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 one of its chief attractions would be that of Michelin: vaut le voyage.

The first image above shows Newington Green in the early 19th century, from a drawing by T. H. Shepherd reproduced in Claire Tomalin’s biography of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974). Below is the scene as it appeared in September 2011. The unitarian chapel that she knew, with its new façade of 1860, is on the left. Belle Époque, boulangerie and pâtisserie, is to the right.

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 (Hermann Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae selectae, Berlin 1892–1916, 9506). 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 incised 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 properly 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 following 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:

‘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’.

Nobody had ever said this before. Now it is accepted without question.

Not long after Lethaby wrote, in 1914, 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 to observe 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). The group of notices of which one was reproduced above are described in the Notizie degli scavi di antichità, xi (1914), pp. 104–6, which include notes on the signatures of the writers, and can be read online.

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 and at different dates. 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 the editions are not very convincing. Other names, like Canon, Brevier, and probably Pica, refer to types used in liturgical works. And there is a whole series of designations for small types, 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, like Parisienne, which was already in use in the 16th century, Sedanoise (Jannon), Parmigianina (Bodoni), and – in the 19th century – the tiny 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 (two bodies of Nonpareil did indeed make a Cicéro), 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’ (the term originally proposed was mètre, but this word was then adopted for the universal unit of linear measurement), a type on a body of 12 of the Didot units was designated ‘corps 12’. However it eventually became known as the Didot point, which 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 also 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 19 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.

Esszet or ß

The German character ß includes the only surviving form of the long s in modern typographical usage. Since its sound is ss, it might be thought to be a ligature made up of ſ and s, to be used at the end of a word or a syllable. But the matter is not nearly so simple. What ever it may look and sound like, it is essentially ſ and z, and the rules for its use have as much to do with the quality of the associated vowel as with its position. It is still required in Germany and Austria for printing in German with roman types (and if the printing is in gothic types, ſ must also be used). The roman form appears to have been first introduced in the 1660s by a printer in Sulzbach, a place that is commemorated in the name by which its design was later known, and it was reintroduced in the 1820s by the philologist Jacob Grimm, who subsequently rejected it. German printers using roman type did not normally employ ß at all until its use became one of the topics raised in the 1870s in the context of spelling reform, and a movement began that led to a requirement in 1903 for its universal use in German schools. As might be guessed from these dates, its modern history has been bound up with the unity and identity of the German state.

Esszet or Eszett is used after a long vowel, as in Straße, street, but not after a short one, as in Gasse, alley. New and wide-ranging spelling rules in Germany, introduced in 1996 and legally required in schools since 2006, have reduced the number of occasions that require the use of ß. The rules have not met with universal assent. The use of ß died out during the 20th century in German-speaking Switzerland, but its retention has been strongly defended in Germany. Latin Small Letter Sharp S, as ß is known, not only has its place among the glyphs of the ASCII character set (since 1986) and Unicode (U+00DF), but it is accessible on mobile phones. Young Germans (and Swiss and Hungarians) currently use it in their texting as a substitute for ss or sz, regardless of spelling rules, in order to reduce the overall character count of their messages. Moves are currently under way, not for the first time, to introduce a majuscule version.

Since ß is a ligature that is made up of ſ and z it is called by the names of these letters, Esszet; perhaps more widely and correctly spelt Eszett; or Eszet: the spelling is inconsistent because it was not generally recognized in the past as a real word, but merely the phonetic rendering of the two letters: Grimm used the term eszet – so spelt – in the foreword to his own dictionary, but there is no headword for it in the body of the work. The word, however spelt, does not appear in some other dictionaries. It is sometimes also known as scharfes S, or unvoiced letter s. The expression ‘sharp s’ in the title for the ASCII and Unicode glyph quoted above is a literal rendering of the German term. In English it makes no sense at all.

In the historical form of the language known as Old High German, and the subsequent Middle High German, until about 1500, there were two closely related sounds for unvoiced s for which the letters s and z were used. Since z was also used (as it still is) for the sound ‘tz’ (as in Zug, train), the second s-sound was spelt sz. And because the s component did not come at the end of the word or the syllable, it appeared as ſ.



The ſz combination can be seen above in separate letters in the word boſzheit in the Weltgericht, a surviving fragment that was presumably printed by Gutenberg in about 1450, using an early state of the so-called DK type. The ligature ß is used in the name of the printer Peter Schöffer, Petrus Schoiffer de Gernßheim, in this colophon of 1477.



The early history of this combination in both manuscript and type is complex and in need of further investigation, as an essay by Max Bollwage of 1999 indicates. The form of z used with long s does not always correspond with the normal z in writing or type, and may have a different derivation. (See the bibliography at the end of this post.) However, ß is visible in the Fraktur of the early 16th century which became the dominant German national type. Below is a detail from Dürer’s Underweysung der Messung, printed in Nürnberg in 1525 by Hieronymus Andreae, whose Fraktur type was made following patterns drawn by the calligrapher Johann Neudörffer. The Esszet can be seen in lines 1, weyß, 3, auß, and 6, reyß. There are two other points of typographical interest worth noting in this example. The round, or ‘ragged’ r, as it was known in English, that follows letters that are rounded behind like b and o, as in breiten in line 2 and vor in line 3. By the 18th century its use had largely ceased in Germany. Note too that lower case is used to begin nouns, such as strich. In Germany by the end of the 16th century they nearly all began with a capital letter, and by and large they still do.



The widespread confusion that still exists about the nature of ß derives from the fact that a shift in the pronunciation of modern High German had led by the 18th century to the same pronunciation of ss and sz, so that the ß character was now used purely as a visual sign to distinguish the use of the long and short vowel. In the late 18th century the dictionary-maker Johann Christoph Adelung noted the complexity of keeping so many letters for the single s-sound: initial and medial ſ, final s, and ß after the long vowel; and also for double s: medial ſſ, final ſs, but ß following the long form of the vowel. He added that this had led to discontent among teachers: ‘It is certainly true that that having four different ways of writing the sound s has its difficulties and irritations, especially when ß is used not only for the unvoiced sound but also for double s. But nothing better has been suggested in its place.’



Roman type was rarely used for setting the German language before the 19th century, but it does appear in a work printed in Sulzbach in East Bavaria by Abraham Lichtenthaler, who attracted attention to his printing-office by printing Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata (1677, etc) there. The lines above, in a tiny type, apparently of the 16th-century and French in origin, with the addition of W and w and vowels with Umlaut as well as ß, are from the German translation by F. M. van Helmont of Boethius, The consolation of philosophy, printed by Lichtenthaler in 1667. (The preliminary pages and the text are set in Fraktur, but the roman type is used for additional verses which appear throughout the translation.) He left his mark on German typography by introducing in the Boethius a design of ß that would be adapted for use in roman type by reformers in the 19th century and called the Sulzbacher form. His use of this ß is referred to by Uta Stötzner in an article in the journal Signa, no. 9 (2006).

Printers who in Germany who began to flirt with the use of roman type for German texts at the end of the 18th century had no easy answer to the rendering of ß with the new founts. When Goethe’s Römische Carneval was printed by Johann Friedrich Unger in Berlin in 1789 in a roman type by Firmin Didot, long s was not used in the text, following the current practice in France – except, paradoxically, for the words in which ß would have been used, which he printed ſs, using a Didot-style long s which must have been cut for this purpose. The contrast in contemporary attitudes to the use of roman types for works in German is nicely shown in two well-known letters that were written in 1794. The poet Wieland expressed to his publisher Göschen his feelings about the roman types made ‘after Didot’ by Justus Erich Walbaum that were used for his own collected works: ‘I cannot say how much I enjoy the pure beauty of those letters. Each is in its way a Medici Venus.’ Goethe’s mother, Elizabeth, wrote to her son, ‘I am more pleased than I can say that your own works have never seen the light of day in those terrible Latin types. Well, they may have been tolerable in your Roman Carnival, but otherwise do stay German even in your type, I beg you. I was going to subscribe to the works of the good Wieland – but I was put off by the new Fashion, and let it go.’ The wars with Revolutionary and Imperial France helped to damp enthusiasm for the alien types. Mrs Goethe’s dislike of roman and strong attachment to ‘German’ type is evidence of a feeling that was widespread and lasted for a long time.

Nonetheless there was some use of roman types for learned publications during the early years of the 19th century. In many German type specimens at this period the showings of roman and italic types, where they occur, are set in Latin or French. Where German is used, ß is generally set as ſs, following the style used by Göschen. Here is a setting of the ‘Didot’ style of roman made by the punchcutter and typefounder Prillwitz in Jena, from his specimen of 1790, with ‘daß’ in the fourth line.



However in the specimen of Carl Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1825, the German texts set in the ‘French’ roman and italic types use simply ss, which would become the common practice of German printers.



The second edition of the Deutsche Grammatik of Jacob Grimm (Göttingen, 1822–6), is set in a French-style (but probably German-cut) roman, using not only ſ but also an ß that was presumably made for him, reminiscent of the character used some 160 years earlier by Lichtenthaler. The illustration above is from the second volume, dated 1826. The italic version, shown below, from a headline in the first volume of 1822, seems closer to the cursive ſs character that is discussed later. (In the same work Grimm reverted to the early 16th-century practice of using small letters for all nouns, the beginning of the so-called Kleinschreibung that would have echoes in the 20th century in the poetry of Stefan George and the work of modernist designers. It seems worth noting that Lichtenthaler’s Boethius of 1667 had used small letters to begin most nouns in both the Fraktur and the roman parts of the text, unusually for its date.) Grimm had changed his mind when, with his brother Wilhelm, he began publication of his great German dictionary in 1854. In this work, which is set throughout in roman types, although he repeated his use of small initial letters for nouns he proposed the total rejection of Fraktur types. To distinguish ß, he proposed to go back to the spelling sz, a combination which, as he noted, was philologically correct, currently used in Hungary and Lithuania, and had the advantage that it worked equally well in capitals.



By and large the German printing trade took little notice of Grimm’s proposals. Although most books and newspapers were set in Fraktur type throughout the 19th century, roman type was increasingly being used for scientific and technical books and journals. Capital letters were used for all nouns, and words with ß in Fraktur were spelt in roman with ss, and neither ſs nor sz. The Journal für Buchdruckerkunst, a major printing trade monthly, was set in Fraktur until 1874, when it changed to roman, remarking simply that, ‘we have put on new clothes’. It printed notes of congratulation from readers in Germany and abroad. For some years, advertisers in the journal had used roman type, and ss for ß. Similarly, another printing trade journal, the Archiv für Buchgewerbe, changed to roman in 1886, and again used ss for ß. So far as I can tell this usage reflects the general practice of German printers and typefounders during the larger part of the 19th century, as the use of roman type spread. The typefounders did not make ſ and ß for roman and italic founts, nor for new types like sanserifs, and the printers did not ask for them.

And so things might have remained. But after the making of the new unified German state that began with a customs union and led in 1871, after the defeat of France, to the creation of the German Empire, with its capital city in Berlin, the first of several successive moves was made towards the reform of German spelling and its consistent teaching in German schools. At a conference in Berlin in 1876 a move was made towards the introduction of ß in roman type for the first time. A trade society in Leipzig, the Typographische Gesellschaft, reviewed a series of designs that were submitted for discussion and these were published in 1879, in a report in the Journal für Buchdruckerkunst.



It is was noted that some of them were based on ſz and others on ſs. The pattern that met the greatest support from the typefounders, notably Ferdinand Theinhardt of Berlin, were 1 and 3 at the bottom left, which it was noted were based on the ß introduced by Grimm. Later, presumably from an awareness that the original model was the character used by Lichtenthaler, this became generally known as the ‘Sulzbacher Form’. Here is an early use, in a work on the invention of printing, J. van der Linde, Geschichte der Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst, Berlin, 1886. The setting is in one of the ‘old style’ romans known in Germany as ‘Medieval’, of which the design originated in Britain, and exceptionally – or was the practice commoner than we think? – it uses Grimm’s Kleinschreibung or small initial letters for nouns. In this instance the design of the ß, which seems to have been intended for a relatively narrow modern-face type, does not match that of the old style.



