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Text of the page (random words):
nting greek for more than a century this is the title page of the second edition of the alkestis of euripides edited by monk and printed at cambridge in 1818 with a detail of its text the new types were based on the script of richard porson 1759 1808 one of the outstanding greek scholars of his time and for this reason they are commonly known by his name but how far was porson involved in their making and does his model for the type survive this is a question of more than passing interest to historians of printing types for example we know that some alphabets engraved on copper during the 1690s although we are far from sure who drew them were models for the types known as the romain du roi that were made for the imprimerie royale in paris john baskerville in birmingham in the 1750s and françois ambroise didot in paris in about 1780 got professional punchcutters to make types for them that follow some radically new ideas and it seems likely that they must have made sketches to explain what they wanted but if they did so the sketches do not survive how many designs for types do exist dating before the introduction of mechanical punchcutting at the end of the 19th century made it possible to have a drawing reproduced faithfully in metal in the case of the porson or porsonic types the alphabet above one that i once published does appear to be something like a design for the type but since i neither found it nor claimed to have done so i ought belatedly to give its finder proper credit less than a year after i was appointed librarian of the st bride library i helped to mount an exhibition of printing in greek types at the library of the university of london it was designed to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of porson s birth i have no greek at all but i am interested in the puzzles that are involved in adapting a script from a different tradition in order to make it work with roman types and i wanted to know more about the process by which greek types began to be made without the tangled and complex ligatured forms that were features of the glamorous grec du roi of claude garamont which reproduced them in 1540 from the elaborate script of a calligrapher from crete who was working on manuscripts for the royal library of françois i in his study of greek printing types in britain from the late 18th to the early 20th century his ph d thesis for the university of reading published in 1998 by typophilia the imprint of klimis mastoridis another reading ph d in thessaloniki john bowman showed the document that i had reproduced it is among the papers of richard porson at trinity college cambridge b 13 27 fol 92 he remarked quoting my study that mosley believed that it could have been a sketch for the type but he did not think i was right and wrote rather magisterially it is quite possible that porson was here practising his design but it seems unlikely that the actual specimen supplied to austin would have found its way back into porson s papers david mckitterick librarian of trinity college citing bowman in his history of the cambridge university press endorsed this sceptical view this detached scholarly consensus disturbed me when i read it because its writer had not asked me if i had really said that i believed that the alphabet i published was a sketch for the porson type the answer to this question would have been no i did not write the suggestion but someone did or at least asked it as a question which was one that i found convincing then and i still do my notes for the exhibition had interested david thomas who worked on book production for a publisher he had compiled a rather elegant and well selected collection of examples of types that was published by sidgwick jackson under the title a book of printed alphabets in 1937 and he had a considerable knowledge of classical texts and their typography he had been invited to look after the production and design of the penrose annual a prestigious publication which published articles on current printing technology and which had acquired the habit of adding studies of the design and history of printing especially when they could be illustrated with the use of interesting processes he plunged happily into the job of helping to provide documentation for my piece doing so rather more energetically than i wanted or needed as i might perhaps have said but it did not seem nice to i was quite young and he clearly knew what he was doing at any rate it was thomas who went to look at the porson papers at trinity who ordered photographs and who wrote the captions for the separately printed four page section of illustrations to my piece which was printed by collotype a process that was becoming rare even then this was the caption that he added beneath the illustration of the alphabet that is shown here is this the model which porson provided for richard austin that is a question to which i think the only sensible answer is quite probably or something very like it i had supplied most of the other examples that were illustrated but i do not think i ever saw proofs of the section my article appeared as porson s greek types penrose annual vol 54 1960 pp 36 40 in the end the porson greek is not an exciting design nor is it an independent one it treats greek as a secondary type like italic some specialists who saw themselves as expert in the matter of greek type like robert proctor at the british museum were incensed at the sloping italic capitals that were provided with some of the porson types although to be fair one should note that similarly sloping capitals had been made for baskerville s calligraphic greek type the forms of the porson type were clearly designed to work well with the admirable british romans and italics of 1810 and so they do matthew carter has adapted a porson type for setting with his miller typeface and the result is a harmonious text greek types were used then in britain chiefly to set the greek classics or the text of the new testament in both cases they would often be set alongside conventional roman and italic types it was the harmony of the porson greek with contemporary italics that attracted me to the design victor scholderer another specialist at the british museum who also helped to mount an exhibition of books in greek became involved in the making of a very different type monotype s new hellenic of 1927 that was based on the type that had been made for the complutensian polyglot bible printed at alcalá de henares in the early 16th century he might have been expected to have reservations about the porson type but on the contrary although he was not pleased by its slope its originator was no doubt influenced by his own rather excessively sloping pen script he liked its harmonious simplicity writing that he greatly preferred it to the restless eye wearying didot letter the standard face of france italy and greece itself however that is a very different story posted by typefounder at 09 09 04 april 2014 a british national letter some such heading seems appropriate for a post about the inaugural use of a letter that has been produced for the refurbished building that was once known as the tate gallery and is now tate britain it houses the national collection of british art the admirable new lettering was realised by the john morgan studio its basis is an alphabet that was published in london in 1775 as bowles s roman and italic print letters by carington