Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

As time went on it was only natural that the remaining space at the foot of the title pages should be utilized for brief details of printing and publishing, but the transition was gradual and unsystematic. Indeed, some printers continued to use colophons alone well into the sixteenth century, and there are frequent instances during that century of books containing both title pages and colophons, the latter being a repetition, at the end of the book, of the imprint, as the few business-like lines at the foot of the title page had come to be named.

By the time that title pages were firmly established, publishing had become a separate business, and the publisher was not long in assuming the ascendency, often pushing the printer altogether into the background and appearing alone in the imprint. For a long time the printer modestly tucked in his name wherever he could, sometimes on the verso of the title page, and sometimes at the bottom of the last page, but in a formal manner, without the naive and often delightful and useful details which make the early colophons so interesting.

With the nineteenth-century revival of interest in typography, the printer came to the fore again and we see his name appearing in a new place, the certificate, preceding the title page--an entire leaf, moreover, on which are set forth the details in which he is interested, the paper, number of copies, and so on. This use seems to have been introduced by the finely printed volumes of the French book clubs, with their "Justification du tirage," and it was followed through the later decades of the nineteenth century, in the publications of book clubs and many other privately and finely printed volumes. Simultaneously with these came the publications of the Kelmscott and other private presses, which revived the use of colophons in the early manner. The separate page, placed at the end of the finely printed book of today, giving details of the making of the volume, is the result of this modern impetus in book-making[9]--the interest in fine production of the person for whom the book is made, added to the desire of the modern printer for recognition of himself as the producer.

This is but the very logical expression in the books themselves of the modern trend, so assiduously cultivated, toward the making of good books, and the return to prominence of the printer after the long period of his subservience to the publisher. In the present-day notice of its makers, on the final page of a book, the colophon is revived, and once more the printer has the last word!

COMPOSED IN GARAMOND TYPES

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Ronald B. McKerrow, _An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students_ (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1927).

[3] Iolo Williams, _The Elements of Book-Collecting_ (London: Elkin Mathews, 1927).

[4] H. B. van Hoesen [and] F. K. Walter, _Bibliography, Practical, Enumerative, Historical_ (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928).

[5] Alfred W. Pollard, _An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations_; with an Introduction by Richard Garnett (Chicago: The Caxton Club, 1905).

[6] Cicero, _Epistolae ad Familiares_, Second edition (Venice, 1469).

[7] Diui Athanasii, contra Arium, etc. (Paris, 1500).

[8] Decretals of Gregory IX (Rome, 1474).

[9] We may note that the French technical term for the modern colophon, "achevé d'imprimer," emphasizes this importance of the printer.

EDWIN ELIOTT WILLOUGHBY

_Printers' Marks_

From _Fifty Printers' Marks_ by Edwin E. Willoughby. Copyright 1947
by the author and reprinted by his permission. Published by the
University of California Press.

A printer's mark is a trade-mark. Printers used them in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the same purpose that printers employ them today--to ornament their books and to make each volume readily recognizable as the product of the printing establishment which produced it.

The printer's mark was but one of the many types of marks which, largely because of the widespread illiteracy of the people, were used throughout all phases of medieval life. The ownership of objects, for example, was often shown by means of a regularly used mark. Two examples of this type of mark, the seal and the cattle brand, go back to the dawn of history and have continued in use to the present time. Merchants in the Middle Ages often identified their property by placing on it their merchants' marks.

The mark of a merchant was legally recognized as his by his guild or by the town government. Often it was a representation of the tools of the man's trade or a replica of his house sign. Sometimes it was an animal or object which formed a pun on the merchant's name. Frequently, simple geometric designs were used. Toward the latter part of the Middle Ages, as merchants grew richer and more powerful, they aped the upper class by making their marks resemble, as closely as they dared, the heraldic devices of the knights and nobles. These marks enabled employees or hired porters to recognize at a glance a merchant's property.

Places, as well as objects, were identified by means of marks. Inns, shops and similar public places in those days before houses were numbered were designated by house signs. The Tabard, the inn from which Chaucer's pilgrims started for Canterbury under the leadership of its host, Harry Baillie, took its name from its sign--a representation of a short outer jacket. An equally famous tavern, patronized by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other "sirenical gentlemen," bore the "Sign of the Mermaid." And over the door of the Globe, Shakespeare's theater, hung a picture of Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders.

Printing houses, like other business establishments, were known by house signs. The printer's mark of Adrien van Berghen supplies an illustration. [Page 48.]

Not only were objects and places designated by marks in the Middle Ages, but under certain conditions people were recognized by them also. A knight, his face obscured by his helmet, made his identity known by wearing on his helmet, shield and tabard simple pictures or symbols by which he could be recognized. As it was usual for members of the same family to wear the same emblems, these simple pictures, many of which became conventionalized, descended from father to son, indicated relationships, and finally developed under the control of officers of the king into the elaborate system of heraldry.

