A signature mark, in traditional

bookbinding Bookbinding is the process of building a book, usually in codex format, from an ordered stack of paper sheets with one's hands and tools, or in modern publishing, by a series of automated processes. Firstly, one binds the sheets of papers alon ...

, is a letter, number or combination of either or both, which is printed at the bottom of the first page, or

leaf A leaf (: leaves) is a principal appendage of the plant stem, stem of a vascular plant, usually borne laterally above ground and specialized for photosynthesis. Leaves are collectively called foliage, as in "autumn foliage", while the leav ...

, of a section. The section is itself referred to as a signature, also called collation or gathering. The aim is to ensure that the binder can order the pages and sections in the correct order. Often the letters of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

were used. The practice has been superseded by advances in printing and bookbinding technology. As a result, signature marks are rarely found in modern books.

Contemporary use of signature marks

A number of symbols traditionally used as binding signature marks were encoded in ISO 5426-2 and from there (to enable migration of data from the old standard) were transposed into

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. * 0x32 was re-encoded with * 0x34 , with * 0x36 , with (also known as "hedera" and "ivy leaf") * 0x37 , with was added later. These latter two are the only

codepoint A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dimensional (sheets in ...

s in Unicode 4.0 to bear the annotation "''binding signature mark''".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Signature Mark Page layout Identifiers Printing technology fr:Signature#Signature de la feuille

Contemporary use of signature marks

See also

References