The Omniscient Copyeditor

[This is for Jerry, faithful reader--perhaps the only one--of Editorland. In a way, as you'll see, he is responsible for it.]

For years, I remembered her first name, but it’s disappeared now, into the oubliette of the past.

She was a copyeditor somewhere, and was the one person who responded when I asked Jerry Miller to put out an urgent appeal to his editing listserv for information about Stephanos numbers. I had seen a reference to them, and was lying awake nights, wondering what they were.

Stephanos numbers, she explained, were an unusual line-numbering system used in all editions of the works of Plato. Whereas most classics use a straightforward system of numbering lines for reference, she said, scholars of Plato have always followed the system devised by a printer of the 1500s named Stephanos.

That satisfied me for a number of years, until Google arrived with its promise of unlimited information about everything. And sure enough, it explained Stephanos (or Stephanus) numbers in exquisite detail. They were first employed for an edition of Plato’s complete works published in Geneva in 1578 by the printer Henri Estienne (1528-1598), better known under his Latin name of Stephanus.

His edition was not actually the first. That honor belongs to the celebrated Aldus Manutius of Venice, who also devised italic type.

My Internet source reproduces several pages of early editions with Stephanos numbers (letters actually) in the space between columns. It also explains just how they worked, an explanation I will not inflict in full on anyone who may be reading this. But it’s worth quoting a bit of it, if only because of its impenetrability:

“One may notice on each page, between the column with the Greek text and that with the Latin translation, letters A, B, C, D, and E located at regular intervals, every tenth line or so of the Greek text (intervals between lines of the Greek text are not the same as those between lines of the Latin translation, the latter being more compact), starting with A on the first line of the page and dividing the page into five sections of about ten lines of Greek text each; but it can be seen that the letters don’t always fall exactly in front of a line of the Greek text, and so, for instance, the E on page 515 falls between two lines of the Greek text, section D of that page includes 11 lines and section E only eight.”

Parse that if you can. What amazes me is that nameless copyeditor somewhere in cyberspace, before Google made finding such things easy. She answered as soon as she got the inquiry. She didn’t have to look it up—she knew.