For my own part, I am sometimes forced to make types, which are commonly brass, of which I here send you a specimen (± a ± b ± c). It is called plus-minus ±. I printed my first tracts at Cambridge when Archdeacon (not Bentham) was their printer. I was very sick of it; the University meanly provided with mathematical types insomuch that they used daggers turned sideways for plus's. They were sunk into arrant traders, even to printing hand-bills, quack-bills, &c., which they then for the first time permitted for Archdeacon's profit. As to tablework of which I had a deal, they knew nothing of it; and many a brass rule was I forced to make myself.... I complained of this to Mr Bowyer, and would have had him print my essay on Hadley's quadrant[126]; but he was too full of more important work. I remember I told him I had marked all Archdeacon's damaged letters; which were not a few, especially in the italic. To which the old gentleman replied 'I don't like you the better for that.'
One of the last books printed by the Archdeacon-Burges partnership was a translation of a Latin poem, The Immortality of the Soul, by Isaac Hawkins Browne who, "one of the first wits of this country," according to Johnson, "got into Parliament, and never opened his mouth."
John Burges continued as sole printer after the death of Archdeacon in 1795. Two large dictionaries were, amongst other works, printed during his term of office: Ladvocat's Historical and Biographical Dictionary (1800-1801) and Hoogeveen's Dictionarium Analogicum (1800); academical works of reference, such as Cambridge University Calendar (1796) and the Graduati Cantabrigienses (1800), also begin to appear; the Calendar, however, was not regularly printed at the Press until 1826, and it is only since 1914 that the Syndics have been responsible for its publication[127].
Finally, there may be noted Relhan's Flora Cantabrigiensis (2nd ed. 1802) and Harraden's Picturesque Views of Cambridge (1800) containing 24 views from original drawings by Richard Harraden, a London artist who came to Cambridge in 1798.
THE SENATE HOUSE, THE NEW LIBRARY, AND ST MARY'S CHURCH
(From Cantabrigia Depicta, 1763)