Holes in Books

To produce a piece of parchment, the parchment maker placed the skin of an animal (usually a cow or sheep) on a frame, and scraped away the outer layers of hair and skin. During the process, the skin would be tightened on the frame, and a tiny hole in the skin would become much larger as the skin was stretched and re-stretched. Some of these holes would be repaired by sewing them together, and others would be patched, but some were left as is. When looking at a manuscript, it’s usually easy to tell if a hole has been there since the piece of parchment was made. If the hole was there when the scribe was writing the book, he simply wrote around the hole, and evidence of this practice can be seen in many medieval manuscripts.

The holes made by scribes when they worked on a book’s layout are usually a great deal smaller than the holes that developed when the piece of parchment itself was made. These holes (or prickings, as they are usually called in medieval manuscripts) can often be found on the untrimmed outer margins of leaves, where they marked the spacing of the lines, and they can occur in a regular or irregular vertical pattern. The holes were usually produced with the point of a knife or of another sharp object, such as an awl, and a number of leaves might be pricked simultaneously. In some cases, it can be deduced that a wheeled tool with points was used, by looking at the slightly irregular, but consistent, marks left by the wheel, as it was rolled down the sides of the leaves to make the small holes that would guide the spacing.

Printed books don’t have the same kinds of layout marks that manuscripts do, but the process of printing, especially during the period in which printing was done by hand, can also leave its traces in the form of holes. One of the more interesting pieces of evidence left by the operation of the handpress is the presence of “point holes.” These holes, which are often mistaken for the numerous holes that were made when the book was sewn for binding, occur in different places in books of various formats (e.g., folio, quarto, octavo, duodecimo). They’re hard to find, though, because they’ve usually been trimmed off or made invisible by the binding of the book. “Points” were the sharp metal projections used to pierce a sheet of paper and hold it in place on the tympan of a printing press, and the points needed to be placed carefully (and asymmetrically) to make it obvious to a pressman if a sheet were turned the wrong way around when it was put back on the press to print its other side. Point holes can be identified by their asymmetrical placement, and they’re most often visible in untrimmed books that are unbound, or which have been disbound. They tend to be much more visible in incunabula than in later books, and though they can be difficult to find, they’re interesting to look for, and they remain unknown to most collectors.

The most obvious holes on the insides of many books are the trails left by insects, usually generically called bookworms. These are most often encountered as small, nearly circular, holes that make their way through a number of leaves in the book. Sometimes, the worming is far from small, and it can encompass a wide area, consuming text, illustration, marginal notes, and anything else printed or written in the book. Though worming is of frequent occurrence, and is often forgiven by collectors if it’s unobtrusive and confined to the margins, even worming can have its evidentiary uses. The most obvious benefit of worming is its use in detecting an inserted leaf taken from another copy of a book. If the leaves before and after the suspect leaf have even a small but similar pattern of worming, and the suspect leaf doesn’t have worming that matches the leaves that precede and follow it, unless there were miraculous occurrences, the leaf was inserted from another copy. These kinds of insertions were commonly done by collectors and booksellers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it’s not surprising to find them today.

There can also be wormholes on the outsides of books, especially if they’re bound in wooden boards, but there may be other holes as well. Nail holes near the center or corners of the front or rear cover of a book may mean that metal bosses, which were meant to protect the book but are now missing, once adorned the covers. A pattern of holes near the outer edges of the boards might indicate that there were clasps or straps that once held the book closed. A hole that goes all the way through a book’s cover, usually near the top or bottom of a board, might be all the evidence that remains that the book was once securely chained in a library.

Books have their own histories, and they deserve to be studied in all of their aspects. It’s much more rewarding to appreciate early books and manuscripts for what they were and what they are than to try to hold them to the condition standards that collectors apply to modern first editions. If you look at books closely enough, there’s much more to see than you might think. Even in holes.