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Signature mark

Mark identifying a section in bookbinding

Signature mark
Summary

Mark identifying a section in bookbinding

At the bottom of page 49, the signature mark "3" represents the number of the gathering.

A signature mark, in traditional bookbinding, is a letter, number or combination of either or both, which is printed at the bottom of the first page, or leaf, of a section.

The section is itself referred to as a signature, also called collation or gathering.

The aim is to ensure that the binder can order the pages and sections in the correct order. Often the letters of the Latin alphabet were used.

The practice has been superseded by advances in printing and bookbinding technology. As a result, signature marks are rarely found in modern books.

Contemporary use of signature marks

A number of symbols traditionally used as binding signature marks were encoded in ISO 5426-2 and from there (to enable migration of data from the old standard) were transposed into Unicode.

  • 0x32 was re-encoded with
  • 0x34 , with
  • 0x36 , with (also known as "hedera" and "ivy leaf")
  • 0x37 , with

was added later. These latter two are the only codepoints in Unicode 4.0 to bear the annotation "binding signature mark".

References

fr:Signature#Signature de la feuille

References

  1. (1998-08-19). "Comments on proposals to add characters from ISO standards developed by ISO/TC 46/SC 4".
  2. Roberts, Matt T.. "Bookbinding and the Conservation of books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology".
  3. 1996, Information and documentation -- Extension of the [[Latin alphabet]] coded character set for [[bibliographic]] information interchange -- Part 2: Latin characters used in minor European languages and obsolete typography
  4. Everson, Michael. (1998-05-25). "Additional signature mark characters for the UCS".
  5. Michael S. Kaplan. (10 January 2005). "Every character has a story #1: U+213a (ROTATED CAPITAL Q)". Sorting it all Out, v2.
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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