In 1903 a pronouncement was made in the name of the association of printers of Germany, Austria and Switzerland that a ß character of the Sulzbacher form, consisting of a ligature of ſ and z, would henceforth be used in roman type. In his essay of 2006, Mark Jamra illustrates the document that was published in a trade journal dated 9 July 1903 (Zeitschrift für Deutschlands Buchdrucker, Steindrucker und gewandte Gewerbe) in which the approved forms of the ‘Sulzbacher’ form of ß were described, with examples, as comprising ‘the so-called lower case long ſ, attached at the head to a z, of which the lower bow ends in a thin or medium-thin line, or a full-point’. The Sulzbacher ß has often been criticised for being ugly and too easily confused with roman capital B and Greek Beta. But it is essentially the model for the ß that has been used in many types ever since, including the Georgia screen font in which some readers will see this text.

Since the use of roman type made a majuscule form at least possible (as it was not in Fraktur, of which the majuscules are rarely used to make words), it was suggested that, since no agreement had been reached concerning its design (and SS was incorrect), SZ would provisionally be used in its place, as in PREUSZEN for Preußen (Prussia). But it was also decided that the typefounders should give their attention to it, perhaps by offering a prize for a design. There was some discussion of possible models in the printing journals, and capital forms do appear in the Kleukens Antiqua of the Bauer foundry (1910), and the Schelter Antiqua of Schelter & Giesecke (1912), shown below. They seem rarely to have been used, and their existence was largely forgotten until recently.



A new type, with a Sulzbacher ß that inclines towards the appearance of a combination of ſ and s, was introduced by the Archiv für Buchgewerbe from the date of its first issue under a new publisher in 1900. It is the Römische Antiqua (1888) of Genzsch & Heyse, designed by H. König:



During the next few years the journal published a number of articles on the subject of ß. A selection is listed at the end of this text. Other designers headed in the opposite direction, making a more explicit combination of s and z. The example below, using an archaic form of z, is the Ingeborg Antiqua (1910) of F. W. Kleukens, cast by the Stempel foundry:



And in Koloss (Ludwig & Mayer 1923) by Jakob Erbar, the z (once again in the archaic form) comes loose from the s altogether:



Many founders kept closely to the basic Sulzbacher form, which even found its way into the new sanserifs of the late 1920s, some of which were also provided with long s, like Renner’s Futura (Bauer 1927) and Koch’s Kabel (Klingspor 1927), below:



It remains to note how designers eventually subverted what many perceived as the ugliness of the Sulzbacher form, and the oddity of some of the versions that emphasized the z, by changing ß more clearly to a ligature of ſs. To this end a note is needed of the ligatured form of long and short s that had in fact existed in the Italian humanistic cursive since the end of the 15th century, and was included in the chancery cursive.



In his Operina of 1522, above, Arrighi shows it as one of two permissable ligatured forms for ss in the chancery cursive: the other is formed from two long esses.



In his own writing book of about the same date, above, the Venetian writing master Tagliente shows this ligature not only in his cursive but also in his Lettera antiqua tonda, or roman script (neceſsario in line 3).



Two alternative ligatures for ss, ſſ and ſs, are seen in the italic type above, the Parangon italic of the French punchcutter Robert Granjon, a type of which the use was widespread in many countries during the 16th and 17th centuries. The combination of types for long and short s, ſs, is also used together within words in many texts in both roman and italic types in Italy and France during the 16th century, apparently as an alternative to the normal ligature of two long esses which is seen in the example above.

There is a technical matter that needs explaining here, since commentators are often unaware of its relevance. In metal printing types, long s, like f, kerns or overhangs the letter that follows, and if the letter that follows is a tall one, there is likely to be a collision and the kerned part may bend or break. It was for this reason that single ligatured types were eventually made for most of the awkward combinations, like f and i, or ſ and i. Long s followed by short s is a safer combination in type, physically, than two separate long esses.

