent (f) and sanctified them, and gat up early and (g) offered for every one a burnt offering: for Job saide ….”
²³
and continues for a while. A sentence the compositor may well have felt he had been sentenced to.)

The Bishops' Bible with its relatively few notes must have been welcomed initially. But if margin notes irritated a conscientious compositor, this new footnote thing must have been a torment. The (f) needed extra pieces of lead under each part to lift it up to its correctly lofty place between the other larger letters. The chances of the compositor dropping such tiny pieces had to make him nervous. He was slowed up; the risk of error was increased; and the note itself had to be fitted into the page bottom, no sure thing. That it was followed by a second footnote (g), and that both came just as the trials of Job got under way, surely made him bite his lip: Was this a sign of more footnote tribulations to come? Children aren't the only ones to believe in omens.

Briefly we give our compositor pleasure by letting him think of all the other lucrative trades requiring coordination and agile hands he might engage in. A cutpurse, perhaps, who spots Richard Jugge (assuming Jugge is held responsible for the footnotes). The compositor/cutpurse falls to the floor as if in a swoon; Jugge, religious but also kind, goes to the poor man's aid. He bends over; his purse dangles; he utters soothing words. Only after the fainted man's recovery, the flurry of thanks, the hurried departure for a doctor's appointment does Jugge feel for an absent purse. Or Jugge gambles, admittedly an unlikely event except in fantasy. The compositor/ cony catcher joins the card game, Mumchance, which has lured the printer. Jugge is allowed as if by chance to see a king of hearts, a card near the top of the pack. When the several gamblers name a card, Jugge, of course, names the king of hearts, and when the deck is dealt the king is the first of the named cards to appear. He wins the pot. A second and a third time he gets his advance look and he wins. Now he throws into the pot all his money; he has spotted the jack of hearts, a fickle lover but a sure bet. The cards are dealt. One … two … three … four. The jack should have shown. Five … six … Another gambler cries: “Mine” and scoops up the pot.
²⁴

The compositor/cony catcher does not get to split up the conned money because now he must carefully slide the lines of type in his composing stick into the “chase.” The chase holds completed pages of type, and must be adjusted with wooden strips so margins and pages are properly spaced and firmly held in the frame. Our compositor, we assume, sighed with relief when the first page of the book of Job was hustled away.

The heavy chase of type is inked, lifted, and tugged under a hinged “frisket.” The frisket looks somewhat like a large waffle iron. The inked type pokes up from the bottom; the paper lies across it; a protective batten lies on the paper; and the top is closed, holding everything in place. The frisket is slid into the printing press as if into an oven—though the press will assault it with force instead of heat. The pressman, his legs braced, the muscles of his arms bulging, pulls the press lever with a quick, sharp jerk. His weight and strength travel along the lever, increasing as they go, enter a massive screw, and, circling and circling, pick up further steam. (A screw can be thought of as just a lever that has been twisted to save space. To have exerted the same force at the end of a straight lever, the pressman might have had to stand on the other side of the Thames or farther.) The screw drives a flat board hard onto the frisket. Bang. The paper is crushed against bristling type.

Violent force is necessary. Paper of that era was not the artificial, easily penetrable stuff of our time. Put our paper under a microscope and you see straight grains, regular as Kansas corn rows. Elizabethan paper was made of pulped rag that refused to be regular; rather, it was tangled and at cross purposes like an overgrown thicket that defies a path. The ink had to drive into that thicket in order to imprint: (f) That is, he willed the[m] to be sanctified, in abstaining fro[m] carnal appetites, and showed how they should behave them selves holylie and soberlie in their banquettes. (g) Herein is Jobs religion and feare of God knowen, & the fatherly care of his children expressed.
²⁵
The printer would be less than human if he did not wish in his heart of hearts for an abstention from tiny, easily blotted footnotes rather than from carnal appetites.

An incident at the time of a later edition of the Bishops' Bible is worth noting. Perhaps to save money, the edition did away with some of the more lavish illustrations. To compensate, the press borrowed 114 decorated initials that made “a profuse display.”
²⁶
One used to start Saint Paul's exceedingly proper epistle to the Hebrews in which all sinners are threatened with eternal damnation (fornicators in particular) turned out to represent Leda and the Swan.

A most incongruous decoration, the incongruity made vivid to later readers of Yeats: “… Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed / By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, / He holds her helpless breast upon his breast ….” No one at Jugge's press, not the compositors, nor the pressmen, nor the “correctors,” brought Leda to his attention; Jugge was “severely censured.”
²⁷
Did the workers at Jugge's press refuse to mimic the acquiescence of Job? Did the added work of the first footnotes cause them to rebel? Is it stretching the evidence to believe that antagonism to the first footnote may have led to this early Luddite action? Caution says yes, it is too much; the lust for historical irony, however, demands we make the leap of faith.

The footnote, like any other significant invention, begins as an idea in someone's swirling gray matter, then seeks a way through human distractions, daydreams, fantasies, arguments, and conflicts, and then gets itself transformed into a “thing.” Our (f) was turned into a scratch on hot iron and a depression in copper, then rode on the top of a mold and was slid and pushed into a line of type. It was slathered by ink and, finally, it had paper slammed against it. Now it rides the paper in the Bishops' Bible, does a complicated dance with light waves and our eyes, and once again is a trace of an idea fluttering across gray matter. If we forget the long trek of the footnote, as writers, readers, and thinkers are apt to, some of the wonder and joy of creation disappear.