Alright #BookHistory friends, what the heck are the A, B, and C in the gutter on each page doing in this book? This is a translation from Latin to Spanish of Seneca's De Beneficiis, and it has these letters on every opening is not the preliminaries.
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They don't line up with the paragraph changes. They seem to be every 8-10 lines? So maybe just rough page dividers for reference? But I've never seen this happen before!
I've definitely seen this before and, as you surmise, to help with page locations. It's more common in larger books--I want to say I've seen this in a Holinshed or a Plutarch (some large Shakespeare-related history text with minimal page breaks), going A to E?
the letters also strike me as a finding and citational aid—they would have been much easier to set than accurate line numbers for the printing (i.e., skeleton formes, etc).
holinshed (1587) has line numbers in 10s between columns, which functionally serve the same purpose as the letters here.
They look sort of like Stephanus numbers, but I did some poking around and it looks like there is no permanent numbering system for sections and paragraphs that attaches to Seneca's text. I assume it's an ad-hoc section-reference system, but curious what others have to say.
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holinshed (1587) has line numbers in 10s between columns, which functionally serve the same purpose as the letters here.