Cancel: Cross it out or pull the whole run

To cancel something ordinarily means to strike it out, withdraw it, or call off a plan. In a letter or document, you might cancel a word by drawing a line through it. The word comes from the Latin cancellare, to make like a lattice or grating, because crossing lines resembled a cancelled gate.

In industrial printing, cancellation takes on a more drastic form. A cancel is a printed page or set of pages that must be suppressed entirely because of errors discovered after printing has begun or completed. Rather than mark through text as you would on a manuscript, the printer literally removes the faulty sheets from the bound book or publication and replaces them with corrected versions, or simply withdraws them from distribution. The cancelled pages are destroyed or kept as waste.

This distinction matters because a printed page cannot be edited in place the way a typed manuscript can. Once the press runs, the ink is fixed on paper. If a full page contains a significant error, a misalignment, or outdated information, the only remedy is to print a new page, cancel the old one by physically removing it, and insert the replacement. Bookbinders would cut out the offending leaves and tip in new ones, or the cancelled pages would be omitted entirely if the correction could wait for a future edition.

The term also applies to cancel sheets, small printed slips pasted over or bound into books to correct or replace a passage without requiring a whole new page. These served the same purpose as modern errata slips. A cancel plate in printing is a replacement engraving made to correct a mistake in an original printing plate, allowing a new impression to be pulled without the error. The industrial meaning preserves the sense of suppression: the original is rendered void, not merely marked, and a substitute takes its place.