“The preface had been signed by the famous seventeenth-century Dutch scholar, Isaac Voss” - Morton Smith

One small sentence in Morton Smith’s popular narrative—“The preface had been signed by the famous seventeenth-century Dutch scholar, Isaac Voss”—has been over-loaded with meaning it probably doesn’t bear. In ordinary bibliographic and cataloguing practice, to say that a preface is “signed” by someone usually just means that the author’s name appears in print at the end of the preface, not that there is an autograph in ink. You can see the same usage in older catalogues, where an item might be described tersely as “Preface signed: Robert Barclay.” That wording does not imply that Barclay personally signed each copy; it just tells you how the preface ends.

Applied to the Ignatius volume at Mar Saba, this means Smith’s remark is most naturally read as a mundane identification note. The title page and binding were gone, so the quickest way to know which Vossius Ignatius he was handling was to look at the preface and see how it closed. Editions of Vossius’s Ignatius from the mid-seventeenth century routinely have a printed “IS. VOSSIVS” or equivalent at the foot of the preface; in standard bibliographic English that preface is “signed” by Vossius. Once you grant that this is all the sentence needs to mean, several things follow at once. The story no longer hints at some fabulously valuable author-signed association copy hidden in a monastery tower. There is no particular reason to expect Smith to have photographed a hand-signature there, because on this reading there wasn’t one, only the normal printed line any bibliographer would mention when describing a title-less book. And the fact that his surviving photos do not include the preface leaf stops looking like a dark clue and reverts to what it probably always was: he used his limited film on the manuscript and on a couple of sample pages from the host volume, not on every bit of paratext.

This shifts the evidentiary balance in the Secret Mark debate in a quiet but important way. A detail that some have used as a psychological “tell”—supposedly revealing a forger’s taste for theatrical touches—is better understood as routine mid-century bibliographic language. It supports a prosaic reconstruction in which Smith simply did what historians do with damaged old books: he noted the printed “signature” on the preface, photographed the first and last surviving pages, and later matched them to complete exemplars to get the date 1646. Whether the Clement letter itself is authentic remains a separate question, but this particular sentence about a “signed” preface, read against early-modern and cataloguing usage, neither furnishes a secret autograph windfall nor provides any real leverage for or against forgery. It is just the way one describes a preface that ends, in print, with the author’s name.