In taking a brief survey of that early period of English Typography when printers are assumed to have been their own letter-founders, we shall attempt no more than to gather together, as concisely as possible, any facts which may throw light on the first days of English letter-founding, leaving it to the historian of Printing to describe the productions which, as we have already stated, must be regarded, not only as the works of our earliest printers, but as the specimen-books of our earliest letter-founders. Mores and other chroniclers are, as we conceive, misleading, when they single out half a dozen names from the long list of printers between Caxton and Day, as if they only had been concerned in the development of the art of letter-cutting and founding. It is true that these names are the most distinguished; but it is necessary to bear in mind that the most obscure printer of that day, unless he succeeded in purchasing his founts from abroad, or in obtaining the reversion of the worn types of another printer, probably cast his letter in his own moulds, and from his own matrices. Respecting many of our early printers, our information especially with regard to their mechanical operations, is extremely meagre. But the researches of Mr. William Blades[153] have thrown a stream of light upon the typography of {84} Caxton and his contemporaries, of which we gladly avail ourselves in recording the following facts and conjectures as to the letter-founding of the period in which they flourished. Adopting as a fundamental rule “that the bibliographer should make such an accurate and methodical study of the _types_ used and _habits of printing_ observable at different presses, as to enable him to observe and be guided by these characteristics in settling the date of a book which bears no date upon the surface,” Mr. Blades has succeeded not only in establishing a precise chronology of the productions of the first English printer, but an exhaustive catalogue of his several types, such as has never before been successfully accomplished. Previous writers, many of them practical printers, have all failed in this particular. Most of them lacked the patience or the opportunity to make a systematic study of the specimens of Caxton’s press, and have been content to perpetuate the account of others who, like Bagford, Ames, Herbert and Dibdin, had ample opportunity for such a study, but failed to bring to bear upon their investigations that practical experience which would have saved them from the inaccuracies with which their descriptions abound. Among such writers few have been more unfortunate than Rowe Mores, whose account of Caxton’s types (although endorsed by the authority of his editor, John Nichols) is as misleading as it is meagre.