1920s Typography: space before or after contraction apostrophe

Joel C. Salomon2 January 2015 · 11:08

(Cross-posted from english.stackexchangecom since folks here are more likely to have come across this sort of thing before.)

In the 1928 Scribner’s (NY) edition of The Plays of J. M. Barrie, I’ve noticed an odd convention: where a contraction happens in middle of a word (e.g., “don’t” for “do n(o)t”), the apostrophe has the usual appearance. But when the contraction removes the entire first part of the word (e.g., “it’s” for “it (i)s” or “I’ll” for “I (wi)ll”), the typesetters consistently left the inter-word space there: not “it’s” or “I’ll” but “it␣’s” or “I␣’ll” (using ‘␣’ to represent a space):
Illustrative example

In the comments someone mentioned seeing a book from that era with “y’all” written as “y’␣all”. The idea is the same: if the apostrophe indicates elision of part of only one word, the words aren’t run together.

• Was this a reasonably widespread practice, or merely an idiosyncratic house style? or
• Was this perhaps an idiosyncratic authorial style, like A. A. Milne’s use of “sha’n’t” in Winnie the Pooh, and should therefore be preserved in reproductions?

dbvisel2 January 2015 · 19:38

I just noticed this, actually, in the first volume of the Library of America's edition of Henry James's collected novels (1871–1880), published in, I think, 1984. All contractions are spaced: "ca n't", "do n't", "it 's". I can't remember if I saw a "won't" – not sure what would have been done with that.

The editorial decisions made in this book were a bit odd – they wanted to present the novels in their initial forms, though multiple revisions exist of most of them – and the spaced contractions are probably part of that.

It is decidedly jarring to a modern reader & seems out of place in a reading edition – though I think an argument could be made for it for a scholarly edition (which the Library of America isn't).