Skip to main content
The Collation

V and U in 17th-century Flemish book imprints

In my last blog post I discussed the use of “V” and “U” in titles on title pages of 17th-century books published in Flanders. For this blog post I surveyed two extra elements which often appear on title pages as well: the place of publication and the name of the printer/publisher as they appear in the imprint. I wondered whether we would see the same trends when it comes to the use of “V” substituting for “U” as we had in titles.

Let us first look at the place of publication in imprints. For this exercise I selected all records in the Short Title Catalogue Flanders (STCV) with exactly one imprint on the title page which includes a year of publication. That resulted in a data set of 9,544 records of works dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. In 992 cases we are dealing with a place of publication featuring either a “u” or a “v”, including instances where a “v” is used in the place of a “u.” The places of publication include Bruges, Brussels, Coutrai (Dutch: Kortrijk), Ipris Flandrorum (Ypres), and Louvain (Dutch: Leuven). An example can explain this: to render the name of Bruges (Brugis, Brugge, Brughe, Brugghe, Brugae, etc.), the compositor could use either a “u” or a “v” and print the name as follows: “Brvgis,” “Brvgge,” “Brvghe,” “Brvgghe,” or “Brvgae.” The first graph below shows how the custom of using “u” or “v” changed during the 17th century. 1 

  1. Of the total number of 992 cases, 603 date from the 17th century. In 164 cases a “v” is used where we would expect a “v” in modern orthography.
  2. For Dutch imprints, 188 words in the statements of printers used a “v” where nowadays a “u” would be expected out of a total of 2,083 individual words. For Latin words in statements of printers, a “v” instead of a “u” was used in 1,310 cases out of a total of 2,294 words.
  3. The sample consists of 736 18th-century v-words, only 13 of which substitute a “u.”
  4. The numbers are the following: 1,255 v-for-u words out of a total of 9,655 v-words for Dutch title words (13%) versus 188 v-for-u words out of 2,083 v-words in Dutch-language printer’s statements (9%). The Z-score is 5.5, which means that both means are significantly different. That is also the case for Latin title words and words in Latin printer’s statements, respectively 4,995/8,125 (61%) and 1,310/2,294 (57%). The Z-score is 3.74, which means that both means are significantly different.
  5. Although the graphs I have produced only deal with Latin and Dutch-language books, I think that the same trends would apply for French books published in the same region. At this moment, the data for French-language books published in Flanders is limited.
  6. Folger 222256.22, STCV 12918664
  7. Ghent University Library Meul.003973, STCV 12912096

Comments

I really enjoyed reading your article on the use of V’s or U’s in early typography.

Andrew Dipper — March 26, 2014

Reply

Thank you, Andrew!

Goran Proot — April 15, 2014

Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *