The Caslon tomb at St Luke’s, Old Street

Historically minded typographical visitors to London sometimes go to the churchyard of St Luke’s in Old Street, about a mile to the north of St Paul’s Cathedral, a public space with some tall plane trees and a single free-standing 18th-century tomb surrounded by iron railings. The tomb commemorates William Caslon I and several members of his family, and the churchyard is historic ground in other respects. Caslon was said to have had his first foundry in a small house, which Edward Rowe Mores called ‘a garret’, in Helmet Row, the street that flanks it to the west. (But the date is not certain: there is evidence that in 1723 he was still working from his first London address in the Minories.)



From 1727 he was established as a ratepayer in Ironmonger Row, the street just to its east, which is the address that appears on his first type specimen sheet, dated 1734. (The image above is from Rocque’s map of London, 1746. That below is of the unique known complete copy of the specimen of 1734, at Columbia University Library, New York.) By 1737 the Caslon foundry had moved to Chiswell Street, still in the newly-created parish of St Luke, which is the address given on the later issues of the specimen sheet that appeared in successive editions of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, and it remained there until the firm ceased trading in 1936.



St Luke’s church is worth a visit for its own sake. It was built on land bought in 1721 for £900 from the Ironmongers’ Company, part of a ten-acre property that had been left to it in 1547. The two names associated with its design are those of John James (c. 1672–1746) and Nicholas Hawksmoor (c. 1662–1736), to whom, when he was clerk of works at the Royal Hospital, Greenwich, James was attached as assistant. Hawksmoor and James were among the surveyors responsible under the Act of Parliament of 1711 for finding locations for building fifty new churches in the expanding London suburbs to the north, east and west. The steeple of the church is in the form of an obelisk, a motif that is known to have pleased Hawksmoor, although the details of the design are attributed chiefly to James.

The building of the church was begun in 1727 and completed in 1733, so that the dates of its planning and construction coincide closely with those known for the location of Caslon’s foundry next to the churchyard. Nor does the coincidence end there. Thomas James, a brother of John James the architect, was a typefounder, with his premises in what had been the Lady Chapel of the church of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, a little over half a mile to the south, and in about 1730 both brothers were involved in an unsuccessful attempt to launch the system of stereotyping devised by William Ged. While Caslon was at Ironmonger Row he must have cut many of the roman and italic types that made his reputation. Although there is little direct evidence about relations between the two rival foundries they must have been complicated by figures like the printer Samuel Palmer, who shared the premises at St Bartholomew’s with Thomas James and had some dealings, not always happy ones, with Caslon. Inevitably one wonders whether Caslon’s choice of addresses next to St Luke’s churchyard was in any way connected with interests there of the James family. Although there is no known proof of anything of the kind it is tempting to speculate that they may have had a hand in the leasing out of neighbouring premises.

For many years during the latter half of the 20th century the church was disused and an embarrassment to the Church of England. It had not been significantly damaged by bombing during the Second World War, but the effects of subsidence were becoming visible and would have been expensive to repair. The original interior woodwork and fittings were stripped out and installed in other churches, the roof was removed, and the churchyard was locked up, leaving the church to become a ‘managed ruin’ which although it had a Piranesian charm seemed to have a precarious future. It was rescued from this state by the London Symphony Orchestra, which raised funds to put a roof back on and to place rehearsal rooms and a small concert hall within the surviving walls, a project that was completed in 2002. The churchyard to the south of the building, with the Caslon tomb, is now a public garden in the care of the Borough of Islington.



T. B. Reed (who to judge from his account of the inscription may not have looked at it very carefully) wrote that the Caslon tomb was kept in repair by a bequest from Mary Hanbey, daughter of William Caslon I, who died in January 1797. In fact it is clear from her will that the present tomb, which she paid for, replaced the original monument of the Caslon family, and was dedicated to her husband Thomas Hanbey, who had been born in Sheffield and died in 1786. He was a Liveryman of the Ironmongers’ Company and Master of the Company in 1775. He was also a freeman of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, and left money to establish charities in Sheffield, and also to support sons of freemen of the Ironmongers’ Company at Christ’s Hospital in London. Mary Hanbey’s bequest was administered by the Ironmongers’ Company. This is the passage :

And whereas upon the death of my said late Husband I erected a new Monument for him where the Monument of the Caslon Family had formerly been in the church yard of Saint Lukes Old Street at the expense of twenty pounds or thereabouts And whereas I am very desirous that the same should be kept in decent and proper Repair from time to time as it may be necessary I now therefore Hereby give devise and bequeath unto the Master and Wardens of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers for the time being the sum of Three hundred pounds three per cent Reduced Bank Annuities Upon this special trust and confidence that they do once in every four years at least after my decease as I have directed the said Monument to be put in Compleat Repair by my Executors immediately after my decease cause the said Monument to be inspected by a proper Workman and out of the dividends and proceeds of the said Three hundred pounds three per cent Reduced Bank Annuities Paint and Repair the said Monument in such manner as the same may want and as to the Remainder of the said dividends and produce after paying for such Reparations upon trust to dispose of and distribute the same every four years as aforesaid to and among the poor Freemen of the said Company.

When the iron railings, which seem to date from the 19th century, were damaged early in 2007 by a branch that was blown from one of the remaining plane trees and an approach was made to Ironmongers’ Company to see if they could help, there was a sympathetic response. (They said, reasonably enough, that they regarded it as the ‘Hanbey’ tomb.) In the end Islington Council, as the authority that is now reponsible for the public space, had the railings expertly restored and repainted. The Council is also considering what can be done about a problem that, paradoxically, seems to derive from the tidying up of the churchyard and its monuments by the restorers of the site. During the period when the railings to the graveyard were locked up, the limestone slab which forms the top of the tomb seemed to have been painted white – perhaps, recalling the reference to painting in the will, a relic of its original state. The paint looked horrid and had begun to flake, but it did seem to have protected the surface of the stone. Now that the paint has gone a thick layer of moss is creeping over the horizontal surface, making it difficult to see much of the lettering, probably degrading the surface of the stone, and offering a temptation to well-meaning typographers to make hazardous attempts at its removal. The Environment and Regeneration Department of Islington Council is aware of the problem and is seeking advice on how to deal with it.

To judge from its style, it looks as if the inscription on the top slab may have been cut (or recut) at some date in the first half of the 19th century. Was it possibly added as an afterthought, belatedly supplying references to the other members of the Caslon family buried there? John Nichols, referring to the burial of William Caslon I at St Luke’s in his Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer, 1783, page 317, has a note that ‘a handsome monument is erected to his memory, with this slight inscription: W. Caslon, Esq. ob. 23 Jan. 1766, Aet. 74. Also W. Caslon, Esq. (son of the above) Ob. 17 Aug. 1778, aet. 58 years.’ The present top inscription, with all the additional names, cannot be called slight (nor especially ‘handsome’, if by that term Nichols meant ornamented). Nor does the present wording exactly match that given by Nichols, which has the Latin terms ‘ob.’ for ‘died’ and ‘aet.’ for ‘aged’. So it seems unlikely that this slab is from the monument that had been seen by Nichols. Perhaps its wording was adapted and added to for the inscription that was cut on the top slab – whenever that was done.

Since the top inscription is no longer completely legible, it seems useful to reproduce here all the texts that are at present on the tomb. Here they are.

Top inscription

William Caslon Esqr. Died Jany. 23d. 1766 Aged 74 years.
Also William Caslon, Esqr. Son of the above died Augst. 17th. 1778 Aged 58 years.
Also Miss Elizath. Mary Caslon, daughter of William & Elizabeth Caslon and Grand Daughter to the above William Caslon, Esqr. who died October 30th. 1780 Aged 7 months and 18 days
Also Mr. Thomas Caslon, Son of the above William Caslon Senr. died March 29th 1783 Aged 56 Years
Also Miss Harriot Caslon daugher of Henry and Elizabeth Caslon and Grand Daughter of the above William Caslon, Esqr. who died May 1st. 1785 Aged 2 months and 9 days
Also Edward Caslon Son of the above Henry and Elizabeth Caslon Died Oct. 29th. 1787 aged 12 weeks and 3 days
Here lyeth the Body of Elizabeth Caslon Widow of William Caslon Senior Esqr. who died October the 24th. 1795 Aged 65 years.

Slate tablet on the north side

Mary Anne Caslon, Wife of Henry Caslon Son of Henry and Elizabeth Caslon Born Aug. 21st. 1785 Died March 31st. 1816.
Sacred to the Memory of Henry Caslon, Esqre. of Higham Hill Walthamstow Essex only Surviving child of Henry Caslon and Elizabeth eldest daughter of William Rowe Esqre. of Higham Hill Born in Gower Street London May 15th. 1786 Died at Boulogne sur-mer May 28th. 1850

Slate tablet on the south side

Thomas Hanbey Esqre. late of Hackney, Died December the 25th, 1786, Aged 74 years.
Here lyeth the body of Mary Widow of the above named Thomas Hanbey Esqr. who died 14th day of January 1797 Aged 75 years. And also Relict of Godfrey Sherwell Esqr. late of this Parish and likewise Daughter of William Caslon Senior Esqr. Formerly of this Parish.



