Salvaged sheets: ghost #3
Then somebody realized there was a prologue for Troilus. The printers cut out, or “cancelled,” the last page of Romeo from sheet 3.4 of the unfinished gathering “gg,” and printed the new prologue, back to back with the first page of Troilus on a half sheet of paper. That first “gathering” of Troilus then consisted of two half sheets, the first being what is known as a “cancel leaf,” to indicate it was a revision. Neither of these leaves have signature marks, and the page numbers on the second leaf reference their old position after Romeo.
The salvaged sheet from exercise 2a is below. Create the needed cancel leaf by dragging and dropping the pages into the blank half sheet beside it.
V
R
Once you have created the required cancel leaf, drag your first, full sheet into the gathering, and then either click "Read" to view the gathering before the cancel leaf was added, or add the cancel leaf to its slot in the diagram and click "Read" to view the corrected bifolium. If you have trouble, you can click "Auto-gather" to have the sheets placed in the gathering diagram automatically.
Gathering "gg3.4" (±"gg3")
3
±3
4
In the sequence of gatherings, this irregular one is labeled “gg,” because the repurposed sheet that included the last page of Romeo was originally from gathering “gg.” Printing of Troilus and Cressida resumed with a gathering that was assigned a character signature, ¶, rather than an alphabetical signature, as it was out of sequence. Thus, we don’t have the regular wayfinders of page numbers and sequence of the alphabet for the sequence of sheets in this play. But, we have the disruptions in the rhythm as witness to the printers’ problem-solving.
