Note 509 — Chapter XI · WILLIAM CASLON, 1720.

This celebrated typographer was born at Saluzzo, in the Sardinian States, in 1740. At an early age he visited Rome, and obtained a situation in the printing office of the Propaganda, where he gained great credit for his printing. In 1768 he settled at Parma, where he published many famous works, and established a European reputation. His Homer in 3 vols. folio, published in 1808, is his most famous work. He never visited England, although one or two works were printed by him in our language, viz., Lord Orford’s Castle of Otranto, 1791, 8vo, Gray’s Poems, 1793, 4to, Thomson’s Seasons, 1794, folio and quarto. He died in 1813, and his widow finished and published in 1818 the Manuale Tipografico, 2 vols., royal 4to, a most sumptuous work, containing upwards of 250 exquisite specimens of type and ornaments. A monument was erected to him in Saluzzo in 1872. Of Bodoni’s office at Parma the following interesting particulars are preserved in Dr. Smith’s Tour on the Continent, 2nd edit., vol. iii: “A very great curiosity in its way, is the Parma printing-office, carried on under the direction of M. Bodoni, who has brought that art to a degree of perfection hardly known before him. Nothing could exceed his civility in showing us numbers of the beautiful productions of his press, of which he gave us some specimens, as well as the operations of casting and finishing the letters. The materials of his type are antimony and lead, as in other places, but he showed us some of steel. He has sets of all the known alphabets, with diphthongs, accents, and other peculiarities in the greatest perfection. His Greek types are peculiarly beautiful, though of a different kind of beauty from those of old Stephens, and perhaps less free and flowing in their forms.”