So far as possible I have reproduced the spelling and the punctuation as they appear on the tomb, but not the use of capitals and of superior letters for abbreviations. Where the lettering can no longer be made out I have used the text that appears on an undated sheet set in Caslon Old Face type that was among items loosely inserted in Talbot Baines Reed’s own copy of his History of the Old English Letter Founders, 1887. The sheet bears a photograph of the tomb, reproduced above, taken from the north and showing the railings entwined with ivy.

Some references

The St Luke’s web site of the London Symphony Orchestra gives the background to their project and hosts a pdf of the St Luke’s Conservation Plan, the document relating to the church and its environment that was prepared in 2000 by Purcell, Miller, Tritton. Another document accessible on the same site is a report by Angela Boyle, Ceridwen Boston and Annsofie Witkin on the tombs and gravestones at St Luke’s, The Archaeological Experience at St Luke’s Church, Old Street, Islington, published in 2005 by the Oxford Archaeology Unit. This is a detailed account of the burials in the church and its graveyard, with much useful information about the site of the church and extracts from the minutes of the commissioners appointed under the Fifty New Churches act. It is a pity that it makes some errors in the text of the inscriptions on the Caslon tomb (which is listed as GR13S or ‘chest tomb 6’), of which the oddest of all is to give the family name as ‘Carlson’. For authoritative and up to date references regarding William Caslon and also the architects Nicholas Hawksmoor and John James, see the articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.



The Lady Chapel, which once housed the foundry of Thomas James and the printing-office of Samuel Palmer, is now again a part of the Church of St Bartholomew the Great, having been restored by Aston Webb in 1897 to what might have been its 14th-century appearance. Since the summer of 2007 it costs four pounds, paid in cash at the door, just to enter the church, an unwelcome innovation and not one that I am inclined to support.

John Smith’s Printer’s Grammar, 1755

Many English printers’ manuals derive to some extent from Moxon’s of 1683–4, and even those of the early 19th century by Stower (1808), Johnson (1824) and Hansard (1825) include passages taken directly from Moxon’s text. The Printer’s Grammar of John Smith (if that was his real name), published in London in 1755, is different. He deals with compositors’ work but not with presswork. Although he shows that he knows Moxon’s manual, he includes detailed observations that are clearly drawn from personal experience. On the title page his name is followed by the unexplained term in italics, Regiom. He mentions some aspects of printing in France and gives an English translation of a passage from Fertel’s manual of 1723, but it is clear that he also drew on previous experience of German printers and printing. Although he sometimes distances himself from German practice (was he perhaps for a time, like Moxon, an Englishman working abroad?), he had known Samuel Struck of Lübeck (‘Mr. Struke’ on page 10), who published one of the earliest German printers’ manuals there in 1713, he had worked in Danzig, and he remembers how in Germany ‘fifty years ago’, large letters were cast hollow, continuing, ‘whether this has been practised ever since, we cannot tell with certainty’. It has been suggested, plausibly, that Regiom. stands for Regiomontanus, the Latin for a citizen of Königsberg. There have been several places with this name, but, given the links to Lübeck and Danzig, it was probably the city in East Prussia. Perhaps he was born there. However, he when he wrote his book he had certainly become familiar for some years with London printers and printing, and his detailed references to current usage in some sections, such as that on type bodies (pages 19 ff.) suggest that he practised the trade in some capacity, whether as a master printer or, perhaps more likely, as a compositor or a reader.

The original printing of Smith’s manual is rare, but an adequate facsimile was published in 1965. It was also partially reprinted by Philip Luckombe, in the Concise history of printing (1770), reissued in 1771 as The history and art of printing, an edition which is available in Google Books. Another reprint, which includes a specimen of the types of Edmund Fry, is The printer’s grammar … chiefly collected from Smith’s edition (London: printed by J. Wayland and sold by T. Evans, 1787). Since the edition of 1755 has neither a table of contents nor an index, it is not easy to get an idea of the details of the text. To make it more accessible I have compiled my own index, and have placed it at the head of this post. Clicking on it will bring up a larger image which seems fairly legible, and if this is printed to a size of 190 by 237 mm it can be folded to fit the reprinted edition.

Here is an image of a table of contents compiled for the edition of 1755:

Casting Bodoni’s type

In June, with the support and cooperation of the Museo Bodoniano, Parma, Stan Nelson and I carried out a pilot project for casting type from one of Bodoni’s own matrices in one of his original moulds. The result, seen above, shows a letter B for a Palestina body (about 24 point), cast from a matrix of the type named after Crema (a town in Lombardy) which is shown on page 117 of Bodoni’s Manuale tipografico of 1818. The ladle is one of a set newly made by Stan Nelson and presented by him to the Museo Bodoniano. The aim of the exercise was to be able to demonstrate the technique of hand casting, and not to make a complete fount. Not any time soon, at any rate. But even if the scale of the exercise is modest in the extreme, the reason for this post is to record the return of the casting of type to Parma after the lapse of some time, and the use of Bodoni’s own materials.

An unrecorded inscription by Eric Gill?

To judge by its lettering, this tablet, in the church of St Peter and St Paul at Northleach, Gloucestershire, must be the work of Eric Gill. Not a brilliant photograph, made with flash and (one may as well admit it) with its verticals adjusted in Photoshop. But since this example is not in the list of Gill’s inscriptional work compiled by his brother Evan, nor among the additions made to it by David Peace, it seems worth putting on record.

Fallen and threaded types

During the hand press period, when type was inked with leather balls stuffed with wool, the sticky ink could pull sorts from the forme if it had not been firmly locked up. Sometimes they fell back and left an impression on the printed sheet.

The value of such examples, which survive when both the printer and the binder failed to discard the spoiled sheet, is that they provide a record of the size and shape of the ‘fallen types’. In the first edition of his History of the old English letter foundries (1887), T. B. Reed showed one that had been found for him by Henry Bradshaw at the University Library in Cambridge, from a work probably printed at Cologne in about 1468, Liber de laudibus ac festis gloriosae Virginis (Inc. A.4.9 [525], f. 14v).

Reed’s relief line illustration, which was practically redrawn from a softly-lit photograph, gives little idea of the original. The image of the same fallen type shown above was made for me in 1994 as a 35 mm slide by the photographers at the University Library, and it is so good that it seems useful to show it more widely here. (I do so with the kind permission of the University Library.) It shows how the type, squeezed into the damped paper, has left a sharp impression of its side. Among its interesting features are the flat base (with no ‘feet’), and a very sharply-outlined circular indentation that looks as if it was made by a hole in the type. Some other examples of ‘fallen types’ seem to show holes in them too: one of the earliest reports, from a book printed in Cologne in 1476, had been published by the French bibliographer J. P. A. Madden, and this image too was reproduced in his original edition by Reed.

These observations of pierced types encourage an interesting line of speculation.

In about 1868 some old types were found in Lyon on the bed of the River Saône near the old printing quarter of the town. Most of them are now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. How early they are is not easy to say, but to judge from their face some at least may be of the late 15th century. A catalogue of the collection by Maurice Audin was published by the Bibliothèque nationale in 1955, and he wrote an illustrated article on the types in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1954. Many of them show odd features, such as an oblique cut-off at the foot, which has led to speculation that the mould in which they were cast did not produce the central detachable ‘jet’ which would later provide type with stable ‘feet’ and a standard height. A few of the sorts (notably types 188 and 189 in Audin’s catalogue) have a circular hole right through them.

There are some stories about surviving examples of early types which had holes in them and which had been designed to be threaded together. Some were of wood. The stories appear quite late, in the middle of the 16th century, with an account by Theodore Bibliander or Buchmann, Zürich, 1548; but however confused they are and however unlikely their attribution to the first printers may seem to be, the accounts seem to have been based on different surviving examples and are not easy to dismiss completely. Reed brought the sources for them together on page 4 of his history.

In any case there is independent evidence that at one time it may have been the practice to make holes in types. One of the tools acquired by the monastic press at Ripoli, near Florence, in 1477 was a drill for piercing type – uno trapano per forar lettere (Melissa Conway, The Diario of the printing press of San Jacopo di Ripoli 1476–1484: commentary and transcription. Firenze: Olschki, 1999, p. 108). Neil Harris, in a recent article of which details appear below, cites an essay by Angela Nuovo of 1998 which notes among the materials of a printer, sold in Ferrara in 1477, 85 pounds of ‘types with holes made in them’ (lettere bucade).

One of the most interesting examples of printing from type that may possibly have been threaded or wired – although this just one guess made in an attempt to explain some puzzling observations – is the Catholicon, and some other books printed with the same type. The first printing of the Catholicon, a late medieval encyclopedia, is undated and has no printer’s name, but there is good reason to believe that it was printed in Mainz in the 1460s. Its enigmatic colophon has led to the belief that it may have been printed by Gutenberg during the period after he lost his possession of the materials with which the 42-line Bible was printed. It is a folio with the text in two columns, and its use of different paper stocks, which are allied to small changes to the text, suggests that there were successive reprints from what was essentially the same setting of type.

