letters evades determination. Sometime in the year 1770, he began
the publication of the "second part" of a periodical known as _Ein
Geistliches Magazien_. The title page of No. I, Part II, of this
early religious magazine tells us that it was printed by Christopher
Sower at Germantown in the year 1770, and the undated colophon of No.
XII of the series contains information of singular interest in the
words, "Gedruckt mit der ersten Schrift die jemals in America gegossen
worden." The probability is that this issue of _Ein Geistliches
Magazien_ was published late in 1771 or early in the ensuing year.
Upon the basis of this quoted statement and in view of the knowledge
that when his estate was sold in 1778 there were disposed of to Jacob
Bay and others certain lots of letter moulds, crucibles and a large
quantity of antimony[10] it becomes clear that Sower's interest in type
making developed well beyond the stage of thinking it would be a nice
thing to do.
The initiatory efforts of Sower have a particular significance in
the story of American type founding; for the tradition is that while
engaged in the casting process of type making in the Germantown
foundry, Justus Fox and Jacob Bay learned the more difficult mysteries
of an art in which later they attained proficiency. Because of the link
of continuous effort thus formed between Sower's initiation of the
business in 1770 and the later cutting and casting of Roman letter by
these artisans, there must be conceded to him the distinction of having
begun in English America the industry of type manufacturing, regardless
of whether or not his casting of German letter from imported matrices
was as extensive as has been supposed.
Our knowledge of Fox and of Bay is derived largely from the _Additions
to Thomas's History of Printing_, a body of tradition of uneven
reliability transmitted to Isaiah Thomas by William McCulloch, a
Philadelphia printer active in the early years of the century.
Selections from the six communications of the period 1812-1814 in which
this information was transmitted were incorporated by Thomas in the
revision of his book upon which was based the second edition brought
out by the American Antiquarian Society in 1874. Long afterward the
series of letters was published as a whole in the _Proceedings_ of the
Society for April 1921 under the title, _William McCulloch's Additions
to Thomas's History of Printing_.
In these letters to Isaiah Thomas, McCulloch was recording his own
memories and the accepted Philadelphia tradition. Because he was well
advanced in years at the time of writing, one is not surprised to find
that now and then he trips over the barrier that separates documented
fact from hearsay and personal recollection. It is much to our comfort
in the present instance, however, to learn that he possessed and made
use of unusual opportunities to obtain correct information as to the
craftsmen who are the subject of our interest. These facts which he
records of Justus Fox, for example, he obtained from Emmanuel, the
son and partner in type founding of that artisan, and in _Justus Fox,
a German Printer of the Eighteenth Century_, Dr. Charles L. Nichols
accepts his testimony as of general reliability. He was indebted to
various relatives of Bay, among them a sister, "a plump lady of 68,"
for the account of him which is found in the pages of the _Additions_.
It is possible to compare various items in McCulloch's sketches of
these men with records unknown to him, but available to us, with
results so little at variance that one is inclined to accord a high
degree of credence to all that he wrote concerning their activities.
At the time of Sower's importation of German equipment, McCulloch
informed Isaiah Thomas, he had among his journeymen an ingenious
general mechanic, Justus Fox, whom he charged with the responsibility
for casting the letters to be used in the great Bible. In April 1772 he
employed a newly arrived Swiss silk weaver, Jacob Bay,[11] to assist
Fox. Two years later Bay left Sower's service and set up a foundry
on his own account in a near-by house in Germantown. Fox remained in
Sower's establishment, presumably engaged in casting the large quantity
of type required to keep standing an edition of the Bible. In addition
to this routine work he is said to have cut and cast an unspecified
amount of Roman letter before 1774, the year of Bay's separation
from the Sower establishment. Working in his separate foundry, it is
recorded by our volunteer historian, Bay "cast a number of fonts,
cutting all the punches, and making all the apparatus pertaining
thereto, himself, for Roman Bourgeois, Long Primer, etc."
That this reported activity in type casting in Germantown about
the year 1774 was not a play of the imagination on the part of its
historian is made certain by the definite statement that occurs in one
of the non-importation resolutions of the Pennsylvania Convention.
On 23 January 1775 the Convention "Resolved unanimously, That as
printing types are now made to a considerable degree of perfection
by an ingenious artist in Germantown; it is recommended to the
printers to use such types in preference to any which may be hereafter
imported."[12] Referring somewhat vaguely to this resolution, both as
to content and as to origin, McCulloch tells us that even at the time
of its passage Fox and Bay each claimed the honor implied in its terms.
To this day the identity of the "ingenious artist" remains uncertain.
It is not clear by what evidence it was known to the Convention that
"a considerable degree of perfection" had been attained in the making
of type in Germantown. The only known specimen of printing type cast
at that place before the meeting of the Convention in January 1775 is
the German letter employed in Sower's periodical, _Ein Geistliches
Magazien_, and it is not likely that this or any other specimen of
German type would have led the Convention to a recommendation as
sweeping as that which has been quoted from its journal. It could only
have been a Roman letter that the delegates had in mind for a usage so
general as was indicated in their resolution, and we must remain in
doubt as to what specimen or specimens they had seen of locally cast
type in this character. It is certain, however, that at the time of
their action a font of Roman letter had been completed, or at any rate,
that it was then in the process of casting. It is quite possible that
a trial specimen of this font had been submitted to the Convention for
its examination and approval.
It is a satisfaction to be able to introduce the new font through the
medium of a contemporary reference to its use. We are indebted to the
correspondence and to the diary of the Rev. Ezra Stiles of Newport,
later President of Yale College, for some important information on
early American type founding. Excited by Buell's efforts to make
type in the year 1769, his interest in the manufacture seems to have
remained in being, for on 9 May 1775 he appended the following comment
to an entry in his Diary: "Extracted from the Pennsylv^a Mercury,
whose first N^o was pub. the 7th of April last: printed with types
of American Manufacture. The first Work with Amer. Types: tho' Types
were made at N. Haven years ago."[13] The fact that Ezra Stiles was
one of the earliest patrons of Abel Buell's venture in letter casting,
supported as this fact is by his interest in American manufactures
generally, lends a certain amount of weight to any observation that he
might make on the subject of American type founding, although it is
probable that he was ignorant of Sower's partial achievement of the
art, just as Sower some years earlier in his claim to priority had
seemed to be unaware of Buell's technically successful effort. If we
may interpret Dr. Stiles's words as meaning that Story & Humphreys's
_Pennsylvania Mercury_[14] of 7 April 1775, Vol. I, No. I, was the
first published work printed in Roman letter which had been cut and
cast in English America, we may unhesitatingly repeat his description
of it as "The first Work with Amer. Types."
The Philadelphia newspaper which has been referred to is one of the
rarest of American journals of the period. Complete files, comprising
issues from 7 April to 27 December 1775, are found only in the Library
of Congress and in the Harvard College Library. From the first page of
its first issue, the publisher's announcement is here reproduced.
A glance at the pages of the newspaper in which the new Roman letter
was first used makes us feel that in his commendable willingness to
admit imperfection the publisher paid small tribute to the skill of
his "ingenious artist." The letters of "rustic manufacture" were far
from perfect, it is true, and in later issues of the newspaper it is
observable that they had not worn especially well, but nonetheless
they composed agreeably and they were sufficiently well executed to
entitle them to something more than the half apology with which they
were offered to the public. Their interest, however, as the first
American-made Roman type to be used in a publication intended for
circulation transcends considerations of worth and appearance.
[Illustration: _Extract from The Pennsylvania Mercury of 7 April 1775.
Courtesy of the Harvard College Library._]
Rejoicing in their encouragement of native manufactures, the
practical support they were giving to the Pennsylvania non-importation
resolutions of six months earlier, the publishers of the _Mercury_
advertised on 23 June 1775 _The Impenetrable Secret_ as a work "Just
Published and Printed with Types, Paper and Ink, Manufactured in
this Province." If they had added, as possibly they might have done
with truth, "on a press of Philadelphia make," we could regard this
statement as the declaration of independence of the American printer
from the English manufacturer.[15]
Isaiah Thomas says that the _Pennsylvania Mercury_ was established with
the backing of Joseph Galloway as a substitute for the _Pennsylvania
Chronicle_, that disastrous earlier venture in journalism in which
the Quaker politician had engaged with William Goddard. If this was
the case, certain features of the new publication must have been
displeasing to the silent partner, for Galloway the Tory could hardly
have rejoiced with the publishers in their virtuous encouragement of
native type founding, with all its patriotic implications. Furthermore,
from an advertisement of John Willis and Henry Vogt in the first
issue of the paper one learns that the publishers were making use of
other articles of printing equipment made by these general craftsmen,
who here announced their ability to make presses and any and all
of the mechanical appurtenances required in a printing shop. This
well-advertised Americanism of the publishers, however, seems not
to have availed them in the attainment of success, and after their
establishment had been destroyed by fire in the closing days of the
year the business was never resumed.
It is not certainly known who was the maker of the significant
_Mercury_ types. Assuming that Sower's foundry was in full operation
in the early months of 1775, we must assume also, in the absence of
knowledge to the contrary, that its principal activity was in the
manufacture of German letters for the great Bible, first published in
1776, and that Sower would not have been likely to engage in the making
of Roman type on a large scale until this work had been completed.
Because of our ignorance of other possibilities there remain to be
considered only the two craftsmen, Fox and Bay, as the probable makers
of this first successful American letter. According to McCulloch, Fox
had cut and cast Roman letter at some period before the year 1774 while
still working for Sower. This statement contains all that is known of
his efforts at making Roman type during the years that he remained
with Sower, but there is the chance to be taken into account that the
_Mercury_ font was the result of his experimentation during this period
in an art which later he pursued with no small degree of local success.
On the same authority it is said, it will be remembered, that Jacob Bay
had left Sower in 1774, and in a near-by house in Germantown had set
up a type foundry on his own account. In this separate establishment,
it is likely that he was able to devote to the business such time
and energy as would be required in making a font of sufficient size
to accommodate the needs of such a newspaper as the _Pennsylvania
Mercury_. The fact of his separate foundry having been established
sometime in 1774, the reference in the Convention resolution of January
1775 to the "ingenious artist" at Germantown and the appearance in
April 1775 of the new font of type acclaimed by the publishers as
"an attempt to introduce so valuable an art into these colonies" are
considerations which, taken in their order, seem to give ground for an
assumption that it was Jacob Bay who cut and cast the letters for "The
first Work with Amer. Types." Until proof is forthcoming, however, this
must remain an assumption and nothing more.
It is certain that both Fox and Bay maintained their interest in
letter casting for many years. At the sale of Sower's confiscated
property in the year 1778 both of these artisans were present as
purchasers of type-making tools and material.[16] Bay especially
seems to have taken advantage of the opportunity to secure equipment
at this dispersal of his old master's goods. Among other purchases
which he made at the sale of what was probably at the time the largest
typographical establishment in the country were "a lot of letter moles"
at three pounds, "a Box with 9 Crusibles" at £5 15_s._, a quantity of
worn type at 8_d._ a pound and antimony worth £8 18_s._ 3_d._ He was
living at the time in a house rented from Sower,[17] and at the sale
of the printer's real property in September 1779 he purchased another
house belonging to the estate for £4200, a sum which he paid in two
installments before 28 October 1779.[18] In recording from tradition
the fact that Bay secured at this time one of the Sower houses,
McCulloch asserts that he purchased it from John Dunlap, the printer,
whom he paid in type of his own making. It is possible that he borrowed
the purchase price from Dunlap on this or a similar basis of repayment,
a transaction that would explain McCulloch's version of the story. It
is said that he conducted his foundry until the year 1789, and that
between this year and 1792 he sold the business to Francis Bailey. Fox
continued the making of type until his death in the year 1805, when
his son and partner Emmanuel Fox sold the equipment to Samuel Sower of
Baltimore, the son of Christopher Sower, the Second, of Germantown,
whose enterprise had been the determining cause of its existence.
McCulloch was emphatic in his praise of the sturdiness of Fox's types,
but when he remarked to Archibald Binny upon the excellent wearing
quality of a set of figures and capitals cast by the Germantown
founder, which he and his father before him had been using for many
years, that gentleman replied with scorn that they were "at first so
devilish ugly ... the longest using cannot mar their deformity."
The type-founding operations of Fox and of Bay have greater importance
in the history of the art in America than is usually conceded them.
When they are referred to at all by general writers, their activities
are mentioned briefly or in such a manner as to give one the impression
that their efforts were sporadic or tentative. It is with the work of
the Scotch founder Baine, using imported equipment, that the story
of American type founding is usually begun, but with the _Mercury_
font before us, cut and cast thirteen years before Baine's first
operations, and with assurances by McCulloch that Fox cut and cast the
letters used in the McKean edition of the _Acts of the Pennsylvania
Assembly_, printed by Francis Bailey in 1782,[19] and with references
by McCulloch to fonts produced by Bay, it seems certain that there
exists material which will require a revision of the story of American
type-founding origins. Beginning with the incontestable fact of the
successful _Mercury_ font of 1775 and accepting McCulloch's relation of
later events as a working hypothesis, there is seen to exist a field
for research which should prove productive of discoveries, inasmuch
as the fact and the tradition indicate a continuous activity on the
part of one or the other of these early Pennsylvania founders, Fox and
Bay, from 1775 to 1805. In the course of these years other founders,
better known to us, began their work, and between the years 1796 and
1801, more than one hundred American printers, from Massachusetts
to Georgia, purchased type from the foundry of Binny & Ronaldson of
Philadelphia.[20]
The identification of the various fonts of locally made type used in
Pennsylvania in the quarter century following "The first Work with
Amer. Types" would form an interesting chapter in the story of early
American type founding.
COMPOSED IN MONTICELLO TYPES
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Editor's Note: _Pennsylvania Archives_, 6th Series, 12:887-919. In
_Typographic Heritage_, the second printing of this essay, Sower's type
founding venture is more extensively treated, and the rare existing
issues of Part II of _Ein Geistliches Magazien_ are located (pp.
143-144).
[11] McCulloch, p. 181, gives the middle of December 1771 as the date
of Bay's arrival in Philadelphia. In Rupp's _Collection of Thirty
Thousand Names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French, and other Immigrants
in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1776_, p. 398, Jacob Bay is among the
arrivals on the Brig _Betsey_ on 1 December 1771. The name is spelled
Bey by McCulloch, Bäy by Rupp, Bay in various lists and documents
in the Pennsylvania Archives. The last-named spelling is used in the
present study on this authority.
[12] Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania ... (1776-1781), Volume the First (Philadelphia, 1782), p.
33.
[13] Ezra Stiles, _Literary Diary_. Ed. by F. B. Dexter. 3 vols. (New
York, 1901), I:549.
[14] Story & Humphreys's _Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal
Advertiser_. Evans 14477. No copy seen by Hildeburn.
[15] It well may be that this production was not a book or pamphlet
but a popular card game of the educational sort. See A. T. Hazen,
_A Bibliography of Horace Walpole_, p. 173, and the same author's
bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press, pp. 145-148.
[16] Pennsylvania Archives, 6th Series, 12:887-919.
[17] McCulloch's statement is borne out by the inventory of Sower's
real estate in Pennsylvania Archives, 6th Series, 12:872-873.
[18] Pennsylvania Archives, 6th Series, 12:918-919.
[19] McCulloch gives the date indefinitely as about the year 1784. His
father, John McCulloch, from whom he received much information embodied
in the "Additions," was at one time foreman in Bailey's shop.
[20] _One Hundred Years_, MacKellar, Smiths and Jordan Foundry,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1896), p. 12, where is given a list of
printers found in Binny & Ronaldson's ledgers from 1796 to 1801.
The original books are in the Typographic Library and Museum of the
American Type Founders Company, now a part of the Columbia University
Library.