Marks, then, were widely used in the Middle Ages. It was inevitable that they should be used to identify the makers of manufactured goods. Craftsmen with pride in their work naturally desired others to recognize their products. As a result, the use of trade-marks became common. Craftsmen of every trade were frequently compelled either by law or by guild regulations, to affix a mark to their products as a guarantee of their honesty and good workmanship. Such marks were required especially of goldsmiths, silversmiths and other artisans who were under unusual temptation to misrepresent the quality of their goods. In England, to take another example, arrowheads, the quality of which might determine the issue of a battle, were ordered, by a statute of Henry IV, to be "marked with the mark of him who made the same."

These trade-marks performed much the same function as the house mark or the merchant's mark; indeed, the three were often the same. They enabled a purchaser, literate or illiterate, to identify the maker of a product and to buy thereafter according as he had been satisfied or displeased with the first article purchased.

The printer, to be sure, was under few of the compulsions to use a trade-mark that beset his fellow craftsmen. His patrons were literate; they could read his name and address--when he chose to set them down--either in the colophon at the end of the book or on the title page. But the example of other craftsmen was not to be resisted. Besides, a well-made printer's mark, or a publisher's device, could be both useful and ornamental. Put at the end of the book, it could give it a fitting close. Used in the middle of a book, it could set off chapters and parts. Above all, especially when it was printed in red, it could give life and balance to a title page.

By the printer's mark, also, a prospective purchaser could recognize at a glance the product of a press. It could prevent a careful purchaser from being deceived by a false imprint. "Look at my sign," warns Benedictus Hector of Bologna, "which is represented on the title page and you can never be mistaken." It was harder to counterfeit a printer's mark than to filch his name.

Even a mark, however, was not infallible protection. The "prince of printers," Aldus Manutius, complains that his Florentine competitors "have affixed our well known sign of the dolphin wound around an anchor. But," he adds, "they have so managed that any person who is in the least acquainted with the books of our production cannot fail to observe that this is an impudent fraud; for the head of the dolphin is turned to the left, whereas that of ours is well known to be turned toward the right."

In one country only, and there for but a brief period, was the use of a mark made compulsory. In 1539, François I, in an act intended to suppress both the piracy of copyrighted works and the printing of heretical books, ordered every printer and book-seller in France to have his own device so that purchasers might easily ascertain where books were printed and sold.

Although (with this exception) the use of marks was voluntary with printers, they were early adopted. In 1457 Fust and Schöffer, the successors of Gutenberg, first employed one in the Mainz Psalter, the first book to contain the name of the printer and the place and date of printing. [Page 39.] The device consisted of two shields resembling coats of arms. Other printers quickly followed their example. As the fifteenth century saw the rise of the mercantile class, it is not surprising that printers used in their marks heraldic devices, if they had the right to bear arms, or shields displaying their merchant's marks in a manner often resembling armorial bearings.

Frequently, printers used as the central part of their marks the signs which served to designate their places of business. Pierre LeRouge, for example, used a red rosebush for his sign and in his device. The London printer, Berthelet, used in like manner the figure of Lucrece.

If the printer's name could be punned on, it was common to use for a mark an object the name of which sounded like the printer's own. Jacques Maillet's surname means mallet. He made it easy to remember by displaying a mallet in his device. [Page 47.] A few printers, among them Aldus Manutius, John Day, John Wight and Willem Vorsterman, even used their own portraits in their marks.

Many other signs and emblems were employed. In an age fond of symbolism it is not surprising to find that many marks had symbolic and mystical meanings--not only in the earlier period, when ecclesiastical symbols were often used, but in the later period also, when devices were frequently copied from emblem books. Sometimes a printer would use a woodcut to illustrate a book and then, because it struck his fancy, adopt it as his mark. Thomas Gardiner and Thomas Dawson, partners, on the other hand, had a block which contained, around a central open square, figures forming a rebus of their names: a gardener, a daw and the sun. With their initials in the open square, it served as a mark; with the appropriate display letter, it was a factotum bearing the initial letter of the first word of a chapter.

Printers' marks, in fact, took a multitude of forms during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the late seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they became conventionalized and were used infrequently; but they did not die out altogether. The Oxford and Cambridge University presses, for example, continued to put them on the title pages of their books.

The revival of printing late in the nineteenth century saw an increased use of the printer's mark. This was almost inevitable, for when the craftsmen strove to do fine printing, they desired, just as did the craftsmen of the fifteenth century, to have their work easily recognized. Today, private presses which specialize in fine printing, some university presses, and many publishing firms, frequently use marks which both ornament their title pages and identify for the reader the creator of the volume.

A. F. JOHNSON

_Title Pages:_

THEIR FORMS AND DEVELOPMENT

From _One Hundred Title Pages_: 1500-1800, selected and arranged with an Introduction and Notes by A. F. Johnson. Copyright 1928 by John Lane, The Bodley Head, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

It is a curious fact that the title page was evolved at a comparatively late date in the history of the book, and is indeed almost unknown before the printed book. There are a few examples among early surviving manuscripts of a separate leaf being used for the title, but they are quite exceptional, and even these give the title on the back of this leaf. The usual practice of the calligrapher was to give any information considered desirable as to the author and the date and place of the making of the manuscript in the colophon. This practice was taken over by the printers, although in the first years of the new art they frequently said nothing as to place of printing, probably with the deliberate intention of concealing the fact that the book was produced by mechanical means. The title page as we know it, giving the title, author's name and an imprint, being, in fact, a kind of advertisement of the book, was not well established until some years after 1500....

