Hello, experts and scholars,
I'm wondering if anyone knows where I could find a good, quality scan of the Austin Type Foundry's specimen of 1838. I found one on Google Books (pls see picture below), but it's predictably awful. Thank you for any advice you may have for me.
Comments
At least, I would call it that.
First half of the first sample, the 7 is in a range that feels almost like I could just call it overshoot? More subtly unusual.
What I had noticed was not the 7, but the 2, in the first and the third samples, as it reminded me of the one in Bell and Brimmer (and to some extent the related faces Brimmer and Oxford).
It’s interesting that this book, published in 1838, shows all the signs of discoloration and deterioration associated with wood pulp paper. Yet, in the book conservation world, it is generally held that wood pulp paper was first introduced in the late 1840s, following an 1844 patent for a pulp grinding machine filed in Germany. Does anyone here know more about this?
About the 7: This “transitional” style of figures is generally associated with the work of William Miller, the Edinburgh typefounder associated with the early “Scotch” style. It’s not just the 7 that extends below the baseline, but 9 as well. Note that the 6 rises slightly above its top line, which is lower than the cap height, making the figures far easier to read in the context of a text. Matthew Carter, who knows a great deal about the types of this period, made similar figures for his Miller fonts. Here is a sample of Miller's figures from A specimen of printing types, Edinburgh, 1822.
Also, it seems that unequally-lined figures were already in place by 1785, at least at Caslon's foundry:
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e29853a0-5f7e-0131-d9ae-58d385a7bbd0
I am definitely not an expert on these issues. However, the discoloration of the book in those images appears to me to be consistent with a form of paper I've encountered in books from India. Possibly the book in question is printed, therefore, on hemp paper, if it predates newsprint.
https://digital.nls.uk/rise-of-literacy/archive/144606555?mode=gallery_grid&sn=1&from_row=1&reset_from_row=no
First experiments to use wood or reed for wrapping paper were by the German Johann Georg von Langen 1753.
After 1767 paper manufacturers in Germany experimented with hemp, cotton and willow, because white linen became more and more scarce.
1843 Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented the process of manufacturing paper from wood and invented 1846 a special grinding machine.
We can guess that since 1800 paper mills tried a lot of materials like glue, resins, or bleaching chemicals to improve paper.
Paper was made from recycled fabric. The Rag and Bone men and women who collected it were paid according to the quality of their merch, which varied considerably. Paper manufacturers, although they processed the fabric to improve its colour and texture, had scant knowledge of what particular plants, dyes and mordants were present in the raw material of their lesser quality products, not to mention substances that the rags had been used to wipe up, or which had leached into the discarded material in the agglomeration of “dust” (garbage/trash) piles. Sorting out the best white linen was relatively easy, but beyond that…
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About the Victorian garbage grubbers, I can recommend a couple of quite different yet equally fascinating accounts: in Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics (1933), and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1854).