Alchemical and calendar symbols from old printer’s manuals – more sources known?

Andreas Stötzner
Andreas Stötzner Posts: 821
in Type History
I work on special sorts from old lettercases which used to be composing material for astrological, alchemical or even calendar print matters.
Since specimen sample pages from printing houses are rare (and tricky to find) I wonder if anyone has some insights to share about more sources of the kind.
The examples I show are from: Ernesti (Nuremberg 1733) and Andreä bookshop (Frankfurt 1834).

Andreä 1834


Ernesti 1733

Comments

  • Florian Hardwig
    Florian Hardwig Posts: 283
    edited July 2024
    Andreas, are you limiting your search to printers, or are specimens by type founders welcome, too? Also, are you focused on a certain period?
    Paul Shaw compiled a list of digitized specimens that are available online, published in a series of four posts: 1486–1704, 1700–1769, 1770–1799, 1800–1836. This includes the pre-1831 type specimen books from the collections of St Bride Library.
    Now you certainly won’t find alchemical and calendar symbols in all of them. But I followed two random links from his list and directly came across such symbols in a specimen by the Levrault Frères, Strasbourg, 1800, and in Bodoni’s Manuale tipografico, Parma, 1818.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,176
    edited July 2024
    Astrological and almanac or calendar printing symbols are common enough in the specimen books of typefounders. But alchemical symbols are very unusual, and so the example you've found is the first I've seen. This need not make it unique; perhaps such symbols would be more common if one looked in specimen books from the same time period.
    In a search on Google Books for books from before 1750 with alchemical symbols such as those, I only found a 1721 edition in addition to the 1733 edition of Die Wol-eingerichtete Buchdruckerey, the one by Ernesti that you found.
  • George Thomas
    George Thomas Posts: 657
    Unicode has at least some of them on their Code Charts page:

    Other Symbols > Alchemical Symbols


  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 821
    Florian, vielen Dank!
    that was exactly the kind of hint I had hoped for. Paul Shaw’s register is just amazing.
    Found a lot of relevant material already.

    I wonder why nobody seemed to had the idea (so far) to go for the encoding of these calendar sorts …

    Interesting or not, whenever you come across a Google digitalization, it is of much poorer quality than the editions of other institutions.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,176
    They were harder to find, but the Ernesti is also on the Internet Archive, in three copies; one from Google Books, one from the Bayerische Staatsbibliotek (it's a rather large download) and one from the Getty Research Institute.
    I see that the Levrault Freres has some of the alchemical symbols; apparently they were still in use by pharmacies, long after alchemy ceased to be taken seriously.

Categories