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Mark Liberman over at Language Log is trying to figure out what fiiijb means. read here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001254.htmlhe says, "In whatever spellings, there's no "Fiiijb" anywhere around in the original, needless to say. And there is no "fiiijb" in Google's index (yet). So Fiiijb must be some OED citational thing, but it's not one that I understand." think we can help him out? 
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I sent Mark an email, but it looks like a signature reference. Early books are often unpaginated, but the signatures have letters assigned to them, so the person putting the book together knows in which order the signatures go. Starting with A through Z and starting over with AA if necessary. A signature contains 2 physical pages (4 paginated pages) if the book's a folio, 4 / 8 if it's a quarto, etc. The physical pages of the signature are numbered also. So F means the F (or 6th) signature, iiij is Roman numeral for 4. (It's a convention to write the last "I" in a Roman numeral as a "J".) Not sure about "b", it could refer to a column (a and b in a two column page), but perhaps it means the other side of a physical page. Anyway that's what I came up with. We can wait and see what it actually is. 
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sounds good to me! I remember working with signatures while on my high school yearbook staff... looking forward to hearing his reply.
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here are some other samples of folio references from OED: Fja, Fija, Fiija, Fiiija, Fva, Fvja, Fvija, ..., Fviijb, and so it goes.
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that would seem to confirm it...
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"*If the i (or I) is the only i or is the last in a series of i’s, it may be written as a j rather than an i (as in the examples above), a style seen particularly common in old-style writing." http://www.usgennet.org/family/smoot/oldhand/romannumerals.html
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congrats, jheem, for the honorable mention!
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for the honorable mention!Thank you. Good company to be in, i.e., Jesse Sheidlower.
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Good company to be in, i.e., Jesse Sheidloweryes! some of us "met" Mr. Sheidlower last year when Anu had him as a guest on a live AWAD chat. much fun!
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