A History of the Old English Letter Foundries / with Notes, Historical and Bibliographical, on the Rise and Progress of English Typography.

A few notes on the origin of the names of English type-bodies will conclude our observations on this subject.

Passing the next four bodies, which with us are merely reduplications,64 we note that—

It now remains to trace briefly the origin and development of the leading type-faces used in English Typography.

I.—ROMAN.

To trace the history of the Roman character would almost require a résumé of the works of all the greatest printers in each country of Europe. It must suffice to point out very briefly the changes it underwent before and after reaching England.

Roman type was adopted before 1473 by Mentelin of Strasburg, whose beautiful letter placed him in the front rank of German printers. Gunther Zainer, who settled at Augsburg in 1469, after printing some works in the round Gothic, also adopted, in 1472, the Roman of the Venetian School, founts of which he is said to have brought direct from Italy. The German name of Antiqua, applied to the Roman character, has generally been supposed to imply a reluctance to admit the claim of Italy to the credit of introducing this style of letter. As, however, the Italians themselves called the letter the “Lettera Antiqua tonda,” the imputation against Germany is unfounded.82 The French, Dutch, and English called it “Roman” from the first. {43}

The Roman made its way rapidly in English typography during the first half of the sixteenth century, and in the hands of such artists as Faques, Rastell, Wyer, Berthelet, and Day, maintained an average excellence. But it rapidly degenerated, and while other countries were dazzling Europe by the brilliancy of their impressions, the English Roman letter went from good to bad, and from bad to worse. No type is more beautiful than a beautiful Roman; and with equal truth it may be said, no type is more unsightly than an ill-fashioned and ill-worked Roman. While Claude Garamond85 in France was carrying out into noble practice the theories of the form and proportion of letters set out by his master, Geofroy Tory; while the Estiennes at Paris, Sebastian Gryphe at Lyons, Froben at Basle, Froschouer at Zurich, and Christopher Plantin at Antwerp, were moulding and refining their alphabets into models which were to become {45} classical, English printers, manacled body and soul by their patents and monopolies and state persecutions, achieved nothing with the Roman type that was not retrograde. For a time a struggle appears to have existed between the Black-letter and the Roman for the mastery of the English press, and at one period the curious spectacle was presented of mixed founts of the two. We present our readers with a specimen of English printing at a foreign press in this transition period, as illustrative not only of the compromise between the two rival characters, but of the average unappetising appearance of the typography {46} of the day. Always impressionable and unoriginal, our national Roman letter, in the midst of many admirable models, chose the Dutch for its pattern, and tried to imitate Plantin and Elzevir, but with very little of the spirit of those great artists. No English work of the time, printed in English Roman type, reproduces within measurable distance the elegant embonpoint, the harmony, the symmetry of the types of the famous Dutch printers. The seeker after the beautiful looks almost in vain for anything to satisfy his eye in the English Roman-printed works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A few exceptions there are86; and when the English printers, giving up the attempt to cut Roman for themselves, went to Holland to buy it; or when, as in the case of Oxford and Thomas James, the English foundries became furnished with Dutch matrices, our country was able to produce a few books the appearance of which does not call forth a blush.

The first English Bible printed in Roman type was Bassendyne’s edition in Edinburgh, in 1576. We have it on the authority of Watson87 that, from the earliest days of Scotch typography, a constant trade in type and labour was maintained between Holland and Scotland; and he exhibited in his specimen pages the Dutch Romans which at that day were the most approved letters in use in his country.

Utilitarian motives brought about one important departure from the first models of the Roman letter in the different countries where it flourished. The early printers were generous in their ideas, and cut their letters with a single eye to artistic beauty. But as printing gradually ceased to be an art, and became a trade, economical considerations suggested a distortion or cramping of these beautiful models, with a view to “getting more in.” In some cases the variation was made gracefully and inoffensively. The slender or compressed Roman letters of the French, Italian, and in some cases the Dutch printers, though not comparable with the round ones, are yet regular and neat; but in other cases, ours among them, there was little of either delicacy or skill in the innovation. The early part of the seventeenth century witnessed the creation abroad of some very small Roman faces, foremost among which were those of the beautiful little Sedan editions of Jannon,88 which gave their name to the body of the microscopic letter {47} in which they were printed. Van Dijk cut a still smaller letter for the Dutch in Black-letter, and afterwards in Roman; and for many years the Dutch Diamond held the palm as the smallest fount in Europe. England followed the general tendency towards the minute, and though it is doubtful whether either Pearl or Diamond were cut by English founders before 1700, an English printer, Field, accomplished in 1653 the feat of printing a 32mo Bible in Pearl.89 Among English printers in the seventeenth century who did credit to their profession, Roycroft is conspicuous, especially for the handsome large Romans in which he printed Ogilby’s Virgil,90 and other works. Yet Roycroft’s handsomest letter—that in which he printed the Royal Dedication to the Polyglot of 1657—was the fount used nearly a century before by Day,91 whose productions few English printers of the seventeenth century could equal, and none, certainly, could excel. Of Moxon’s attempt in 1683 to regenerate the Roman letter in England, we shall have occasion to speak elsewhere. His theories, as put into practice by himself, were eminently unsuccessful; and though the sign-boards of the day may have profited by his rules, it is doubtful if typography did. His enthusiastic praise of the Dutch letter of Van Dijk may have stimulated the trade between England and Holland; but at home his precepts fell flat for lack of an artist to carry them out.

