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/82

78 are wearisome to the eye. Yet he made his types look Beauty of his printing. beautiful by printing them beautifully. Always using the blackest of ink on the smoothest of paper, always providing broad spaces of white relief between his lines and in the margin, always using new types and clean balls, always hot-pressing his sheets, he showed printing with a perfec- tion of workmanship that astonished as much as it delighted the literary world. On the smaller sizes of type his cut of letter is not so pleasing, nor was his presswork on the small types of greater superiority than that of Barbou of Paris, or of Millar Ritchie and Corrall of London. The most noticeable exhibition of skill in recent Italian Microscopic type of Milan, type-founding is in the strongest contrast to the heroic style of Bodoni. It is the type of a dainty miniature edition of " La Divina Commedia," printed at Milan in 1878, on a leaf about If by 2 inches a "microscopic type" about twenty lines to the inch. France has steadily maintained her early reputation for Early French punch-cutters, good punch-cutters. The Imprimerie Royale" gave em- ployment from 1640 to 1790 to some of the more famous: to Grand jean and Alexandre, to the family of Luce, father, son, and grandson, as well as to Firmin-Didot, Marcellin Legrand, Jacquemin, Delafoiid, and Leger-Didot, of later date. Their work and those of their rivals and predecessors are shown with magnificence in the " Specimen Typogra- phique" of 1845, of the then French Royal Printing-house. This book exhibits a bewildering variety of types of foreign