The Trieste leaf: a Bodoni forgery?

This leaf is from the facsimile edition of Giambattista Bodoni’s first comprehensive specimen of his own types, his Manuale tipografico dated 1788, printed by Giovanni Mardersteig at the Officina Bodoni, Verona, in 1968.

The original work, which was printed in several formats, is one of the rarest of the Bodoni specimens, and its production was the outcome of some years of activity during which Bodoni cut many new types, of which he printed specimen pages with different typographical treatments. It appears, moreover, to have been produced in two parts, and Bodoni’s close confidant in Rome, José Nicolás de Azara, who acknowledged the receipt of leaves 1 to 50 in January 1788, complained two years later that he had still not had the rest of the specimen (A. Ciavarella, ed. De Azara–Bodoni, Parma: Museo Bodoniano, 1979).

The types that are shown in Bodoni’s early specimens have never been examined systematically, which is something that needs to be done, since many of them were never included in the more formal specimens and, although the inventory of his materials drawn up in 1843 includes an extensive list of ‘Punzoni e matrici de’ primi lavori i quali facevano parte del Manuale del 1788, molti dei quali sono servibili’ (punches and matrices of the early works that appear in the Manuale of 1788, many of which are usable), it is not known for certain whether all of them survive among the collections at Parma. There are collections of these early leaves in several places, and there is a summary of them in the list of Italian type specimens that was published in La Bibliofilía in 2000. (For the reference, see Sources, below.)



This proof for one of these trial leaves, annotated by Bodoni himself, is from a volume that was in the collection of the Marchese Saporiti della Sforzesca, at the sale of which in London in 1886 William Blades and Talbot Baines Reed bought many items that are now in the St Bride Library.

The texts used for all these specimens are short descriptions of cities. Some of the earlier examples include the names of foreign cities – Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Madrid – as well as Italian ones. But the cities that are named on the leaves of the Manuale tipografico dated 1788 are all Italian, and they provided an identity for each type and its punches and matrices when several designs were made for the same body. Roman and italic types in the smaller sizes are shown on the same leaf, but after leaf 50 the roman is shown on one leaf, with the text in Italian, and the italic, with the text in French, is on another leaf, bearing the same number but in roman numerals. Three types appear in two states, one later in style than the other, and Mardersteig includes examples of these in his facsimile.

Here, below, is a leaf showing a type for the body of Canoncino (about 28 points) with a text describing Crema, a town near Milan which at this date formed a detached part of the Venetian Republic. And below it is the leaf numbered 72 in the Manuale tipografico, showing not only a revised state of the type, but a setting in which the long s has been discarded. (But note that this is not the type that bears the name of Crema in the Manuale tipografico of 1818, which is a very different design.)





The specimen begins with a narrative of the history of Parma, showing the tiny size that Bodoni had called Parigina but renamed at about this date as Parmigianina. It ends with an example of the largest size, Papale, a leaf numbered 100, which has the text for Saluzzo in Piemonte, Bodoni’s birthplace: Saluzzo mia amata patria (Saluzzo, my beloved home). This image is from the second half of the Manuale tipografico on vellum in the St Bride Library.



Leaf 71, which is shown at the head of this post, is missing from all known copies of the Manuale, but it is present in Mardersteig’s facsimile. So how was it possible for him to include it?

As far as we know the leaf that Mardersteig reproduced was first described and illustrated in a work by Giampiero Giani, Catalogo delle autentiche edizioni Bodoniane (Milan, 1948), published under the imprint of Edizioni la Conchiglia. Giani had produced a brief monograph on Bodoni in 1946, Saggio di bibliografia bodoniana, and he published some works on contemporary painting during the same decade. His book of 1948 lists a number of rare items printed by Bodoni, including what he describes as a proof for this leaf.



Giani wrote that he had found it in a copy of the Manuale tipografico of 1788 which was annotated in Bodoni’s own hand. The absence of the leaf from the published specimen, he explains, was accounted for by the wording of its text:

‘Trieste, in the age of Augustus, with Venice and Istria, made up the tenth region of the [Roman] Empire. In 1719 Carlo VI declared this beautiful and ancient Italian city of ours a free port.’

A porto franco or free port was one that was free of many of the taxes and duties that were commonly levied. ‘Carlo VI’ was Karl VI, the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna, and the father of Maria-Teresa (died 1780), who followed his initiative in developing the city as Austria’s major mercantile seaport, a role that it would keep, with a brief interlude in the hands of Napoleonic France, until 1920. Although Italians continued to form a large proportion of its population, Trieste had opted for Hapsburg protection in the 13th century in order to escape domination by the Venetian Republic, which did acquire a substantial part of the peninsula of Istria, just to the south. The city was assigned to Italy after the First World War, but at the end of the Second it was claimed by Yugoslavia, and fierce disputes continued for many years. Trieste did not become an internationally recognized part of modern Italy until 1975.

Giani suggested that that the term ‘Italian’, implying a unifying identity, was potentially a politically charged one in the separate states that made up the peninsula, in many of which France, Spain and Austria, not to mention the Papal authorities, had an interest. He remarked that Ferdinando, Duke of Parma (whose consort was one of the daughters of Maria Teresa) was especially unlikely to have welcomed the suggestion that Trieste was an Italian city. This term, said Giani, explained the suppression of the leaf. He cited a passage by Bodoni which appears to express love of his Italian identity and his pride in having done something to restore, against ‘foreign’ competition, the almost abandoned honour of Italian typography. (The passage, of which the source was not given, had been quoted in the biography of Bodoni by Piero Trevisani published in 1940.) Giani concluded that the manner in which Bodoni issued the specimen, with its pagination jumping conspicuously from leaf 70 to 72, was intended as his protest against a veto prohibiting the inclusion of the Trieste leaf.

When Mardersteig reproduced the Trieste leaf in his facsimile, it was in the possession of the Biblioteca Cantonale in Lugano, in the Italian-speaking region of Ticino in Switzerland. In 1976, when its director Adriana Ramelli described the treasures of the library, which in 1945 had acquired the major Bodoni collection assembled many years earlier by Richard Hadl, this single leaf was the item that she counted among the most notable:



‘We are proud to possess this courageous declaration by Bodoni, the servant of princes who was obliged always to be respectful and obedient, of his Italian identity. Our Bodoni collection has many fine folio volumes, but the Trieste Leaf (la Carta di Trieste) is the most precious item we have, not only because of its absolute rarity, but because his voice – silenced for political reasons – is kept alive in this unique document that is jealously preserved in the library of the Italian part of Switzerland.’

The pride is sincere and eloquently expressed. But it was misplaced. The leaf was not printed by Bodoni. It is set in a type designed and made in the 20th century, the ‘Bodoni’ of the American Type Founders Company, of 1911, based indeed on late types made by Bodoni but redrawn for making with the pantographic matrix-cutting machine of L. B. Benton and realised as a design by his son Morris Fuller Benton. It is one of the first revivals of a historical model by one of the major ‘type directors’ of the 20th century.



The version of the 24-point type that was used on the sheet was probably the ‘Giambattista Bodoni’ of the Società Augusta of Turin (a typefoundry soon to become merged with the Società Nebiolo), who first made the type under licence from ATF in 1913. It appears in many of the publications produced in 1913 to mark the centenary of the death of Bodoni, including the monograph L’arte di G. B. Bodoni, by Raffaello Bertieri, and it was used by the trade journal Il Risorgimento grafico throughout the year.



Giovanni Mardersteig evidently accepted the ‘Trieste leaf’ as wholly authentic. Having presumably acquired a photograph from Lugano, he prepared it for publication in his facsimile.



The quality of the impression in the original being very uneven, Mardersteig produced an image that was suitable for reproduction by retouching a film positive, to an extent that involved redrawing some of the detail of the original. The image above is from an article by Vanni Scheiwiller in the volume published to accompany an exhibition in Verona, Giovanni Mardersteig: stampatore, editore, umanista (Verona: Edizioni Valdonega, 1989). Moreover, since the original leaf lacked a leaf number within the characteristic frame that is on the others (a motif often used by Bodoni, based on the tabula ansata that is the form of many small Roman inscriptions), he made one up for leaf 71 and added it to the page to make it uniform with the others, as he freely admits in his introduction.

Thus far, but no further, Mardersteig can be held responsible for some slight complicity in what one can only describe as a 20th-century forgery. Although he ‘improved’ the original image in a manner that later makers of facsimiles might not have followed, he gave its source and stated openly what he had done to it. He clearly accepted the genuineness of the ‘proof’ itself in perfect good faith, as did Adriana Ramelli and the authorities of the Biblioteca Cantonale. But there are more questions to be asked about the role of Giani. He said little about the annotated copy of the Manuale in which he ‘found’ the leaf. He quoted from a confidential letter of 1790 written by one Mazza, which implied that the national sentiment that pervades the whole work (as demonstrated by the use of texts that list only Italian cities) did Bodoni no favours at the court of Ferdinando, whose consort, Maria Amalia, as noted above, was a daughter of Maria Teresa of Austria. The writer of the letter was presumably Andrea Mazza, who was briefly director of the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma during the temporary eclipse of its founder, Paciaudi, as a consequence of the dismissal and disgrace of the prime minister, Guillaume Du Tillot (an act in which Maria Amalia is believed to have had a part), and he was likely to be no friend to other protegés of Du Tillot’s like Bodoni. Giani gave no precise location for the letter, writing only that it was ‘in a private collection in Milan.’

Giani’s lack of frankness about his sources did not impress the distinguished scholar Sergio Samek Ludovici when he wrote his own account in 1964 – one of the few that are of lasting value – of the type specimens of Bodoni (‘I Manuali Tipografici di G. B. Bodoni’). But Samek Ludovici voiced no doubts concerning the genuineness of the Trieste leaf. Indeed he endorsed it and, in an article on the connection of the Bodoni family with Saluzzo in the journal Accademie e Biblioteche d’Italia that was published in the same year, he repeats, but without attributing it to him, Giani’s story of the suspicion relating to Bodoni that the printing of the names of so many Italian cities had aroused. (An extract is given among the Sources below.) In the introduction to his facsimile, Mardersteig similarly touches on the story of the suppression of the Trieste leaf, and of the consequent slight cloud on Bodoni’s reputation, treating it as common knowledge; but he does so briefly and without mentioning the name of Giani. In fact all the sources that appear to corroborate Giani’s version of the story independently appear to be derived from it.

