Reddit mentions of Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Material Texts)

Dating handwriting is a difficult thing, but, the important thing here is the presence of some characters from 'secretary' hand. (Look at the 'Secretarie Alphabete here http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/alphabets.html ). In general, you'll find secretary forms being used very commonly up to the 1630s or 40s, and less universally (but still often) in the later decades of the 17th Century. It would be very unusual to see it at all in the 18C. The main conclusion you can make is that the annotator was most likely roughly contemporary with the printing - getting more solid than that would be a chore. And I think a quill would at this point would be correct; wikipedia says fountain pens are starting to get used, but I still think it's most common to make your own quill and ink. (Check this out for more detail http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Writing-Implements-Age-Quill/dp/1872477003/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383010783&sr=8-1&keywords=western+writing+implements ) .

Ah, so h e and r don't stand for anything - it's just that they are some of the letters that have a more distinctive 'secretary' style.

I think (and I might be wrong) that one of the reasons such books survive because the common quality of paper back then was just so much higher than it is now, at least in big print-runs. Whereas a modern paperback would go brittle and yellow in less than a decade, that just doesn't happen so quickly with early modern books.

The whole idea of renaissance annotation has been a big growth industry, (at least within academia!) in recent years. Here's a book on the subject that's genuinely interesting http://www.amazon.co.uk/Used-Books-Material-Texts-ebook/dp/B00DPBKJWK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383010543&sr=8-1&keywords=used+books+sherman .

It's pretty rare to see posts or queries on here that I'm equipped to answer with anything resembling specialist knowledge, so I guess it's just nice to have the opportunity to be useful! Rare books are kind of difficult to get a working knowledge of without prolonged exposure to them, and not everyone has had that opportunity.