cancel

In printing, a cancel is a replacement page or signature (folded sheet) that overwrites defective printed matter already bound into a book. When a press run discovers a significant error on a completed page, rather than scrap the entire print job, presswork stops, the offending page is reprinted, and copies are bound in with the cancel pasted or tipped over the original. This is faster and cheaper than destroying stock and restarting the whole signature.

Cancels appear most often in traditional letterpress and offset lithography, where corrections cannot be made mid-run without stopping production. A typographical error, misalignment, or image quality issue discovered during collation or binding triggers the decision to print cancels. The replacement page must be on identical stock and at the same trim size; it is glued along one edge over the original, leaving no visible gap from the spine. Large print runs of multi-signature books justified the labour cost of this repair method.

A cancel can be a single leaf, but more commonly it is a full signature, since reprinting a partial sheet wastes paper. The term also extends to cancellans (the cancelled matter) and cancellendum (the matter to be cancelled). In rare cases, a publisher issued cancels months after initial binding, shipping them separately to distributors or libraries for insertion into remaining stock. Digital printing has nearly eliminated the need for cancels; mistakes are caught in proofs, and print-on-demand allows reprinting without inventory waste.

The practice left traces in rare book culture. Collectors note cancels as evidence of production corrections or (occasionally) deliberate suppression of text. Bibliographers distinguish cancels from the more labour-intensive practice of rebinding entire signatures. The term derives from Latin cancellare, to cross out with a lattice or grid, reflecting the visual appearance of struck-through type.