Nonetheless, the example above in the Granjon Parangon, showing a ligature of two long esses, followed by ligatures for ſi and ſs, all in the same line, is a puzzle. Perhaps there were not enough ſſ ligatures in the case, or perhaps the compositor used the alternative form for the sake of variety. But the lack of ligatures hardly seems to explain the frequent use of the medial and final form together in the middle of words in several 16th-century Italian and French texts set in roman types, such as the example below, from a work printed in Venice in 1571. Note ſteſsi in line 2 and cariſsimi in line 8, but miſſero, with a ligatured form of ſſ, in the first line. (Is the intention possibly to distinguish the voiced ſſ of miſſero from the unvoiced consonants of the other words, in the manner suggested earlier in the century by the spelling reformer Trissino?)



Whatever the explanation, it should be noted that the combination of ſs as a single sort is seen only in italic type, presumably on the model of the calligrapher’s ligature, and has not been found in roman type – unless, as seems not unlikely, Lichtenthaler’s ß was indeed an exercise in making an upright form of the existing italic ligature.

In 1940 Jan Tschichold published an essay on ß in which he asserted with his characteristic force and dogmatism that its basis was ſ and s, and that all the suggestions that it was ſ and z had simply been wrong. He repeated the assertion in his Meisterbuch der Schrift (1952), issued later in English as Treasury of alphabets and lettering. Later writers agree that in this instance it was Tschichold himself who was mistaken, but perhaps it was his authority that encouraged more type designers to explore this new model for the roman ß. Hermann Zapf’s Palatino, drawn for Stempel in 1948, is an early example. It has now become familiar in such fonts as Adobe Garamond, in which the italic form is borrowed from the original by Robert Granjon, which had also been a special character made for the Monotype Garamond of 1923. The Sulzbacher form of ß had been made by Monotype for Times New Roman and its other types before the Second World War. Here are examples of setting in the 17th-century ‘Luther Fraktur’ of the Stempel foundry (from a modern adaptation), Times, Linotype’s Palatino, and Adobe Garamond:



It is currently claimed in Germany, among reasons why ß should be preserved, that it distinguishes some different words with different sounds and meanings that would otherwise look the same. It is also said that since some personal names are traditionally spelt with ß, and since legal forms must be filled in using capital letters, there is a need for the majuscule version that once existed but has now been forgotten. Cases are cited in which the discrepancy between the look of a name in minuscules in a birth certificate and in capitals on a form has caused real confusion and bureaucratic obstruction. Here is a problem to which the simple, logical suggestion made by the brothers Grimm in 1854 (use sz) would have had provided an answer. There is an active movement reviving the idea of the addition of majuscule Esszet to the character set, and the latest news indicates that it should shortly have an identity in Unicode. The subject is reviewed in detail in the journal Signa.



In Hungarian the letters sz, as the brothers Grimm noted, are treated as a single consonant with the sound of s. When he returned home and printed in his native Kolozsvár, Nicholas Kis made ligatures for sz, with initial long s, for his own use in both roman and italic. The design illustrates the problems in a roman type of uniting ſ with a broad letter like z, and this ſz ligature never seems to have caught on generally. The example above is from György Haimann, Nicholas Kis (Budapest, 1983). But, as noted on the website Signographie, a ß not unlike that of Lichtenthaler was used for sz in a roman lower case in a Latin–Hungarian–German dictionary in 1782.

Sources

There is still work to do on the origins of the ß. The work of Uta Stötzner on this subject is especially valuable. The essay published in 2006 by Mark Jamra, to which reference is made above, is also a useful and well-informed summary, and so is the entry in Wikipedia, which has become more wide-ranging. (Search under Eszett, or the character ß. The German-language version is the most extensive.) As this link to Typophile Forum shows, the revival of the debate concerning the majuscule version of ß, which originally arose over century ago in the context of the creation of a German national orthography, still continues. My initial suspicion is confirmed: the use and retention of ß, and consequently its belated (and in my view hardly necessary) insertion into the majuscule character set, is felt in Germany to be bound up with national identity. The feeling is undoubtedly strong, but how widely it is shared is difficult to gauge. In German-speaking Switzerland ß was gradually abandoned during the 20th century, and its loss seems hardly to be noticed there, let alone regretted.