In 1982 Paul Needham, discussing the evidence for the reprinting of the text, added his own observation that the book was printed from two-line units, which in successive impressions could be seen to shift slightly from side to side. Moreover, when damage to type was repaired or a textual alteration was made, the two-line unit was wholly reset. Needham suggested that the whole book had probably been printed from castings that he called two-line ‘slugs’, using the term that had been introduced for the solid cast lines of the Linotype machine. (‘Johann Gutenberg and the Catholicon Press’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 76, pp. 395–456.)

My own contribution to the debate was to try look for an explanation that did not require one to think of Gutenberg as the inventor of a 15th-century Linotype, and it occurred to me that lines of type that were pierced and tied together with thread or wire might offer an alternative.

Could you thread a single line of type and tie it together? Not easily, since the result is unstable. But two lines tied together make a solid unit. (The practical experiment is not difficult, and there is no need to pierce holes since modern type has a nick which makes a space for the thread or wire to pass through.) Looking at the Catholicon, observers have noticed that on some leaves there are blind impressions of what seems to be wire – quite a lot of wire. And in one of the smaller publications printed in Eltvil from the same type the cause of a thin, sharp white line which crosses a whole page obliquely may have been a piece of loose wire that lay on the forme.

My hypothesis was included by Lotte Hellinga in her own contribution to a debate about the dates of the successive impressions of the Catholicon which ran through several issues of Gutenberg-Jahrbuch. The details of that debate are not relevant here, except to note that it was common ground between the parties to it that the type of the text was kept together for reprinting. In such a case, having the lines held together, whether tied up or as cast slugs, would have usefully helped to preserve them from falling apart between impressions.

Paul Needham did not take readily to my suggestion, and objected that if the lines were merely wired up, the type could easily be reset and there would have been no need to replace whole two-line units whenever a minor alteration was made. Perhaps. But his cast slugs are no less tentative a conjecture. Experience shows that when type is kept standing for some time and is not well rinsed after cleaning, the ink that is dissolved seeps down between the letters and solidifies them. The type becomes ‘baked’, and ‘it is very difficult to separate and distribute, and causes great loss of time and injury to the letter.’ (William Savage, Dictionary of the art of printing. London, 1841, s. v. ‘bake’.) For a text that was to be kept solid for months or even years, ‘baked type’ would have had positive advantages. And if any change to the text was needed, resetting the whole two-line unit would have been quicker and easier than trying to get the baked type apart. Keeping a whole text set in type standing safely between impressions posed formidable problems, especially the text of a long book of which the typeset pages would weigh several tons. But before the common use of stereotyping, and where the text was likely to have a steady sale, the investment in such big founts of type might have seemed justified. The printing office of an orphanage at Halle is said to have printed a Bible from standing type in the early years of the 18th century, and Christopher Sower (Sauer), Germantown, and Matthew Carey, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Isaiah Thomas, Worcester, Massachusetts, did the same later in the century.

We shall never be wholly certain about so many details of the technique of early printing, but the sight of an impression of a ‘fallen type’ often has an immediacy that carries us closer to the world of workers in a real printing-office, mostly doing their job well but sometimes having accidents.

A survey of some examples of ‘fallen types’ was made by Victor Scholderer in an essay on ‘The shape of early type’ in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1927. He noted that several of them seem to be pierced by holes, and he repeated Madden’s rather facile objection to the suggestion that the holes were designed for passing thread through them, namely that if the type had been threaded it would not have been pulled from the forme. Well no, obviously it would not. But perhaps during the first half century of so of printing, during the infancy of typefounding, the pulling of type from the forme was more likely: there is a faint image of a fallen piece of type in one copy of the 42-line Bible. And so the practice of piercing type and threading it may have been introduced – who knows when or how widely? – to deal with the nuisance. Eventually the labour of threading must have begun to seem so tiresome a task that it was given up, even by printers with pierced type, who began to take the risk that some sorts would be pulled out and fall on the forme.

Such accidents were not unknown in later centuries. The writer of an 18th-century Spanish manual for writers and compositors remarked at the start of his ‘Fe de errores’ that when the printer spotted what had happened and tried to push the type back where it might have come from this probably created not one but two errors in the text, since as likely as not the type was pushed back in the wrong place. And, since ink was stiffer when it was cold, printed texts were more liable to such errors in winter than in summer. (Joseph Blasi, Epítome de la orthographia Castellana, con los elementos de la typographia y un modo de enseñar de leer bien. Barcelona, 1751.)

A thorough survey of the literature of fallen types was made by Neil Harris in the notes to his article in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 2003, pp. 22-30, which examines the impression of an unidentified fallen object (hence UFO), perhaps a type, on the forme of a book of the late 15th century: (‘A mysterious UFO in the Venetian “Dama Rovenza” [c. 1482]’). Some recently discovered fallen types, pierced in a manner very similar to the example at the University Library, Cambridge at the head of this post, are described in the University of Reading Ph.D. thesis of Claire Bolton, ‘The Fifteenth-Century printing practices of Johann Zainer, Ulm, 1473–1478’, 2008.

The image below, from the Italian dictionary of printing by G. I. Arneudo, Dizionario esegetico tecnico e storico per le arti grafiche (Torino, 1917), art. ‘fori’, p. 776, is a fanciful reconstruction, but not an implausible one.

The first fallen type?

In 1900, in an paper with the title ‘Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des ersten Buchdruckes’ in the Festschrift zur Gutenberg-Feier produced to commemorate the the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Gutenberg, Paul Schwenke published this tantalisingly faint image of the mark of a fallen type in the copy of the 42-line Bible at Pelplin, Poland. It is the only published image that I have been able to locate, but I believe that a facsimile of this copy has been made, and perhaps it has a better image of the fallen type.

Last edited 7 January 2012

With twenty-five soldiers of lead he has conquered the world.

This phrase or some variation upon it used to stick in the minds of English writers on printing like a maddening half-remembered tune. It was often attributed, confidently but without ever giving a reference, to prolific and sententious writers like Benjamin Franklin. From time to time the trade press tried to get to the bottom of the matter. It never succeeded.

To disprove the attribution to Franklin (or Marx, or any of the even less likely candidates) would be a wearisome business, but we can be sure that if there had ever been a genuine reference to quote we should have heard all about it by now, many times over. In fact the earliest known instance of the phrase for which there is a certain date is in a small booklet, Une Visite à l’Imprimerie nationale, written by the dramatist Jules Claretie, and issued in 1904. The same text was repeated in the following year as the preface to an odd book, half type specimen, half promotional brochure, entitled Débuts de l’im­primerie en France. It was written by Arthur Christian, the Director of the Imprimerie Nation­ale. At the time of its publication the national printing office was preparing to move from the district known as the Marais to a new site in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. After the move, suggested Claretie, it would be possible to create a garden in the Marais and to preserve there the statue made for the Imprimerie Nationale, a copy of the original by David d’Angers in Strasbourg, represent­ing Gutenberg,

celui dont on a dit lors de son cinquième centenaire: Avec vingt-cinq soldats de plomb il a conquis le monde!

(He of whom it was said at the time of his fifth centenary, ‘with twenty-five soldiers of lead he has conquered the world’.)

In the event the statue was moved to a garden in front of the new building. It is shown at the head of this post as it appeared after the building was sold by the Imprimerie Nationale when it left Paris in 2oo5.

The fifth centenary of the birth of Guten­berg was celebrated in 1900 in both Germany and France, and the event generated a great deal of printing. Who made the remark cited by Claretie, and on what occasion? So far the search has been unsuccessful.

It may have been Christian’s book that launched the phrase in the anglo­phone world, for there its first observed appearance is in 1920, in French, accurately render­ing the phrase cited by Claretie, ‘Avec vingt-cinq soldats de plomb il a conquis le monde’. It appears without attribution, or indeed any explanation at all, beneath the heading to a brief essay, ‘Printing as an art’, by Frederic Goudy, in his journal Ars typographica (vol. 1, no. 3, 1920). Goudy later wrote a piece headed ‘The Type Speaks’: ‘I am type! ... I bring into the light of day the precious stores of knowledge and wisdom long hidden in the grave of ignorance. ... In books, I present to you a portion of the Eternal Mind caught in its progress through the world, stamped in an instant, and preserved for eternity. ... I am the leaden army that conquers the world: I am type!’ This turgid slab of prose, which has occasionally been claimed as the origin of the ‘soldiers of lead’, was first published as a broadside by Goudy’s Village Press at Marlborough, New York, in 1931. The last words are evidently derived from the simple phrase cited by Claretie.

By 1923 the original words had gained enough currency for R. A. Austen-Leigh, giving the inaugural lecture in the series of Stationers’ Company Craft Lectures in London to say (changing the 25 soldiers to 26):

‘If I were standing in a pulpit instead of on a platform I should feel inclined to take as my text, though without being able to give chapter and verse for it, that arresting phrase concerning the earliest printer “with twenty-six soldiers of lead he conquered the world.”’