That artist was forthcoming in William Caslon in 1720, and from the time he cut his first fount of pica, the Roman letter in England entered on a career of honour. Caslon went back to the Elzevirs for his models, and throwing into his labour the genius of an enlightened artistic taste, he reproduced their letters with a precision and uniformity hitherto unknown among us, preserving at the same time that freedom and grace of form which had made them of all others the most beautiful types in Europe. Caslon’s Roman became the fashion, and English typography was loyal to it for nearly 80 years. Baskerville’s exquisite letters were, as he himself acknowledged, inspired by those of Caslon. They were sharper and more delicate in outline, and when finely printed, as they always were, were more attractive to the eye.92 But what they gained in brilliance they missed in sterling dignity; they dazzled the eye and fatigued it, and the fashion of the {48} national taste was not seriously diverted. Still less was it diverted by the experiments of a “nouvelle typographie,” which Luce, Fournier, and others were trying to introduce into France. The stiff, narrow, cramped Roman which these artists produced scarcely finds a place in any English work of the eighteenth century. The Dutch type was now no longer looked at. Wilson, whose letter adorned the works of the Foulis press, and Jackson, whose exquisite founts helped to make the fame of Bensley, as those of his successor Figgins helped to continue it, all adhered to the Caslon models. And all these artists, with Cottrell, Fry, and others, contributed to a scarcely less important reform in English letter-founding, namely, the production by each founder of his own uniform series of Roman sizes,—a feature wofully absent in the odd collections of the old founders before 1720. Towards the close of the century the Roman underwent a violent revolution. The few founders who had begun about 1760 in avowed imitation of Baskerville, had found it in their interest before 1780 to revert to the models of Caslon; and scarcely had they done so, when about 1790 the genius of Didot of Paris and Bodoni of Parma took the English press by storm, and brought about that complete abandonment of the Caslon-Elzevir models which marked, and in some cases disfigured, the last years of the eighteenth century. The famous presses of Bensley and Bulmer introduced the modern Roman under the most favourable auspices. The new letter was honest, businesslike, and trim; but in its stiff angles, its rigid geometrical precision, long hair-seriffs, and sharp contrasts of shade, there is little place for the luxuriant elegance of the old style.93 In France, the new fashion, even with so able an exponent as Didot, had a competitor in the Baskerville type, which, rejected by us, was welcomed by the French literati. Nor was this the only instance in which the fashion went from England to France, for in 1818 the Imprimerie Royale itself, in want of a new typographie of the then fashionable Roman, came to London for the punches.

The typographical taste of the first quarter of the present century suffered a distinct vulgarisation in the unsightly heavy-faced Roman letters, which were not only offered by the founders, but extensively used by the printers; and the date at which we quit this brief survey is not a glorious one. The simple uniformity of faces which characterised the specimens of Caslon and his disciples had been corrupted by new fancies and fashions, demanded by the printer and conceded by the founder,—fashions which, as Mr. Hansard {49} neatly observed in 1825, “have left the specimen of a British letter-founder a heterogeneous compound, made up of fat-faces and lean-faces, wide-set and close-set, proportioned and disproportioned, all at once crying “Quousque tandem abutêre patientia nostra?”

Some of the coarsest of the new fashions were happily short-lived; and it is worth transgressing our limit to record the fact that in 1844 the beautiful old-face of Caslon was, in response to a demand from outside, revived, and has since, in rejuvenated forms, regained both at home and abroad much of its old popularity.