Here are some printed sources:

Uta Stötzner, ‘Die Geschichte des versalen Eszetts’, Signa, Nr. 9 (2006), pp. 21–38.

Herbert Brekle, ‘Zur handschriftlichen und typographischen Geschichte der Buchstabenligatur ß aus gotisch-deutschen und humanistisch-italienischen Kontexten’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 2001, pp. 67–76.

Max Bollwage, ‘Ist das Eszett ein lateinischer Gastarbeiter? Mutmaßungen eines Typografen’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1999, pp. 35–41.

John Flood, ‘Jacob Grimm’s advocacy of roman type’, in ‘Das unsichtbare Band der Sprache’: studies in German language and linguistic history in memory of Leslie Sieffert (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1993), pp. 279–312.

‘Das Antiqua-sz: Referat der Typographischen Gesellschaft zu Leipzig’, Journal für Buchdruckerkunst, 42 (1879), col. 852–6, 43 (1879), col. 873–7.

Heinz König, ‘Vom Antiqua-Eszet’, Archiv für Buchgewerbe, vol. 40 (1903), pp. 7–9.

H. S. [= Hermann Smalian?], Leipzig, ‘Nochmals das Antiqua-Eszet’, Archiv für Buchgewerbe, vol. 40 (1903), pp. 103–4.

Heinrich Schwarz, ‘Das Antiqua-Versal-SZ’, Archiv für Buchgewerbe, vol. 43 (1906), pp. 93–6. ‘Nochmals das Antiqua-Versal-SZ’, Archiv für Buchgewerbe, vol. 44 (1907), pp. 111-12.

Wilhelm Hellwig, ‘Das lange s in der Antiqua und die Rechtschreibung’, Archiv für Buchgewerbe, vol. 49 (1912), pp. 306–9.

The original version of this post, which was intended simply as a brief supplement to the earlier one on long s, was an ill-prepared venture into the topic. The present considerably revised and corrected version owes much to the kind intervention of others. More correction, if it is needed, will be welcome. It can be claimed to include some typographical illustrations that are not easy to find elsewhere.

Long s

In most works printed before about 1800 two forms of the lower-case s were used. One was the s that is still in use today; the other was the long s, a character which looks like f without the right-hand part of its crossbar. The italic form of long s usually lacks the ‘crossbar’ altogether. (The image above is a detail of the showing of Pica No. 2 in William Caslon, Specimen of Printing Types, London, 1766.)

The present form of the minuscule s (called ‘short s’ here for convenience) resembles the capital letter S in Roman inscriptions. The long s originates in the straggling form given to this letter in Roman cursive script.

In the late Roman cursive of the fourth century the letter had already acquired the shape that it kept when it was was adopted in more formal hands, such as the ‘half uncial’ of the sixth century and other minuscule hands of the middle ages, including the Carolingian script. (The example above, a letter written on papyrus in about 400, reads ...sam uilissima...) The inscriptional S was used in uncial scripts, and in capital letters for headings and initials. Some minuscule scripts used both the long and the short s: the script of the Lindisfarne Gospels, written in Northumbria in the ‘insular’ form of half uncial in about 698, is an example. (Is there any rule that governs this early use of two forms of s?) The Carolingian script of the ninth century used only long s, but in late Carolingian or early gothic scripts from the twelfth century onwards, the convention was adopted of using long s at the beginning and in the middle of words, and short s at the end.

The first types were based on gothic hands, and the early printers followed the established use of initial and medial long s and final short s. However the first writers of the humanistic script, which was based on the Carolingian hand, had followed its convention of using only long s thoughout. Some printers who began to use types influenced by the humanistic script (Sweynheym and Pannartz, Subiaco, 1465, for example, and Ulric Gering, Paris, 1470) did the same, but they soon reverted to the ‘gothic’ use of initial and medial long and final short s, and this became the almost universal rule in printing until the end of the eighteenth century. Because long s was kerned and overlapped adjacent characters, the short s was sometimes used as an expedient in front of the tall letters with which the long s would have collided. Special ligatured types were eventually made for many of the combinations, such as (for printing English) sb, sh, si, sk, sl, ss, st, ssi, ssl.