Having failed to locate the original of the first-named essay by Samek Ludovici, which was published in the volume strenna for 1964 of the journal Italia grafica, I found it reprinted in the useful volume of collected essays on Bodoni by several authors that was put together in 1990 under the title Conoscere Bodoni by Luigi Cesare Maletto and Stefano Ajani. Another piece in the same collection is an Italian version of a short note that Mardersteig had written in 1968 about the Bodoni types he had used at the Officina Bodoni, reprinted from the volume of his collected essays published in Milan in 1988. In Conoscere Bodoni (where the title of the essay is for some reason reworded), an editorial hand added a note to the passage where Mardersteig – referring to his decision to have Bodoni’s original types recast in 1926 – observed that ‘the Bodoni types then in commercial use were very different from Bodoni’s own creations.’ The editorial note reads, ‘This probably refers to those drawn in America by Benton in 1910, which were universally accepted as “the” Bodoni.’ And then it adds: ‘Mardersteig also used the Benton types to set page 71, “Trieste,” the page missing from the Manuale of 1788, in his reprint. In our opinion this was a very odd thing to do, since the authentic original was in the Biblioteca Cantonale di Lugano.’ To have spotted the use of the ATF type in Mardersteig’s facsimile was acute (I was unaware of this note when I wrote my own first account of this affair), but the suggestion that Mardersteig had set the leaf himself in the modern type was highly implausible, and was in any case incompatible with the account in his introduction to the facsimile, where he gave the document at Lugano as the source of his image.

‘Forgery’ is a strong term to use, but in this case it cannot really be avoided. Someone created the Trieste leaf using 20th century materials, and someone, possibly the same person or someone else who may have been aware that its authenticity was not above suspicion, must have persuaded the Biblioteca Cantonale, which was systematically adding to its already distinguished Bodoni collection, that this was a document worth acquiring.

Even if the paper of the Trieste leaf may have seemed right for the date claimed for it by Giani, unprinted leaves of any date are not impossible to get hold of. In any case, that is something that remains to be ascertained, since the original is not currently accessible, nor do there appear to be records showing from whom the leaf was acquired, and when. Type is different. Anyone with a quite basic knowledge of typography should have recognized the ATF Bodoni used for the Trieste leaf, one of the most familiar of modern typefaces. The machine-cut quality of the type design, the lining figures for the date ‘1719’ (compare those in leaf 72, ‘Crema’), and the letter-spacing of the line beginning ‘l’Istria’, all point unmistakeably to type and typesetting practice of the 20th century. Moreover Bodoni never used the flat-topped letter t (a French innovation) that was added to the ATF typeface. Mardersteig’s blindness in this instance is unaccountable, but it is perhaps a useful reminder that we are none of us infallible.

Lastly, we need to consider other relevant evidence. Even if Giani did find the leaf, as he claimed, in an unidentified copy of the Manuale bearing notes in Bodoni’s own hand (did it, too, go to Lugano?), the sheet itself bears no leaf number, and his assumption that it was the missing leaf 71 of the Manuale appears to be pure guesswork. There seems to be no evidence at all that a leaf bearing a reference to Trieste was ever set for inclusion in the Manuale. It is possible that all the descriptions of cities used for these specimens are derived from some contemporary published account, and if so, it would of course be very useful if it could be identified, and to discover whether it does indeed include Trieste, and in what terms.

As for Trieste as an ‘Italian’ city, the heading for it in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert is indeed Trieste, ville d’Italie, a city that was located in the area that traditionally, to use Metternich’s neutral and widely-misapplied words, had the ‘geographical name’ of Italy. But the text of the article makes it clear that it was politically a part of Austria, as it had been for centuries. A contemporary guide for travellers in Italy, the Guida per il viaggio d’Italia in posta that was published in 1786 by the Fratelli Reycends in Turin, includes the journey from Venice to Trieste, città della Germania, ‘Trieste, a city of Germany’, which was a term that included Austria.

With the new status of free port that greatly enhanced its prosperity, Trieste was currently regarded as a major asset of Austria, in which substantial funds were invested by the imperial authorities during the later 18th century, when provision was made for dredging the harbour, removing the old city walls and lighting the streets. The Encyclopédie noted that the Empress (Maria Teresa) had improved the fortifications and established shipyards. For any work printed in Italy in the late 1780s, and especially one issued from a press with the ducal protection that was conferred on Bodoni’s, to call Trieste ‘this ancient and beautiful Italian city of ours’ (thus begging the question of what was meant by ‘Italian’, and who ‘we’ might be in this context) might indeed have seemed provocative. But it should be noted that, while many of the cities that are the subject of the text of each leaf in the Manuale are described as città d’Italia, a city of Italy, or città del Piemonte, or some other region of Italy, the text relating to Trieste is the only one that uses the term città italiana (an Italian city). In writing that is claimed to be of the 1780s, the use of words such as nostra and italiana, with their overtones of the patriotic movements that belong to a much later period, seems oddly anachronistic. The text of leaf 72 shown above, with its description of Crema, is scrupulously precise in giving its status as a part of the Venetian Republic located near Milan.

During a lifetime spent during a period of constant political upheaval, from the loss of his patron Du Tillot within three years of his arrival in Parma in 1768 to living with the Napoleonic French administration of the region during the last years of his life (to which one could add the tensions that can be detected in his environment in Rome), Bodoni demonstrated one supreme talent: that of surviving. For him to print the text presented by Giani, even as a proof, would have been an act that seems wholly out of character.

The term carta (paper), used for ‘leaf’ by both Giani and Ramelli, rather than the more ordinary foglio, can also have political associations not unlike those of ‘charter’ in English, and the choice may have been deliberate. As suggested above, the tone of its words is reminiscent of the later irredentist rhetoric that supported the rights of the Italian-speaking citizens of neighbouring states, in France and Switzerland as well as Austria, and which aimed at territorial annexation. But this issue hardly entered wide political consciousness much before the latter part of the 19th century, when a number of different events, but most notably the dissatisfaction felt in Italy with the national settlements resulting from the Congress of Berlin in 1878, fuelled irredentismo as a popular cause. Thus the wording of the leaf is suspect, as well as its physical properties.

Resentment of Austria and sympathy for the Italian-speaking citizens of Trieste were feelings that gained greatly in strength just before and during the First World War, when the ATF Bodoni type produced by the Augusta/Nebiolo typefoundry was introduced and quite widely used, almost as a ‘national’ typeface. It is not inconceivable that someone forged both the leaf and its words at that time, and placed it in the copy of the Manuale tipografico of 1788 where Giani said he found it, in order to provide a fictitious early instance of the movement. But awareness of the antagonisms associated with the more recent history of Trieste and fears for its future were also widely and acutely present in Italy during the years just after the Second World War, and they perhaps help to account for the lack of any critical examination of the leaf at this time and the general acceptance of Giani’s account of its discovery. On the whole it seems more likely that the leaf belongs to this later date. The writer of the text and its printer remain to be identified.

Footnote



In the Bodoni Collection of the Biblioteca Palatina, Parma, there is a bound set of pairs of identical printed leaves annotated in Bodoni’s own hand (Coll. Bod. 8/ 8 es.) which appears to provide a synopsis of the characters in the founts of roman and italic types that were to be used for the Manuale tipografico of 1788, together with the name and leaf number to be assigned to them and the bodies on which they were to be cast. It lists all the types that appear on the pairs of leaves numbered 51 to 100, with just one exception: there is no type for leaf 71. The first half of this volume, showing synopses of the types for leaves 1 to 50, appears to be the item that that was described by Giani on page 24 of his work of 1948 as a ‘plan’ (stesura) for the Manuale. It is in the Mortara collection of the Biblioteca Braidense, Milan. A leaf from it is shown above, with details of the characters in the roman type under the name of Assisi, for the body of Testo (about 16 points), which appears on leaf 50 of the Manuale. Another volume at Parma, which includes a copy of the Manuale tipografico, 1788, and some other works (Coll. Bod. 9/ 1 es.), contains a note apparently in the hand of Angelo Pezzana, the long-serving librarian of the Palatina (1804 to 1862) under whose direction the punches and matrices were acquired and the holdings of examples of Bodoni's own printing were greatly expanded. Discussing the make-up of the Manuale tipografico of 1788 the writer observes: ‘Il No. 71 Ital[ian]o & Franc[ese] non si trova in alcuno e dicesi che non fosse impresso.’ That is, ‘[Leaf] 71 in Italian and French is not found in any copy, and it is said that it was not printed.’ There is no mention of Trieste.


Sources

Texts in Italian that are quoted below without translation are summarized above.


James Mosley, ‘Italian type specimens to 1860’, in ‘Sources for Italian typefounding’, La Bibliofilía, anno CII (2000), pp. 56–102. Revised reprint in: Cento anni di Bibliofilía: atti del convegno internazionale, Biblioteca nazionale Firenze, 22–24 aprile 1999 (Firenze: Olschki, 2001), pp. 299–354. The present text is a revised and expanded version of a footnote that appears in the section of this article dealing with the Manuale tipografico of 1788.


Conoscere Bodoni, a cura di Stefano Ajani e Luigi Cesare Maletto nel 250. anniversario della nascita: contributi di G. Spadolini [etc] (Collegno, Torino, 1989).


Giampiero Giani, Catalogo delle autentiche edizioni Bodoniani (Milano: Conchiglia, 1948), pp. 18–20, [30].

