A Specimen of Printing Types, by W. Caslon and Son, Letter Founders, London

What it is

The house specimen of the Caslon foundry in London, printed by John Towers and dated MDCCLXIV. There is no preface and no price list. Display alphabets from Five Lines Pica open the book, then two-line sizes, then every text size from French Canon down to Nonpareil, roman paired with italic, some in numbered cuts, each set in the opening of Cicero's first speech against Catiline, closed with the alphabet. Minion is set instead with a passage from Acts, Paul before Agrippa. Then come the learned founts: eight sizes of Greek, Hebrew with and without points, Gothic, Coptic, Ethiopic, Etruscan, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Saxon and black-letter. Flower pages follow, noting that the foundry was begun in 1720 and finished in 1763. It closes with two leaded sizes set in Horace, credits the ink to Beale Blackwell, and offers to show the other types any way the buyer wishes.

Why read it now

This is how the face that set much of English and colonial American printing was shown to its buyers. The method is the fixed control text: one Cicero passage in every size, so the buyer compares letters, not words. Two smaller moves still teach. Crediting the ink maker tells the printer the black on the page can be reproduced, the same job a modern spec sheet does when it names the paper stock or the screen settings behind a sample. And the showings printed open answer a practical doubt by showing the same type with extra space between the lines, the way it will actually sit in a book. What has dated: the book assumes an expert buyer who knows the trade sizes, it states no price or terms, and the exotic founts, Arabic among them, appear as one size each to prove range; the OCR cannot show how well they were cut. Use: in any sample kit or product demo, name the supplier or setting that controls the result, and show the product in its normal use, not only at its best.

Passages worth keeping

The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.

What it teaches best

• Specimen as proof
• Demonstration ad

Read the original archive.org