Like the printers, writers of the formal humanistic script in the later fifteenth century generally reverted to initial and medial long s and final short s. But writers of the cursive form of the script and the hands that developed from it (chancery cursive and the later ‘Italian’ hands) often made no use at all of long s, and the relaxed and inconsistent usage of calligraphers is strikingly different from the rigid practice observed by printers. Examples of initial and medial short s can be found towards the end of the fifteenth century in the work of Bartolomeo Sanvito, and perhaps a significant figure in this context (as in many others) is the reforming sixteenth-century calligrapher and teacher Giovan Francesco Cresci in Rome who, unlike earlier writers of the cancellaresca corsiva, including his arch-rival Giovanni Battista Palatino, made little use of long s in his own manuscripts and writing books. His new style, adopted by his pupils and followers, changed the look of Western handwriting, and the use of long s became less common. Lodovico Curione was one of the pupils listed by Cresci. His Lanotomia, shown here, was engraved on copper and published in Rome in 1588.

However, from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries there are very few exceptions in texts printed from type to the rule that the initial and medial s was long and the final s was short. One of the exceptions is seen in the series of works printed at Vicenza in the 1520s for the Italian linguistic reformer Gian Giorgio Trissino, in which short and long s are used to distinguish the voiced and unvoiced consonant. The same distinction between short and long s, an idea perhaps derived from Trissino, was made by Edward Capell in his Prolusions, or select pieces of antient poetry, printed in London by Dryden Leach and published in 1760, and in his edition of Shakespeare (1768, etc.).

Pierre Moreau, Paris, who printed in the 1640s with types based on a current version of the Italian cursive hand, followed the practice of contemporary calligraphers and used only short s. The long s was not used in Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities (London, 1749), nor in the Virgil of 1758 printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis of Glasgow and a few of their other titles.

The first consistent move away from long s among printers from type appears to take place in Spain. An example identified by Paul Nash, and still the earliest example recorded in Spain, is in Compendio de los diez libros de arquitectura de Vitruvio (Madrid: Gabriel Ramirez, 1761). Not long after there is one printed by Joaquín Ibarra: Tomás Lopez, Descripción de la Provincia de Madrid (Madrid, 1763). The first known type specimen of Antonio Espinosa, Madrid, Muestras de la letra nueva de los grados de Atanasia y Lectura, dated 13 August 1764, shows texts and alphabets of roman and italic that wholly omit the long s, and it appears only intermittently in his later specimens. Other early examples include Andres Xímenez, Descripción del ... Escorial (Madrid: Antonio Marín, 1764), and some other works printed by Ibarra, including his Sallust (Madrid, 1772), using types by Espinosa (and also a Small Pica by Caslon). D. B. Updike, Printing types, 2nd ed. (1937), figs. 233–44, shows examples of the omission of long s in the setting of some books of the 1770s. For the specimen of Espinosa, 1764, see Albert Corbeto, Especímenes tipográficas españoles (Madrid, 2010), p. 78, plate 16. Settings with the use of just one or two lines with long s appear in Espinosa’s specimen book of 1780. Clearly its use and disuse in setting books in Spain, together with the roles of Ibarra and Espinosa and the links between them, are matters that are still in need of attention.

Giambattista Bodoni followed the current convention and used long s in his first books printed at Parma and in his early undated single-leaf type specimens. However there are intermittent instances of the omission of long s in some works that he printed during the 1770s. In one, to which my attention has been drawn by James Clough, long s is used in the early sheets but not in the later ones: Atti della solenne coronazione fatta in Campidoglio della insigne poetessa Maria Maddalena Morelli Fernandez... (Parma: Stamperia Reale, 1779), Brooks 135. Is this perhaps the piece of printing in which Bodoni began to abandon long s? Another work printed in the same year omits long s altogether, Panegirico in lode di San Vincenzio Ferreri, Brooks 146, and thereafter this appears to have been Bodoni’s established practice. Perhaps the spectacular example of the usage in Spain by Ibarra in his Sallust had provided the model. The long s is omitted throughout the first Manuale tipografico of 1788, with just two exceptions: it appears, as Paul Nash has pointed out, on leaves 68 and 78, once in an st ligature and once within a word, in types for the body of Canoncino. Since these are both examples of the reuse of settings of types that had first appeared as earlier single-leaf specimens using long s, it is likely that they are cases of its accidental survival.

