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/91

 REVIVAL OF OLD STYLE. 87 ing of its history and cared nothing for its associations, had to admit, after an hour's perusal, that the types were easy to be read. A few months of familiarity established the old style in general favor. Pickering was encouraged to popular, make use of it for other works. Then other publishers began to inquire for printers who had old style types, and other type-founders restored to useful service the neglected and despised matrices of the previous century. In a few years, the old style was as popular in France and America as it was in Great Britain ; it became a letter necessary to the equipment of every good book printing-house. Not all of the restorations made by the different founders injudicious restoration were warrantable. Some suites of matrices were drives of of bad types, badly cut punches that never should have been made that never were used even in their own period by any reputable printer. To a few undiscriminating publishers who seemed to think, if they thought at all about it, that bad workman- ship would be regarded by the reader as evidence of greater age, the uncouthness of mean designs gave the types higher value. Some grave mistakes were made then, and are made now, in the selection of old style letter for good books. Types made by old bunglers in type-founding, types made for and used by only the ignorant printers of chap books iu selection of and penny ballads, types that Tonson and even Curll would not have had at any price, occasionally appear in books intended to suggest the special good taste and dis- crimination of the author or publisher.