century has been preserved, nor is there in any old book an engraving or a description of a type. This neglected information has been unwittingly furnished by a careless pressman in the office of Conrad Winters, who printed at Cologne in 1476. This pressman, or his mate, when inking a slackly justified form, permitted the inking ball to pull out a thin-bodied type, which dropped sideways on the face of the form. The accident was not noticed; the tympan closed upon the form, and the bed was drawn under the platen. Down came the screw and platen, jamming the unfortunate type in the form, and embossing it strongly in the fibres of the thick wet paper, in a manner which reveals to us the shape of Winters' types more truthfully than it could have been done even by
A Type of the Fifteenth Century.[1]
[From Madden.]
special engraving. The height[2] of this type is a trifle less than one American inch. The sloping shoulder, or the beard, as it was once called, was made to prevent the blackening of the paper, for it would have been blackened if the shoulder had been high and square.[3] The circular mark, about one-
- ↑ Lettres d'un bibliographe, 4th series, p. 231.
- ↑ It agrees exactly with the old French standard (of 1723) for height of type, which was 10½, geometric lines, or, by modern French measure, 24 millimetres. Fournier, Manuel typographique, vol. i, p. 125.
- ↑ The sloping shoulder, which was in general use in the first quarter of this century, was discarded to meet the requirements of the new art of stereotyping. It was found that these sloping shoulders made projections in the plaster mould, which imperiled the making of an accurate cast. The blackening of the sheet from square shoulders was prevented by altering the mould and placing the shoulder lower on the body.