The title page owes its origin, according to one theory, to the fact that printers found it necessary to protect the first leaf of the text. Whereas a manuscript would be bound as soon as the calligrapher had finished the text, most of the copies of a printed edition were delivered to a book-seller in sheets, and many might remain unbound for years. Hence arose the practice of beginning the book on the second leaf or on the back of the first leaf. The first page could then be used for the purpose of advertising the book, for the fully-developed title page arose out of a commercial need. A few early examples of the addition of a brief title on the first page are known, the first being that of a Bull of Pope Pius II, printed by Fust and Schöffer at Mainz in 1463. But the blank title leaf is found for many years after that date, and to the end of the fifteenth century a title leaf containing a brief description in a few words is common. As late as 1548 we find the brothers Dorici at Rome printing several volumes of the works of Cardinal Bembo with the title on the back of the first leaf. An edition of the Vulgate printed at Venice in 1487 by Georgius Arrivabene offers an example of the most rudimentary form of a title page, with the single word _Biblia_ on the first leaf.

The example of Ratdolt at Venice, who in 1476 printed a Calendar of Regiomontanus with woodcut borders and an imprint on the first leaf, was not followed by contemporary printers. Even this solitary case hardly presents a title page in the form in which we know it, since the leaf, in place of a title, has a poem in praise of the book. Of the fully developed title page, giving title, author and full imprint, Dr. Haebler, the German authority on incunabula, knows of only one instance in the fifteenth century, a book by Johannes Glogoviensis printed by Wolfgang Stöckel at Leipzig in 1500; the title itself, however, is cut on wood.

The lettering of the simple fifteenth-century title page was often that of the text of the book, or sometimes a larger, heading type was used. Very frequently the words were cut on wood, and since for the printer it was as easy to print from a block containing a design in addition to a brief title, the woodcut illustration on the first leaf soon followed. The examples of the John Lydgate, printed by Pynson, _c._ 1515, and of the _Deceyte of Women_, printed by Abraham Vele about 1550, are typical title pages of popular books of the earlier printers. In Spain especially this combination of title and illustration, in that country often an heraldic cut, both cut on wood, became the fashion and persisted for many years in the next century. Scenes from school life often illustrated educational texts, while a school of woodcutters at Florence designed a famous series of illustrations which decorated the title pages of devotional tracts by Savonarola and other works. The first printers' devices, the two shields of Fust and Schöffer and the double cross rising out of a circle at Venice, were added to the colophons, and it was only when the French printers began to use large devices surrounded by borders, for which there was no room on the last leaf, that the printer's name, or at least mark, began to appear on the title page. Thus one further step was taken towards the title page as we know it.

The sixteenth century is especially the age of the woodcut title-border (or metal-cut, for the material used for blocks was frequently metal). The practice of decorating the first leaf of the text with a woodcut border had been started by Ratdolt at Venice, and after 1490 was common among the printers of that city. In fact, several of the borders originally used for an opening were actually converted into title-borders after 1500. During the following century the variety of borders used in all the countries where printing was practised is remarkable. In Germany especially, during the years of the Reformation, when the printing press was unusually active, a very large number of decorative borders were cut, many of them by artists of the first rank, including even Dürer and Holbein. The work of the Holbeins and Urs Graf at Basle is well known to English book collectors. Perhaps less familiar is the work of Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Weiditz and Daniel Hopfer at Strasbourg and Augsburg, and that extraordinary series of designs which appear on the Luther tracts printed at Wittenberg and on similar works produced in Saxony. Many of these borders are highly successful as decorative pieces. The fact that they are less familiar to us may be accounted for by two circumstances. In the first place the earlier book collectors were almost all collectors of the classics, and the first writers on the history of printing, except in the matter of the invention of printing, approached the subject from the point of view of the student of the Greek and Roman classical writers. In the second place the German printers cut themselves off from Western Europe by clinging to the gothic letter after Italy, France and finally England had adopted Roman and Italic, even for books in the vernacular....

There is one point about the early woodcut borders which must seem strange to the printer of today, and that is the suitability of the decoration to the subject matter of the book. The sixteenth-century printer naturally found it economical to ignore the fact that a border originally intended for a Bible was not suitable for a medical work. He did not regard it as incongruous to use a border depicting scenes from Greek mythology on a French medieval romance. Even a printer of the class of Jean de Tournes uses the same piece on the title page of a _Xenophon_ and of a book of French verse. Nor was the average printer very particular about the state of a block. Especially in England, where the general standard was lower than on the Continent, a damaged block would be used as long as it held together.

