N taking a brief survey of that early period of English Typography when printers are assumed to have been their own letter-founders, we shall attempt no more than to gather together, as concisely as possible, any facts which may throw light on the first days of English letter-founding, leaving it to the historian of Printing to describe the productions which, as we have already stated, must be regarded, not only as the works of our earliest printers, but as the specimen-books of our earliest letter-founders. Mores and other chroniclers are, as we conceive, misleading, when they single out half a dozen names from the long list of printers between Caxton and Day, as if they only had been concerned in the development of the art of letter-cutting and founding. It is true that these names are the most distinguished; but it is necessary to bear in mind that the most obscure printer of that day, unless he succeeded in purchasing his founts from abroad, or in obtaining the reversion of the worn types of another printer, probably cast his letter in his own moulds, and from his own matrices.
Respecting many of our early printers, our information especially with regard to their mechanical operations, is extremely meagre. But the researches of Mr. William Blades[153] have thrown a stream of light upon the typography of {84} Caxton and his contemporaries, of which we gladly avail ourselves in recording the following facts and conjectures as to the letter-founding of the period in which they flourished. Adopting as a fundamental rule “that the bibliographer should make such an accurate and methodical study of the types used and habits of printing observable at different presses, as to enable him to observe and be guided by these characteristics in settling the date of a book which bears no date upon the surface,” Mr. Blades has succeeded not only in establishing a precise chronology of the productions of the first English printer, but an exhaustive catalogue of his several types, such as has never before been successfully accomplished.
Previous writers, many of them practical printers, have all failed in this particular. Most of them lacked the patience or the opportunity to make a systematic study of the specimens of Caxton’s press, and have been content to perpetuate the account of others who, like Bagford, Ames, Herbert and Dibdin, had ample opportunity for such a study, but failed to bring to bear upon their investigations that practical experience which would have saved them from the inaccuracies with which their descriptions abound. Among such writers few have been more unfortunate than Rowe Mores, whose account of Caxton’s types (although endorsed by the authority of his editor, John Nichols) is as misleading as it is meagre.
As we are concerned with Caxton only in his capacity as letter-founder, we must refer the reader for all details respecting his life and literary industry to Mr. Blades’ admirable biography; merely stating here that he made his first essay at printing in the year 1474–5, in the office of Colard Mansion at Bruges; that in 1477, if not earlier, he settled as printer at Westminster, where he remained an industrious and prolific worker until the year of his death in 1491.
As we have already observed, the history of the introduction of printing into England differs from that of its origin in most other countries in this important particular, that whereas in Germany, Italy, France and the Low Countries letter-founding is supposed to have preceded printing, in our own country it followed it. Caxton had already run through one fount of type before he reached this country, and it appears to be quite certain that his Type No. 2, with which he established his press at Westminster, was brought over by him from Bruges, where it had been cast for him, and already made use of by his preceptor, Colard Mansion. The English origin of his Type No. 3 is also open to question. There seems, however, reasonable ground for supposing that Type No. 4 was both cut and cast in England; so that Caxton had probably been at work for a year or two in this country as a printer, before he became a letter-founder. It must be admitted that any conclusion we may come to as to {85} Caxton’s operations as a letter-founder are wholly conjectural. In none of his own works (in several of which he discourses freely on his labour as a translator and a printer) does he make the slightest allusion to the casting of his types, nor does there remain any relic or contemporary record calculated to throw light on so interesting a topic.
That Caxton made use of cast types, it is hardly needful here to assert. Even admitting the possibility of a middle stage between Xylography and Typography, the general identity of his letters, the constant recurrence of certain flaws among his types, and the solidity of his pages, may be taken as sufficient evidence that his types were cast, and not separately engraved by hand.
It is scarcely likely that during his residence at Bruges, where, as he himself states in the prologue to the third book of the Recuyell, “I have practysed and lerned at my grete charge and dispense to ordeyne this said book in prynte,” he would omit to make himself acquainted with the methods used in the Low Countries for the production and multiplication of types; and it is at least reasonable to suppose that, once established in this country, and removed from the source of his former supplies, he would put into practice this branch of his knowledge, and produce for himself the remaining founts of which he made use.
As to the particular process he employed, we have, as Mr. Blades points out, only negative evidence on which to rely. The frequent unevenness and irregularity of his lines, as well as the variations of the letters themselves, lead to the conclusion that the method employed was a rude one, inferior not only to that now in use, but even to that adopted by the advanced German School of Typography of his own day. Rude, however, as his method may have been, we are not disposed to allow that Caxton could have produced the types he did without the use of a matrix and an adjustable mould. Despite his rough workmanship, his types are as superior to those of the Speculum and Donatus as they are inferior to those of the Mentz Bible and the Catholicon; and we consider it out of the question that works like the Dictes, or the Polychronicon, or the Fifteen O’s, could have been produced from types cast by a clay or sand process, which we have elsewhere described as possibly employed in the most primitive practice of the art.
It is more probable that both Colard Mansion and Caxton, possessing the principle of the punch, matrix and adjustable mould, but ill-furnished with the mechanical appliances for putting that principle into practice, made use of rough and perishable materials in all three branches of the manufacture. Some such rough appliances we have already suggested in our introductory chapter. . His {86} punches, as Mr. Blades has pointed out, were, in the case of at least two of his founts, touched-up types of a fount previously in use. A matrix formed from such a punch, either in soft lead or plaster, could not be anything but rough and fragile; and such a matrix, when justified and applied to a mould of which the adjustable parts may have lacked mathematical finish and accuracy, could scarcely be expected to produce types of faultless precision.
As we have freely admitted, it is impossible on this subject to go beyond the regions of speculation, but we decidedly incline to the opinion that the irregularities and defects of Caxton’s types may be accounted for in the way here suggested, rather than by the assumption that he made use of a method of casting differing wholly in principle from that which was presently to become the universal practice.