Now look at Plates III, IV, V, VI, and VII showing another Alphabet by the same artist, which he patterned after the Roman letters. He found that they were made according to a certain rule and proportion, and it was these he worked out in making his Alphabet. Here you see the pattern is a large square, and the letters are drawn very carefully in them. Did you know before there was as much figuring and measuring done in the making of the Alphabet as there is in building a house? Look at the letter E, for example, and all the circles and squares that have been measured and drawn to make it. You will find that every letter is made just as carefully.
Here are the three A’s that you see in Plate III. You will find that they are not exactly alike. Can you see the difference between them?—A, 1, is cut off in a curve at the top, A, 2, goes straight up in a sharp point, and A, 3, is cut off flat. Do you notice, too, the difference in the thickness of the letters?
Look at the other letters in this Alphabet (Plates III, IV, V, VI, and VII) and see if you can tell me about them in the way I have told you about the A’s.
For many, many years, the printers in the different countries used Alphabets the artists had made for them, without being able to decide which they liked the best, the Roman, Gothic or Italic. On Plate VIII you will find a little poem by Shakespeare printed in these three Alphabets. Which one do you like the best? I am sure you will choose the one that is the simplest, the easiest to read and at the same time the most beautiful—the Roman. In the quarrel which had been going on for so many years, the Roman alphabet won the victory, and that is how it came about that the Roman is used in printing all our newspapers and books today. At last after so many hundreds of years it has traveled through the other countries to us. Many times you cannot recognize the letters, and they look very different from the Roman models from which they were patterned, but that is because we are not as careful with the measurements and proportions as were Albert Dürer and the other Masters in that time long ago.
Chapter III
You know now the beginning of the Alphabet, the careful way it was planned and made, and how finally after so many years it has come to be used in the form in which we have it today. Do you remember that when Albert Dürer made his Alphabet of Roman letters he made more than one form of each letter—there were three A’s, for example. Would you like to know why he did this? Plate IX shows you two other kinds of Alphabets made long ago by a Spanish artist, Francisco Lucas. Look at the Italic capital letters in the upper part of this Plate. You can easily see that there are two different forms of the same letters, can you not? But now look at the small letters. You still see that there are two examples of each letter, but they are so much alike that you will have to look very carefully to see the difference between the two forms. Why do you suppose this artist went to the trouble to make these letters so much alike, and yet different? Do you not think that this would be a very strange thing to do unless there was a good reason for it? Look at the lower part of the Plate and you will see that there are two different forms of the small Roman letters also. Now turn back to Lesson XV. You see that by using a capital letter for the a form and a small letter for the b form you were able to hide within the phrase “Biliteral Cipher” the word, “key.” You can easily see that this would not be a good way to hide a secret, for the difference between the large and small letters is not only easy to see, but looks so strange that it is the first thing you notice. Now suppose that instead of using a capital letter for the a form and a small letter for the b form you use for each letter of the Alphabet, both capital and small, two forms which were very much alike but still were different. In the following line—