The notion persists to this day that, although one cannot quite pin it down, it should be easy enough to locate the origin of the phrase if only one took the trouble to look in the right place. This idea appears in an essay by Francis Meynell which probably did more to ensure its currency than any previous use, but it did so in a slightly perverted form. Meynell’s version is ‘With twenty-five soldiers of lead I have conquered the world’. This phrase appears as the heading to an essay in the first of a series of leaflets with the title A Printer’s Miscellany that were issued by the Pelican Press in about November 1921. Meynell repeated it in Typography, a decora­tive octavo volume promoting the Pelican Press, issued in 1923. The essay in Typography begins:

‘That dramatic statement is French in origin, and (as they say) of a certain age – which means, here as always, of an uncertain age. Who said it, and when? Was it a village-bound boaster with a sudden and wonderful revelation of the dramatic spirit? Or was it in very truth a conqueror of men’s minds?’

‘Let those who know forbear to tell us,’ says Meynell, adding that ‘doubtless, the thing is indexed, dated, annotated, ascribed, analysed, historified, and stripped naked’ in the dictionary of phrases. He must have discovered that the matter was not so simple, for ‘French in origin’ becomes ‘obscure in origin’ in the second edition of Typography, published in 1926. Meynell claims that the reference in the phrase to twenty-five letters is evidence for its date: ‘In the mid-17th century the W was added to the 25; and the 25 itself was promoted from 24 only a decade or two earlier by the establishment of J.’ This reasoning is not very soundly based. Capital J and U seem to have been introduced by typefounders at more less the same time, in the first quarter of the 17th century, and the first volume of Fournier’s Manuel typographique (1764) shows that in France W was a ‘double letter’ that was still not regarded as strict­ly part of the alphabet in the second half of the 18th century. But then Meynell’s essay is essentially an exercise in facetiously elegant writing. (In his autobiography, My lives (1971), he had the grace to comment, ‘the style of my prose was as mannered and florid as the style of the setting, a typical effusion of a young man now grown a stranger to me.’)

It will be noticed that Meynell’s version of the phrase bluntens its point by removing any perceptible link with Gutenberg: the printer, any printer, now speaks in the first person. In 1928, an anonymous writer in the Monotype recorder (Beatrice Warde, no doubt), while paying tribute to Francis Meynell’s ‘brilli­ant introduction’ as its source, altered the wording again, adding yet another and a rather sinister twist to it. As a contribution to the Lord Mayor’s Show the Monotype Corporation had produced a float carry­ing

‘two ancient type frames, lent specially for the occasion by the Oxford University Press, where they had been in use since Jacobean times. At these stood compositors in the costume of London Printers before the fire, picking type by hand into old-fashioned composing sticks. At the back of the lorry was a modern “Monotype” equipment in actual operation... Following the coaches and banner of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, and marching as a guard of honour to the float, came twenty-six brightly dressed lead soliders. They were boys from the 4th and 21st Southwark Troop of Scouts, in amazingly realistic costumes. But instead of a gun, each lad carried on his shoulder an enormous scale enlargement of that far more potent weapon, a printer’s type. The device on the float explained the allegory: “With Twenty-Six Soldiers of Lead I will Conquer the World.”’
(Monotype recorder, no. 227, Nov–Dec 1928, p. 5).

Why should such a trite phrase still haunt us? One reason for its apparent familiarity may simply be that it embodies a common­place idea that has been expressed many times before. Its essen­tial paradox is to suggest that a small force can affect a large mass, or in other words, in the phrase attributed to Archimedes, ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth’.

The idea that the alphabet is like a small but nevertheless effective band of soldiers is embodied in the following puzzle:

‘Je suis le capitaine de vingt-quatre soldats, et sans moi Paris serait pris.’ (I am the captain of twenty-four soldiers, and without me Paris would be taken.) H. Rowley, Puniana, or thoughts wise and other-wise, London, 1867, quoted by Peter Mayer in Visible language, vol. 9 (1975), p. 91. The answer is the letter A.

Although the immediate source for this riddle is a 19th-century collection, one would not be surprised to find that it dated from a couple of centuries or more earlier, and it is therefore just possible that the allusion to an alphabet of ‘twenty four’ letters may in fact give some clue to its age.

In this particular case we are concerned with the alphabet, not with type, and it is possible that in tying the phrase so narrowly to Gutenberg and to printing we are overlooking the fact that the tradition of an alphabet of twenty-five letters antedates the Latin script: ‘The number of alphabetical signs found among the inscriptions on Egyptian monuments has been reckoned at forty-five. Some of these, however, are used only in special cases; others are only alternative forms for signs more commonly employed. The total number of signs ordinarily in use may thus be reduced to twenty-five – a number which agrees with the tradition handed down by Plutarch, that the Egyptians possessed an alphabet of five-and-twenty letters.’ (E. M. Thompson, Handbook of Greek and Latin palaeography, London, 1893, p. 3.)

However, the conceit that pages of type are like an army of soldiers drawn up in orderly files is found in a Latin poem written in seven­teenth-century Germany, which is discussed by Friedrich Seck in an essay on Kepler and his concern with printing. The poem, by J. B. Heben­streit, is dealt with in a section which has the, from our point of view, promising title of ‘Kriegerische Buchstaben’ or warlike letters. (Friedrich Seck, ‘Kepleriana’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1971, pp. 235-41.) He also cites a Latin comedy by Frischlin, Julius redivivus (1584), in which an analogy is drawn between the lines into which compositors make up their types and ranks of soldiers – veluti milites in aciem collocant. (Claus Gerhardt directed me to this essay.)

Hebenstreit, likening type to the ‘progeny of Cadmus’, is evidently referring to the polemical poli­ti­cal and religious pamphleteering which accompanied the Thirty Years War. Cadmus, the mythical founder of Thebes, was not only the traditional inventor of writing, but he also sowed the dragon’s teeth from which there grew an army of warriors who fought among themselves. The impossibly neat blocks that represent opposing armies in con­temporary maps and diagrams do indeed look rather like type made up into pages. The disruptive power of printing that lies behind the image gives it force in another German text of the seventeenth century. ‘O father,’ says the young unlettered Simpli­cissimus, puzzled by observing the hermit absorbed in the mysterious lines of his printed Bible, ‘here be more soldiers that will drive off sheep: they do take them from that poor man with whom thou didst talk: and here is his house a-burning.’ (Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, 1667, chapter 10).

In connection with the neat representations of armies mentioned just above, perhaps there should be a reference here, though more of a footnote than a whole paragraph, to a work printed in France during the Thirty Years’ War, which is striking enough in its appearance: Colbert de Lostelnau, Le Mareschal de Bataille, contenant le maniment des armes, printed by Estienne Migon in Paris in 1647 and privately distributed. It has a set of copper plate engravings showing the handling of arms, but also some 400 diagrammatic illustrations showing military formations. These are printed with types that Migon is said to have ‘cut’, though whether that means cut as punches or simply by adapting types already cast is unclear: they are squares, dots and rectangles, printed in colours, cavalry in yellow, musket infantry in red, and bayoneteers in black. Here is an example.

And so we come to the idea that the pen, at least when aided by the press, may be mightier than the sword. ‘Lead, when moulded into Bullets, is not so mortal as when founded into Letters’, wrote Andrew Marvell (The rehearsal transpros’d: or animadversions upon a late book, intituled, A preface shewing what grounds there are of fears and jealousies of popery, London, 1672). A variant of Marvell’s phrase is the ponderous aphorism of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99): ‘More than gold, lead has changed the world. And more than the lead in the musket, the lead in the printer’s type case’. (Mehr als das Gold hat das Blei die Welt verändert, und mehr als das Blei in der Flinte jenes im Setzkasten der Drucker.) As Carlyle resoundingly put it (in Sartor resartus, London, 1834):

‘He who first shortened the labour of copyists by the device of moveable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world.’

A new variation on the original paradox is introduced with the idea that the prin­ter’s army of type is made up of ‘soldiers of lead’, or toy soldiers. Toy soldiers cast in tin or lead, both of which are also constituents of typemetal, appear to have been intro­duced in Germany in the seventeenth century, but they did not become wide­­spread as play­things before the nineteenth. The locus classicus for English rea­ders, and French and German ones too, is a work which must surely be the chief reason for the nagging famili­­arity of the phrase. (Without being sure why, Meynell was convinced that he knew it.) It introduces the most famous of literary toy soldiers. In the first English translation of Hans Ander­sen’s ‘Constant tin soldier’ (‘Den standhaftige Tinsoldat’, 1838), the tale begins:

‘There were, once upon a time, five and twenty tin soldiers...’

(Wonderful stories for children, London: Chapman and Hall, 1846, p. 111.)