‘L’edizione [Manuale tipografico, 1788] … non ha prefazione e volutamente si diede ad essa un valore del tutto tecnico perchè l’intima ragione di questo lavoro (sfuggita fino ad ora agli esperti) piaque assai poco alla Corte di Ferdinando, come annota il Mazza in una lettera confidenziale (1790) da me vista in una collezione privata milanese: «… da questo capo d’opera, ove si ammirano li più svariati caratteri, traspira una certa aura di romanità al di là d’ogni tolleranza…» È infatti all’ideale di una Unità Italiana che si respira questa sua fatica incisoria! Presenta cento Città italiane che ai suoi tempi erano dominate da Governi stranieri e che solo molti anni dopo diedero i primi segni di una sospirata libertà. Ecco l’elenco: «Parma, Roma, Torino […] Tivoli, Saluzzo.» La forma dello «Stivale rovinatissimo» nasce evidente da questo elenco confermato poi dalle sue stesse parole: «È stato sopratutto l’amore che io porto al nome italiano e all’Italia a cui mi compiaccio e reco ad onore di appartenere e la lusinghiera speranza che dalle mie improbe fatiche qualche gloria di più refulga su questa bella regione d’Europa che per la prima emerse dalle tenebre dell’ignoranza, che per la prima salì al più alto grado di celebrità e di splendore nelle arti, nelle scienze e nelle lettere, che mi ha spinto a rivendicarle per quanto era in me quanto era in me quell’onore tipografico che ella aveva alle straniere sue rivali pressochè totalmente abbandonato». L’ultima carta (la centesima) porta questa scritta: Saluzzo, mia adorata patria. In tutti gli esemplari da me visti (nove in tutto) manca una carta, la settantunesima, e in sua vece, qualche volta, si trova ripetuta la settantesima (Terracina). La carta che manca è stata da me trovata, in bozza, in un esemplare in-4° (postillato da Bodoni stesso) e presenta la città di Trieste (!), con la scritta: «Trieste, ai tempi di Augusto fece parte parte con la Venezia e l’Istria della decima regione dell’Impero. Nel 1719 Carlo VI dichiarò questa nostra bella ed antica città italiana, Porto Franco-». Una frase del genere doveva essere alquanto ardita ai tempi di Maria Teresa e certo fu la ragione del veto di stampa posto a questa carta; veto che Bodoni volle risultasse evidente transcurando di sostituire la scritta e numerando 70/72.’


Adriana Ramelli, ‘Raccolte particolari e rarità della Biblioteca Cantonale di Lugano’, in Storia di biblioteconomia e storia del libro in onore di Francesco Barberi (Roma, 1976), p. 454, tav. 41.

‘Abbandoniamo ora i letterati di casa per citare una stampa rarissima, una stampa bodoniana, probabilmente un «unicum». Si tratta di un foglio acquistato alcuni anni fa, la cosiddetta Carta di Trieste che Bodoni aveva composto per il suo Manuale tipografico del 1788. Vi si legge: «Trieste … questa nostra bella e antica città italiana …», ecco il motivo per cui il foglio – che avrebbe dovuto recare il N. 71 – non potè essere incluso nel Manuale. Noi siamo fieri di possederlo, questo foglio, che è una coraggiosa dichiarazione d’italianità da parte del Bodoni, il quale, al servizio dei principi, doveva sempre essere pronto a omaggi e a obbedienze. La nostra raccolta bodoniana è ricca di imponenti celebri in-folio, ma la Carta di Trieste è per noi il pezzo più prezioso non solo a motivo della sua assoluta rarità, ma perché è una voce che – ridotta al silenzio per motivi politici – è rimasta viva in questo «unicum» conservato gelosamente proprio nella Biblioteca della Svizzera italiana.’


Sergio Samek Ludovici, ‘I Bodoni e Saluzzo’, Accademie e Biblioteche d’Italia, vol. 32 (1964), pp. 333–8 (at p. 335).

«SALUZZO — si legge nel Manuale del 1788 — MIA ADORATA PATRIA » ripetuto con varianti in altri manuali e prove. Leggenda che ha il sapore di una dichiarazione di innamorato e nel quale non gioca soltanto il naturale e tradizionale amor di campanile, ma qualche cosa di più, se la dichiarazione va ad aggiungersi alle belle piccole storie delle città italiane. Tra le quali celeberrima quella dedicata a Trieste ed espunta poi dal Manuale. Bozza rarissima, posseduta dalla Biblioteca Cantonale di Lugano che l’acquistò in Milano orsono vent’anni.
Questo spirito cavourriano avanti-lettera, com’è noto, lo fece sospetto, anche se egli fu leale servitore della Corte di Parma …

Here is a free translation:

In the Manuale of 1788 we read, ‘Saluzzo, my beloved home’, a phrase repeated with variations in other specimens, a text that has the flavour of a lover’s declaration, and which goes beyond a natural attachment to one’s birthplace to something more intense, if we add it to the charming brief histories of the cities of Italy. The most celebrated of these is the text relating to Trieste, which was removed from the Manuale, [and which survives in the form of] a very rare proof sheet, owned by the Biblioteca Cantonale of Lugano, which acquired it in Milan some twenty years ago.
This premature voicing of the sentiments of Cavour, as is well-known, made Bodoni suspect, even if he was a loyal servant of the Court of Parma …

Samek Ludovici is quoting here the version of the phrase concerning Saluzzo (Saluzzo mia amata patria) in the mistaken form of words given by Giani in 1948 (see above). It is not in fact known to appear in this form in any other specimen of Bodoni’s types, although a more sober text, reproduced by Giani in his book of 1946, does appear in one of the early single-leaf specimens of the italic of the Canone size: Saluzzo, Città del Piemonte, feconda di uomini celebri nelle Lettere, nelle Armi, e nelle Arti belle, ed amene. It is worth noting that the names of Trieste, and of many Italian and non-Italian cities, including London (‘Londra’) and Oxford, are attached to specimens of roman and italic types in the two-volume Manuale tipografico of 1818, but the text of each specimen in this part of the work is uniformly Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? from the speech of Cicero In Catilinam that was used by Caslon and some other typefounders of the 18th century.


Last edited 19 June 2009

Recasting Caslon Old Face

The heading to the image above claims authentic historical origins for the type that is shown. Something like it was often used in presenting the Caslon ‘Old Face’ types to the customers of the typefounders H. W. Caslon & Co. The example is from a finely-printed large quarto specimen that the foundry produced in about 1896 in order to promote the type more widely. The title page reads, Specimens of the original Caslon Old Face printing types, engraved in the early part of the 18th century by Caslon I.

‘Caslon’ is an example of what became known in the commercial world of the 20th century as a ‘brand’: a family name that was not only widely recognised by customers but which stood as a guarantee of long-standing integrity. George Bernard Shaw had the editions of his plays set in the Caslon Old Face types on the recommendation of Emery Walker, the friend and adviser of William Morris. Printing-offices rooted in the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, like the Dun Emer Press, later the Cuala Press, of Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, the Cranach Press of Harry Graf Kessler and the Cloister Press in Ditchling, used Caslon Old Face. The printed versions of the Declaration of Independence of the United States having mostly been set in Caslon types (necessarily so, since there was hardly a satisfactory alternative available), there was a comparable revival of interest in the face there towards the end of the 19th century. John E. Powers (1837–1919), who acquired a reputation as ‘the father of honest advertising’, had ‘a partiality, which became a fetish, for dressing up his advertisements in Caslon Old Style type. Rivals who imitated his make-up are said to have found great initial difficulty in telling a lie in Caslon Old Style’ (E. S. Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising. London: Michael Joseph, 1952. p. 134).

The preface to the new specimen, signed by Thomas W. Smith, the proprietor of the foundry, contains this passage:

‘The modest specimens issued by the first Caslon were quite inadequate to render justice to his work, and, admiration and demand for these remarkable founts being steadily on the increase, we venture to hope that the following quarto pages, showing in ample form the complete series, from Five-line Pica to Nonpareil, and, at the same time, giving an account of the life and labour of their originator, with the history of the Caslon Foundry to the present day, will be acceptable to the Literary as well as the Printing world.’

One must concede that the types look splendid. Perhaps their impression on the highly-calendared paper is a little pallid, but the comfortingly familiar, old-fashioned shapes and the clarity of outline and the quality of their casting do honour both to the punchcutter and to the typefounder. But which punchcutter? That is a question that is less simple to answer, because this is how the same type had appeared in a specimen just a few years earlier, and somehow it did not look quite the same:

The story of the revival of the Caslon types at the Chiswick Press in the 1840s, recast by the Caslon foundry from original matrices that were still in their hands, is a familiar one. Advised, it seems, by Henry Cole, a figure who would be active in the organizing of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Longman, one of the major London publishing houses, had published the pseudonymous Diary of Lady Willoughby, printed in 1844 by the Chiswick Press in an elaborately imitated 17th-century style, both literary and typographical, using the Great Primer Caslon type, with its long s, that had been ordered for the printing of an Eton leaving present, a quarto edition of the Juvenal Satires. This, in the event, appeared in 1845. Works using other sizes of the Caslon types were printed by the Chiswick Press in 1844. In 1852, Longman published Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, a novel in the form of a memoir that purports to have been written in the early 18th century. It is set wholly in the Caslon Pica, using the long s. The printer was Bradbury & Evans. Anne Manning’s popular Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell, afterwards Mistress Milton, published by Hall, Virtue and Co. in 1855 and printed by Richard Clay, set in the English size of Caslon type, using long s, was another exercise in pseudonymous historical typographical pastiche. And of course the Chiswick Press continued to use the types for the tasteful editions, notably of the rediscovered works of 17th-century high-church clergy like Herbert and Taylor, that were published by William Pickering. During the 1850s, then, the types achieved a discreet success as a choice for the publishing of nostalgic evocations of historical texts.

Title page of a showing of the Caslon Old Face types that was included as a section in many of the foundry’s specimens during the later 19th century and is sometimes found bound as a separate specimen.

During the 1850s two related events took place that left their mark on typography. Types that appear to be identical with those cast by the Caslon foundry in London appeared under the name of ‘old style’ in the specimens of three type foundries in the United States: John K. Rogers, Boston (The Boston Type Foundry), 1856, Peter Cortelyou, New York (Cortelyou & Giffing), 1857, and in the Typographic Advertiser in 1859, the promotional journal of L. Johnson, Philadelphia, whose foundry later became MacKellar, Smiths and Jordan.

