[202] The type-casting machine, of which this is the first patented attempt in England, was not generally adopted till after the International Exhibition of 1851, at which the hand-mould alone was shown. The model generally adopted was the machine patented in America in 1838, by David Bruce, which Alexander Wilson introduced in this country about 1853. Previous to David Bruce’s machine, a machine invented by Edwin Starr had been introduced at Boston in 1826, and tried for five years.
5. THE STATE CONTROL OF ENGLISH LETTER-FOUNDING
[203] The reader is referred to the concise summary given under the title “Parliamentary Papers,” in Bigmore and Wyman’s Bibliography of Printing, also to the Abridgments of Specifications relating to Printing, 1617 to 1857, published by the Commissioners of Patents in 1859, and for more minute particulars to Mr. Arber’s Transcript of the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, and the Calendars of Domestic State Papers.
[204] Notwithstanding this flattering announcement, we find that five years later Grafton and Whitchurch, who held the King’s Bible patent, received the royal permission to print the revised edition of Matthews’s Bible in Paris, “because at that time there were in France better printers and paper than could be had here in England.” The project, as history records, was cut short by the Inquisition; but the presses, types, and workmen were with great difficulty brought over from Paris to London, where the Bible was finished in 1539.
[205] A brotherhood of Stationers, consisting of “writers of text letter,” “lymners of bokes,” and subsequently admitting printers to its fellowship, had existed since 1403. The term Stationer, at the time of the incorporation, included booksellers, printers, bookbinders, publishers, type-founders, makers of writing-tables, and other trades, amongst which were “joiners and chandlers.”
[206] Arber’s Transcripts, ii, 753–69.
[207] This unruly printer troubled the Company’s peace for eleven years, and demonstrated, by his persistent defiance of their authority, the insufficiency of their powers to execute the control they nominally possessed. John Wolfe, the City printer, distinguished himself in a similar way.
[208] Arber’s Transcripts, ii, 22.
[209] A commission appointed to inquire into the disputes at that time agitating the Company, gave as one of its chief reasons why the monopolies should be sustained, that if anyone were to print any book he chose, this inconvenience would follow, viz., “want of provisions of good letters,” in other words, the quality both of type and printing would degenerate.
[210] Arber’s Transcripts, i, 114, 144.