In the French version the metal is not tin, as Andersen had written, but lead: Il y avait une fois vingt-cinq soldats de plomb..., and in German too, although the usual title of the tale is ‘the constant tin soldier’ (Der standhafte Zinnsoldat) he is sometimes a lead soldier (Bleisoldat).

(Why five and twenty? There was some military justification for the number. Consider the ‘Quadrille’, as defined by Cotgrave in his dictionary of 1611, and cited by OED: ‘a Squadron containing 25 (or fewer) Souldiers’.)

It would be pleasant to think that the persis­tence of our phrase might partly be accounted for by its echo of the adven­ture of one of the least aggressive of literary soldiers. But the dis­turb­ing military image is there nonetheless, if only in the sense that it hints at the Western ‘cultural hege­mony’ that sought to replace all other systems of writing with the Latin script. Even in the decades follow­ing the Second World War, as long as metal type remained the only practical means of composing texts for printing, it seemed possible that the ‘roman­izing’ of Chinese, Japanese and perhaps the other non-Latin scripts was only a matter of time, and that Guten­berg’s invention would then indeed have conquered the world:

‘Unhappily, there is little to encourage the hope that China will make its full contribu­tion to the common life of mankind till it can take its place on equal terms among nations which regard literacy as a prerequisite to good citizenship; and it is not likely that China will implement a programme of universal literacy until it adopts a different technique of writing.’ (Lancelot Hogben, From cave painting to comic strip, London, 1949, p. 77.)

In his note on the ‘kriegerische Buchstaben’ Friedrich Seck cites the handbook of library science published in 1931 by Fritz Milkau, General­direktor der ehemaligen Preußischen Staatsbibliothek, who develops the theme of conquest with enthusiasm, writing in his introduction of ‘the wonder of the alphabet and the invention of type, of the drilling and impetuous advance in victory over the Earth of the 25 lead soldiers of Guten­berg’, a style of rhetoric which is frankly militaristic. (‘...von dem Wunder des Alphabets und der Erfindung der Schrift, von der Ausbildung und dem stürmischen Siegeslauf der fünfundzwanzig Bleisoldaten Gutenbergs über die Erde’. Handbuch der Bibliotheks­wissenschaft, Leipzig, 1931, p. viii.)

The bizarre apo­theosis of this theme must surely be a type­founder’s advert­isement for one of the singu­lar­ly brutal textura types that greeted the rise to power of the Nazi party in Germany. Their names speak powerfully in the newly redis­covered lan­guage of national self-assertiveness: ‘Tannen­berg’, ‘Pots­dam’, ‘Her­mann’, ‘Deutsch­land’.

In an advertisement for this last type in the printing trade journal Deutscher Drucker for September 1934, the Berlin type­foundry H. Berthold AG proclaims,

‘Germany is on the march! Thousands of ‘sol­diers’ of the ‘Deutsch­land’ type leave our casting machines daily in rank and file! All Germany will advertise with ‘Deutsch­land!’ (‘Deutschland marschiert! Tausende von Soldaten der Deutschland-Schrift verlassen täglich in Reih und Glied unsere Schrift­gieß­maschinen... Ganz Deutschland wird mit ‘Deutschland’ wer­ben!’)

Since werben, the term used here for ‘to advertise’ commercially, can also mean ‘to make propa­ganda’ and ‘to recruit for the army’, we have here a hint at an apocalyptic vision of the typefounder as sorcerer’s apprentice; or perhaps we should say that this is a nice example of the dangers into which Guten­berg’s Faustian compact would lead his descendents.

Note

This essay was first published in a Festschrift for Ellic Howe, Wege und Abwege: Beiträge zur europäischen Geistesgeschichte der Neuzeit (Freiburg im Breisgau: Hochschul Verlag, 1990). Those who know something of Howe and his work in black propaganda, which he described in his book The Black Game: British subversive operations against the Germans during the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1982), will understand my attention to German militarism. The text was reprinted in James Mosley: a checklist of the published writings 1958–95, compiled by Steven Tuohy (Over, Cambridgeshire: Rampant Lions Press, 1995).

I had thought that the phrase it deals with had been largely forgotten, for which I was thankful, recalling the ponderous sententiousness with which it used to be trotted out. Apart from a few helpful attributions to Franklin and Marx it is almost undocumented on the Web. I had not intended to clutter up my blog with this piece, but since Meynell’s facetious nonsense is sometimes still taken seriously perhaps it is worth placing here. I have made a few cuts and amendments and have absorbed footnotes into the text.

As for the Andersen connection, John Lane has recently reminded me that in another work of his, the A-B-C Book (first published in 1858 and translated into English in the same year in New Fairy Tales and Stories) there are other familiar echoes. Andersen refers to: ‘the alphabet, that wonderful army of signs which rules the world; ... Everything depends on the order in which they are commanded to stand; ... marshaled and ranked in word formations, what can they not accomplish!.’ John Lane tells me his quotation is from the 1948 translation by Jean Hersholt. No lead soldiers here, or even tin ones – but it seems not unlikely that someone conflated the two passages. One ought in due course to see how the passage is rendered in the first English translation, and in the original Danish.

Peter Bain and Paul Shaw also came across the militaristic advertisement from the Berthold foundry for its typeface ‘Deutschland’ which I quote from and show above. They reproduced it on page 35 of the catalogue of their exhibition Blackletter: type and national identity (New York: Cooper Union, 1998). During the Second World War the phrase ‘Deutschland marschiert!’ appears in the words of the ‘Rußland-Lied’, a song of the Waffen-SS during the campaign against Russia:

Im Osten nun marschieren wir,
Für Adolf Hitler kämpfen wir.
Die rote Front, brecht sie enzwei!
Deutschland marschiert, Achtung! Die Straße frei!

The confident use of the phrase in the Berthold advertisement suggests that it had a currency long before WW2, a topic that I shall be glad to leave it to others to investigate.

Appendix: Jaugeon’s soldiers of lead

Having recently come across the following passage, I wondered whether to make a special posting for it, but it seems best simply to add it to the ‘soldiers of lead’, where it reinforces other examples illustrating the 17th-century idea that ordered type possessed the power of a troop of disciplined soldiers. It comes in the passage relating to the justifying of matrices in the manuscript account of punchcutting and typefounding by Jacques Jaugeon, dated 1704, which was intended for the ‘Description of Arts and Trades’ that was prepared with the authority of the Académie des Sciences. This text has never been published (I am currently working on it). One malicious 18th-century critic who had seen it said this was on account of Jaugeon’s style: ‘Le stile effrayant dans le quel cet ouvrage est écrit est peut être ce qui l’a empesché de voir le jour.’ Jaugeon’s writing about techniques can be clear and precise, but in handling ideas he is sometimes diffuse and vague. In the present case the concept would certainly have had more power if it had been expressed in fewer words.

This is roughly the sense:

Letters [meaning type, in this instance], which are almost nothing on their own, have almost limitless power when they are joined together. They need to be arranged in a way that will develop their merits, make their beauty perceptible, and enable them to work together so that nothing is left to be desired in all their different situations, rather in the manner of the order that is given to troops that are prepared for battle, which in all the ways in which they are assembled, and in commands for them to advance, following the ideas of an individual, makes them always evenly spaced, in a manner that neither crowds them nor scatters them, and with an expression that is not only pleasing to see, but which confirms all the more the idea one has of their merit, the more they are examined, since the orders that they receive place them exactly where they should be in order to produce every aspect of their power and its potential.

Here is the original passage:

Les lettres qui ne sont quasy rien separement et qui meslées ensemble, ont une puissance a quoy on ne peut assigner de bornes, demandent un arrangement qui les mette dans un jour qui developpe leurs vertus, qui releve leurs graces et qui leur fasse s’entredonner une aisance qui ne leur puisse rien faire desirer dans toutes leurs differentes scituations, semblable a peu pres a celuy qu’on donne a des troupes qu’on veut disposer a une action, qui dans tous les estats qu’on les pose, dans toutes les marches qu’on leur ordonne, et avec qui que ce soit qu’on associe chaque particulier, se trouvent tousjours dans des distances qui ne pressent ny n’esloignent personne et dans des contenances qui plaisent non seulement a les voir, mais qui augmentent encore l’idée qu’on a conceu de leur merite a proportion qu’on s’occupe a les examiner, parceque l’ordonnance met tout ou il doit estre et un estat de produire jusqu’au moindre effect de sa puissance et de sa vertu.

Last edited 24 January 2011

Drawing the typefounder’s mould

The typefounder’s mould was first described during the 16th century, and the principles of its construction do not appear to have changed greatly thereafter. Since the mould consists of two L-shaped pieces that slide together, these principles are essentially simple, but it is not an object that is at all easy to represent graphically.

Philip Gaskell’s New introduction to bibliography, first published in 1972 and reissued with some radical corrections in 1974 (a few more were made later), is still the most reliable and comprehensive historical guide to the processes of printing and the related trades. Its account of the setting of type and printing at the hand press was based not only on his reading of technical works but on personal experience at the Water Lane Press, the printing office that he set up in a cellar at King’s College, Cambridge, and where some undergraduates joined him. I was one of them.