In the second half of the century two rival fashions of decoration were developed which finally banished the woodcut border, first the method of decoration by type ornaments or printers' flowers, and secondly the engraved title page. There is one example of type ornament known even in the fifteenth century, in an _Aesop_ printed at Parma in 1483. After 1500, examples of borders made up of separate cast pieces are fairly frequent and are especially common in England in the books of Wynkyn de Worde and his contemporaries. But it is not until about 1560 that we find borders built up of type ornaments worked into arabesque patterns. It seems to have been Robert Granjon, the engraver of types at Paris and Lyons, who cut arabesque fleurons, divided them up and built up fresh patterns out of their component parts. The use of printers' flowers in borders is found at most centers of printing towards the end of the century and obtained its greatest popularity in the Netherlands and in England. Many fine examples are found in English books from about 1570 for the next fifty years. Joseph Moxon, who wrote on English letter-founding in 1683, tells us that they were considered old-fashioned in his day. They were revived again in the eighteenth century by P. S. Fournier at Paris, who cut many new designs which were copied all over Europe. Fournier's flowers could be built up to form all manner of ornaments and were more adaptable than the arabesques of the sixteenth century, when the original unit always resulted in the same pattern. Just as Granjon had devised a method of decorating without the use of the woodcut block, so Fournier designed his new flowers in order that printers might dispense with engraved vignettes. However, the vogue of the Fournier designs had a shorter life, and may be said to have been killed by the classical school of printing of the end of the century.

Engraving on copper was practised in the fifteenth century, but the engraved title page originates about 1550. Curiously enough, the earliest known engraved border occurs in an English book, the Anatomy of Thomas Geminus, printed in London in 1545. In the following year we find a second example, cut by Corneille de La Haye for Balthazar Arnoullet at Lyons, where there was a remarkable group of engravers at work about this time. From 1548 the books of Enea Vico printed at Venice begin the fashion in Italy, where, after 1550, examples are fairly numerous. In the Netherlands also, beginning with the work of Hubert Goltzius at Bruges, they are met with almost as frequently as in Italy. It was, perhaps, Christopher Plantin at Antwerp who, more than any other printer, made the engraved title-border the fashion for all larger and more important publications. But it is with the seventeenth century especially that engraved borders are associated. The Elzevirs used them even on their pocket editions, while at the other extreme the massive volumes issued at Amsterdam and at Paris in the reign of Louis XIV are almost invariably introduced by an elaborate engraved frontispiece....

Perhaps the worst examples of these overloaded frontispieces are to be found in German books of the period. Often, also, the engraved border is only a bastard title, the proper title page being set up in type. The earlier examples, dating from the sixteenth century, are in general the best, being simpler and not yet overburdened with a mass of detail. The good taste of the eighteenth century brought about a reform. But at Paris most books of this period had a typographic title page and the work of the famous school of French engravers was lavished on the illustrations. However, the engraved vignettes of that age were often very effectively used. Even Baskerville did not always disdain the vignette, and it was the last form of decoration abandoned by Bodoni.

One other form of decoration may be mentioned, that of metal rules. Rules have been used occasionally at almost all periods, by Geofroy Tory, for example, among others. But as far as title pages are concerned they are found most often in the seventeenth century.

The purely typographic title page is naturally of greater interest to the modern producer of books. At all periods the title page which was effective mainly by the arrangement of type has been common, and at most periods there have been printers who preferred to dispense with ornament of any kind. In the sixteenth century the books of the Paris printer, Michel de Vascosan, illustrate this severer manner, and the classical style of the great printers at the close of the eighteenth century was likewise independent of decoration. Some sort of arrangement of the letters displayed on the title page suggested itself from the first, and very soon various shapes were tried. Perhaps the commonest arrangement was the conical one, or the so-called hour-glass shape, in which the lines of type begin by being long, to become short at the center, lengthening again in the imprint at the foot. Others have preferred a natural arrangement, printing the matter exactly as if on a page of the text. Geofroy Tory, a book producer whose work was of great importance in the history of the book, seems to have been against the fashion of his day in his choice of the natural layout. It has certainly been the usual custom to aim at some sort of pattern in the division of the lines of type. In this respect the earlier printers had one advantage which was not enjoyed by their successors. They felt no difficulty about dividing a word in a title, even when the second part of the word was to be set in a different size or even a different kind of type. Frequently we find examples of such breaks in words as custom has made impossible for the modern printer. The simplification of the task for whoever was responsible for the layout is obvious. One rule which seems to have been almost universally observed is that the mass of the type must be in the top half of the page and not evenly distributed. [Page 69.]

Equally important with the distribution of the matter is the question of the kind of type to be used, the sizes of type, upper- or lower-case, and the number of different fonts. The simplest manner of using the letter employed in the text met with little favour and was soon displaced by the use of larger types and especially by the use of capitals. The heavy, square Roman capitals, like those of Froben at Basle, for the first line, with smaller capitals for succeeding lines, were more or less customary in Northern Europe in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In some countries a mixture of a "lettre de forme" and Roman capitals was not unusual at the same period. With the introduction of the new Garamond romans at Paris about 1530 began the fashion of using the Canon and Double Canon sizes of the lower-case letters for titles. In the seventeenth century we find large and heavy Roman capitals again in favour, often balanced by a woodcut ornament or a basket of flowers. This century, undoubtedly the worst in the history of typography, notwithstanding the Elzevirs, is especially remarkable for its crowded title pages. It had become the custom to give as much information as possible about the contents of the book and the qualifications of author, editor, etc., and the printer took the opportunity of displaying as large a variety of his types as possible. No doubt the use of title pages as posters for advertising is partly responsible for the custom. It has been established by documentary evidence that such methods of advertising books were usual in England and in Germany, and probably this was so in other countries also. Incidentally it may be pointed out that the posting up of title pages accounts for some of the early collections, such as that of Bagford, now in the British Museum. Bagford has been attacked for his vandalism in mutilating books for the sake of his hobby, but it now appears that he may have been quite innocent of the charge. In any case the result on the title page as a specimen of typographical arrangement was deplorable....