The other event was the making of a type with the name of ‘Old Style’ by Miller & Richard, Edinburgh. This is the first page of the earliest known specimen, dated 1860:

The text, as can be seen, is knocking copy, playing on the unease of some clients with the irregular and unconventional appearance of the original ‘old face’ or ‘old-faced’ types, the term that appears in a specimen from the Caslon foundry that can be dated 1854, the earliest appearance of the type in a specimen that I have yet found:

Text sizes of the Caslon ‘old face’ type appear in the big new specimen book of the foundry that is dated 1857. The punchcutter of Miller & Richard’s type was Alexander Phemister, who emigrated to the United States in 1861. He was said by T. L. De Vinne, in the second edition of his Plain Printing Types (New York, 1914), to have begun his work on the type in 1852. If this was so, and if Phemister’s old style type became at all widely known at this date or shortly after, perhaps its name was adopted by typefounders in the United States for their versions of a type to which they were perhaps reluctant to give the name of the English artist of the 18th century who had cut it and the foundry which had recently recast it. Or perhaps, conversely, Miller & Richard borrowed the name from them for the improved version of the archaic ‘old face’ type that they had made. There is still uncertainty about the exact chronology of these events, but we know that the design of the bland and regular Old Style type produced by Miller & Richard was quickly copied by other typefounders in Britain and the United States, including H. W. Caslon & Co., and that it would become a generic typeface that was widely used by English-speaking publishers for literary texts (and to some extent, under the name of Mediäval, in Germany), ‘modern face’ types being kept for works of technology and information.

The middle years of the century were difficult ones for the Caslon foundry. It was put up for sale in 1846, but then withdrawn, one of its advertised attractions to buyers having been that it included ‘the original works of its founder, William Caslon, which have recently been much in request for reprints’. A strike in 1865, followed by a protracted lockout, sapped confidence in the management of Henry William Caslon, the last lineal descendent of William Caslon I.

Two years before his death in 1874, Caslon invited back a former employee, Thomas White Smith, who had left the firm at its low point in 1865. The effect of Smith’s energy as manager soon became apparent. In 1875, he set up a journal, Caslon’s Circular, to promote its products. A branch of the foundry opened in Paris. By the 1890s, he had become the sole proprietor of the foundry and was modernizing the firm to face competition from other foundries at home and abroad, and from the new Linotype machine. A new and well-equipped typefoundry, shown below, was built at Hackney Wick in 1900.

However the value to sales of the firm’s name and its traditions did not escape T. W. Smith, and his own sons, when they entered the business, were instructed to change their surnames from Smith to Caslon.

In 1878 Caslon’s Circular published an article with the title, ‘Hand-cast v. machine-cast type’. It opens with this text:

‘In one department of our venerable foundry may still be seen the old process of type-casting by hand, such as was in use nearly two-hundred years ago: indeed we may say such as was in use, with but little alteration, in the days of Caxton. Four or five old men, whose heads have grown grey in the service of the Caslons, bend over their melting fires, and with tiny spoons pour the fused metal into the quaint old moulds, jerking and swaying about with grotesque monotonous movement. They look very much behind the time in the midst of revolving wheels and clanging machinery turning out type at incredible speed. During recent years hand-casters have learnt machine-casting, only a few having been kept at the old process, for reasons which we shall hereafter explain. The art is not taught to new hands, and the consequence is that in a few years hand-casters and their art will be unknown. Machine-cast type can be easily distinguished from hand-cast. It is bright as silver; moreover it has a small round mark on its side near the face of the letter. On the other hand, type produced by the old hand-process does not look so bright, is not so sharp in its angles, and gutters or air-holes may be seen on its sides and foot. We venture to say, however, that beyond its appearance, which is certainly inferior to that cast by machinery, there is little or no superiority in machine over hand-cast type.’

The reason for publishing this explanation then becomes clear:

‘Most of the original old-face founts, for which a demand has sprung up within recent years, are still cast by hand, and we have been led to make the foregoing remarks on the hand-casting process through having received letters from purchasers of an old-face fount, drawing attention to what they concluded to be inferior workmanship. The face of some of the letters of these old founts is no doubt rough and inferior to the modern type in finish—but in finish only. Notwithstanding that the matrices from which they are cast are more than a century old, the type produced by them is not only excellent but unique. […] We may state that the demand for these original founts, instead of declining, as some have predicted, is steadily on the increase, and we are taking steps to improve them so far as smoothness of face is concerned, and to produce them by the machine-casting process, without altering their shapes in the least degree.’

There seems little doubt that the Caslon types that appeared in the United States in the 1850s derived directly from those cast in London, and the most plausible explanation is that they were cast from electrotyped matrices made from the newly-cast Caslon types. There is a persistent story that the matrices for the Johnson type were made with the consent of the Caslon foundry, and indeed possibly by it, a suggestion that is supported by Johnson’s reputation as an honourable man of business. How Rogers and Cortelyou got their copies is unexplained, but a suspicion of piracy is inevitable. (Rogers, like Cortelyou and Johnson and the Caslon foundry in London, included long s in the specimen texts, but mistakenly used it in place of f.)

In 1858 the Caslon foundry supplied electrotyped matrices for the roman of the English and Small Pica sizes of Caslon Old Face to Charles Whittingham at the Chiswick Press. He passed them on to William Howard, the punchcutter and typefounder who had made its Basle and Caxton types during the earlier 1850s and who was no longer capable of such demanding work. Howard, who appears to have died in 1864, cast type from them by hand for filling the cases at the Press. The matrices survive among the materials of the Chiswick Press at the St Bride Library. Those for the English lower case were adapted for machine casting. Some examples are shown below.

Electrotyping, that is the growing of a copper shell from an impression of typeset matter, which could be backed up with metal and used to print from as a substitute for cast stereotype plates, was invented in about 1840 and spread rapidly in the printing trade. The use of electrotyping to make matrices from cast type was the subject of US Patent 4130 of 1845, granted to Thomas Starr. By the 1850s, the technical defects of the process had been overcome, and it had entered the normal practice of typefounders. Increasingly, later in the century, punchcutters turned from cutting their designs in steel – especially the more elaborate ones – towards making them in typemetal, from which electrotyped matrices could be grown. The practice and its historical background are well described in detail by Roy Rice. Unlike the original matrices that were designed for use with the hand mould, electrotyped matrices could be shaped to work with any of the new typecasting machines that were developed during the second half of the 19th century, and by preserving sample types, the founder could generate any number of identical replacements for matrices that suffered wear or damage. But the process was the cause of unease among the major founders, since an unscrupulous rival could make an undetectable copy of a type from a small fount that had been bought commercially. The Caslon foundry was a strong and vocal critic of this practice.

The modernizing of Caslon Old Face was studied in detail by Justin Howes, who was able to spend some time at Stephenson, Blake in Sheffield before all the foundry’s punches, matrices and specimens were acquired for the Type Museum in 1996 and moved to London. He published his report on what he found as ‘Caslon Old Face: an inventory’, which appears as an inset in the article that he wrote for the journal Matrix, no. 20 (2002). It is the result of long and painstaking work, and it throws a great deal of light on the reworking of the smaller sizes of the Old Face types. His conclusion was that a process of remaking the Caslon Old Face punches took place from around 1893. This was the date of the first recutting that he found recorded in the Punch Notes, the documentation kept at the Caslon Foundry. The size was the Great Primer, now cast on 18-point, which was the work of Emile Bertaut. George Hammond, another punchcutter, took over where Bertaut left off, and was responsible for most of the recutting by hand of other sizes that took place between October 1894 and 1908. Later punches for revised characters were mostly machine-cut.

In the light of what he had put together about the state of the ‘Caslon Old Face’ that was cast during the 20th century, Justin went on to make his own digital version of the type, Founder’s Caslon, taking it back where he could to original forms, and purging it of some of the anachronistic characters that had been introduced when the types had first been recast in the 19th century. (These characters are also, incidentally, to be seen in both the Cortelyou and Johnson ‘Old Style’ types, making it abundantly clear what their direct source had been.)

Smith – the article of 1878 in Caslon’s Circular must be his – had been quite frank about the reason for reworking the Old Face types. It was simply no longer practicable to continue to cast any substantial part of the output of the foundry by hand. But there is no evidence – and this I find puzzling – that the expedient of making electrotype matrices from existing types was resorted to, at least not on any significant scale. Perhaps the original matrices had deteriorated too far. (Where are they, by the way?)

In fact a substantial move towards achieving the ‘smoothness of face’ that was promised in 1878 had undoubtedly been made by the date of a specimen book of about 1884, when on a page that shows the four biggest sizes, the ‘Two-Line Double Pica’ (which would later be cast on a 42-point body), a type that first appears in a specimen in 1742 and which is in fact the work of William Caslon II, still shows the irregular lining of type hand-cast from original matrices. But the first three sizes are now ‘smooth’.

Moreover the same specimen includes a slip showing swash italic capitals based on a 16th-century model that had been added to the type. The wording is studiedly vague. One could read it as suggesting that the matrices for these sorts had come to light among the many treasures of the foundry. They had in fact been newly and very expertly cut. (An account of them in Caslon’s Circular, intended for printers, is more frank about their origin.)