The general discarding of the long s by printers was given what may have been its decisive encouragement by François-Ambroise Didot, Paris, who in about 1781 initiated the cutting of the style of type that later became known in English as ‘modern face’. Long s was not included in his new types, and the example was quickly followed by printers under his influence. One of these was John Bell, printer and typefounder in London, to whom the movement for its disuse used to be attributed, mistakenly. Bell did not use long s in his newspaper The World, first published on 1 January 1787, nor in the text of the specimen of the new types cut for his British Letter-Foundry by Richard Austin (1788), although the synopsis of the fount shows that long s and its combinations were made for it. Bell was familiar with contemporary French books, which he imported into England, and he had made use of a small size of one of the types cut by Firmin, son of François-Ambroise Didot.

In the ‘Prolegomena’ to his Shakspeare (1788) Bell explained that his objects in omitting long s were to give the lines ‘the effect of being more open’ (an aim of many printers of the late 18th century, when texts were commonly leaded) and to avoid the confusion of long s with f.

When typefounders in Britain introduced ‘modern-cut’ types during the decade from 1795 to 1805, long s was often not supplied in the fount, and as these new types were bought by printers its general use quickly declined. It was revived for a time for the sake of its antiquarian flavour by printers like Charles Whittingham and Louis Perrin when old face types were again used for printing towards the middle of the nineteenth century, but the long s never returned in everyday printing with roman types.

Long s and its combinations are still used when German is set correctly in gothic types like Schwabacher and Fraktur. The character ß, a ligature which is known as Eszett (or some such spelling) since it is essentially based on sz, is still used when the German language is set in roman type, except in Switzerland, where it has disappeared. Some attempt is made to give its history, some models for its design and the rules for its use in the post that follows. Recent changes to German orthography have modified the rules and reduced the occasions for its use.

Several other scripts, notably Arabic and Hebrew, have differing initial, medial and final forms for many letters. Greek retains two forms of sigma, one for initial and medial and one for final use, but the existence of the two forms seems completely unconnected with the duplication of s in the Latin script.

This text was written years ago for giving out in classes and it was printed in 1995. I am adding a revised version of it to this blog because it still seems to give rather more historical information about the use of long s by printers and professional calligraphers than can easily be found. One or two of the references that are added above relating to the discarding of the long s are from a study by Paul Nash, ‘The abandoning of the long s in Britain in 1800’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, new series 3 (2001), pp. 3–19. Two online references are The Long and the Short of the Letter S, and The Rules for Long s. These ‘rules’ are given in a series of detailed tables. Their compiler might have learned something from the brief notes above on the printer’s need to use the short s, regardless of its position in a word, in order to avoid the collision of the overhanging kerned part of long s with ascending types that followed

Long into the 19th century it was still common practice in English handwriting to use long and short s for double s, notably in ‘Miss’ in the address on letters. William Bulmer’s grand folio Shakspeare [sic], 1792, and Milton, 1794, were a British rejoinder to the austere magnificence of the books printed by Pierre Didot with the types of Firmin. They display a certain conservatism. The forms of the types are almost closer to those of Baskerville, cut forty years earlier, than to those of the Didots. The warmly-tinted Whatman wove paper avoids the icy whiteness of the French papers. And although the long s was generally omitted in the text, it was retained – as in handwriting – for the combination ss. Note ‘glassy’ in this detail from the Milton:

My thanks for help to Albert Corbeto for references to Espinosa, and to James Clough for titles by Bodoni. Last edited 15 February 2011