bowles a maker and seller of prints and maps for the use of signwriters and other makers and users of letters including engravers and grave stone cutters nothing else quite like this handbook for makers of letters appears to been made at this date or at any rate none is known to have survived illustrations from it have appeared several times in this blog the original printed alphabet of which only one copy is known was originally in the collection assembled in oxford by john johnson printer to the university and it is now with the rest of his collection in the bodleian library i published it myself in my original essay on english vernacular in the 11th issue of the journal motif i may republish it again one day here is bowles s first plate in the mean time i salute john morgan and his colleagues and contemplate with satisfaction the use of this traditional letter on a major public building it is worth recalling that as this blog has noted it is barely ten years since a weakly drawn trajan letter was used by well meaning but poorly informed restorers to paint the ship s name at the stern of hms victory this blog was begun principally in order to register criticism of the director of the national gallery who had its name cut in big imperial roman letters on the hitherto unblemished portico of the greek revival building for which he was responsible an act that it would be an understatement to call insensitive he has since departed from his post it has also told the dismal story of the making of the clumsy new numerals that disfigure the front door of ten downing street since bowles included the makers of grave stones among the clients to whom his guide is offered i should include a note in this post on some work by james sutton since he was the first letter cutter to make use of the bowles alphabet in his work and he has shown how effective it can be this memorial that he cut is in a country church in kent and here is the inscription on his monument to admiral sir philip vian which is in the crypt at st paul s cathedral it is not far from the monument that originally having been made for cardinal wolsey but not used for him was stored with other accumulated royal property at windsor and handed over for the burial of nelson in 1806 it bears a good inscription in relief letters of gilded brass i made the image of the monument to admiral vian with the kind permission of the chapter of st paul s cathedral by whose courtesy it is shown here posted by typefounder at 07 43 06 october 2013 commercial at note this post is now followed by a postscript that its readers are recommended to look at the commercial at the character has needed an entry in this blog for some time and indeed i have drafted many texts on it without posting them this was not so much because the wikipedia article on was seriously defective it does as one might expect supply a great deal of what is needed but the published information has failed to settle some of the puzzling details that we have some right to expect would have been resolved by now in his mostly excellent brief history for a non professional readership ancient writing and its influence 1932 the palaeographer b l ullman rather rashly remarked that the national hands which grew out of cursive preserved a still greater number of ligatures the carolingian hand suppressed most of them but some of them were too well established and therefore have persisted to this day the most important of all was that of et introduced into formal writing by half uncial we use it in english for and the equivalent for latin et and call it ampersand and per se and a name that arose when this character was placed at the end of the alphabet and was recited with the other letters x y z and per se by itself the character standing for and this has taken on many different forms in different styles of writing and printing but nearly all are based on the old and the italic other ligatures still in use are ae æ there is also the sign which is really for ad with an exaggerated uncial d the lay or arrangement of types in the compositor s case although it had mostly become fairly standardized tended to vary in some of its details from printing house to printing house according to the kind of work that was chiefly set there the abandonment of long s and its ligatures in about 1800 which had occupied nearly twenty sorts of the roman and italic founts freed up some space in the case the 1892 edition of the practical printing of john southward showed a series of non alphabetic characters in its example of an improved upper case which had not been in a normal case earlier in the century these shown above in the top three rows of the upper case included not only and the mostly redundant per cent character but also the pound sign the dollar and also types for the calligraphic per and for lb the pound weight these were all needed for use in commercial jobs like the printing of catalogues of goods for sale the was included in one of the small boxes at the left hand side of the lower case which had long been its traditional place the lb character with its cross stroke became obsolete but it is worth noting that it was used throughout the 29 volumes of the 1911 edition of the encyclopaedia britannica set on the monotype machine many of these characters migrated to the typewriter which was introduced as a commercial machine for use in offices no significant domestic market for it was imagined by its original makers just as the first makers of computers notoriously could not believe that there might be a domestic market for their product the commercial characters were not found on every early typewriter but it seems to be agreed that most of them including had been placed on typewriters by the early twentieth century and thereafter few typewriter keyboards lacked them for this reason these symbols were unquestioningly adopted by the makers of computer keyboards who were rigidly bound by tradition the per symbol which was admittedly a rather elaborate design failed to get onto the normal typewriter keyboard and has faded from memory however one symbol that did although few users of computers had any idea what it was for and how to use it was of course since it appeared to be both universally available and largely useless it was adopted as we know the event has been well documented for use with the internet and with email and although it has been a nuisance to the designers of fonts who have rarely found its form easy to adapt to match traditional letters there seems little likelihood that we shall get rid of it easily the we have is rooted in the commercial handwriting of the 19th century if this is the case we are entitled to ask why this is and where and when did it begin to be used surely this is a question that it should be easy enough to answer since the question was of no interest to academic historians of writing or typography enthusiastic amateurs entered the discussion scattering a profusion of badly informed ideas not long ago the blogosphere seemed to be full of their excited chatter here is some of it from italian and spanish blogs scoperta la è italiana discovery the is italian la chiocciola di e mail è una invenzione tutta italiana the is a wholly italian invention creó un sevillano la did a sevillian create the sevilla utiliza la como reclamo turístico seville uses the as publicity for tourism la arroba no es de sevilla ni de italia the is not from seville nor from italy la ya se utilizaba en 1448 en aragón the w...