The first full presentation of the newly made-over and presumably machine-cast type to printers was in 1890, when a four-page showing of all sizes of the Caslon Old Face roman types, in which each page was headed, ‘Original Caslon Founts’ was given in Caslon’s Circular. The public relaunch of the new ‘smooth’ Old Face took place with the issue of the specimen of 1896, directed at ‘the Literary as well as the Printing world’, in which all the large sizes, including the Canon (the roman lower case of which was Joseph Moxon’s type of the late 17th century), which had looked so crude in the earlier specimens of the ‘ancient types’, were now irreproachably regular in their appearance. The inescapable conclusion is that they have been recut. Here is the lower case a of the Five-line Pica, in the old and new castings:

The image in the older impression is distorted to some extent by heavy inking, and the defects of hand-casting are evident, but it is clear that in the new type the opportunity has been taken to improve the form of the letter. In fact we have proof of the extent to which the whole type was altered. A album from H. W. Caslon & Co. has survived from the 1890s which gives synopses of newly-cut types. One of these, shown below (it is unfortunately neither dated nor annotated), has what are clearly the old and new versions of the Five-line Pica or 72-point size of Caslon Old Face, with the new version, in which the tidying-up can clearly be seen, above the old one. Serifs are more even and regular, the deviation of long s from the vertical is corrected, and the weight of strokes generally has been made more uniform. The corrections of anomalies are not overdone: the ascender of d still does not line with that of b, and j is far too short, but the overall impression is that of a type just a little too beautifully remade by a highly-skilled punchcutter of the 19th century. (It seems to me that Matthew Carter’s ‘Big Caslon’, 1994, based on these large sizes, especially on the 4-line Pica which was later cast on a 60-point body, manages to preserve more of the energy of the originals.)

The inventory compiled by Justin Howes was only a start, as he was well aware, and some entries raise questions that only a careful examining of the surviving materials can begin to answer, something that is hardly possible in the present state of the Type Museum. There are, for example, 48 surviving punches for the Five-line Pica, but only two of these seem to be original. Justin Howes writes that the ‘hand-cut punches for the remaining authentic sorts presumably date from the nineteenth century’. There are also machine-cut punches for a further 28 characters. Are the hand-cut punches those that were made for the revised type that is first seen about 1890? It seems likely, since although the 149 surviving matrices are largely ‘punch-struck’, he does not suggest that these date from the 18th century.

As it happens we have a small piece of more accessible evidence that became detached from the Caslon materials, having apparently at some time formed part of a display for exhibition: a set of four original punches, for K O U and m, for the Four-line Pica, later cast on a 60-point body, together with matrices for these letters. They are now in the St Bride Library.

It can hardly be doubted that these are the original 18th-century punches, in poor condition. Here is the face of m. The width, from one extremity of the foot serifs to the other, is 15.5 mm.

Here are impressions of the type, before and after recutting.

The second counter is slightly narrower than the first, and its upper curve is higher. In the earlier impression, on the left, the initial stroke aligns with the first of the upper curves. In the new type, on the right, these features have been kept, and the oddly-angled ends of the central foot-serif have been preserved, but it seems clear that the drawing of all the parts is more accurate. Moreover the first vertical stroke now rises above the line of both subsequent curves. It is the earlier impression that matches the original punch.

If there could be any doubt about the suggestion that the type was recut, the struck matrices that accompany the old punches confirm that something of the kind took place. The old punch and the new matrix do not fit together, but rattle uncomfortably when one is placed in the other. Here is the matrix for the Four-line Pica m, made for machine casting, and stamped with the code for its character number (47), the point size (60) and the name of the type, OF for ‘Old Face’.

The right-hand letter in the pair of m’s shown above is from the specimen printed in London for H. W. Caslon & Co. Ltd in 1924 by George W. Jones, which is one of the most elaborate and carefully-printed presentations of the Old Face type that the foundry ever produced. This claim, which forms the ‘usp’ or ‘unique selling proposition’ for the product (to use another piece of 20th-century marketing jargon) is made on the title page:

These words, an echo of those that had appeared in many specimens of the Caslon foundry, were clearly designed to sustain the faith of their customers, among whom were so many devoted craft printers, in the genuineness of types that bore one of the most respected names in typography. But to say that the type was derived from the original punches and matrices was now no longer true.

Sources

The list by Justin Howes, ‘Caslon Old Face: an inventory’, is an eight-page insert in his article, ‘Caslon’s punches and matrices’, Matrix no. 20 (2000), pp. 1–7.

Here are some other related sources. The Caslon types as they appeared in the 18th century can be seen in the specimen book of the foundry published in 1766, reproduced in facsimile in Journal of the Printing Historical Society, no. 16 (1981/2).

G. W. Ovink, ‘Nineteenth-century reactions against the didone type model’, Quaerendo, vol. 1 (1971), pp. 18–31, pp. 282–301; vol. 2 (1972), pp. 122–43, is a series of articles, the first of which is the most wide-ranging survey that has been published of the appearance of ‘old face’, ‘old style’ and ‘elzévir’ types, in the 19th century. Similarly, A. F. Johnson’s survey of the English scene, ‘Old-face types in the Victorian age’, which originally appeared in the Monotype Recorder in 1931, and which is incorporated in his Type designs, their history and development, third ed. (London, 1966) and in his Selected essays on books and printing, 1970 (pp. 423–44), though much in need of updating, is the most thorough account yet attempted.

For details of the revival of Caslon Old Face, the account by Janet Ing (now Janet Ing Freeman), based on work with the surviving accounts of the printer as well as the books and other materials, is the most detailed study: ‘Founders’ type and private founts at the Chiswick Press in the 1850s’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 19/20 (1985–7), pp. 63–102. I am most grateful to her for guidance to the sources for the history of the Caslon Old Face matrices used by William Howard that are illustrated above. In her article she makes the suggestion that the early appearance of Caslon Old Face capitals in a set of five title pages that were proofed in 1839, of which an example is shown below, some four years before the setting of Lady Willoughby and other related texts from newly-cast type, may be due to the finding by the younger Charles Whittingham of old Caslon types in his uncle’s cases when he took over responsibility for the shop. This seems highly plausible – and if this is what happened, perhaps it was the discovery of the old types and their use in these few books that set off the whole revival.

The image of the new Caslon foundry at Hackney Wick shown further above is from an album made for a member of the Caslon-Smith family. It was bought by the St Bride Library from the book- and print-seller Ben Weinreb, who generously added the Caslon ‘Synopsis book’ from the same source as part of the deal. I published some of the images in 1993: James Mosley, ‘The Caslon foundry in 1902: selections from an album’, Matrix 13 (1993), pp. 34–42.

ATF Caslon

Here is the presentation of the series known as Caslon 471 in the Specimen book and catalogue of the American Type Founders Company issued in 1923:

This curiously opaque statement appears to suggest that the original Caslon matrices were brought to the United States. It fails to mention that in 1859 the type had already been cast in London for over a decade from early matrices by the Caslon foundry, which continued for many years to cast it from the same matrices. The reference seems likely to be to the electrotyped matrices referred to above that were possibly made in London and perhaps by the Caslon foundry itself, which were imported by Johnson. However, if these matrices had been derived from types cast from the surviving matrices, it can be argued that the Caslon types cast in the United States had a closer relationship to the 18th-century originals than the recut types that were produced in England during the 20th century.

Electrotyped matrices deriving from MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan for the Small Pica size of the Caslon type, later 11 point, survived the break up of ATF in 1993. See the account and images given by Theo Rehak at the web site of the Dale Guild Type Foundry. I learn that they have now been bought by Rich Hopkins.

I should like to express my thanks to Steve Saxe and Alastair Johnston for help with the documenting of the versions of the Caslon types that appear under the name of ‘Old Style’ in the USA.

Last edited 4 July 2009

Tarte au citron

The script shown in this image is an interpretation of the anglaise, more fully the écriture anglaise, the script that was thus named in France after its model, the 18th-century English round hand.
The forms of all styles of writing are influenced by the tool with which they are written and the medium that it employs. In the present case the tool is that of the pâtissier and the medium is chocolate.

There is not a lot more to add, except that the tarte au citron which is the substrate of the script came from Belle Époque, a pâtisserie at Newington Green in London which consistently maintains a level of quality that its equivalents in Paris would be glad to reach, even occasionally.

Newington Green, and Stoke Newington just to the north, across the fields, were known during the 18th century as centres of Dissent. Their inhabitants were disinclined to accept uncritically any doctrines, whether those of the established church or of any arbitrarily asserted system of political values. It is a tradition that, happily, the district still respects. Daniel Defoe was a notable resident of Stoke Newington. Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A vindication of the rights of women (1792), set up her school at Newington Green. The young John Stuart Mill, who lived at the Green shortly afterwards, remembered walks before breakfast ‘in the green lanes towards Hornsey’, while he gave his father an account of what he had read the day before. His earliest recollections were ‘of green fields and wild flowers’.

Hornsey was the name of the civil parish that began just to the north of the Green. The busy road that runs to the north-west is called Green Lanes. Sheep may no longer graze on Newington Green, but a good phrase to apply to its chief current attraction would be that of Michelin: vaut le voyage.

Cast brass matrices made for Pierre Didot

An earlier post (March 2008) described the big 16th-century letters that were acquired in the 18th century by Johannes Enschedé, and which were known to him, because they were supposedly derived from punches cut in brass, by the name Chalcographia. To modern writers it has seemed more likely that punches for the alphabet were cut in steel, and that the surviving brass matrices were castings in sand that were made by using as patterns an intermediate set of strikes in lead from the steel punches.

The post concluded with a quotation from an account published in 1851 by Ambroise Firmin-Didot of the use that had been made of this technique to make brass matrices for a set of very elaborate and delicate ornamented capitals for the gothique ornée of the Didot typefoundry, for which the punches were cut in steel by a punchcutter called Cornouailles. Brass matrices were made by striking the punches in lead, making casts in brass using the lead strikes as patterns, and finishing off the resulting matrices by driving the steel punches into them.

The punches and matrices for these capitals appear to be identifiable with sets that are also in the Enschedé collection (type 1489), to which they were added when the materials of the foundry of Pierre Didot and his son Jules were acquired in the early 19th century. They were shown in a Specimen des caractères de la Fonderie Normale à Bruxelles, provenant de la fonderie de Jules Didot et de son père Pierre Didot, printed by Joh. Enschedé en Zonen in 1914, and reprinted in 1931.

The capitals are about 21 mm square. The images at the head of this post show the punches, which are cut with a degree of precision that makes them look oddly like the product of one of the pantographic engraving machines of the end of the 19th century.

Here is one of the punches, set in the matrix to which it belongs.

And here is one of the brass matrices, which has been fitted in a block of steel, followed by an impression from type cast from it.

