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Text of the page (random words):
ury one of the earliest convincing examples i have found was something but hardly more than an ill defined scribble in the papers of william strahan 1715 1785 whose prosperity among contemporary printers in london was commonly supposed to be due to his exemplary business methods the example that follows is simply my rough sketch from a document of 1739 add ms 48800 f 17v among the strahan papers in the british library it is the earliest example that i have found thereafter but much later and far more slowly than i had thought the symbol did indeed begin to be adopted in british practice for at a certain price or at a rate of this example of the as a printing type which is the first that i have found anywhere is in a specimen of the miller typefoundry in edinburgh 1822 it can be seen again in an english manual of printing t c hansard typographia 1825 in a passage reproducing handwritten book keeping notice too the use here of a typographical version of the symbol for per here finally is an example of in a british handbook of instructions for book keeping c morrison practical book keeping edinburgh 1838 it is very nicely drawn but its date is quite late what about the spanish connection in 2000 there was a flurry of excitement about the discovery of the early use of by an italian academic the source was professor giorgio stabile of la sapienza university in rome who was engaged on an article for the treccani encyclopedia one of the enterprises that google and wikipedia have to some extent displaced for use in our current research stabile let it be known to some friends in the media that in the course of his researches into commercial documents he had found an early use of in the correspondence of some italian merchants based in seville in 1536 this discovery made news and it still generates some excitement in journals that should know better like the new york times and the guardian who keep obsolete links alive to stabile and his important researches it would have been satisfactory if prof stabile had been more candid about the source of his discovery to his credit he did later acknowledge that his research among original documents consisted in this case of finding an example in a well known well edited and well illustrated published collection of commercial correspondence that had been made some decades before by federigo melis documenti per la storia economica dei secoli xiii xvi con una nota di paleografia commerciale di elena cecchi firenze olschki 1972 istituto internazionale di storia economica f datini prato pubblicazioni serie i documenti 1 the documents that stabile claimed to have found are illustrated on pages 214 215 and the originals are among the strozzi papers in the archivio di stato florence stabile explained that the symbol in this text stood for containers of wine measured by the unit known as the amphora and he suggested but without providing sources that this was a widely used mediterranean unit of measurement he might have added but he did not that in several of the commercial letters shown in his book by melis the is also commonly used for the date in phrases like ad di 20 di gennaio on 20 january which takes it closer to its later use in business documents he made no reference to its more general use in contemporary italian commercial handwriting or the scrittura mercantesca on which as its title shows a useful appendix in melis s book was contibuted by elena cecchi how far did the historians of writing contribute to the story for writing of the italian renaissance they gave most of their attention to the cancellaresca corsiva the official chancery hand derived from the humanistic cursive of the 15th century which was shown in a well known series of printed handbooks of the 16th century all the same in several of these handbooks an example of the gothic commercial hand the mercantesca was often to be found at the back there is in fact a little handbook of the hand by eustachio celebrino an associate of the writing master tagliente il modo di imparare di scrivere lettera merchantescha 1525 but it does not appear to include examples of the use of the earliest example of the character that i have found in an italian writing book is in a document in the commercial hand in a letter dated 8 may 1557 a woodcut at the end of the first publication of giovanni francesco cresci the essemplare di scrivere più sorti lettere published in rome in 1560 with the phrase ponete conto nostro put the sum to our account and here is the again in a document dated 1569 in cresci s il perfetto scrittore of about 1570 la valuta di libre centouinticinque di seta calabrese presa da noi ragion di scudi tre la libra per pagar a tempo dj xviij mesi proximi venire the value of a hundred and twenty five pounds of silk from calabria obtained from us at a rate of three scudi per pound to be paid within eighteen months from these examples there seems little doubt that the was in regular use in more or less its later sense of the commercial at in italian documents of the 16th century if it disappears from later writing books this is probably because they were not much concerned with the gothic commercial hands there are intermittent examples that have been published online of later french and spanish handwritten usage but very few with reference to specific dated documents of which the present whereabouts is clearly specified for the arroba that term of arabic origin the later spanish character in printing was indeed but it seems to me that this usage may simply be the result of borrowing anglo saxon type since by 1900 the was widely available from typefounders in europe and in north america we need far more authenticated examples of its use and its meaning in earlier dated handwritten documents i ought to add a final illustration of the in the type specimen of j b clement sturme in valencia 1833 details of which are given in the admirable list of spanish type specimens by albert corbeto catalogación y estudio de las muestras de letras impresas hasta el año 1833 published in 2010 the with a design that is based on a roman a is used to give the price of the type by weight the unit being the arroba precio di cada castellana 162½ reales i am sure that there is much documentation that can be done by the many researchers who trawl through the innumerable business records that survive in major collections i hope that in the course of their work they will spare a thought for historians in other fields and save some well documented images for us that will fill in the many gaps that exist and which still frustrate the fulfilment of our wish to complete the story postscript this post began with a reference to discontent with the confused often badly informed and sometimes chauvinistic sources of information that frustrated my own attempts to understand where this symbol came from and what it has meant it made me doubt whether i should add yet another contribution to the debate however i am glad that i did because it has led me to discover a substantial body of work that will do much to clear up the confusion in january 2013 marc smith professor of mediaeval and modern palaeography at the école nationale des chartes the leading institution in its field in france gave an illustrated lecture on the in french a link to which can be found on youtube he has published a summary of his lecture in a printed journal in france graphê 55 july 2013 and he