Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/309

Rh type was the result of design, of accident, or of necessity need not now be considered; in this place it is enough to say that all the early printers made many varieties of the letters which they most frequently used. It should, however, be noticed that this apparent taste for variety of form was confined to the small or lower-case letters. Two forms of a capital letter are rarely found in the same book, but the same form of capital is occasionally used with two faces of lower-case types that are decidedly different.

The dissimilarity of the small types has been made greater by faults of type-founding and of presswork. In all copies of the Speculum the careful observer will see the impressions of types with imperfect faces. There are many half-formed letters, with little peculiarities of appearance which can be satisfactorily explained only by the conjecture that the types in leaving the mould, carried with them the impress of defects in the matrices. We can see that the types were unequal in height, and that the over-high types have been flattened out under impression. This flattening-out of the soft metal has produced a strange appearance of compactness, making letters that were really separate seem connected. The ink, which