When I first saw Gaskell’s book in 1972 I thought that his illustration of the mould on page 11 of the New introduction (shown above) was one of the clearer and better images that I had seen. I still think so, but the more I looked at it the more puzzled I became. Typefounding was not one of the trades that he knew at first hand, and this probably accounts for his omission of any discussion of the illustration, or indeed any indication of its source. I found that this was a more complicated matter than I had thought.

The origin of the image is evidently plate 7 in the first volume of the Manuel typographique of Fournier le jeune (Paris, 1764), above, but it is reversed laterally. It does not show the mould that was in common use in France and Britain, which is on his plates 5 and 6, but an alternative design, ‘the mould used in Germany, Holland, and elsewhere’, and although this operates on the same principles it does have some different features. But Gaskell’s image, although it shows Fournier’s German mould, does so at a distance, via other interpretations.

His figure includes not only a mould but several other objects, a punch, a matrix, a piece of type, and also a ‘schematic diagram of the casting mould’ to show its principles. These had all been published some years before in an article by Otto Fuhrmann, ‘A note on Gutenberg’s typemetal’, in the Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 1950.

As his caption acknowledges, Fuhrmann’s images had in turn been assembled from several separate unattributed illustrations in an article on typefounding by Friedrich Bauer, ‘Schrift und Schriftguß’, in Das moderne Buch, the third volume, issued in 1910, of a series published in Stuttgart under the general title Die graphischen Künste der Gegenwart. The drawing of the mould is shown above.

The mould in Bauer’s article may possibly have been suggested by an engraved plate, above, that was published a century earlier by C. G. Täubel in the third volume of his Allgemeines theoretisch-praktisches Wörterbuch der Buchdruckerkunst (Vienna, 1809). There is no doubt that Täubel’s image of the German mould was taken from Fournier’s plate, since it also shows the different parts of the mould in an exploded view on the same plate. In the process of copying the image was ‘flipped’ horizontally. However, the angle at which the mould is represented was altered, and so was the relative position of the two parts, so that at first glance the reversal is not apparent, and the hooks which are used to extract the types that stick in the mould after casting had their position switched so that they seem to match those of Fournier’s original plate.

Why the slight deception? Images are often reversed when they are copied, but in this case, I suspect, one reason for the reversal may be that Fournier’s ‘German’ mould has its ‘body’ on the right when it is in the casting position, as in French moulds. German moulds seem generally to have had the body on the left, in the manner shown in the plate in the handbook Die so nöthig als nützliche Buchdruckerkunst und Schriftgießerey, published by C. F. Gessner in Leipzig in 1740, and some surviving later German moulds seem to confirm that this was the German practice. By flipping Fournier’s image, Täubel was able to show a mould that looked more convincingly German.

The mould shown by Bauer reproduces Fournier’s image more faithfully, although also in reverse, and since it keeps the hooks in their correct relative position, it may have been derived directly from the Manuel typographique. But there are some changes too. A wooden sheath is added to the end of the spring that holds the matrix in place, perhaps as insulation (since all metal parts of the mould get hot). This is a feature that is often seen in German moulds but not in French or English ones. And only one turn is given to the coil of the spring where it is fixed to the insulating wood.

In adapting Fournier’s image, Täubel had perhaps inadvertently preserved one very French feature: the mould that is shown on his plate, and in Bauer’s illustration and Gaskell’s, would cast type with the nick above the letter, in the French manner, and not below it, as was the practice in Germany and England. But the separate example of a cast printing type shown by both Bauer and Gaskell has the nick below and could not have been cast in the mould that is shown (for which it is in any case too big), something that must puzzle the observant reader of either text.

Acting no doubt with the best of intentions, Gaskell himself introduced one last element of confusion. For his extensively revised impression of 1974, he had the image of the mould redrawn with a ‘pecked’ line, presumably to show its internal structure more clearly. He also added ‘a matrix, held in place by the spring’, in order to show how it fits in the mould. The matrix that is shown is a simple slab of copper with a round indentation at the back. It is not a matrix for casting with a hand-mould. In his notes to the reprint of Moxon’s Mechanick exercises (2nd edition, London, 1962, at page 161) Harry Carter observes that ‘matrices meant for casting-machines have a shallow hole at the back instead of a notch. The hole is no good in a hand-mould: the bow [or spring] tends to pull the matrix off its seating on one side.’

Gaskell died in 2001. Since his text is still in current use, it seems useful to continue to make corrections to it where they are needed. The image of the typefounder’s mould in his book is clear and has some value, but Gaskell, as befits a bibliographer, was a scrupulous writer, identifying even the individual copies of the books he photographed for their type and crediting the many individuals who offered corrections to his text. He clearly had no idea that this image had been altered from its original model to the extent that is set out here.

Big brass matrices: a mystery resolved?

Above. A brass matrix for one of the sets of titling capitals of the romain du roi, Imprimerie nationale, Paris. Photograph made in 1993. Letter height 31 mm.

In a note to the reprint of Moxon’s Mechanick exercises (2nd ed. 1962, p. 154), Harry Carter wrote, ‘it is a mystery to find matrices of brass struck with big punches in the sixteenth century at the Plantin-Moretus Museum and in the seventeenth century at Oxford.’

The reason for Carter’s puzzlement is as follows. Punches were normally cut in steel and hardened so that they could be hammered into copper in order to make the matrices from which type was cast. Copper, which is ductile, is a good metal for the purpose. Brass, which is generally an alloy of copper and zinc, is far harder. (It was used in the 20th century for the matrices of Linotype and Monotype machines, but mostly in relatively small sizes, and the punches were struck using powerful modern machinery.) So how is it that several sets of surviving early matrices for quite big types, for which the punches were cut in steel, are all made of brass?

The two examples that Carter had in mind were probably these. At Antwerp there are the unfinished Grosses capitales extraordinaires of Claude Garamont, bought by Christophe Plantin after his death in 1561, for which there are steel punches, brass matrices, and also a set of strikes in lead. The height of the letters is 14 mm. And at the University Press, Oxford, there are 38 brass matrices for the 3-line Pica titling capitals of the ‘Fell’ types, 11 mm high. ‘They cannot have been made by striking—the metal is too hard,’ wrote Carter in his notes to Stanley Morison’s monograph John Fell, the University Press, and the ‘Fell’ types (1967), p. 150. ‘The letters must have been cut out of the brass with chisels and finished by striking with the punches whilst the brass was hot (the method recommended by Fournier le jeune in his Manuel typographique).’ The term used by Fournier, on pages 75 and 76 of his first volume, is cuivre or copper, and although as noted below cuivre can mean brass as well as copper at this date, the process he describes is so laborious that it is difficult to believe that a hard metal like brass would be used for it.

There are more surviving examples of early matrices for big types made in brass.

When he was in Paris as the Minister of the United States, Benjamin Franklin bought some matrices dating from about 1740 of the foundry of Claude Mozet. The surviving matrices, for a big titling type (measuring 16 mm), are of brass. They belong to the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, were recently shown in the Franklin tercentenary exhibition in Philadelphia, and are illustrated at page 244 in the article by Ellen R. Cohn, ‘The printer at Passy’, in Page Talbott (ed.), Benjamin Franklin in search of a better world (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 235–71.

At Haarlem, among the materials in the museum of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen, there is a set of brass matrices for a titling type of the mid-16th century, probably French, measuring 16 mm. There are no surviving punches of steel, but there is a set of strikes of the same letters in lead.

And then there is the series of ‘two-line’ or titling capitals for the romain du roi among the materials of the Imprimerie nationale, Paris, cut during the 18th century. There are steel punches for these, but all the matrices, for types of which the largest size has a face 41 mm high, are brass. They could not possibly have been struck with these punches.

In this last case we have an answer to the puzzle, and one that seems both simple and convincing. In his accounts for the year 1728, asking for payment for one of these big types, the punchcutter Jean Alexandre claimed 90 livres,

Pour avoir fait soixante grosses Matrices de plomb frapées avec les gros poinçons des grandes lettres de deux points du quatorzieme, pour en pouvoir tirer les creux, pour avoir lieu de les mouler avant que de justifier les Matrices en Cuivre: a raison de 1 [livre tournois]: 10 [sous] pour chacune matrice.

This is not easy to interpret in every detail: why, for example, were 60 matrices were needed for a set of capitals? But it seems to mean something like this:

“For having made sixty big matrices in lead, struck with the big punches for the large two-line letters of the Fourteenth [body], in order to make impressions with which to cast brass matrices...”

