Note 188 — Chapter IV · LETTER-FOUNDING AS AN ENGLISH MECHANICAL TRADE. 1477–1830.

Psalmanazar, in referring to Samuel Palmer’s projected second part to his History of Printing, which should describe all the branches of the trade, says that this project, “though but then as it were in embryo, met with such early and strenuous opposition from the respective bodies of letter-founders, printers and bookbinders, under an ill-grounded apprehension that the discovery of the mystery of those arts, especially the two first, would render them cheap and contemptible . . . that he was forced to set it aside” (Timperley, p. 647).