CHAPTER VII.

TYPES, IMPRESSION, PAPER, INK.

After this summary, and necessarily very compressed, sketch of the general history of the Book, it will not be without importance to place some technical information before the reader, to explain as clearly as possible the function of the presses, the practical side of typography, from the engraving of the character and the founding of types up to the binding, taking by the way composition, impression, and collation. Many of these operations have been already sketched in the preceding part of our work; we have spoken of engraving of the punch, of impression, of the thousand details that constitute the typographic art, and the knowledge of which is so little diffused. We return to it now, with more method, on the different subjects, and shall try to point out the principal features.

We have seen in our first chapter what patient researches the discovery necessitated for the Mayence printers in the founding of the character in matrix. True, the punch and the matrix had existed from time immemorial for coins and seals. To engrave in relief a punch of material hard enough to strike a resisting metal, and to run into the space obtained by this blow a melted alloy, which took at its extremity the same form as the punch had given, is, in a few words, the whole economy of the process. For the engraving of the punches a sort of burin of tempered steel was used, which scooped out the part intended to remain white in the letter.

From the beginning the printers themselves engraved their own characters. The most ancient, whose constant preoccupation was the imitation of manuscript, copied the Gothic letter of ordinary writing. Soon afterwards, Jenson, the French refugee at Venice, designed a round letter, like that of Sweynheim and Pannartz, the Roman publishers, in 1467; and his type, absolutely perfect, is used to this day.

In France the introducers of the invention in Paris also imitated the Roman, but multiplied abbreviations until they became tedious. We can imagine what the engraving of a character could be where so few letters stood alone, where lines abridged the nasals; the words _pro_, _pre_, figured as in manuscripts; the sign 9 signified _cum_ or _con_ in Latin or French words, without reckoning a thousand other rigorous usages. This truly perplexing profusion of signs as well as the want of precision and clearness in the letter enables us now to recognise the first Parisian _incunabula_.[A]

[Footnote A: See above, figs. 10, 11, 12.]

The first English printers used Gothic or black letter. Caxton brought his first fount from Cologne, but that which he made afterwards for himself was of the same character. Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, and their successors used the same style; and for official publications and Bibles the black letter was used up to the seventeenth century.

But the art of the founder-engraver was destined to specialise itself. There were artisans in this branch, and among them in France, in the fifteenth century, Simon de Collines, who engraved good Roman characters about 1480. Later was Claude Garamond, of Paris, who died about 1561, a pupil of Geoffroy Tory, the most celebrated of all of them; Tory definitely proscribed the Gothic character, of which Vostre and Verard had made constant use. Garamond worked in this way, producing with microscopical precision new letters, among others those of Robert Estienne, the most marvellous and the most distinct. It was he who was charged by Francis I. to form the celebrated royal Greek types. He assisted in getting up the _Champfleury_ of Geoffroy Tory.

On his death William Lebé succeeded him, and inherited his punches. Lebé engraved by preference Hebrew characters, of which he made a specialty. His travels to Rome and Venice had given him a singular value in his art; and when he died about the end of the century, he was incontestably the first cutter of Oriental characters in the whole world. Philip II. of Spain had begged him to engrave the letters of the Bible of which Plantin had undertaken the impression, and Francis I. had charged him to make types for the Estiennes.

At the commencement of the seventeenth century we find James Sanlecque, pupil of Lebé, and his son. During this period several women succeeded their husbands as type-founders. In the eighteenth century Philip Grandjean, an artist who was royal printer to Louis XIV., was keeper of the foundry afterwards united, in 1725, to the Royal Printing House; Fournier succeeded the Lebés, then P. S. Fournier the younger, who engraved with great success. In our days we have seen above the Didots themselves working their punches; and one of them, Henri, founded microscopical characters for a La Rochefoucauld about the middle of the nineteenth century.

We have referred to English type-founders of the eighteenth century in