1. THE ENGLISH TYPE BODIES AND FACES
[54] Unterweisung der Messung. Nuremberg, 1525. Fo.
[55] Champfleury. Paris, 1529. 8vo.
[56] Orthographia Practica. Caragoça, 1548. 4to.
[57] Both Testo and Glosilla subsequently became the names of Spanish type-bodies, the former being approximately equivalent to our Great Primer, and the latter to our Minion.
[58] Dissertation upon English Typographical Founders and Founderies. London, 1778. 8vo.
[59] See post, chap. v.
[60] See post, chap. v.
[61] Hansard’s Typographia. London, 1825, 8vo, p. 388.
[62] See post, chap. xxi.
[63] In several of the German specimens thus examined, not only do the bodies of one founder differ widely from those of others, but the variations of each body in the same foundry are often extraordinary. Faulman, in his Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst, Vienna, 1882, 8vo, p. 488, has a table, professing to give the actual equivalents of each body to a fraction; but we conceive that, in the absence of a fixed national standard, such an attempt is futile.
[64] Two-line English, Mores points out, was originally a primitive, and not a derivative body, corresponding to the old German Prima.
[65] Henry VIII, in 1545, allowed his subjects to use an English Form of Public Prayer, and ordered one to be printed for their use, entitled The Primer. It contained, besides prayers, several psalms, lessons and anthems. Primers of the English Church before the Reformation were printed as early as 1490 in Paris, and in England in 1537.
[66] We have nowhere met with the suggestion that Primer may be connected with the Latin “premere,” a word familiar in typography, and naturalized with us in the old word “imprimery.” Great Primer might thus merely mean the large print letter.
[67] The religious origin of the names of types is in harmony with the occurrence in typographical phraseology of such words as chapel, devil, justify, hell (the waste type-pot), friars and monks (white and black blotches caused by uneven inking), etc.
[68] Ulric Hahn’s St. Augustini De Civitate Dei, Rome, 1474, is printed in a letter almost exactly this body. Others derive the name from the great edition of St. Augustine printed by Amerbach at Basle in 1506.
[69] “Liber presens, directorium sacerdotum, quem pica Sarum vulgo vocitat clerus,” etc., is the commencement of a work printed by Pynson in 1497.
[70] Both the Cicero of Fust and Schoeffer at Mentz, 1466, and of Hahn at Rome, 1469, were in type of about this size.
[71] This Prymer of Salysbury use, is set out a long, wout ony serchyng, etc. Paris, 1532. 16mo. Many editions were printed in England and abroad.
[72] Fournier (ii, 144) shows a specimen of the lettre de Somme with exactly a Bourgeois face.
[73] The first of the family of Paris printers of this name, mentioned by De la Caille, flourished in 1615.
[74] The German Brevier, corresponding to our Small Pica, is of more frequent occurrence in these works.
[75] De Germaniæ Miraculo. Lipsiæ, 1710, 4to, p. 37.
[76] The Lactantius, published the same year, and usually claimed as the first book printed in Italy, appears, according to a note of M. Madden’s (Lettres d’un Bibliographe, iv, 281), not to have been completed for a month after the Cicero de Oratore.
[77] “Il (Jenson) forma un caractère composé des capitales latines, qui servirent de majuscules; les minuscules furent prises d’autres lettres latines, ainsi que des espagnoles, lombardes, saxones, françoises ou carolines.” (Man. Typ., ii, 261.)
[78] M. Philippe, in his Origine de l’Imprimerie à Paris, Paris, 1885, 4to, p. 219, mentions two books printed in this fount, which contain MS. notes of having been purchased in the years 1464 and 1467 respectively.
[79] Lettres d’un Bibliographe, iv, 60.
[80] For a full account and analysis of Jenson’s Roman and other type, the reader is referred to Sardini’s Storia Critica di Nic. Jenson. Lucca, 1796–8, 3 parts, fol.
[81] Annales de l’Imprimerie des Alde. Paris, 1803–12, 3 vols., 8vo.
[82] Sardini (iii, 82) cites an interesting document wherein Zarot, in forming a typographical partnership with certain citizens of Milan, covenants to provide “tutte le Lettere Latine, e Greche, antique, e moderne.” Bernard points out that “antique” undoubtedly means Roman type, the traditional character of the Italians, while “moderne” applies to the Gothic, which was at that time coming into vogue as a novelty among Italian printers.
[83] Renouard and others claim that these famous characters were cut by the French artists Garamond and Sanlecques. This legend is, however, disposed of by Mr. Willems, in his work, Les Elzevier. Brussels, 1880, 8vo.