With the eighteenth century title pages became simpler and letters became lighter, and the result is again work as good in its different style as that of the sixteenth century. The eighteenth century is certainly a great period in the history of book production, with its center in Paris. In England the influence of Caslon and Baskerville at length raised our typography to a level with Continental work. For one innovation P. S. Fournier is mainly responsible, the introduction of outline and other decorative capitals which were so successfully used at Paris. At the end of the century we have the work of the Didots and Bodoni, the classical school, whose technical achievement has hardly been surpassed at any period. One may cavil at their conception of the ideal shape of letters, one may dislike their excessive use of hair lines and their flat serifs, but it must be admitted that as practical printers and type-cutters their work was of first rate quality. These classical printers were proud of their types and wished them to stand alone. Bodoni, who at the beginning of his career used ornaments copied from Fournier and engraved vignettes, in his later years more and more abandoned decoration and outline letters. The classical title page is composed in Roman capitals of varying size, but without the admixture of lower-case letters or italics and without the aid of decoration. Like Baskerville, these printers considered that type is itself sufficiently interesting to stand alone.

Lawrence C. Wroth

THE FIRST WORK WITH AMERICAN TYPES

From _Typographic Heritage_. Copyright 1949 by The Typophiles.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

On 7 April 1775 there appeared in Philadelphia the initial issue of Story & Humphrey's _Pennsylvania Mercury_. This newspaper was referred to by a contemporary diarist as "The first Work with Amer. Types" and with certain qualifications, later to be made, it seems to be entitled to the distinction of priority implied in this descriptive phrase. Type founding in the colonies went through those phases of tentative effort, complete failure, and partial achievement which are normal to the beginnings of great industries, and before going on with the story of the font of type from which the _Pennsylvania Mercury_ was printed, it is proposed to give briefly an account of earlier attempts at the establishment of letter founding in English America. By doing this it will be possible to secure correctness of sequence and of relationship among the several elements of this study in origins.

The first font of types cast in English America was that which resulted from the painful efforts of Abel Buell, a silversmith and lapidary of Killingworth, Connecticut. Shortly before 1 April 1769 Buell cast a small font of letters, crude in design and in execution, from which proofs were taken for the examination and the criticism of his friends. In October of the same year, using a different and much better type of his own making, he presented to the Connecticut Assembly a printed petition in which he asked that body for financial assistance in his proposed establishment of a letter foundry. In reply to this memorial he received a loan from the colony for the purposes of his venture, and soon afterwards he removed to New Haven and prepared to manufacture type for the printers of a continent. The story of his failure at this time, and of his success on a much smaller scale twelve years later, is a part of the present study only in the sense which has been indicated in the introductory sentences.

Buell was not without a rival in his ambitious plans. David Mitchelson of Boston, possibly acting under the direction of John Mein, a printer of that city, is reported by a contemporary newspaper writer to have attained as great a degree of success as the Connecticut silversmith in the difficult art of letter casting. In the _Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter_ for 7 September 1769 there appeared among the local news items a report on recent developments in American manufacturing activities in which are certain sentences of interest in the story of colonial type founding. "We are assured by a Gentleman from the Westward," said the writer, "that Mr. Abel Buell, of Killingworth in Connecticut, Jeweller and Lapidary, has lately, his own Genius, made himself Master of the Art of Founding Types for Printing. Printing Types are also made by Mr. Mitchelson of this Town [Boston] equal to any imported from Great-Britain; and might, by proper Encouragement soon be able to furnish all the Printers in America at the same price they are sold in England." The absence of a known specimen of Mitchelson's letters or of any specific information as to his operations is enough, however, to require a verdict of "not proven" on any claim to priority in American type casting that has yet been made on his behalf.

Because of the unfruitful nature of the enterprises which have been spoken of, the year 1770 found the American printer still dependent upon European importation for his printing type, and at the moment there existed little prospect of relief from a situation which in the years of the Revolution was to become a hardship rather than the simple inconvenience of the earlier period. The policy of non-importation, however, was stirring the colonies to the establishment of local manufactures, and under the whip of necessity, type founding, among other essential industries, was to take its rise in the United States. The carrying to success of this manufacture in Pennsylvania in the year 1775 was undoubtedly assured by the political and economic situation of the country, but its beginning, which must first be described, had its cause in a set of circumstances of a more general character.

"The secular history of the Holy Scriptures," wrote Henry Stevens, "is the sacred history of printing." In these words the Vermonter gave sententious expression to the truth that the printing of the Bible has been in all ages an appreciable factor in the development of typography. The successful beginnings of type founding in English America, it is believed, may be traced to the desire of Christopher Sower Jr. of Germantown, Pennsylvania, to issue a third edition of that German Bible which first had made its appearance at the pains and expense of his father in the year 1743. It is said that the younger Sower's dissatisfaction with the conditions of type importation from Germany led him to conceive the idea of importing thence matrices and moulds instead of finished type, and with these placed in the cunning hands of Justus Fox, his journeyman, of casting his own letters for use in the proposed edition of _Die Heilige Schrift_. An enterprising man, a religious zealot, and the proprietor of one of the most extensive printing offices in America, he was able, partly at least, to carry out his intention.

The exact date of the first use by Sower of locally cast German letters evades determination. Sometime in the year 1770, he began the publication of the "second part" of a periodical known as _Ein Geistliches Magazien_. The title page of No. I, Part II, of this early religious magazine tells us that it was printed by Christopher Sower at Germantown in the year 1770, and the undated colophon of No. XII of the series contains information of singular interest in the words, "Gedruckt mit der ersten Schrift die jemals in America gegossen worden." The probability is that this issue of _Ein Geistliches Magazien_ was published late in 1771 or early in the ensuing year. Upon the basis of this quoted statement and in view of the knowledge that when his estate was sold in 1778 there were disposed of to Jacob Bay and others certain lots of letter moulds, crucibles and a large quantity of antimony[10] it becomes clear that Sower's interest in type making developed well beyond the stage of thinking it would be a nice thing to do.

The initiatory efforts of Sower have a particular significance in the story of American type founding; for the tradition is that while engaged in the casting process of type making in the Germantown foundry, Justus Fox and Jacob Bay learned the more difficult mysteries of an art in which later they attained proficiency. Because of the link of continuous effort thus formed between Sower's initiation of the business in 1770 and the later cutting and casting of Roman letter by these artisans, there must be conceded to him the distinction of having begun in English America the industry of type manufacturing, regardless of whether or not his casting of German letter from imported matrices was as extensive as has been supposed.

Our knowledge of Fox and of Bay is derived largely from the _Additions to Thomas's History of Printing_, a body of tradition of uneven reliability transmitted to Isaiah Thomas by William McCulloch, a Philadelphia printer active in the early years of the century. Selections from the six communications of the period 1812-1814 in which this information was transmitted were incorporated by Thomas in the revision of his book upon which was based the second edition brought out by the American Antiquarian Society in 1874. Long afterward the series of letters was published as a whole in the _Proceedings_ of the Society for April 1921 under the title, _William McCulloch's Additions to Thomas's History of Printing_.

In these letters to Isaiah Thomas, McCulloch was recording his own memories and the accepted Philadelphia tradition. Because he was well advanced in years at the time of writing, one is not surprised to find that now and then he trips over the barrier that separates documented fact from hearsay and personal recollection. It is much to our comfort in the present instance, however, to learn that he possessed and made use of unusual opportunities to obtain correct information as to the craftsmen who are the subject of our interest. These facts which he records of Justus Fox, for example, he obtained from Emmanuel, the son and partner in type founding of that artisan, and in _Justus Fox, a German Printer of the Eighteenth Century_, Dr. Charles L. Nichols accepts his testimony as of general reliability. He was indebted to various relatives of Bay, among them a sister, "a plump lady of 68," for the account of him which is found in the pages of the _Additions_. It is possible to compare various items in McCulloch's sketches of these men with records unknown to him, but available to us, with results so little at variance that one is inclined to accord a high degree of credence to all that he wrote concerning their activities.

At the time of Sower's importation of German equipment, McCulloch informed Isaiah Thomas, he had among his journeymen an ingenious general mechanic, Justus Fox, whom he charged with the responsibility for casting the letters to be used in the great Bible. In April 1772 he employed a newly arrived Swiss silk weaver, Jacob Bay,[11] to assist Fox. Two years later Bay left Sower's service and set up a foundry on his own account in a near-by house in Germantown. Fox remained in Sower's establishment, presumably engaged in casting the large quantity of type required to keep standing an edition of the Bible. In addition to this routine work he is said to have cut and cast an unspecified amount of Roman letter before 1774, the year of Bay's separation from the Sower establishment. Working in his separate foundry, it is recorded by our volunteer historian, Bay "cast a number of fonts, cutting all the punches, and making all the apparatus pertaining thereto, himself, for Roman Bourgeois, Long Primer, etc."

That this reported activity in type casting in Germantown about the year 1774 was not a play of the imagination on the part of its historian is made certain by the definite statement that occurs in one of the non-importation resolutions of the Pennsylvania Convention. On 23 January 1775 the Convention "Resolved unanimously, That as printing types are now made to a considerable degree of perfection by an ingenious artist in Germantown; it is recommended to the printers to use such types in preference to any which may be hereafter imported."[12] Referring somewhat vaguely to this resolution, both as to content and as to origin, McCulloch tells us that even at the time of its passage Fox and Bay each claimed the honor implied in its terms. To this day the identity of the "ingenious artist" remains uncertain.

It is not clear by what evidence it was known to the Convention that "a considerable degree of perfection" had been attained in the making of type in Germantown. The only known specimen of printing type cast at that place before the meeting of the Convention in January 1775 is the German letter employed in Sower's periodical, _Ein Geistliches Magazien_, and it is not likely that this or any other specimen of German type would have led the Convention to a recommendation as sweeping as that which has been quoted from its journal. It could only have been a Roman letter that the delegates had in mind for a usage so general as was indicated in their resolution, and we must remain in doubt as to what specimen or specimens they had seen of locally cast type in this character. It is certain, however, that at the time of their action a font of Roman letter had been completed, or at any rate, that it was then in the process of casting. It is quite possible that a trial specimen of this font had been submitted to the Convention for its examination and approval.

It is a satisfaction to be able to introduce the new font through the medium of a contemporary reference to its use. We are indebted to the correspondence and to the diary of the Rev. Ezra Stiles of Newport, later President of Yale College, for some important information on early American type founding. Excited by Buell's efforts to make type in the year 1769, his interest in the manufacture seems to have remained in being, for on 9 May 1775 he appended the following comment to an entry in his Diary: "Extracted from the Pennsylv^a Mercury, whose first N^o was pub. the 7th of April last: printed with types of American Manufacture. The first Work with Amer. Types: tho' Types were made at N. Haven years ago."[13] The fact that Ezra Stiles was one of the earliest patrons of Abel Buell's venture in letter casting, supported as this fact is by his interest in American manufactures generally, lends a certain amount of weight to any observation that he might make on the subject of American type founding, although it is probable that he was ignorant of Sower's partial achievement of the art, just as Sower some years earlier in his claim to priority had seemed to be unaware of Buell's technically successful effort. If we may interpret Dr. Stiles's words as meaning that Story & Humphreys's _Pennsylvania Mercury_[14] of 7 April 1775, Vol. I, No. I, was the first published work printed in Roman letter which had been cut and cast in English America, we may unhesitatingly repeat his description of it as "The first Work with Amer. Types."

The Philadelphia newspaper which has been referred to is one of the rarest of American journals of the period. Complete files, comprising issues from 7 April to 27 December 1775, are found only in the Library of Congress and in the Harvard College Library. From the first page of its first issue, the publisher's announcement is here reproduced.

A glance at the pages of the newspaper in which the new Roman letter was first used makes us feel that in his commendable willingness to admit imperfection the publisher paid small tribute to the skill of his "ingenious artist." The letters of "rustic manufacture" were far from perfect, it is true, and in later issues of the newspaper it is observable that they had not worn especially well, but nonetheless they composed agreeably and they were sufficiently well executed to entitle them to something more than the half apology with which they were offered to the public. Their interest, however, as the first American-made Roman type to be used in a publication intended for circulation transcends considerations of worth and appearance.

Rejoicing in their encouragement of native manufactures, the practical support they were giving to the Pennsylvania non-importation resolutions of six months earlier, the publishers of the _Mercury_ advertised on 23 June 1775 _The Impenetrable Secret_ as a work "Just Published and Printed with Types, Paper and Ink, Manufactured in this Province." If they had added, as possibly they might have done with truth, "on a press of Philadelphia make," we could regard this statement as the declaration of independence of the American printer from the English manufacturer.[15]

Isaiah Thomas says that the _Pennsylvania Mercury_ was established with the backing of Joseph Galloway as a substitute for the _Pennsylvania Chronicle_, that disastrous earlier venture in journalism in which the Quaker politician had engaged with William Goddard. If this was the case, certain features of the new publication must have been displeasing to the silent partner, for Galloway the Tory could hardly have rejoiced with the publishers in their virtuous encouragement of native type founding, with all its patriotic implications. Furthermore, from an advertisement of John Willis and Henry Vogt in the first issue of the paper one learns that the publishers were making use of other articles of printing equipment made by these general craftsmen, who here announced their ability to make presses and any and all of the mechanical appurtenances required in a printing shop. This well-advertised Americanism of the publishers, however, seems not to have availed them in the attainment of success, and after their establishment had been destroyed by fire in the closing days of the year the business was never resumed.

