VMs: Re: quire 9

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [John Grove:] The title page is definitely f67r2 with its
    > underlined and 'bold' text at the bottom.
    
John, my notes say that line 2 of that paragraph is in red ink. That
may be true also of the outermost ring of text. This page and f1r seem
to be the only ones with colored text.

Those two lines of text definitely look bolder than normal. But the boldness may be
unintentional: for all I know, the only strong and durable red inks
were based on opaque and insoluble mineral pigments (such as
cinnabar), hence thicker than iron-gall ink (based on a soluble
pigment), or india ink (based on soot, which has much smaller
particles).

Another possible explanation for the boldness is that those bits of
text were "reinforced" a later owner (presumably the same one who
colorzed the illustrations) who carefully overwrote each letter in
red. However, the result looks a little too perfect for that. And why
would he have colored *only* those two lines?

Here is a third possibility. The B&W image I have got was scanned from
a B&W photostatic or photographic copy. If that copy was made using a
green light (as found in some very old Xerox machines), then the red
ink would indeed look darker, and hence bolder, than a brown or grey
text of similar intensity.

    > The next page in the sequence is often referred to as the
    > eclipse and begins the long foldout, followed by the old man sun
    > (whose reverse side just happens to carry the end of quire
    > marker, and then the sun over moon, moon over sun, and the four
    > seasons (my interpretation). The verso side of the foldout
    > begins with the nebula and its TO map, followed by the sun in a
    > black hole(okay, I just didn't know what else to call it), and
    > finally, the last two pages are: the new sun and the new moon --
    > the new moon page contains the end of quire marker just where it
    > would be expected -- bottom right of the last verso page of a
    > folio. This page should be facing the gutter with f69r on the
    > right side.

That sounds good!  I must try it out with printer and scissors...

All the best,

--stolfi