Papermaking and Printing

Para1In the early modern period, all aspects of printed material, including paper, broadsheets, and books, were handmade. Paper was made from a mix of rags, linen, and even old fishing nets, which were broken down and pressed into sheets. The quality of the fiber determined the quality of paper. Fine fibers, like cloth and linen, made better paper than nets and rope fiber. Paper was an expensive product and its labor-intensive production helped keep the cost of books high. Pages for books or broadsides were printed after individual letters and pieces of metal type were set in frames, then inked and pressed onto this handmade paper. Printed sheets were bound in a variety of sizes that depended on the number of times a sheet of paper was folded.

Papermaking Process

Para2The process to convert cloth and other fibers into paper began by placing them in vats filled with water and lye (an alkaline material leached from wood ash) to begin a bleaching process. Women typically did the work to separate the varying fiber types into piles, such as fine for high-quality white paper, rough for lower grade paper.
Para3Next, retting occurred, which was a process of fermentation where the shredded rags were dissolved into a pulp that could be pressed out into large sheets. Many paper mills had individualized retting procedures and routines, impacted by environmental factors like temperature and humidity, as well as by availability of catalysts like lime (calcium oxide) to speed the process.
Para4After the multi-day retting, the pulp was cut into pieces and then beaten with large machines called stampers. Stamper construction was irregular but had some shared key elements
Waterwheels to drive the machinery
A wide head of wood (or a hammer) capped with a plate of iron or bronze that had a series of nails forged in
Subsequent hammers had different heads to restructure the pulp and create a pourable liquid, which was heated prior to molding.
Para5Once semi-dried, a sheet of this rag paper was lifted out of the mold and placed into a large press machine to have any remaining water squeezed out. This machine also had a sieve-like function with many wires running in all directions to hold the pulp in place. The final pressing left a watermark on the paper which identified what mill it was made at.

Printing in England

Para6The printing presses was first introduced in England by a merchant named William Caxton in 1476. He established his press shop at Westminster. This was a Gutenberg-style printing press, with the innovation of moveable metal typeface letters individually assembled in a frame to create each page of a book. This process stayed relatively unchanged for the next two centuries. The stages of the bookmaking process were composing the type (setting the letters, punction, and spacing within the frame), printing (inking and pressing sheets of paper onto the frame), drying, proofreading, and binding. Many books were sold unbound, which allowed to buyer to customize the appearance and cost of securing the book between leather-covered thin boards.

Composing the Type

Para7The size of the desired finished page was determined before the text was composed by a skilled worker called a compositor, letter by letter and space by space. The compositor sat in front of two cases, the upper one with capital letters and the lower one with what we still call lower-case letters (and ligatures—letters that were cast as a pair, like Æ). The compositor would slot the letters, upside down, into a wooden frame called composing stick, which held a line of text. The finished line was added to others in a galley until a page was finished. This block of type would then be placed on a table combine with the other pages.
Para8Two, four, or six, or more pages (depending on the size of the planned book) were set in a forme, then printed on one side of a sheet of paper. When a book was finished, the individual letters of the type were broken up, resorted, and reused.

Page Sizes

Para9Finished paper was categorized by its size and fold, which determined how a book would be bound. Broadside was the largest size, 70 by 50 cm (29 by 20 inches), followed by the folio, with foolscap as the smallest, 45 by 31.5 cm (17.5 by 12.5 inches).
Name Folds Symbol Leaves Sides for Printing
Broadside None 1° One Two
Folio One Fo or 2° Two Four
Quarto Two 4to or 4° Four Eight
Octavo Three 8vo or 8° Eight 16
Duodecimo Four 12mo or 12° 12 24

Printing

Para10Before being pressed down via a modified wine-press screw, the fitted box of composed letters was inked by rubbing two pads full of ink across the letters. Then the entire page was pressed into slightly damp paper, forming a sheet. It was hung to dry before either being printed on again on the reverse side or stacked for binding.

Proofreading

Para11Proofreading was a much less important element to early texts. This stemmed from the practice of continually printing new pages as the first copy was being proof-read. Printers did not want to lose time (and thus money) by being idle, so only when the proofreader spotted a problem was the page redone. The already completed pages would often be used in the case of minor typos.

Key Print Sources

Craig, Heidi. English Rag-women and Early Modern Paper Production. In Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England. Ed. Valerie Wayne. Bloomsbury Press, 2020, pp. 29–46.
Fahy, Conor. Paper Making in Seventeenth-Century Genoa: The Account of Giovanni Domenico Peri. Studies in Bibliography vol. 56, 2003, pp. 243–259.
Pratt, Aaron T. Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature. The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society vol. 16, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 304–328.

Key Online Sources

Barrett, Timothy. European Papermaking Techniques 1300–1800. Paper Through Time: Nondestructive Analysis Of 14th- Through 19th-Century Papers. The University of Iowa, 18 Aug. 2011. https://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/european.php.
Best, Michael. Making Paper. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/publishing/paper.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.
Lynch, Kathleen, and Kyle Vitale. Printing Folios in Shakespeare’s Time. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/diy-first-folio/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.
Plays in Print. Shakespeare Documented. Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/playwright-actor-shareholder/plays-print. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.
Saunders, Joe. The Lowest Sort in the Print Trade of 17th Century England. The Many Header Monster. 2 Mar. 2021. https://manyheadedmonster.com/2021/03/02/the-lowest-sort-in-the-print-trade-of-17th-century-england/.

Prosopography

Aaron Cope

Aaron Cope was a student at Utah Valley University.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Papermaking and Printing
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Aaron Cope, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
License/availability
Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.