Word Play: A pocket book

WORDPLAY

GEORGE GRANT: Like most trades, printing and publishing has its own peculiar idioms, its own jargon, its own vocabulary to describe technical aspects of the bookmaking craft.

Leading, kerning, and tracking, for instance, are essential elements of typographic design. Leading describes how text is vertically spaced on the page—making sure the distance between lines is optimal for legibility. Kerning also adjusts space, but of the horizontal distance between the letters in each word. Tracking adjusts the spacing within a word since all letters are not created equal—an “I” requires less space than a “Q” or an “M.” Folio, Quarto, and Octavo indicate the size of a volume—describing how many times a printed page is folded and cut: a Folio is folded once, a Quarto four times, and an Octavo eight times.

But one of my favorite terms from bookmaking is Vade mecum. It is a Latin phrase meaning “go with me.” For centuries, it has been used in the publishing trade to describe small devotionals, hymnals, how-to manuals, travel guidebooks, or commonplace journals designed to fit in a pocket or a satchel or a purse—literally, to go with the reader anywhere and everywhere.

Sometimes the phrase has been appropriated for the title or subtitle of such works. In 1629, the English Puritan pastor, Daniel Tuval, published a discourse on virtue in education entitled, Vade Mecum: A Manuall of Essayes Morrall and Theologicall Interwoven with Observations Historicall and Politicall. Don’t you just love those long, descriptive titles of antiquarian books?

It is a fascinating compact volume, widely disseminated among Puritans and later, influential with several of America’s Founding Fathers, though sadly out of print since the middle of the 18th century. It was intended to be carried daily by pastors, teachers, and students alike, reminding them of the true purpose of knowledge and learning as the pathway to wisdom.

The phrase has fallen out of common usage but can still be encountered in on-ramp employment guides, technical reference works, and quick-start handbooks. Even so, Vade Mecum is a very useful phrase even for those of us who will never use it to describe a tiny how-to tome.

Thomas Chalmers, the great 19th century Scottish theologian and reformer often used the phrase. He said, “Let us be convinced more and more of the prodigious fertility of the Bible. How much lies hidden and unobserved, even after many perusals; and surely if it be true that a man may read it an hundred times and find something on his next reading which he missed on all his former ones.” Chalmers goes on to say, “We have to make the Bible our Vade Mecum: our book of reference, our book of trust. Therefore, let us be quick to be in the way of grace.”

Indeed, with pocket testaments, apps on our phones, and Scripture hidden in our hearts (to be made manifest in our lives), may the Bible always “go with us,” be with us, our Vade Mecum.

I’m George Grant.

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