The American Printer: A Manual of Typography: Containing practical directions for managing all departments of a printing office, as well as complete instructions for apprentices; with several useful tables, numerous schemes for imposing forms in every variety, hints to authors, etc.MacKellar, Thomas
History
The American Printer: A Manual of Typography: Containing practical directions for managing all departments of a printing office, as well as complete instructions for apprentices; with several useful tables, numerous schemes for imposing forms in every variety, hints to authors, etc.
MacKellar, Thomas
Graphic design (Typography); Printing -- United States -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.; Printing industry -- United States
We have repeated the experiment in our own foundry with Long Primer type,
and with a similar result. These experiments are sufficient to show the
ungroundedness of Mr. De Vinne’s argument. He further states that in some
of the specimens given by him, the letters have been so worn that they
have run into one another; but the fact is, such letters were logotypes,
and cut on the same block. Any accurate type-founder can verify this
fact almost at a glance. In a lecture by Mr. Josiah Marples, an accurate
English printer, before the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society
on _Type-founders and Type-founding_, the speaker alluded to Caxton
and his types, and to Mr. Vincent Figgins’s reproduction of the “Game
of Chesse,” whose nephew had enabled him to exhibit a copy of the
same to the meeting. “Mr. Vincent Figgins, whose skill as a practical
type-founder,” it was remarked, “entitled his opinion to great weight,
believed that the book was not printed from types such as were cast by
Schœffer, but from types which were cast with solid faces, upon which
were cut with the graver each letter separately. To this Mr. Figgins
attributed the fact that in the original book no pure style of letters
was used, but a mixture between the old black and that called Secretary;
that no two letters were exactly alike, and that frequent use was made of
logotypes.”
Mr. De Vinne finds some difficulty in demolishing the Koster “legend” (as
he and Van der Linde call it) in the fact that the existence of numerous
volumes and fragments of ancient printing have to be somehow accounted
for; and he thereupon adopts the hypothesis of an unknown printer, to
whom he attributes these early productions. The admittedly ancient
water-marks in the paper he rules out, simply because such water-marks
were used long afterward. He gives fac-simile specimens of the types
used in these books; but, in violation of all the laws of probability,
he gives the inferior specimens last. The necessities of his theory
compelled him to this course, the natural order being the reverse of
the one adopted by him. The inferior specimens show clearly the first
attempts of an inventor, an inventor too who had before been a block
printer. The succeeding books show as clearly the successive stages of
improvement, the last stage of which was equal or even superior to any
thing executed by Gutenberg before the appearance of the great Bible.
This “unknown printer” was doubtless Koster.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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