After this summary, and necessarily very compressed, sketch of the general history of the Book, it will not be without importance to place some technical information before the reader, to explain as clearly as possible the function of the presses, the practical side of typography, from the engraving of the character and the founding of types up to the binding, taking by the way composition, impression, and collation. Many of these operations have been already sketched in the preceding part of our work; we have spoken of engraving of the punch, of impression, of the thousand details that constitute the typographic art, and the knowledge of which is so little diffused. We return to it now, with more method, on the different subjects, and shall try to point out the principal features. We have seen in our first chapter what patient researches the discovery necessitated for the Mayence printers in the founding of the character in matrix. True, the punch and the matrix had existed from time immemorial for coins and seals. To engrave in relief a punch of material hard enough to strike a resisting metal, and to run into the space obtained by this blow a melted alloy, which took at its extremity the same form as the punch had given, is, in a few words, the whole economy of the process. For the engraving of the punches a sort of burin of tempered steel was used, which scooped out the part intended to remain white in the letter. From the beginning the printers themselves engraved their own characters. The most ancient, whose constant preoccupation was the imitation of manuscript, copied the Gothic letter of ordinary writing. Soon afterwards, Jenson, the French refugee at Venice, designed a round letter, like that of Sweynheim and Pannartz, the Roman publishers, in 1467; and his type, absolutely perfect, is used to this day. In France the introducers of the invention in Paris also imitated the Roman, but multiplied abbreviations until they became tedious. We can imagine what the engraving of a character could be where so few letters stood alone, where lines abridged the nasals; the words _pro_, _pre_, figured as in manuscripts; the sign 9 signified _cum_ or _con_ in Latin or French words, without reckoning a thousand other rigorous usages. This truly perplexing profusion of signs as well as the want of precision and clearness in the letter enables us now to recognise the first Parisian _incunabula_.[A] [Footnote A: See above, figs. 10, 11, 12.] The first English printers used Gothic or black letter. Caxton brought his first fount from Cologne, but that which he made afterwards for himself was of the same character. Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, and their successors used the same style; and for official publications and Bibles the black letter was used up to the seventeenth century. [Illustration: Fig. 102.--Type-founder in the middle of the sixteenth century. Engraving by Jost Amman.]