It will not be out of place to add a word, before leaving the Roman, in reference to letter-founders’ specimens. When printers were their own founders, the productions of their presses were naturally also the published specimens of their type. They might, like Schoeffer, in the colophon to the Justinian in 1468, call attention to their skill in cutting types; or, like Caxton, print a special advertisement in a special type; or, like Aldus, put forward a specimen of the types of a forthcoming work.94 But none of these are letter-founders’ specimens; nor was it till letter-founding became a distinct trade that such documents became necessary. England was probably behind other nations when, in 1665, the tiny specimen of Nicholas Nicholls was laid under the Royal notice. It is doubtful whether any founder before Moxon issued a full specimen of his types. He used the sheet as a means of advertising not only his types, but his trade as a mathematical instrument maker; and his specimen, taken in connection with his rules for the formation of letters, is a sorry performance, and not comparable to the Oxford University specimen, which that press published in 1693, exhibiting the gifts of Dr. Fell and Junius. Of the other English founders before 1720, no type specimen has come down to us; that shown by Watson in his History of the Art of Printing being merely a specimen of bought Dutch types. Caslon’s sheet, in 1734, marked a new departure. It displayed at a glance the entire contents of the new foundry; and by printing the same passage in each size of Roman, gave the printer an opportunity of judging how one body compared with another for capacity. Caslon was the first to adopt the since familiar “Quousque tandem” for his Roman specimens. The Latin certainly tends to show off the Roman letter to best advantage; but it gives an inadequate idea of its appearance in any other tongue. “The Latin language,” says Dibdin, “presents to the eye a great uniformity or evenness of effect. The m and n, like the solid sirloin upon our table, have a substantial appearance; no garnishing with useless {50} herbs . . to disguise its real character. Now, in our own tongue, by the side of the m or n, or at no great distance from it, comes a crooked, long-tailed g, or a th, or some gawkishly ascending or descending letter of meagre form, which are the very flankings, herbs, or dressings of the aforesaid typographical dish, m or n. In short, the number of ascending or descending letters in our own language—the p’s, l’s, th’s, and sundry others of perpetual recurrence—render the effect of printing much less uniform and beautiful than in the Latin language. Caslon, therefore, and Messrs. Fry and Co. after him,”—and he might have added all the other founders of the eighteenth century,—“should have presented their specimens of printing-types in the English language; and then, as no disappointment could have ensued, so no imputation of deception would have attached.”95 Several founders followed Caslon’s example by issuing their specimens on a broadside sheet, which could be hung up in a printing-office, or inset in a cyclopædia. Baskerville appears to have issued only specimens of this kind; but Caslon, Cottrell, Wilson and Fry, who all began with sheets, found it necessary to adopt the book form. These books were generally executed by a well-known printer, and are examples not only of good types, but of fine printing. Bodoni’s splendid specimens roused the emulation of our founders, and the small octavo volumes of the eighteenth century gave place at the commencement of the nineteenth to quarto, often elaborately, sometimes sumptuously got up. Mr. Figgins was the first to break through the traditional “Quousque tandem,” by adding, side by side with the Latin extract, a passage in the same-sized letter in English. But it has not been till comparatively recent years that the venerable Ciceronian denunciation has finally disappeared from English letter-founders’ specimens.

ITALIC.

The ITALIC letter, which is now an accessory of the Roman, claims an origin wholly independent of that character. It is said to be an imitation of the handwriting of Petrarch, and was introduced by Aldus Manutius of Venice, for the purpose of printing his projected small editions of the classics, which, either in the Roman or Gothic character, would have required bulky volumes. Chevillier informs us that a further object was to prevent the excessive number of contractions then in use, a feature which rendered the typography of the day often unintelligible, and always unsightly.96 The execution of the Aldine Italic was entrusted {51} to Francesco da Bologna,97 who, says Renouard, had already designed and cut the other characters of Aldus’ press. The fount is a “lower-case” only, the capitals being Roman in form. It contains a large number of tied letters, to imitate handwriting, but is quite free from contractions and ligatures. It was first used in the Virgil of 1501, and rapidly became famous throughout Europe. Aldus produced six different sizes between 1501–58. It was counterfeited almost immediately in Lyons and elsewhere. The Junta press at Florence produced editions scarcely distinguishable from those of Venice. Simon de Colines cut an Italic bolder and larger than that of Aldus, and introduced the character into France about 1521, prior to which date Froben of Basel had already made use of it at his famous press. Plantin used a large Italic in his Polyglot, but, like many other Italics of the period, it was defaced by a strange irregularity in the slopes of the letters. The character was originally called Venetian or Aldine, but subsequently took the name of Italic in all the countries into which it travelled, except Germany, which, acting with the same independence as had been displayed towards the Roman, called it “Cursiv.” The Italians also adopted the Latin name, “Characteres cursivos seu cancellarios.”

The Italic was at first intended and used for the entire text of a classical work. Subsequently, as it became more general, it was used to distinguish portions of a book not properly belonging to the work, such as introductions, prefaces, indexes, and notes; the text itself being in Roman. Later, it was used in the text for quotations; and finally served the double part of emphasising certain words98 in some works, and in others, chiefly the translations of the Bible, of marking words not rightly forming a part of the text.

In England it was first used by De Worde, in Wakefield’s Oratio, in 1524. Day, about 1567, carried it to a high state of perfection; so much so, that his Italic remained in use for several generations. Vautrollier, also, in his New Testaments, made use of a beautiful small Italic, which, however, was probably of foreign cut. Like the Roman, the Italic suffered debasement during the century which followed Day, and the Dutch models were generally preferred {52} by English printers. These were carried down to a minute size, the “Robijn Italic” of Christopher Van Dijk being in its day the smallest in Europe.