without the system, standards and gauges which modern type-founders
use, it is not surprising that the first printers made types with difference
of body. It was the impracticability of casting in this primitive
mould, at diferent times, types of uniform body, that compelled later
type-founders to discard it, and to use instead a mould for each body.
The casting of the types, which was always done in the printing
oflice, was then adjudged a proper part of a printer's trade. The earlier
chroniclers said the first types were made of lead and tin. The Cost
Book of the Ripoli Press specifies these metals, and obscurely men-
tions another which seems to have been one of the constituents of
type-metal. If this conjecture can be accepted, types were probably
made in the fifteenth century as they are now, of lead, tin and antimony.
Was this obscure metal antimony? The text books say that anti-
mony was, for the first time, set apart as a distinct metal in 1490, by
Basil Valentine. a monk of Erfurt. But Madden says that a book
supposed to have been printed at Cologne, before the year 1473,
plainly describes antimony as a metal frequently used and much abused by many monks of
the thirteenth century in their pharmaceutical preparations. Not one of the millions of types
founded during the fifteenth century has been preserved, nor is there in any old book an
engraving or a description of a type. This neglected information has been unwittingly furn-
ished by a careless pressman in the ofice of Conrad Winters, who printed at cologne in 1476.
This pressman, or his mate, when inking a slackly justified form, permitted the inking ball to
pull out a thin-bodied type, which dropped sideways on the face of the form. The accident
was not noticed; the tympan closed upon the form, and the bed was drawn under the platen.
Down came the screw and platen, jamming the unfortunate type in the form, and embossing it
strongly in the fibres of the thick wet paper, in a manner which reveals to us the shape of
Winters' types more truthfully than it could have been done even by special engraving. The
height of this type is a trifle less than one American inch. It agrees exactly with the old French
standard (of 1723) for height of type, which was ten and one-half geometric lines, or, by
modern French measure, 24 millimetres. The sloping shoulder, or the beard, as it was once
called, was made to prevent the blackening of the paper, for it would have been blackened if
the shoulder had been high and square. The sloping shoulder, which was in general use in
the first quarter of this century, was discarded to meet the requirements of the new art of stere-
otyping. It was found that these sloping shoulders made projections in the plaster mould,
which imperiled the making of an accurate cast. The blackening of the sheer from square
shoulders was prevented by altering the mould and placing the shoulder lower on the body.
The circular mark, about one-tenth of an inch diameter, on the side of the type, was firmly
depressed in the metal, but did not perforate it. As this type had no nick on the body, it is
apparent that the circular mark was cast there to guide the compositor. When the type was
put in the stick with the mark facing outward, the compositor knew, without looking at the
face, that it was rightly placed. There is no groove at the foot. Duverger says that the early
types had no jet or breaking-piece; that the superfluous metal was cut off, and the type made
of proper height by sawing. These details may seem trifling, but they are of important: they
show that, in the more important features, the types of the early printers closely resembled ours.
There is a disagreement among bibliographers about the quantity of types ordinarily cast
for a font by the early printers. Some, judging from appearances which show that one page
only was printed at an impression, say that they cast types for two or three pages only: others
maintain that they must have had very large fonts. That the latter view is correct seems fully
established after a survey of the books known to have been printed by Zell, Koburger, Leeu,
and others. It would have been impossible to print these books in the short period in which
we know they were done, if the printer had not been provided with abundance of types. As
10 Point Lining XV0entury
Set Solid

SUPERIOR COPPER-MIXED TYPE

BARNHART BROS. & SPIN%DLER'S