The lead strikes, having served their purpose, appear not to have survived. These images, except for the one just above, were made by Johan de Zoete, curator of the Stichting Museum Enschedé, Haarlem, to whom I am grateful for his interest, and for his permission to reproduce them.

Roman tragedy

A decade ago the great collection of Roman inscriptions at the Museo Nazionale in Rome, not far from the Termini railway station, was expertly reorganized. The inscriptions are now beautifully shown in a context that explains their purpose, and a very full guide is available, the work of Rosanna Friggeri, one of the organizers of the new display.

To many former visitors one of the most visible treasures of the Museo Nazionale had been the fragmentary inscription dedicated to Epaphroditus, the freedman who served the Emperor Nero, which can on that account be dated to about the end of the 1st century. It had been discovered in the early 20th century and was therefore largely unweathered. It was displayed in the open air, and the natural lighting made every detail appear beautifully crisp. (There is something depressing about the Galleria Lapidaria of the Vatican Museum, where the actual forms of the letters of the inscriptions, many of which have been clumsily and fairly recently daubed with red, can hardly be made out in the diffused lighting.) The image at the head of this post is from a slide that was made in December 1977, in clear, soft winter sunshine. The image (clicking will enlarge it a little) does not do full justice to the quality of the original, but gives some idea of what it looked like then.

However the location was worrying, since the pollution of the urban atmosphere in Rome, as elsewhere, was becoming increasingly unfriendly to its monuments, and many of those that could be moved, like the bronze equestrian statue of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol, were brought indoors, and a good facsimile was left in their place.

The Epaphroditus inscription can now apparently be seen in one of the larger spaces of the museum, mounted on a wall.

But any visitor who knew it before will be puzzled to see that it looks grey and indistinct, and also half as thick as it was. In fact what you see is not the original stone at all, but a reproduction that has neither the lovely colour of its model nor its sharpness.

So where is the original? The sheer number of the inscriptions in the possession of the museum is clearly a problem, and to one side of the space in front of the main building, where some gardens have been created, there is a kind of dump, formed from the inscriptions, mostly large ones, for which there was presumably no room in the interior display.

Among them is the original Epaphroditus inscription. It is hemmed in closely by others, so that it is now impossible either to see or to photograph clearly.

However it is all too easy to observe that since the slide was made, the surface of the stone has been badly bruised. (This bruising is in several places, but is most clearly visible over letter O in the second line on the right.) A crack that was hardly visible in 1977 has now advanced across the letter P. And the surface is now heavily stained in streaks by the dirty rain that continues to wash over it. These images were made in 2005.

The sight is a distressing one, evidence of a public abandonment of all responsibility on the part of the museum for a work of art in its care. In a bizarre inversion of the policy that removed the Marcus Aurelius statue to safety, visitors to the museum are offered an inadequate copy while the original, having been damaged, is allowed to decay still further. One possible explanation – but this is simply guesswork and any information will be welcome – might be that it was indeed intended to display the original inscription and that, having been damaged, it became too embarrassing to show.

Why is this inscription, among so many, important enough to make so much of? It’s worth trying to explain, even though – judging from the evidence provided by its display and its publications – it may be hard work to get the museum’s authorities to understand.

At some date in the first century BCE, the appearance of Roman inscriptional lettering changed dramatically and permanently, and the results are still with us. ‘Monoline’ letters, that is letters made up of strokes of uniform thickness, gave way to the thick and thin strokes that we know from the shapes of the capital letters of many of our printing types. Exactly why this happened is still unclear. It is sometimes said that the increasing use in Rome of marble in place of the coarser tufo or travertine made it possible for ever finer letters to be cut. That may be so, but when the Greeks cut their letters on marble four hundred years earlier, they made them small and geometrical – and monoline. What seems to have happened in Rome is that a highly sophisticated calligraphic tradition, the existence of which was hardly suspected and for which very little evidence has survived, had suddenly entered the permanent medium of letters cut in stone.

‘The Roman characters which are our letters today, although their earlier forms have only come down to us cut in stone, must have been formed by incessant practice with a flat, stiff brush, or some such tool. This disposition of the thicks and thins, and the exact shape of the curves, must have been settled by an instrument used rapidly; I suppose, indeed, that most of the great monumental inscriptions were designed in situ by a master writer, and only cut in by the mason, the cutting being merely a fixing, as it were, of the writing’.

That passage was written by W. R. Lethaby, founder of the Central School of Arts and Crafts, in his editor’s introduction to Edward Johnston’s writing manual of 1906. Nobody had ever said this before. Now it is accepted without question.

Not long after Lethaby wrote, in 1912, brush lettering was discovered that had been painted on the walls of Pompeii in 79, when it was covered by the volcanic ash and preserved. Pompeii was a sophisticated and lively little town, and the publicity for the contested local elections was painted, mostly at night, by the light of lanterns or the moon, by brilliant signwriters, working sometimes in teams and sometimes alone, who signed their names. (Aemilius Celer was one of the loners, often working by moonlight: Speedy Aemilius. Banksy under the shadow of Vesuvius.)

Among a great deal of excellent rapid writing in the style to which later palaeographers gave the name ‘rustic’ there is one piece in Roman capitals that link directly to the new style that was now beginning to be cut in stone:

The proportions are not identical with those of the so-called ‘square capitals’, of which the lettering of the inscription at the base of Trajan’s Column has become known as the archetype. But there are other stone-cut inscriptions of which the drawing is no less masterly which are very closely related indeed. And Epaphroditus is one of these.

There is room here to compare only the two letters A, and to note how in the Pompeian example the right-hand stroke shows the angle of the laying-on of the brush, a slight swelling of the line as it descends, and a very slight curve too, and its rapid lifting away at the foot to make a serif – and how closely the Epaphroditus letter catches this dynamic calligraphic movement.

Much of Roman epigraphy is dull stuff, turned out soundly enough as a matter of civic duty. Happily there are exceptions, inscriptions that are full of life and beautifully drawn and cut. These in turn inspired the antiquarii of the 15th century, like Felice Feliciano, who drew them and passed them on to their contemporaries. Their work is known to us from inscriptions on the buildings of the Italian Renaissance and printing types that were cut by punchcutters like Francesco Griffo who worked for Aldus.

The Epaphroditus inscription ranks with these inspirational models. It may lack the nervous refinement of the Trajan letter, but that example is increasingly inaccessible, having suffered from nearly two thousand years of weathering, and, as visitors to Rome are all too well aware, our view of it is now almost permanently obstructed by scaffolding and green plastic. (To add to this dismal catalogue, it should be borne in mind that the two letters RI are all that remain at Pompeii of the SATRI inscription shown above, and they are faint and ghostly after nearly a century of exposure to sun and rain: all the rest of the plaster was blown from the wall by bombing in 1943.) The brilliance of the Epaphroditus inscription offered us a direct link to the master writer who was its ordinator (writer and designer) and perhaps its sculptor (cutter) too. It deserves more care from those who are responsible for it, and we have some right to ask them to apply it, however belatedly.

Sources

This is the English edition of the guide book referred to above: Rosanna Friggeri, The epigraphic collection of the Museo Nazionale Romano at the Baths of Diocletian (Milan: Electa, 2001). The English translation of the text is an obstacle to readers (to call it inexpert would be too kind), but the illustrations are excellent. However, the Epaphroditus inscription is neither mentioned nor illustrated. There is a section on the making of inscriptions that is headed ‘Epigraphy: workshops and culture’. It sets out some useful basic information, but offers no analysis of the forms of letters.

Joyce S. and Arthur E. Gordon wrote on page 80 of their Contributions to the palaeography of Latin inscriptions (Ann Arbor, 1957), ‘The origin of shading’ [that is, the use of thick and thin strokes] ‘obviously has to do with several questions, principally How? Where from? and When? To the first two the answer is that we do not know, and to the third the answer is the same, except that the shading appears in Latin lettering in Rome by about the time of the death of Julius Caesar’ [44 BC]. They added, ‘This problem of the origin of shading needs a careful and extensive investigation.’ The assertion of Jean Mallon, in his Paléographie romaine (Madrid, 1952), that, ‘[la capitale est] la fixation calligraphique, à un moment donné, d’une écriture vulgaire déterminée, qui a continué sa carrière en dehors d’elle’ is a remark that has lost none of its resonance; but so far as I am aware, the question of the introduction of ‘thick and thin strokes’ to inscriptions cut in stone still awaits the serious attention of scholars. The modest monograph by Giancarlo Susini, Il lapicida romano (Bologna, 1966) did not attempt to address it, and its English version, The Roman stonecutter (Oxford, 1973), is obscured by the imperfect translation of some technical terms.

A good account of the painted electoral notices of Pompeii is given in: Romolo A. Staccioli, Le elezioni municipali nell’antichità romana, con particolare riferimento ai ‘manifesti’ elettorali di Pompei (Roma: Edizioni Palatino, 1963).

An earlier note that I wrote about the fate of the Epaphroditus inscription was published under the heading ‘Inscription under threat’ in Forum, the journal of Letter Exchange, issue 13 (April 2007).

Type bodies compared

Pica has survived as a familiar unit of measurement, although it is not what it was. (In digital terms it is 4.236 mm, or 12 points of 1/72 inch or 0.353 mm.) But what about Nonpareil, or Brevier, or Great Primer? Or Gros Parangon and Petit Romain? What exactly were they?

Several of the works that deal with the history of type, including those by authorities like H. D. L. Vervliet, Harry Carter and Philip Gaskell, print tables of ‘typical’ or ‘average’ numerical values for these names which are useful for giving a general notion of their size. But, disconcertingly, an average value may not fit any specific example. As Harry Carter once wrote, ‘Nonpareils and Picas varied: there were local traditions about them’.

What were these traditions? The purpose of the table above (click on it to view it) is to try to begin to discover some of them. It aims to say how big the named sizes were in different places. How Caslon’s Pica differed from Moxon’s. And how Fournier’s Cicéro related to Plantin’s Mediane. The measurements were made directly from original type specimens, and the result, however approximate, is at least drawn from real life, and is not a homogenized average quantity. The basic unit is the millimetre. As explained below, the actual measurement of the body from the original printed document is the figure in square brackets; the figure that precedes it is the measurement increased by 1.5 per cent to make up for the notional paper shrinkage.