RONALD B. McKERROW
_Typographic Debut_
Notes on the Long ſ and other Characters in Early English Printing.
From _An Introduction to Bibliography_ by Ronald B. McKerrow. Copyright 1927
by the Clarendon Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
_The letters ſ and s_
From the beginning of printing until towards the end of the eighteenth
century ſ was used initially and medially and s finally, following
of course the practice of the MSS. There were certain exceptions:
Sweynheim and Pannartz, setting up the first press in Italy at Subiaco
in 1465, used a type transitional in character though with marked
gothic features, which used the long ſ in all positions, a practice
which may have been imitated from Neapolitan MSS. of the period. Other
printers sometimes followed the same usage in Roman type.
The first book to discard ſ is said to have been Joseph Ames's
_Typographical Antiquities_ of 1749, but this was regarded as an
eccentricity, and the normal ſ is used in Herkert's edition of
1785-90. The effective introduction of the reform has been credited to
John Bell who in his _British Theatre_ of 1791 used s throughout, the
same practice being followed in the Boydell _Shakespeare_, of which
vol. I appeared in 1792.[21]
It is worth noting that Capell in his _Prolusions_, 1760, had
attempted a modification of the usual practice. He there uses s
medially for a z-sound, retaining ſ for an s-sound, thus: easily,
visible, rais'd, &c., but verſes, purſuit, ſatiſfy.
In London printing the reform was adopted very rapidly and, save in
work of an intentionally antiquarian character, we do not find much
use of ſ in the better kind of printing after 1800. The provincial
presses seem, however, to have retained it somewhat longer and it is
said to have been used at Oxford until 1824.
_The letters i, j, u and v_
As a general rule, until early in the seventeenth century there was
only one capital letter, I (in Roman) or [Illustration: J] in black-letter),
for the letters now represented by I and J; and only one capital letter
V (in Roman) or [Illustration: U, V]] (in black-letter) for the
letters U and V. As was pointed out by F. W. Bourdillon, this has in
early French books the odd result that a _libraire juré_ is liable to
appear in capitals as "I V R E." When reprinting a black-letter text
in Roman it seems logical to represent these by I and V in all cases,
though some editors have preferred to use J and U, perhaps because the
black-letter forms approximate more closely to these letters in shape.
In lower-case most founts had i, j, u and v, but j was only used in
the combination ij (often a ligature) or in numerals, as xiij, while
v and u were differentiated according to position, not according to
pronunciation; v being always used at the beginning of a word and u
always medially.
Thus the following are the normal spellings: iudge, inijcere or
iniicere (= _lat._ injicere), vse, euent, vua (= _lat._ uva). Certain
printers varied the practice in a few books, but the rule followed
by most was absolutely rigid. It is quite incorrect to say that the
letters were used indifferently, or that the sixteenth-century usage
was the converse of the modern.... Rimes and puns show that the
Elizabethans _called_ V by the name we now give to U (hence W is called
double-u). I have failed to discover the originator of the modern name
"ve...."
In England no example of the distinction [between i and j, u and v]
seems to have been found earlier than J. Banister's _History of Man_,
printed by John Day in 1578. The new method is followed in a few other
books of Day, and in 1579-80 we find it followed by Henry Middleton
in reprinting a Latin Bible from a Frankfurt edition in which the
distinction had been made. From that time onwards to the end of the
century we find a certain number of books following the new system
either completely or with certain modifications, and thereafter the
number gradually increased until between 1620 and 1630 it became the
general rule.
The majuscule U at first employed was of the general design of the
lower-case u with a small tail or serif at the foot (which has been
revived in some modern fonts). The modern U begins to come into use in
English printing about the middle of the seventeenth century.
_The letter w_
In early fonts this is often represented by vv. In later times the same
is often found in fonts of extra large size (presumably of foreign
origin), and in ordinary fonts when there happened to be a run on the w
and the compositor had not enough.
_Ligatures_
Two or more letters joined together, or differing in design from the
separate letters, and cast on one type-body, such as [ct] or [ffi],
are called a ligature. There were two reasons for their being so
cast, custom and convenience.