are wearisome to the eye. Yet he made his types look
Beauty of his
printing. beautiful by printing them beautifully. Always using the
blackest of ink on the smoothest of paper, always providing
broad spaces of white relief between his lines and in the
margin, always using new types and clean balls, always
hot-pressing his sheets, he showed printing with a perfec-
tion of workmanship that astonished as much as it delighted
the literary world. On the smaller sizes of type his cut of
letter is not so pleasing, nor was his presswork on the small
types of greater superiority than that of Barbou of Paris,
or of Millar Ritchie and Corrall of London.
The most noticeable exhibition of skill in recent Italian
Microscopic
type of Milan, type-founding is in the strongest contrast to the heroic
style of Bodoni. It is the type of a dainty miniature edition
of " La Divina Commedia," printed at Milan in 1878, on a
leaf about If by 2 inches a "microscopic type" about
twenty lines to the inch.
France has steadily maintained her early reputation for
Early French
punch-cutters, good punch-cutters. The Imprimerie Royale" gave em-
ployment from 1640 to 1790 to some of the more famous:
to Grand jean and Alexandre, to the family of Luce, father,
son, and grandson, as well as to Firmin-Didot, Marcellin
Legrand, Jacquemin, Delafoiid, and Leger-Didot, of later
date. Their work and those of their rivals and predecessors
are shown with magnificence in the " Specimen Typogra-
phique" of 1845, of the then French Royal Printing-house.
This book exhibits a bewildering variety of types of foreign
Page:Historic printing types, a lecture read before the Grolier club of New York, January 25, 1885, with additions and new illustrations; by De Vinne, Theodore Low, 1828-1914; Grolier Club.djvu/82
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78
HISTORIC PRINTING TYPES.