PICA.—This important body, now the standard body in English typography, presumably owes its name to its use in printing the ordinal of the services of the early Church, and is coeval with Great Primer. “The Pie,” says Mores, of which this is the Latin name, “was a table showing the course of the service in the Church in the times of darkness.[69] It was called the Pie because it was written in letters of black and red; as the Friars de _Pica_ were so named from their party-coloured raiment, black and white, the plumage of a magpie.” “The number and hardness of the rules of this Pie” is referred to in the preface to our Prayer-book; and it will be remembered that Caxton’s famous advertisement related to “Pyes of Salisbury use.” But as a larger type-body than Pica was generally used to print these, it is possible the name may refer to nothing more than the piebald or black-and-white appearance of a printed page. Some authorities derive Pica from the Greek πίναξ, a writing tablet, and, hence, an index. The name was, in fact, applied to the alphabetical catalogue of the names and things in rolls and records. In France and Germany the body was called Cicero, on account of the frequent editions of Cicero’s Epistles printed in this size of letter.[70] It was the Mediaan body of the Dutch. SMALL PICA, as already stated, was an innovation in Moxon’s day, and was probably cast in the first instance to accommodate a foreign-cut letter, too small for pica and too large for long-primer. It subsequently came into very general use, one of the first important works in which it appeared being Chambers’s _Cyclopædia_, in 1728. The French called it Philosophie, and appear to have used it as a smaller body on which to cast the Cicero face. The Germans called it Brevier, the Dutch (it being one body below the Mediaan) called it Descendiaan, and the Italians, when they had it, followed the French, and called it Filosofia. LONG PRIMER, Mores suggests, was another of the old English bodies employed in liturgical works. He explains the use of the word Long to mean that Primers in this size of type were printed either in long lines instead of double columns, or that the length of the page was disproportionate to the width, or more probably, that they contained the service at full length a long, or without contraction.[71] These _Primers_, however, are rarely to be met with in this body. The French named the body Petit Romain, preserving a similar {39} relationship between it and their Gros Romain, as we did between our Long Primer and Great Primer. The other countries evidently attributed the body to France, and named it after Claude Garamond, the famous French letter-cutter, pupil of Tory, one of whose Greek founts, cut for the Royal Typography of Paris, was on this body. The Germans, however, also called the body Corpus, on account of their _Corpus Juris_ being first printed in this size.