It is singular that, after this announcement by the Archbishop, neither of the replies to Sanders was printed in Italic type. Clerke’s Responsio,[173] in 1573, appeared in a new Great Primer Roman type, with the quotations only in Italic, the headings being set in the large Italic afterwards used in the Asser. Acworth’s De Visibili Romanarchia,[174] another rejoinder, in the same year, was in an English Roman, with a corresponding Italic and Greek. In Parker’s great work, however, De Antiquitate Britannicæ Ecclesiæ,[175] published the year before (1572), and supposed by some to have been printed by Day at a private press of the Archbishop’s at Lambeth, the entire text, consisting of 524 pages, was in the English Italic, which Dibdin describes as “a full-sized, close, but flowing Italic letter.” The preface only to this work was in Roman; the various titles and sub-titles being in the larger founts of the Responsio and Asser.
Day was among the first English printers who cut the Roman and Italic to range as one and the same fount. Hitherto the two letters had been but seldom {98} intermixed, and when they were, they frequently exhibited a disparity in size and an irregularity in line which was disfiguring.[176] Day, however, cut uniform founts.
In addition to the characters already mentioned, he greatly improved the Greek letter of the day. The Christianæ Pietatis Prima Institutio, printed by him in 1578, is in a beautiful type, which is considered to be equal to that of the great Greek typographers of Paris—the Estiennes.
Among his further enterprises in letter-cutting may be mentioned the Hebrew words, cut in wood, which he used in Humphrey’s Life of Jewell, in 1573, and in Baro’s Readings on Jonah, in 1579; and the musical notes which he introduced into his editions of the metrical Psalter. These notes are chiefly lozenge-shaped and hollow, differing from those used by Grafton in 1550, in Merbecke’s Booke of Common Praier, noted, which are mostly square and solid. He also, as he himself stated in a book printed in 1582, “caused a new print of note to be made, with letters to be joined to every note, whereby thou mayest know how to call every note by its right name.” Besides these, he made use of a considerable number of signs, mathematical and other, not before cast in type; while his works abound with handsome woodcut initials, vignettes and portraits, besides a considerable variety of metal “flowers.” Of the disposal of Day’s punches and matrices after his death we have no precise information, but the reappearance of the beautiful Double Pica Roman and Italic of the Ælfredi, in the Bibles printed by the Barkers, in Young’s Catena on Job in 1637, in Walton’s Polyglot in 1657, and other works, most of them executed by the royal printers, suggests that these founts at any rate were retained (probably under archiepiscopal control), and handed down for the service of the privileged presses.
19. Portrait of JOHN DAY, 1562. (From the Colophon to Peter Martir’s Commentaries on the Romans, 1568.)
In Strype’s Life of Parker, already quoted, is preserved an interesting account of Day’s business, with which we close this short notice: “And with the Archbishop’s engravers, we may joyn his printer Day, who printed his British Antiquities and divers other books by his order . . . for whom the Archbishop had a particular kindness . . . Day was more ingenious and industrious in his art and probably richer too, than the rest, and so became envied by the rest of his fraternity, who hindered, what they could, the sale of his books; and he had in the year 1572, upon his hands, to the value of two or three thousand pounds worth, a great summ in those days. But living under Aldersgate, an obscure corner of the city, he wanted a good vent for them. {101} Whereupon his friends, who were the learned, procured him from the Dean and Chapter of St. Pauls, a lease of a little shop to be set up in St. Pauls Churchyard. Whereupon he got framed a neat handsome shop. It was but little and low, and flat-roofed and leaded like a terrace, railed and posted, fit for men to stand upon in any triumph or show; but could not in anywise hurt or deface the same. This cost him forty or fifty pounds. But . . . his brethren the booksellers envied him and by their interest got the mayor and aldermen to forbid him setting it up, though they had nothing to do there, but by power. Upon this the Archbishop brought his business before the Lord Treasurer, and interceded for him, that he would move the Queen to set her hand to certain letters that he had drawn up in the Queen’s name to the city, in effect, that Day might be permitted to go forward with his building. Whereby, he said, his honour would deserve well of Christ’s Church, and of the prince and State.”—P. 541.
Day died in 1584, aged 62, and was buried at Bradley Parva. He published about 250 works. “He seems indeed,” says Dibdin, “(if we except Grafton) the Plantin of Old English Typographers; while his character and reputation scarcely suffer diminution from a comparison with those of his illustrious contemporary just mentioned.”
