Page:Historic printing types, a lecture read before the Grolier club of New York, January 25, 1885, with additions and new illustrations; by De Vinne, Theodore Low, 1828-1914; Grolier Club.djvu/14

 10 HISTOKIC FEINTING TYPES. written for printers, and interest printers only. There is no popular treatise about book types; nothing that gives us in succinct and connected form information about their designers and makers, and that tells us why styles once popular are now obsolete. 1 . The subject is not trivial. The services that have been rendered to literature by types, and the esteem in which good printing and fine editions have always been held, should dignify the agents by which these results have been produced. Nor is the subject meager. There is more to be said "about types than can be fairly told in an evening's lecture. Much must be left unsaid. The origin, and the early forms of letters, and their frequent changes before they were fixed in types, as well as the methods of making types, cannot be described for want of time. I propose to consider only the " faces " or general appearance of the plain types of our standard books the faces or styles that have been selected by eminent printers and are found in good editions. To do this fairly, one must begin with the Black Letter, or the Gothic character. 1 Moxon's " Mechanick Exercises " Mores entirely neglects the practical (London, 1683),Mores's "Dissertation part : he writes with wit and zeal about upon English Typographical Founders early English types and type-founders, and Founderies " (London, 1778), and but not always with exactness. These Hansard's " Typographia" (London, books are scarce. Hansard is full and 1825) are the only books in English, exact concerning English types and known to me, which attempt to fully founders of his own period ; but he treat of type-founding. Moxon writes has little to say about the types of chiefly on the practice of type-making, printers on the Continent.