Something I should probably have said in my previous post, because it took me a distressingly long time to start doing it myself: if acid-free paper slips are available, they make ideal ‘anchors’ in the manuscript. Using a slip, you can mark a quire-division that you’re sure of, and work from there much more easily. I used to use book-snakes to do this, but that doesn’t work nearly as well, because it’s best to have them free to pin open openings within the quire you’re examining.
A friend has pointed out that for general readers (like him) who aren’t consulting manuscripts but are interested in what I do, it might be useful to have a short post describing how books are structured, what on earth quires are &c. I might come up with that at some point.
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