Note 99 — Chapter I · THE ENGLISH TYPE BODIES AND FACES.

This reform, which was an incident in the general typographical revolution at the close of last century, is usually credited to John Bell, who discarded the long ſ in his British Theatre, about 1791. Long before Bell’s time, however, in 1749, Ames had done the same thing in his Typographical Antiquities, and was noted as an eccentric in consequence. Hansard notes the retention of the long ſ in books printed at the Oxford University press as late as 1824.