[84] Pynson was the first to introduce diphthongs into the typographical alphabet.
[85] Garamond’s Roman was cut for Francis I. The Roman character was an object of considerable royal interest in France during its career. In 1694, on the re-organisation of the press at the Louvre under Louis XIV, arbitrary alterations were made in the recognised form of several of the “lower-case” letters, to distinguish the “Romain du Roi” from all others, and protect it from imitations. The deformity of the letters thus tampered with was their best protection.
[86] Amongst which should be named Vautrollier’s edition of Beza’s New Testament in 1574, which, both in point of type and workmanship, is an admirable piece of typography. The small italic is specially beautiful. Renouard says this type was cut by Garamond of Paris.
[87] History of the Art of Printing. Edinburgh, 1713. 8vo.
[88] The Horace, printed in 1627, may be mentioned as one of the most interesting of these little typographical curiosities. The type is exactly the modern pearl body. The text is 2 5⁄6 inches in depth, and 1 1⁄2 inch wide.
[89] The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments. London, printed by John Field, 1653, 32mo. The inexperience of English compositors and correctors in dealing with this minute type is illustrated by the fact that Field’s Pearl Bibles are crowded with errors, one edition, so it is said, containing 6,000 faults.
[90] In one of the Bagford MSS. (Harl. 5915) appear, with the title “Mr. Ogilby’s Letters,” the drawings and proofs of this alphabet in capital and lower-case.
[91] See Specimen No. 21, post.
[92] Tradition has asserted that Hogarth designed Baskerville’s types.
[93] In recent years a French typographer, M. Motteroz, has attempted to combine the excellences of the Elzevir and modern Roman, with a view to arrive at an ideally legible type. The experiment is curious but disappointing. For though the new “typographie” of M. Motteroz justifies its claim to legibility, the combination of two wholly unsympathetic forms of letter destroys almost completely the beauty of each.
[94] Specimen Bibliorum Editionis Hebr. Gr. Lat. (folio sheet); no date.
[95] Bibliographical Decameron, ii, 381–2.
[96] Origine de l’Imprimerie de Paris, Paris, 1694, 4to, p. 110. Chevillier gives a curious instance of this tendency of the old printers to contract their words. The example is taken from La Logique d’Okam, 1488, fol., a work in which there scarcely occurs a single word not abbreviated. “Si
hic ẽ fa
m
d ad simp
r a ẽ
ducibile a Deo
a ẽ & sir hic a
ẽ
a
ẽ
ducibile a Do,”-which means: “Sicut hic est fallacia secundum quid ad simpliciter; A est producibile a Deo; ergo A est. Et similiter hic. A non est; ergo A non est producibile a Deo.”
[97] Sir A. Panizzi, in his tract, Chi era Francesco da Bologna ? London, 1858, 16mo, shows that this artist was the same as the great Italian painter, Francesco Francia.
[98] The German practice of inserting proper names and quotations, occurring in a German book, in Roman type, probably suggested a similar use of the Italic in books printed in the Roman letter.
[99] This reform, which was an incident in the general typographical revolution at the close of last century, is usually credited to John Bell, who discarded the long ſ in his British Theatre, about 1791. Long before Bell’s time, however, in 1749, Ames had done the same thing in his Typographical Antiquities, and was noted as an eccentric in consequence. Hansard notes the retention of the long ſ in books printed at the Oxford University press as late as 1824.
[100] The suggestion that Lettres de Forme may have meant merely letters commonly used in print (adopting the early printers’ use of the word forma as type), appears to be somewhat far-fetched. The term, though apparently distinctly typographical, was used both by Tory and Ycair to denote a class of letter which the former denominated Canon, or cut according to rule, as opposed to the more fanciful lettres bâtardes.
[101] Petrarch expressed a strong aversion to the character; but some Italian and French printers adopted it, to the exclusion of the Roman, and, like Nicholas Prevost in 1525, boasted of it as the type “most beautiful and most becoming for polite literature.” Gothic printing began in Italy about 1475 and in France in 1473.
[102] See specimen No. 15, post.
[103] See specimen No. 49, post.
[104] Bibliographical Decameron, ii, 407.
[105] The first part of this work is without date or printer’s name; but the types are those of the 1462 Bible. The Secunda Secundæ was printed by Schoeffer at Mentz in 1467, in the types of the Rationale.
[106] See specimens Nos. 5 and 6, ante, and 18A, post.
[107] See specimen No. 27, post.
[108] See specimen No. 52, post.
[109] See specimen No. 73, post.
[110] See specimen No. 51, post.