Cuivre is an ambiguous word in French at this period, since it can mean either ‘copper’ or ‘brass’ according to the context. But in this case it seems more likely that it means ‘brass’ because the surviving matrices for these big types are all of brass. ‘Fourteenth’ is a reference to the scale of interrelated type bodies invented for the romain du roi by Sébastien Truchet, an invention for which the credit was disingenuously claimed by Fournier le jeune. The capitals for the two-line letters for this body are about 25 mm high or about 72 points. Thus the lead strikes that are referred to in the accounts were probably patterns that were used for making replicas in brass by casting in sand. When these castings were made into matrices, the faces of the letters would be cleaned up by striking with with the steel punches that had been used to create the impressions in lead, a practice sometimes followed in making medals: in the article on ‘Coining’ in the 2nd edition of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, 1738, it is noted that ‘medallions, and medals of high relievo, by reason of the difficulty of stamping them in the balancier, or press, are usually first cast or molded in sand, like other works of that kind, and are only put into the balancier to perfect them; by reason the sand does not leave them clean, smooth, and accurate enough.’ That these matrices were cast in sand and then cleaned up with the original steel punches is the conclusion of Stan Nelson, former typecaster at the Smithsonian Institution and now a maker of typefounders’ moulds and the writer of their history. He believes that the matrix for the ‘Fifteenth’ body (31 mm) of the titling capitals of the romain du roi, shown in the photograph at the head of this post, shows evidence of having been cast in sand, and that some traces of a casting process are also visible in the Mozet matrices bought by Franklin.

So it seems not only possible but even quite likely that the sets of brass matrices listed here were cast in sand, and that the lead ‘strikes’ that accompany some of them were patterns used in the casting process. One should add that, since he fails to mention it, Fournier had either never heard of this process or did not believe in it. It should also be borne in mind that punches for larger-bodied types were sometimes cut in brass and used to make lead matrices, from which – with great care – type could be cast. It is known that this was done in Germany, and there are surviving examples of such leaden matrices in the Norstedt Collection in Sweden. But it seems highly unlikely that a set of lead matrices that were primarily intended for casting type would be associated with steel punches and brass matrices for the same typeface.

With technical advice from Stan Nelson – to whom I am also grateful for help with the present text – I first put a brief note on the accounts from Alexandre and the brass matrices of the romain du roi at the Imprimerie nationale into Le romain du roi: la typographie au service de l’État, the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Musée de l’imprimerie, Lyon, in 2002. (It is note 73 on page 64, and there are more images of the matrices for the 15th body on page 51 and 67.) The image at the head of this post was made in 1993 on Kodachrome film. The digital image just above of the same matrix was made in 2008. The cancelled figure 15 is a reference to the 15th body in the scale for the bodies of the romain du roi devised by Sébastien Truchet. The figure 48 which replaces it, which may have been added in about 1810, gives the size of the type for which it is designed to serve as a ‘two-line’ initial in the point IN, the ‘point millimétrique’ of approximately 0.4 mm that is still in use at the Imprimerie nationale. The type body is therefore 96 points. The image below shows a punch for the body one size larger, 112 points.

Scotch Roman

William Miller, A specimen of printing types. Edinburgh, 1822

In his Typographia, 1825, p. 361, T. C. Hansard wrote that the English punchcutter Richard Austin ‘executed’ most of the founts of the two Scotch foundries of Alexander Wilson in Glasgow and William Miller in Edinburgh. In his Practical hints on decorative printing (1822) William Savage had made the comment that Miller’s types ‘so much resemble [Wilson’s] as to require a minute and accurate inspection to be distinguished.’ William Miller, formerly foreman to Alexander Wilson, appears to have set up his foundry in 1808 and issued his earliest surviving type specimen in 1813. Wilson’s ‘modern cut’ types appeared in a specimen dated 1812.

Although Hansard was a careful writer, it is difficult to know how much reliance to place on his unsupported statement. Richard Austin, a professional punchcutter and engraver in London, cut types during the 1780s for John Bell’s British Letter Foundry, and in 1806 he cut the ‘Porson’ Greek type for the University Press at Cambridge from the writing of the scholar Richard Porson. He set up his own foundry in London, the Imperial Letter-foundery, from which he issued the specimen dated 1819 with its critical preface that is quoted in a previous post. Even if he may have had some involvement with one or both of the Scotch typefoundries, it seems unlikely that he would have had the time to cut many of their punches if he was also making types at the same time for his own foundry. Moreover, although there is indeed some similarity between the Miller and Wilson types, none of Wilson’s has anything resembling the distinctive capitals of the Miller Pica No. 2 that is shown above, with a detail below, which became the model for the Pica Scotch Roman.

Detail of William Miller’s Pica No. 2, as shown in 1813, from the specimen of 1822.

The term Scotch Roman originates in the United States towards the end of the 19th century. It probably has something to do with Scotch-face, the name given to some types of the typefounder S. N. Dickinson in Boston that are said to have been made to his own design by Alexander Wilson & Son in Glasgow, and which were first cast by him in 1839 with matrices imported from Scotland. Other founders made similar types with this name. They do not in fact look much like the Miller and Wilson types of the second decade of the 19th century. De Vinne tells the story in his Plain printing types (1900), defining the Scotch-face as ‘a small, neat, round letter, with long ascenders, and not noticeably condensed or compressed.’ He adds that James Conner of New York appears to have shown the first complete series of the face, and gives this example:

The types that became known as ‘Scotch Roman’ are derived from a quite different model from this one. In 1882 two sizes of the early types of William Miller, a Pica and a Long Primer, were recast by the Miller foundry in Edinburgh, by now known as Miller & Richard, for a reprint of Sir Walter Scott’s edition of the works of John Dryden, originally printed by James Ballantyne and published in 1808. The new edition was printed by T. & A. Constable of Edinburgh, who according to a little history of the firm published in 1937 appear for a time to have had exclusive rights to the recast type.

Founts for five sizes of these types from Pica to Brevier (12 to 8 point) were bought from Miller & Richard in 1901 by the University Press at Oxford, where the type, as shown above, was known as Dryden. The same sizes were in due course marketed by Miller & Richard under the name of ‘Old Roman’. Several recut sorts had been included in this recasting, perhaps because the old matrices were missing or perhaps because the older forms did not satisfy contemporary taste. A new, wider capital S was substituted in the Pica, and in all sizes t was given a flat top in the French, rather than the English, manner. The Pica size, the Pica No. 2 of the early Miller specimens with its bold capitals, has sometimes been picked out as characteristic of the whole range of sizes, although the capitals of the smaller bodies are more delicate. The contrast in the Pica, often noted critically, between the weight of the capitals and the lower case characters was made more extreme in the revival by mistakenly choosing one of the heavier sets of capitals for revival among the matrices for the Pica italic and casting a light lower case for it.

The Miller & Richard types with their telltale added modern sorts were cast and sold under the name of Scotch Roman by the A. D. Farmer foundry of New York from about the beginning of the century, though the date is uncertain, and whether by arrangement with Miller & Richard or by opportunistically making their own electrotype matrices from imported types is not known.

The Farmer foundry added some larger sizes of its own that appear to have been crudely redrawn from the existing design. T. L. De Vinne showed them in his firm’s specimen book of 1907, and his words are worth quoting: ‘This Scotch Roman, as it is now called, was a contribution made to novelty made for and first used by the Ballantyne Printing House in Edinburgh, in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Its most striking peculiarity to the inexpert is the greater breadth and openness of the letters without appearance of undue obesity. It has no eccentricity save the almost unnoticeable flat top to the lower-case t.’

A type that appears to be Farmer’s was chosen in 1903 for setting the text of the new journal Printing Art. The design was followed in the same year for the Scotch Roman of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, and also by the Monotype Company in Philadelphia for its Scotch Roman, Series 36. At about the same date ATF introduced the design from 6 to 12 point under the name of Wayside, a name that suggests the cooperation of Will Bradley, who was responsible for their series of ‘Wayside Ornaments’. In the specimen of 1912 a full series of Scotch Roman was introduced, perhaps derived directly from materials from the Farmer foundry that had belatedly been joined with ATF. Unlike Wayside, which continued to be produced under that name, it has descenders that, like those of the US Monotype version, are brutally truncated to make them fit the foundry’s ‘standard line’. Perhaps one should add that about the same date the H. C. Hansen foundry, Boston, made a version of the Miller & Richard type, which it marketed as National Roman.

The flat-topped t of the revived ‘Scotch Roman’, to which De Vinne refers, shows that the model for all the new American ‘Scotch Roman’ types that appear around 1900 was the revived version cast in Edinburgh by Miller & Richard, since this form of t is not seen in the early Miller types, and very rarely appears in British modern face types. The acceptance of this form in the US seems in its turn to have induced the designers of some other types to add flat tops to the t of some types related, however distantly, to ‘Scotch Roman’. Dwiggins’s Caledonia for Linotype is an example. Even more oddly, ATF’s Bodoni (1911), the model for countless other types with this name, with its flat-topped t may possibly be another example of the influence of the Miller & Richard ‘wrong font’ character, since the top of Bodoni’s own t was generally pointed.

Since he made distinguished use of the type, it is perhaps worth quoting D. B. Updike’s remarks on ‘the modern face known in America as Scotch’ (Printing Types, ii. 230). However, it is an oddly confused piece of writing:

‘Perhaps the most beautiful version of it ever brought out was that cut by William Martin; and a very close copy if not actually the same face was produced in Scotland in the last century—notably in the ‘Series of Old Founts’ by Messrs. Miller & Richard of Edinburgh. The Wayside series of the American Type Founders Company, if in its original form, with long descenders—is a fairly satisfactory equivalent.’