The traditional names for type sizes, like Cicéro, began to appear in France during the 16th century, when they were used in the bills submitted by punchcutters to their clients and in lists of printers’ stock. No doubt some names like Cicéro and St Augustin were originally a reference to the type used in specific editions of these writers, though claims that have been made to be able to identify them are not convincing. Other names, like Brevier in French and English and probably Pica in English, refer to the types commonly used in certain liturgical works. And there is a whole series of names for the smallest types of all, which sometimes have winsome names like Nonpareil (meaning ‘nonesuch’ or ‘incomparable’), Robijn (Ruby), and Diamant (Diamond), or alternatively bear the names of cities where they were made, beginning with Sédanoise (Jannon), and including Parisienne (which was already used in the 17th century and is named in Truchet’s document shown below), Parmigianina (Bodoni), and – in the 19th century – Milanina (by the Milanese punchcutter Wilmant).

But how big were they? And did two Nonpareils make a Pica? The answer to that question is, sometimes but not always. The Parisian book trade regulations of 1723 defined the relationships of some of the sizes to each other, but did not set a standard on which to base their measurement.

Named bodies continued in use in different European countries until numerical point systems were generally adopted, but that was not until the later 19th or early 20th centuries. One reason for having information about their actual size is that historical types were made to fit the bodies used in the foundry that originally cast them, and when they were later cast from original matrices on bodies based on one or other of the ‘point systems’, which in the smaller sizes have relatively crude arithmetical increments, they often look different. That is something it is useful to be aware of.

This table gives some information about the size of the bodies of the types made in some major foundries before the introduction of such standards. There is one fundamental problem in trying to ascertain the exact size of type by measuring from printed matter of the hand press period. When the paper was damped for printing it expanded. The print was made on the expanded paper, which then shrank as it dried. The size of the print must therefore always be slightly smaller than the type that made it.

In order to counteract this effect, the measured values that are given first in most of the columns are adjusted to show a notional value for the real size of the type by making a rather arbitrary allowance of 1.5 per cent for the shrinkage of the dampened paper when it dried after printing. The measurements that were actually made from the original printed documents are the figures that follow and which appear in square brackets. Thus the body of the Gros Texte shown on the Berner sheet of 1592, which measures 5.9 mm on paper, is reckoned on this basis to have been 5.99 mm. A rigorously scientific observation of the degree of the shrinkage of damped paper after printing during the hand press period seems never to have made. Philip Gaskell added a very cautious note on the subject to his New introduction to bibliography (1972), p. 13, noting shrinkage of between 1 and 2.5 per cent, with a more pronounced shrinkage across the chain-lines than along them. My own experiments with old paper roughly agree with his. But there are all kinds of problems involved. Different kinds of papers and degrees of damping would probably give very different results. Systematic experiments on handmade papers of varying consistencies and made at different periods would be worth conducting and publishing.

The values given here under the names of Joseph Moxon (which are from his Mechanick exercises, 1683) and John Smith (Printer’s grammar, 1755) are calculated from their lists of names for bodies, in which both authors gave the number of them contained in one foot, how accurately we cannot tell. Since the figures in the two scales do not all correspond, it looks as if Smith did not copy Moxon’s list but gave his own, based on type in current use, perhaps Caslon’s. Moxon’s Pica, for example, is much smaller than Smith’s. Smith’s Pica is not only more or less that of Caslon in London, but as can be seen from this table it is close to the Cicéro of the contemporary typefounder Sanlecque in Paris. Moreover it is also close to the equivalent body of Le Bé in Paris and Berner in Frankfurt am Main, two of the major commercial foundries of the late 16th-century. Moxon’s Pica is similar to Plantin’s Mediane in Antwerp, and may reflect the influence of the Low Countries on British typefounding.

Since this table was compiled measurements have been made from the copy of Moxon’s type specimen sheet, Proves of several sorts of letters (1669), in the British Library, MS Harl. 5919. (459.) These are the sizes of the 7 bodies that are shown: Great Cannon 16.65 [16.40]. Double Pica 7.23 [7.12]. Great Primmer 6.26 [6.17]. English 4.94 [4.87]. Pica 4.14 [4.08]. Long Primmer 3.35 [3.30]. Brevier 2.71 [2.67].

In the column headed ‘US points’ the figures in parentheses or round brackets give the number of US points that are equivalent to the millimetre value that precedes them, based on the established value of 1 US point = 0.351 mm. This measurement is included simply in order to give a familiar standard for the purposes of comparison, but (as mentioned above) for use in modern computer software, the point has been made equivalent to one seventy-second of an inch, or 0.353 mm. For the purposes of this exercise the difference is insignificant.

In the column of the French names for type bodies, the names are followed by the number of ‘typographical points’ assigned to them by Fournier le jeune. Fournier studiously avoided giving an exact measurement for his points in terms of the official units of measurement. He stated that the system of ‘typographical points’ that was set out in the first volume of his Manuel typographique (1764), had first been published in 1737, and it seems likely that it was the table headed Table des proportions des differens caracteres de l’imprimerie, reproduced as his illustration 5 by Updike, that appears in the type specimen entitled Modéles des caracteres, 1742. This was expressed in lignes and points. The ligne was an official measure of one twelfth of the pouce or inch, and the point was an indeterminate small unit of which in this case there were six to the ligne, but the units used by Fournier do not correspond to the official ones. Fournier’s nompareille is given as 1 ligne in the Table des proportions, but the reference to notional lignes was abandoned and the size of the same body is given as 6 points in the Manuel typographique. Fournier’s system was derived from the scale of related type bodies, of which he was well aware since he mentions it in the Manuel, that had been drawn up by Sébastien Truchet, member of the Carmelite order, mathematician, hydraulic engineer, and member of the ‘Commission Bignon’ that in 1693 began to plan a ‘Description des Arts et Métiers’ or description of trades. It was also responsible for the new type for the Imprimerie royale, which was first used to print the Médailles sur les principaux événements du règne de Louis le Grand, 1702.

In about 1694 Truchet began to plan a series of related type bodies for the new type. His initial unit was a ligne seconde of 0.188 mm, one twelfth of the ligne, which was one twelfth of an inch and thus 1/144 of the official pied de roi of 324.8 mm. One of Truchet’s working documents shows how in measuring different examples of works printed in type called ‘Petit Romain’ or ‘Cicéro’ or ‘St Augustin’, he found two or three or even four different sizes for some of these named bodies. By their side he set out his recommended reformed system, the nouvelle proportion à imiter:

Bodies based on Truchet’s system appear to have been used throughout the 18th century by the Imprimerie royale, until a ‘millimetric’ point of 0.4 mm was introduced at the Imprimerie impériale in about 1810 by Firmin Didot. This was effectively the ‘point IN’ of 0.39877 mm that is still used for the metal types of the Imprimerie nationale.

In about 1781 François-Ambroise Didot followed the example of Truchet and made new types with bodies using a unit based on the pied de roi, one sixth of the ligne, or 0.376 mm. Since the Didot family never used the term ‘point’, a type on a body of 12 Didot points was designated ‘corps 12’. However eventually the unit became known as the Didot point, and it was adopted as the common unit of the French and German typefounders, the basis of what was later known as the Cicéro system.

One reason for the variety of the bodies among founders must be that each founder worked independently from all the others and there was no movement towards uniformity. It may have suited some of them to know that the printer who bought a fount could only use it conveniently with another from the same source.

Something to bear in mind in approaching this question is that the setting of standards for the accurate measurement of very small sizes does not appear to have been possible in any technology before the introduction of precise tools, like micrometers, during the 19th century. But this is a subject on which I can find no reliable information, and shall be glad of help. However the lack of such independent standards does not mean that typefounding was not performed to a very level of precision indeed, probably to a greater degree than in any other pre-industrial small-scale technology. It is simply that the dimensions of the body (and also the ‘set’ of the registers of the mould, governing the side bearings of the type) were established by matching samples of the same type that had been kept as a standard and used when a new fount was cast or a mould was refurbished.

I do not claim absolute reliability for these measurements. I hope, though, that they go a little way towards showing some kind of relative picture in an area where one was almost wholly lacking. The measuring was done from time to time on occasions when I had the opportunity of visiting the libraries where the original documents are kept, and I am grateful to those who made them available. Most of the figures are derived from measurements of several lines at a time, and the size of the single body is calculated from this overall figure, which should reduce error. At the same time, by way of a check, single lines were measured with a magnifying glass that incorporated a scale of tenths of a millimetre. Even so, where measurements are made in millimetres to two places of decimals, the first of these figures, and a fortiori the second, must be approximate. Human error must be allowed for. Rulers vary, and so does the rate of the expansion of paper and its shrinkage. Caveat lector.

The table above and its notes were put together as part of a historical study of type bodies that is work in progress. I can think of some improvements to make. It would be worth measuring several copies of the more common specimens (Caslon, Fournier, Enschedé) to see what variations there are. But three of the specimens – Berner, Le Bé and Jannon – are known only from single copies in Frankfurt, Antwerp and Paris, and my measurements are based on these. So it seemed to me that, since the topic seems never to have been tackled systematically, the table in its present form might be worth publishing on its own.

For more on Truchet’s type bodies, see my article, ‘French academicians and modern typography: designing new types in the 1690s’, Typography papers, 2 (1997), pp. 5–29. And see also my contribution and that of Jacques André in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Musée de l’Imprimerie, Lyon, Le romain du roi: la typographie au service de l’État 1702–2002 (Lyon, 2002), the stock of which is now available from Frits Knuf Antiquarian Books (26 rue des Beguines, 41100 Vendôme, France).

