In 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

The 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.

Next, 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.

After 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.

Once 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

The 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

The 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.

Two, 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

Finished 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

Before 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

Proofreading 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. . . Ed. Valerie Wayne. Bloomsbury Press, 2020, pp. 29–46. Fahy, Conor. . vol. 56, 2003, pp. 243–259. Pratt, Aaron T. . vol. 16, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 304–328.

Key Online Sources Barrett, Timothy. . . The University of Iowa, 18 Aug. 2011. https://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/european.php. Best, Michael. . . . 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. . . https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/diy-first-folio/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024. . . Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/playwright-actor-shareholder/plays-print. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024. Saunders, Joe. . . 2 Mar. 2021. https://manyheadedmonster.com/2021/03/02/the-lowest-sort-in-the-print-trade-of-17th-century-england/.