The types cut by William Martin for William Bulmer are so very different from those of Miller that the use of his name here is difficult to understand, unless Updike was confusing it with that of Richard Austin. And the Miller & Richard types were called ‘Old Roman’, not ‘Old Founts’. Nonetheless the endorsement of the Wayside types suggests that these may have been the founts that Updike himself used with distinction.

In 1906 the English Monotype Corporation made a robust but rather clumsy adaptation (above), based on a single size of the Miller & Richard types, the Pica, but with the capitals made more uniform in width. This type, Series 46, was known simply as Old Style. It became so widely used in Britain that it was often taken to be the normal form of the type. It was used for the edition of Jane Austen’s novels, edited by R. W. Chapman, that was published by the Oxford University Press in 1923. This was a pity, since Series 137, a more faithful recutting of all the different sizes of the Miller & Richard ‘Old Roman’, including the delicate Small Pica and Long Primer on 11 and 10 point bodies, was made by Monotype at the request of the Edinburgh printers R. & R. Clark in 1921:

Like Series 46 it was called simply ‘Old Style’, but eventually (and confusingly) both types were given the US name Scotch Roman. The sales of Series 137 were never seriously promoted (these were the years of Garamond, Baskerville, Fournier and Bembo), and very few other British printers bought matrices. (The larger sizes of Series 137, on the analogy of those made in the USA, were enlarged from one of the smaller ones (the 14-point in this case) and were not based on original Miller types for these bodies.) Monotype’s digital version was based on its mediocre Series 46, and the opportunity to make a better Scotch Roman was missed until the appearance of Matthew Carter’s Miller (1997), based on the early Miller types.

My own digital New Scotch (below) is derived from the Long Primer (about 10 point) size of the Miller types. I am well aware that the spacing, alignment and kerning are all very far from perfect and the outline looks pretty rough, but I have been agreeably surprised to see that it is robust and readable in high-resolution typesetting. The @ character (the earliest that I have found in type) is from the Miller specimen dated 1822. Monotype cut the Miller italic w that is seen here for its Series 137, and it is seen in some printing with this typeface, but their nerve failed them and they later substituted a more conventional character. The fist is adapted from one that I once cast in a Figgins matrix.

Footnote 1

The text above is derived from a note that I originally wrote in 1972 for Brooke Crutchley, University Printer at Cambridge, when a public edition was being prepared of the text by Stanley Morison that had been privately printed in 1953, A tally of types cut for machine composition and introduced at the University Press, Cambridge 1922–1932. I had suggested to him that, since the new edition was not limited to types acquired by the Press between 1922 and 1932, a note on ‘Scotch Roman’ should be included. Modern-face types had been great favourites of the former University Printer, Walter Lewis. He welcomed the idea.

The new edition of the Tally was published in 1973. For some time afterwards I thought that the text I had sent to Crutchley had not been used. I took this philosophically until one day, looking rather more carefully at Morison’s preface, as ‘revised and amplified by P. M. Handover’ (his research assistant at The Times), I found every word of my note, without attribution, on pages 27 to 30 of the new edition. I would not labour the point if it were not for the possibility that to anyone who reads this passage in the preface I might appear here to be plagiarizing it.

A recent history of printing types suggested that the account of ‘Scotch Roman’ in this preface of 1973 (there had been no reference at all in Morison’s original preface) has ‘what remains the best description of Miller’s finest Modern’. Whether this is the case or not, the words are neither Morison’s nor Handover’s. Morison had, however, written a brief account of what he called ‘Scotch Roman’ in 1935, and this is published in Footnote 2 below. I notice with mixed feelings that my narrative in the Tally was evidently one of the sources of Alexander Lawson’s worthy but rather garbled account of ‘Scotch Roman’in his Anatomy of a typeface (1990), which reproduces my words at some length, something that it seems all the more worth noting now that parts of his text have turned up on Google Books, which makes the story more than ever in need of the additions and corrections that are made in the present post. The 1973 edition of the Tally was reprinted by David Godine, Boston, with the addition of an excellent introduction by Mike Parker, in 1999.

A revised version of my original essay was published by Alastair Johnston in Ampersand: quarterly journal of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts, San Francisco, autumn/winter 1998, pp. 2–11.

There is a useful note on ‘Historic Scotch Roman: a design originated by an American Printer?’ in issue 24 of Richard L. Hopkins’s ATF Newsletter, with a ‘Follow-up to Newsletter Article on Scotch Roman’, including a facsimile of a sheet of Specimens of Book and Job Faces issued by the Dickinson Type Foundry, in issue 26 of the Newsletter. In this instance ATF, with its echoes of the initials of the American Type Founders Company, stands for the American Typecasting Fellowship, set up by Hopkins and other enthusiasts in 1978.

Footnote 2

This is Morison’s own account of Scotch Roman, published in 1935, which seems to have been written with some knowledge of the version of the story that was believed at the Edinburgh printing firm of T. & A. Constable. The paragraph that follows it is an extract from Constable’s little house history, issued privately in 1937. Morison’s reference to the date of 1808 is clearly derived from the story believed by Constable, and refers to Scott’s edition of Dryden. But this, as noted above, is not set in any of the types that appear in the Miller specimens, and the claim that they were cut in 1808 was baseless.

‘In 1808 Messrs. Miller & Richard cut a new fount whose virtues seem to have been completely overlooked at the time. This design, now known to the trade variously as Scotch Old Face or Scotch Roman, would have had a fair claim to rank as the Scottish National Face if circumstances had been otherwise. But in the fifties the Miller & Richard foundry brought out ... a sort of diluted version of Caslon’s Old Face known to the trade as ‘Revived Old Style’. The Scotch Roman, cut originally in 1808, was laid aside immediately, and never given the consideration it deserved until Messrs T. & A. Constable secured its exclusive use and printed a number of very handsome books in it, for some years after 1882. The Scotch Roman, though a modern face within the Bell-Austin tradition, possesses an individuality distinguishing it from the other members of the group. The fount, released by Messrs. Constable, is much used at the present day, being suitable for working upon smooth and coated papers. As these words, set in Scotch Roman, prove, the fount possessed boldness of character and orderliness in the disposition of colour.’
Stanley Morison, Introduction to W. T. Berry and A. F. Johnson, Catalogue of specimens of printing types by English and Scottish printers and founders 1665–1830 (London, 1935), p. xliii. The last sentence of Morison’s text was set in Monotype’s Series 46. As can be seen he makes no reference at all to the more faithful version, Monotype Series 137, cut at the request of R. & R. Clark in 1921. His reference to its ‘release’ by T. & A. Constable suggests that the latter firm still had a notion that the type was in some sense their property, something that seems odd, given its wide adoption in the USA.

‘During the next twenty years there was a great development in the typography of the firm. The partners were dissatisfied with the types then available, and on exploring the possibilities of improvement they discovered a fount of type which had been cut in 1808 by Miller & Richard, the Edinburgh typefounders. For some reason the possibilities of this type had not been realised, and the sales had been slight. The firm of T. & A. Constable were granted for a period of years the exclusive rights to this type, and the first books to be printed in it were the Works of John Dryden, with notes, and a life of the author by Sir Walter Scott, edited by George Saintsbury. As a result of this the type was known as Dryden, and other books printed in this fount were the Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson, Carmina Gadelica, and the Edinburgh Folio Shakespeare.’
Brief notes on the origins of T. & A. Constable Ltd (Edinburgh, 1937), p. 9.

Footnote 3

In 1888 T. & A. Constable, who had printed Scott’s edition of Dryden in 1882, wrote the note shown above to the London typefounder Sir Charles Reed, asking for help in locating the matrices of the ‘New Long Primer No. 5’, a type from the Wilson foundry that had been used – so they claimed – ‘for the original edition of the Waverley Novels, printed by the Ballantyne Press’. The materials of the Wilson foundry had been sold at auction in 1845, and it seems likely that this request was related in some way to the revival of the Miller types that is discussed above. The first of the ‘Waverley Novels’ of Sir Walter Scott was Waverley, or ’tis sixty years since, published in 1816, and they were indeed printed in Edinburgh by Scott’s friend James Ballantyne, originally of Kelso. The first edition of Waverley was not set in the Wilson type named above, which does seem to have been cut later, but it is possible that it was later adopted. Nor were the early Miller or Wilson types used for Scott’s Dryden of 1808. But the document (which was kept by Talbot Baines Reed in his interleaved and annotated copy of his History of the Old English Letter Foundries, 1887) does suggest that the revival of the early Miller types may have encouraged more attempts to recreate the appearance of Scott’s works.

This text has been much revised and expanded since it was first posted, but the story it tells is so involved and the published versions are so confused and contradictory that it seems worth doing this as thoroughly as possible. Moreover, thanks to many helpers and contributors, much new material has come to hand. The last revision was on 14 February 2009