plans to put its substance into a book one hopes that it will include a generous selection from the many images of documents handwritten and printed some of which are familiar but most of which are wholly unknown that accompany the lecture at the heart of his argument is the question of the arroba the unit of weight and capacity of twenty five pounds that was a part of spain s heritage from its arabic past until the metric system overtook it one meaning of in spain and portugal and to some extent in france was indeed the arroba but it stood for many other things too professor smith shows that it was something of an all purpose abbreviation for many words beginning with a like avoir in one of his documents in french dated 1391 it is used for initial an the current french term arrobase appears to be simply based on the spanish plural arrobas but he notes as i have done that english speakers belatedly adopted a continental variant of an accented form of a as à tending to use it where it was a convenient way of saving space by not writing at in full as a universal term he appears to be content with the anglophone commercial at as a palaeographer marc smith was well qualified to find and to interpret the many early documents in which has appeared but his researches have been wide ranging and he has done good work among handbooks for book keepers typefounders specimens several from spain beginning with pedro ifern 1793 but he shows a rather crude example possibly cut on wood in the ortografìa de la lengua castellana of the real academia española madrid 1754 collections of commercial correspondence and typewriters he offers the caligraph no 2 commercial of 1883 as an early machine with a key for for french typefounders with an eye on their neighbouring market in spain the stood for arroba he has found a type for an english in patrick kelly elements of book keeping 1805 since he does not substantially differ from the suggestions i make in my own text i am inclined to leave it more or less as it was posted but anyone wishing to take the matter further and stand on firm ground must turn to his account of his own extensive researches and follow them as they progress one hopes that they will jm 11 october 2013 posted by typefounder at 16 07 17 march 2013 this is a fragment the slate headstones of nottinghamshire and leicestershire are the glories of their churchyards much of the stone came from the quarries of swithland in leicestershire which were worked until the later 19th century the headstones are a nuisance to the incumbents of the churches getting in the way of the machines that cut the grass neatly but often score the surface of the stones as they hit them the sheep which browse in some country graveyards are a gentler and more effective alternative where they are not wholly destroyed gravestones are dealt with in various ways often by uprooting them and setting them against a wall or by laying them flat so the mower can pass over them one of the more devilishly practical solutions to the problems they pose is not only to lay the stones flat but to make a dry and convenient path to the church door with them none of these actions has much to recommend it slate set upright so that it drains naturally is resistant to weathering and its grain permits the cutting of fine detail it withstands even the acid rain of urban environments which eats away the limestones that are also used for gravestones uprooting the stones and placing them against a wall tears them away from association with the original graves they were set to mark laying them flat allows water to penetrate so that as it freezes the stone is shattered into its natural layers worst of all when they are used as paving stones not only does the damp penetrate but the fine and delicate surface is destroyed by the accumulated grit that is pounded into it grinding away the detail it takes an insensitive personality to be indifferent to such treatment this is a fragment of a headstone from a churchyard in nottinghamshire which had become a paving stone it measures about 18 by 13 inches it is a fragment because it appears to have been quite deliberately reduced to a quarter or less of its original size by blows from a heavy hammer which have removed from it the name and the dates of the person it was designed to commemorate and they have also truncated the verse that had been cut below we shall never know the name as for the verse with a glance at similar examples one can guess how it may have read when i first saw the stone i was distressed by the sight of the damage and by the erosion of the design that was already visible and which would continue if it was left to lie where i found it i went into the church i forget what i said but it got the result i least expected the hapless verger or whatever he was possibly even the incumbent asked if i would like to take it away and look after it it was staggeringly heavy but somehow i got it back home and it now stands safely upright as it had done originally with what is left of its beautifully cut message washed clean by the rain and often lit by sunshine that was a long time ago should i have accepted the offer i do not think i could have removed a stone which still bore the name of a parishioner who had lived nearby but it seemed to be worth doing something to preserve this anonymous fragment although i shall not name the church i see that its current web page offers admiring tributes to the few widely spaced tombs that have been allowed to stay in its churchyard and even has the temerity to praise their lettering an image posted on flickr in 2008 shows that the path to the door of the church is still made up of incised slate headstones the church must do what it can to look after itself but it seems to me that there is a more wide ranging and worthwhile question to be asked why since by common consent this lettering belongs to a tradition of such quality have letter cutters let it die out i don t want to see a flood of weak pastiches of the original vernacular idiom the work of gill s contemporaries and of his pupils too are reminders to us that there were very few who could ever string the bow of odysseus but i should be glad to see some evidence in the work of modern artists that they are aware that we have a durable legacy from the date of this fragment from nottinghamshire which i guess to be about 1760 the period of the work of the letter cutter typefounder and printer john baskerville posted by typefounder at 08 48 29 july 2012 caractères de l université this type on a body of about 18 points appears in the big type specimen book of the imprimerie royale paris 1845 it is the first known published reappearance of the type by jean jannon of sedan for which matrices had been acquired by the imprimerie royale in 1641 and the first text to link it to the name of garamont it is a detail of a table headed spécimen des caractères romains employés par l imprimerie royale de 1640 à 1846 yes 1846 although the title page of the book has the date 1845 the table showing roman and italic types of three centuries is spread across facing pages it appears paradoxically in a long preliminary section on non latin types not on romans and italics headed notice sur les types étrangers du spécimen de l imprimerie royale the text and the table were reprinted from the same types as a book with this title in 1847 making a volume that is easier to find in libraries the table from this reprint is familiar to readers of updike s ...