There is quite a large bibliography relating to type bodies, although very little of it addresses the questions that interest me. Perhaps the nearest (and a very useful piece of work it is) is David Shaw, ‘Standardization of type sizes in France in the early sixteenth century’, The Library, 6th ser., vol. 3, no. 4 (December 1981), pp. 330–6. Philip Gaskell’s note on ‘Type sizes in the eighteenth century’ (Studies in bibliography, 5 (1952–3), pp. 147–51), another useful piece based, like Shaw’s, on an extensive knowledge of the books of its period, illustrates the problem with which I began this post: the table he gives ‘is based on measurements taken from ten eighteenth-century specimens by Caslon, Wilson and Fry. The average of these measurements is given, so that the table is unlikely to be completely accurate with regard to the products of any one foundry.’ John Richardson, ‘Correlated type sizes and names for the fifteenth through twentieth century’ (Studies in bibliography, 43 (1990), pp. 251–272), brings together indiscriminately a mass of data – 400 measurements – from sources that are unevenly reliable. It is a useful reminder of the problems involved.

These were the original specimens measured for the table:

Plantin c. 1585
Folio specimen.
Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp. Arch. Varia II.
Facsimile in: Type specimen facsimiles [16–18]: reproductions of Christopher Plantin’s Index sive specimen characterum, 1567, and Folio specimen of c. 1585, together with the Le Bé-Moretus specimen c.1599; with annotations by H. D. L. Vervliet and Harry Carter. London, 1972.

Berner 1592
Conrad Berner, Specimen characterum seu typorum probatissimorum… Frankfurt am Main, 1592.
Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main. Gustav Mori, Schriftprobensammlung, Mappe 1, 19. (Other press marks: Mf 7024a, HM6: Em 6)
Facsimiles in: Gustav Mori, Eine Frankfurter Schriftprobe vom Jahre 1592: Studie zur Geschichte des Frankfurter Schriftgießer-Gewerbes. Frankfurt am Main, 1920. Type specimen facsimiles [1–15]: reproductions of fifteen type specimen sheets issued between the 16th and 18th centuries, accompanied by notes mainly derived from the researches of A. F. Johnson [and others]; general editor, John Dreyfus. London, 1963.

Le Bé c. 1599
Fragmentary annotated specimens sent by Guillaume II Le Bé, Paris, to the Moretus printing office, Antwerp, c. 1599.
Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp. Arch. 153.
Facsimile in: Type specimen facsimiles [16–18]: reproductions of Christopher Plantin’s Index sive specimen characterum, 1567, and Folio specimen of c. 1585, together with the Le Bé-Moretus specimen c. 1599; with annotations by H. D. L. Vervliet and Harry Carter. London, 1972.

Jannon 1621
Espreuue des lettres nouuellement taillez. Sedan, 1621.
Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris. A.15226 (2).
Facsimile in: The 1621 specimen of Jean Jannon, Paris and Sedan : designer and engraver of the caractères de l’Université: edited in facsimile with an introduction by Paul Beaujon. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1927.

Lamesle 1742
Épreuves générales des caracteres qui se trouvent chez Claude Lamesle. Paris, 1742.
St Bride Library, London. 20228.
Facsimile in: The type specimens of Claude Lamesle; a facsimile of the first edition printed at Paris in 1742, with an introduction by A. F. Johnson. Amsterdam, 1965.

Fournier 1764
Les caracteres de l’imprimerie. Par Fournier le jeune. Paris, 1764.
St Bride Library, London. 20666.
The same settings of type were used in vol. 2 of the Manuel typographique, Paris, 1766. Facsimile: Darmstadt, Technische Hochschule, 1995.

Sanlecque 1757
Épreuves des caracteres du fond des Sanlecques. Paris, 1757.
Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. TypTS 715.57.767.

Caslon 1766
A specimen of printing type by William Caslon. London, 1766.
St Bride Library, London. 7518.
Facsimile in: Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 16 (1981/2).

Enschedé 1768
Proef van letteren welke gegooten worden in de nieuwe Haarlemsche lettergietery van J. Enschedé. Haarlem, 1768.
St Bride Library, London. 20248.
Facsimile in: The Enschedé type specimens of 1768 and 1773: a facsimile with an introduction and notes by John A. Lane. Haarlem: Stichting Museum Enschedé, 1993.

Last edited 13 August 2008

Big brass matrices again: the Enschedé ‘Chalcographia’ type

In the post of March 2007 it was suggested that existing brass matrices for big types could not have been struck with steel punches in so hard a hard metal as brass, but were probably reproductions cast in brass of strikes that had been made in lead with steel punches. Examples that were cited were the ‘large capitals’ of Garamond at the Museum Plantin-Moretus, titling capitals among the ‘Fell types’ at the University Press, Oxford, a titling from the French foundry of Claude Mozet that was acquired by Benjamin Franklin, and the series of two-line capitals of the romain du roi at the Imprimerie nationale in France. The brass matrices for the Garamond titling are accompanied by strikes in lead. In the case of the titling letters of the romain du roi there is a claim from the punchcutter that strikes were made with the steel punches in lead, and that these were used as patterns to cast replicas in brass.

A passing reference was made to a titling type in the museum of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen in Haarlem of which the height of the face measures 16 mm and for which there are ‘matrices’ in brass and lead, and relief ‘punches’, also of brass. Johannes Enschedé acquired them with other materials from the foundry of Jan Roman in 1767, and showed some characters under the heading ‘Chalcographia’ in his specimen of 1768, of which a facsimile was published in 1993. In a note below them Enschedé says, ‘The punches of these types are cut in brass, and struck and cast in leaden matrices, following the practice of the first typefounders.’ He does not refer to the matrices in brass, but there are reasons, given below, for thinking that the types that he shows were not cast from the strikes in lead.



The type can be dated to the middle of the 16th century, when its use in Lyon is documented. It was later used in Frankfurt am Main, and it is shown (with some altered and additional characters) in a specimen of titling capitals from the typefoundry of Johann Erasmus Luther dated 1665. For further details see the introduction and notes by John Lane that accompany the facsimile of 1993. The conclusion of Harry Carter, endorsed by Lane, was that the alphabet can be attributed to Jacques Sabon, originally of Lyon, the former owner of the Luther foundry, who had a German privilege for his method of casting large letters.

In his history of typefounding in the Low Countries published in 1908, Charles Enschedé printed an alphabet cast from the brass matrices. The face of these types was defective, like that of the types shown in 1768, which, despite the note by Johannes Enschedé, were pretty certainly also cast from the same brass matrices. Charles Enschedé added that he had not dared to try to cast from the thin strikes in lead. These were in excellent condition, as they still are, with an unblemished face. He had them copied by electrotyping, which produced good matrices, and he also showed an alphabet cast from these.



The strikes in lead are only 4 mm thick, and the depth of strike of 2 to 3 mm reduces the thickness of the metal still further at the face of the letter: if an attempt had been made to use them as matrices to cast type they would have suffered damage, since the overall thickness of the lead matrix is not much greater than that of the pattern. In the words of a note written by Stan Nelson, ‘the bottom of the lead matrix is very, very thin and impossible to use for casting type. There isn’t enough metal to absorb the heat of molten alloy being poured into the matrix.’ Given the good condition of the lead ‘matrices’, one must conclude that an attempt to cast type in them has never been made.

What then is the purpose of the little brass letters that accompany the matrices. They fit the lead strikes snugly. Are they – as Johannes and Charles Enschedé believed – the original ‘punches’ that were used to drive the impressions in the lead plates? Their thinness and flimsy construction, with completely open counters, makes them seem less than ideally suited to the purpose. Harry Carter thought that they were ‘castings reproducing punches of steel’ (A View of Early Typography, p. 15) . The lead plates were almost certainly made with some kind of punch, for there are impressions showing at the back of some of them.



This is what Charles Enschedé wrote in 1908 (as translated by Harry Carter for his English edition of 1978):

‘We have always shrunk from using the [lead] matrices. … I doubt whether any casts were made from them before their acquisition by Johannes Enschedé; the more so because we found brass reproductions with the originals. It may be that Enschedé or an earlier owner had found means to avoid the risk of damaging these precious relics by casting in them. The brass matrices appear to be castings from clay moulds. The moulding, however, is unskilful; [the illustration] is set in letters cast in the brass facsimiles, and it shows that these matrices are too poor to produce clean casts …’

If brass punches – the present letters or others related to them – were used to make the impressions in lead, the limitations of this method become clear. They could not be used afterwards to ‘clean up’ the cast replicas in brass, as was probably done with the steel punches that accompany the brass matrices at Antwerp, Oxford and Paris. So despite the fact that (notwithstanding the criticism of Charles Enschedé) the casting seems to have been done skilfully enough, it was inherently impossible to achieve a perfect reproduction of the face by this method alone, and the type cast from them suffered accordingly.

The notion that the original steel punches were used to clean up the face of matrices cast in brass has hitherto been guesswork – although in the last post I cited an 18th-century account which indicated that this was the practice when medals with a high relief were struck. Now a source has been found which confirms that this practice was also used by typefounders. In his extensive and well-informed discussion of early typefounding, all of which is well worth reading (Essai sur la typographie, Paris, 1851, col. 607, note 3), Ambroise Firmin-Didot has this passage (the English translation is mine):

‘Fournier le jeune is mistaken when he asserts in his work on the origin and progress of printing, page 20, that ‘matrices have never been cast: they are struck with a steel punch’. In order to assist the striking of very delicate punches, like the capitals of the large ‘ornamented gothic’ cut for our own typefoundry with such remarkable skill by Monsieur de Cornouailles, I had matrices cast in brass after matrices in lead that had been struck with the steel punches. After cleaning them out with care, to accommodate the effect of shrinkage in cooling, I drove the steel punches again into the cast brass matrices obtained in this way.’

If no steel punches were available to clean up the cast brass matrices in the Enschedé collection at Haarlem, this may explain the roughness of their face, and the signs they appear to show of a rather crude attempt to smooth it out. Their visible graininess suggests that, as in the case of the big matrices at the Imprimerie nationale, sand, rather than clay, was used for the moulding.

I am much indebted to the Stichting Museum Enschedé, Haarlem, for permission to make the images shown in this post, and to its curator Johan de Zoete and to Stan Nelson for their advice and help.