“A Founding-House,” he says, “is also call’d a Chappel: but I suppose the Title was originally assum’d by Founders to make a Competition with Printers. The Customes used in a Founding-House are made as near as maybe those of a Printing-House; but because the Matter they Work on and the manner of their Working is different, therefore such different Customes are in Use as are suitable to their Trade, as:—
“First, To call Mettle Lead, a Forfeiture.
“Secondly, A Workman to let fall his Mold, a Forfeiture.
“Thirdly, A Workman to leave his Ladle in the Mettle Noon or Night, a Forfeiture.” {113}
We are given to understand that in the case of other offences, common to both printing and typefounding, such as swearing, fighting, drunkenness, abusive language, or giving the lie in the chapel, or the equally heinous offence of leaving a candle burning at night, the journeyman founder was liable to be “solaced” by his fellow-workmen, in the same hearty and energetic way which characterised the administration of justice among the printers.
After Moxon’s time we meet with numerous accounts of foundries and their appointments. The interesting inventory of the Oxford foundry, appended to the specimen of the press in 1695, gives a good idea of the extent of that establishment. There were apparently two casters, two rubbers, and two or three dressers, and the foundry possessed twenty-eight moulds. The punches were sealed up in an earthen pot, possibly to protect them from rust or injury; or possibly, because having once served their purpose in striking the matrices, they were put aside as of little or no use. The small value put upon punches after striking is constantly apparent about this period. Very few punches came down with the foundries which were absorbed by that of John James; and of those that did, the greater portion were left to take their chance among the waste as worthless. The small value set upon the punches of Walpergen’s music, in the inventory of his plant,[186] shows that they were considered the least important of his belongings. Matrices did not wear out in the old days of hand-moulds and soft metal, as they do now under steam machines and “extra hard”; but the liability to loss or damage, and the importance of protecting and preserving the steel originals of their types, can hardly have been less with the founders of a century and a half ago than it is to-day.
The entertaining letters of Thomas James from Holland, in 1710,[187] point to a curious practice in that country, which we believe has never obtained in this. We refer to the habit of lending casters and matrices by one founder to another. In each of the two foundries he visited there were places for four casters; but in one case only one man was at work, and in the other no one was to be found, for this reason. This system of interchange is hardly consistent with the jealousy and suspicion shown by the same Dutch founders towards their English rival in his endeavours to procure sets of matrices from their punches. In this endeavour, however, he succeeded, much to his own satisfaction. He also purchased moulds, which, like all the other Dutch moulds he saw, were made of brass. Voskens’ foundry, which he visited, appears to have been “a great business, having five or six men constantly at the furnace, besides boys to rub, and himself and a brother {114} to do the other work.” He also found artists who, like Cupi and Rolij, were punch-cutters only, not attached to any one foundry, but doing work for founders generally. Van Dijk was a cutter only, who kept a founder of his own named Bus, and this founder cast, not at his own or Van Dijk’s house, but at the house of Athias, by whom probably he was also engaged. The Voskens, who succeeded Van Dijk, did their own casting, but their punches and matrices were supplied them by Rolij, who, as an independent artist, was free to sell duplicate matrices of his letters to James. This division of letter-founding into one or more trades, though common abroad, was never a common practice in England, where jealousy and lack of enterprise conspired to keep each founder’s business a mystery known only to himself.[188]
In the course of this book we shall have constant occasion to point out the intimate relations which existed at the beginning of the eighteenth century between English printers and Dutch founders. There was probably more Dutch type in England between 1700 and 1720 than there was English. The Dutch artists appeared for the time to have the secret of the true shape of the Roman letter; their punches were more carefully finished, their matrices better justified, and their types of better metal, and better dressed, than any of which our country could boast. Nor was it till Caslon developed a native genius that English typography ceased to be more than half Dutch.
Thiboust’s quaint Latin poem on the excellence of printing,[189] though throwing little new light on the practice of the art, is worth recording here, not only for the description it gives of letter-founding in France at the time, but for the sake of the curious woodcut which accompanies it. The latter represents a round furnace in the centre of a room, surmounted by a metal pot, at which two casters are standing, with ladle and mould in hand. The moulds, of which a number are to be seen in a rack against the wall, are almost cubic in shape, and apparently without the hooks shown in Moxon’s illustration. One of the casters is holding his mould low, as in the act of casting. A workman sitting on a stool is setting up in a stick the newly-cast type from a box on the {115} floor—possibly breaking them off at the same time. Beyond is a dresser grooving out the break in a stick of types.
26. Letter-founding in France in 1718. (From Thiboust’s Typographiæ Excellentia.)
Of the portion of the poem devoted to letter-founding,[190] we venture to give the following rough translation:— {116}