[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.