Signature mark explained

A signature mark, in traditional bookbinding, is a letter, number or combination of either or both, which is printed at the bottom of the first page, or leaf, of a section.

The section is itself referred to as a signature, also called collation or gathering.^[1]

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 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The practice has been superseded by advances in printing and bookbinding technology.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.^[2]

Contemporary use of signature marks

A number of symbols traditionally used as binding signature marks were encoded in ISO 5426-2^[3] and from there (to enable migration of data from the old standard) were transposed into Unicode.^[4]

0x32 was re-encoded with
0x34, with
0x36, with (also known as "hedera" and "ivy leaf")
0x37, with ^[5]

was added later. These latter two are the only codepoints in Unicode 4.0 to bear the annotation "binding signature mark".

Notes and References

"General Comments about Signature Marks" in Web site: Comments on proposals to add characters from ISO standards developed by ISO/TC 46/SC 4 . 1998-08-19 . Unicode – The World Standard for Text and Emoji . 2024-08-06.
"signature mark" on Web site: Bookbinding and the Conservation of books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology . Roberts . Matt T. . Etherington . Don .
1996, Information and documentation -- Extension of the Latin alphabet coded character set for bibliographic information interchange -- Part 2: Latin characters used in minor European languages and obsolete typography
Web site: Additional signature mark characters for the UCS . Everson . Michael . 1998-05-25 . Unicode – The World Standard for Text and Emoji . 2024-08-06.
Web site: Michael S. Kaplan . 10 January 2005 . Every character has a story #1: U+213a (ROTATED CAPITAL Q) . Sorting it all Out, v2 . 21 October 2015 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20060909235709/http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/01/10/349769.aspx . 9 September 2006.