Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/528

518 The types of the fifteenth century were made without system. The dimensions of each body and the peculiarities of each face were determined chiefly by the manuscript copy which had been selected as the model. No printer had any idea of the advantages to be derived from a series of regularly graduated sizes, nor of the beauty of a series of uniform faces, nor of the great evils they would impose on themselves and their successors by the use of irregular bodies. A classification by scale of the types of any printer of this period will show that there are often wide gaps between the larger, and confusing proximities between the smaller, bodies.

As the size of every body is determined by the mould in which it is cast, it would seem that there must have been a separate mould for every distinct body. But this inference is encumbered with fatal objections. The type-mould of hard metal is, and always has been, a very expensive tool, and it cannot be supposed that any early printer made two or four moulds for one body when one mould would have served. It