The necessary information he will find in the article Ink (Vol. 14, p. 571) with special descriptions of writing inks, tannin inks, China or Indian ink, logwood ink, aniline ink, copying ink, red and blue ink, marking ink, gold and silver inks, indelible or incorrodible ink, sympathetic ink, and, of the most importance for our present purpose, printing inks.
The process of putting ink on paper is a subject which in the Britannica takes much more ink and paper than the subject of ink or of paper.
Printing
This topic is treated in two main articles: one dealing with type and the other with presses. The former, Typography (Vol. 27, p. 509), is a good sized treatise in itself, being equivalent to more than 135 pages of this Guide. It is divided into two parts: The History of Typography, by John Henry Hessels, author of Gutenberg: an Historical Investigation; and Modern Practical Typography, by John Southward, author of A Dictionary of Typography and its Accessory Arts, and Hugh Munro Ross, editor of The (London) Times Engineering Supplement.
The former part of the article, and the longer, is a very important and elaborate contribution to the knowledge of early printing. On these first developments the student should read the same writer’s article Gutenberg (Vol. 12, p. 739) and should notice the great difficulty surrounding the whole question of the “invention,” obscured by the fact that so many of the documents on Gutenberg exist only in copies, while others seem to be forgeries by two librarians of the city of Mainz who were eager to prove the claims of their fellow citizen Gutenberg to be the inventor of printing with movable metal types. See also Mr. Hessel’s article on Johann Fust (Vol. 11, p. 373). The honour of the invention of typography, Mr. Hessels decides, belongs to Lorens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem and its date was somewhere between 1440 and 1446. In Mexico printing was established in 1544, in Manila in 1590, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638 or 1639. The early printers had only a few types of each character in a fount, and they printed books, even small quartos, page by page.
This whole treatment of the history of typography is too elaborate to be summarized here, but it is interesting to note that the article gives information about the history of the earliest types—Gothic, Bastard Italian, Roman, Burgundian, etc., with fac-similes of 13 different and characteristic faces between 1445 and 1479; and of different styles and alphabets—Italic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Coptic, Samaritan, Slavonic, Russian, Etruscan, Runic, Gothic, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Music, Characters for the Blind, Initials, Ornaments and Flowers.
Practical Typography
The second part of the article Typography, on Modern Practical Typography, will be of more value, probably, to most students of printing and book-making. It deals with the following topics:—
Material characteristics of Type. Fount may consist of 275 “sorts” or characters. Numbers of sorts vary with different languages—and with different styles and writers; Dickens draws heavily on vowels, Macaulay on consonants. Bill of type or scheme—how computed.
Logotypes or word character as distinct from letters.