It is not certainly known who was the maker of the significant _Mercury_ types. Assuming that Sower's foundry was in full operation in the early months of 1775, we must assume also, in the absence of knowledge to the contrary, that its principal activity was in the manufacture of German letters for the great Bible, first published in 1776, and that Sower would not have been likely to engage in the making of Roman type on a large scale until this work had been completed. Because of our ignorance of other possibilities there remain to be considered only the two craftsmen, Fox and Bay, as the probable makers of this first successful American letter. According to McCulloch, Fox had cut and cast Roman letter at some period before the year 1774 while still working for Sower. This statement contains all that is known of his efforts at making Roman type during the years that he remained with Sower, but there is the chance to be taken into account that the _Mercury_ font was the result of his experimentation during this period in an art which later he pursued with no small degree of local success. On the same authority it is said, it will be remembered, that Jacob Bay had left Sower in 1774, and in a near-by house in Germantown had set up a type foundry on his own account. In this separate establishment, it is likely that he was able to devote to the business such time and energy as would be required in making a font of sufficient size to accommodate the needs of such a newspaper as the _Pennsylvania Mercury_. The fact of his separate foundry having been established sometime in 1774, the reference in the Convention resolution of January 1775 to the "ingenious artist" at Germantown and the appearance in April 1775 of the new font of type acclaimed by the publishers as "an attempt to introduce so valuable an art into these colonies" are considerations which, taken in their order, seem to give ground for an assumption that it was Jacob Bay who cut and cast the letters for "The first Work with Amer. Types." Until proof is forthcoming, however, this must remain an assumption and nothing more.

It is certain that both Fox and Bay maintained their interest in letter casting for many years. At the sale of Sower's confiscated property in the year 1778 both of these artisans were present as purchasers of type-making tools and material.[16] Bay especially seems to have taken advantage of the opportunity to secure equipment at this dispersal of his old master's goods. Among other purchases which he made at the sale of what was probably at the time the largest typographical establishment in the country were "a lot of letter moles" at three pounds, "a Box with 9 Crusibles" at £5 15_s._, a quantity of worn type at 8_d._ a pound and antimony worth £8 18_s._ 3_d._ He was living at the time in a house rented from Sower,[17] and at the sale of the printer's real property in September 1779 he purchased another house belonging to the estate for £4200, a sum which he paid in two installments before 28 October 1779.[18] In recording from tradition the fact that Bay secured at this time one of the Sower houses, McCulloch asserts that he purchased it from John Dunlap, the printer, whom he paid in type of his own making. It is possible that he borrowed the purchase price from Dunlap on this or a similar basis of repayment, a transaction that would explain McCulloch's version of the story. It is said that he conducted his foundry until the year 1789, and that between this year and 1792 he sold the business to Francis Bailey. Fox continued the making of type until his death in the year 1805, when his son and partner Emmanuel Fox sold the equipment to Samuel Sower of Baltimore, the son of Christopher Sower, the Second, of Germantown, whose enterprise had been the determining cause of its existence.

McCulloch was emphatic in his praise of the sturdiness of Fox's types, but when he remarked to Archibald Binny upon the excellent wearing quality of a set of figures and capitals cast by the Germantown founder, which he and his father before him had been using for many years, that gentleman replied with scorn that they were "at first so devilish ugly ... the longest using cannot mar their deformity."

The type-founding operations of Fox and of Bay have greater importance in the history of the art in America than is usually conceded them. When they are referred to at all by general writers, their activities are mentioned briefly or in such a manner as to give one the impression that their efforts were sporadic or tentative. It is with the work of the Scotch founder Baine, using imported equipment, that the story of American type founding is usually begun, but with the _Mercury_ font before us, cut and cast thirteen years before Baine's first operations, and with assurances by McCulloch that Fox cut and cast the letters used in the McKean edition of the _Acts of the Pennsylvania Assembly_, printed by Francis Bailey in 1782,[19] and with references by McCulloch to fonts produced by Bay, it seems certain that there exists material which will require a revision of the story of American type-founding origins. Beginning with the incontestable fact of the successful _Mercury_ font of 1775 and accepting McCulloch's relation of later events as a working hypothesis, there is seen to exist a field for research which should prove productive of discoveries, inasmuch as the fact and the tradition indicate a continuous activity on the part of one or the other of these early Pennsylvania founders, Fox and Bay, from 1775 to 1805. In the course of these years other founders, better known to us, began their work, and between the years 1796 and 1801, more than one hundred American printers, from Massachusetts to Georgia, purchased type from the foundry of Binny & Ronaldson of Philadelphia.[20]

The identification of the various fonts of locally made type used in Pennsylvania in the quarter century following "The first Work with Amer. Types" would form an interesting chapter in the story of early American type founding.

COMPOSED IN MONTICELLO TYPES

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Editor's Note: _Pennsylvania Archives_, 6th Series, 12:887-919. In _Typographic Heritage_, the second printing of this essay, Sower's type founding venture is more extensively treated, and the rare existing issues of Part II of _Ein Geistliches Magazien_ are located (pp. 143-144).

[11] McCulloch, p. 181, gives the middle of December 1771 as the date of Bay's arrival in Philadelphia. In Rupp's _Collection of Thirty Thousand Names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French, and other Immigrants in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1776_, p. 398, Jacob Bay is among the arrivals on the Brig _Betsey_ on 1 December 1771. The name is spelled Bey by McCulloch, Bäy by Rupp, Bay in various lists and documents in the Pennsylvania Archives. The last-named spelling is used in the present study on this authority.

[12] Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ... (1776-1781), Volume the First (Philadelphia, 1782), p. 33.

[13] Ezra Stiles, _Literary Diary_. Ed. by F. B. Dexter. 3 vols. (New York, 1901), I:549.

[14] Story & Humphreys's _Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser_. Evans 14477. No copy seen by Hildeburn.