Supplement to Specimen (1828)
A short supplement, 15 scanned pages, issued by the Sheffield type foundry Blake, Garnett & Co. to show faces added since its main specimen book.
What it is
A short supplement, 15 scanned pages, issued by the Sheffield type foundry Blake, Garnett & Co. to show faces added since its main specimen book. Each page names a face and size, such as Four Lines Pica, English No. 4 leaded, Small Pica Nos. 7 and 8 and Bourgeois, and sets it in running text. The display pages did not survive OCR. The text pages use the standard filler of the trade: Cicero's first speech against Catiline ('Quousque tandem'), lines from Thomson's hymn on the seasons and Milton's Il Penseroso, Racine's Andromaque in French, an English essay on how humour in writing differs from wit in conversation, and a mock merchant's letter reporting two months of sales and prices. Full alphabets with the ligatures Æ and Œ, the pound sign and figures follow each setting.
Why read it now
Read it as the plainest form of the demonstration sale: no claims and no prices, only the product doing its job in the settings where the buyer will use it. Each face appears in literary prose, Latin, French verse and a commercial letter, so a printer can judge colour, spacing and the full character set for the jobs on his own bench, from books to merchants' circulars. The mock sales letter is a small piece of targeting, since job work for merchants was a large share of a printer's trade, and the foundry shows its type doing exactly that job. The method holds; font and software sellers now let buyers type their own words into a live preview, the same idea with the buyer choosing the sample. What has dated: the Latin filler tells a modern reader nothing about the product, and a supplement with no prices or order terms leaves the close to the main book. Use it: when you sell a tool, show it on three or four real jobs your buyer does, including a dull commercial one.
Passages worth keeping
Humour in writing is the offspring of reflection, and is by nice touches and labour brought to wear the negligent air of nature
الفكاهة المكتوبة ثمرة تفكير وتعب، يشتغل عليها الكاتب حتى تبدو عفوية طبيعية.
People are pleased at wit for the same reason they are fond of diversion of any kind, not for the worth of the thing, but because the mind is not able to bear an intense train of thinking
يحب الناس الطرفة لأنها استراحة، فالعقل لا يحتمل التفكير المركز طويلًا، لا لأن الطرفة نفسها ذات قيمة كبيرة.
We have the pleasure to annex for your information a memorandum containing particulars of the sales made here during the last two months, and of our arrivals to this day.
رسالة تجارية نموذجية ترفق كشفًا بالمبيعات والشحنات، وضعها المسبك ليرى صاحب المطبعة كيف يبدو الخط في مطبوعات التجار.
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?
مطلع خطبة شيشرون ضد كاتلين ومعناه: إلى متى تستغل صبرنا يا كاتلين؟ وكان النص المعتاد في عينات الحروف في ذلك العصر.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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