- Sm. stain throughout in outer lower margin; a few scattered lightbrown stains; sm. tear (max. 1 cm.) in lower margin. Vellum lacks ties and sl. duststained.
= Written on paper with the watermark listed under Churchill 13 (dating 1675). Very early (if not the earliest known) Dutch imposition manual. As explained in the review of Frans Janssen's The Earliest Dutch Imposition Manual. A Facsimile of the Manuscript Overslag-boek by Joannes Josephus Balthazar Vanderstraelen, in Quaerendo 44, p.211-212: "An imposition manual is a technical handbook for printers. This illustrated manual has schemes which indicate the position of the composed pages on the sheet. The schemes specify how to set pages in different formats in order to get a proper sequence of the pages after printing and folding the sheets into quires. The manual is a guide for the compositor in placing the pages in the form." The until now oldest known Dutch imposition manual is Vanderstraelen's manuscript, which dates from 1794-1795 and was sold by Christie's in 2006 for 9600$. Frans Janssen mentions one other earlier manuscript Dutch printer's manual in his edition of the Vanderstraelen facsimile. It is a presumed lost manual by the Middelburg typographer Sigismund Matthaeus, which has a somewhat different title (apart from the first two words "Letterzetters Luywagen") and a preface dated 1761. This work is referred to by J.W. Enschedé in his article Een Nederlandsche handleiding voor boekdrukwerk uit 1761 (in Het Boek 1, 1912). On the basis of the paper and the handwriting in our manuscript, the present "Letter-zetters Luywagen" might be an earlier (unrecorded) manuscript on the subject than both the work by Vanderstraelen and that of Matthaeus. SEE ILLUSTRATION PLATE LXII.