RONALD B. McKERROW Typographic Debut

Notes on the Long ſ and other Characters in Early English Printing.

From An Introduction to Bibliography by Ronald B. McKerrow. Copyright 1927 by the Clarendon Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

The letters ſ and s

From the beginning of printing until towards the end of the eighteenth century ſ was used initially and medially and s finally, following of course the practice of the MSS. There were certain exceptions: Sweynheim and Pannartz, setting up the first press in Italy at Subiaco in 1465, used a type transitional in character though with marked gothic features, which used the long ſ in all positions, a practice which may have been imitated from Neapolitan MSS. of the period. Other printers sometimes followed the same usage in Roman type.

The first book to discard ſ is said to have been Joseph Ames's Typographical Antiquities of 1749, but this was regarded as an eccentricity, and the normal ſ is used in Herkert's edition of 1785-90. The effective introduction of the reform has been credited to John Bell who in his British Theatre of 1791 used s throughout, the same practice being followed in the Boydell Shakespeare, of which vol. I appeared in 1792.[21]

It is worth noting that Capell in his Prolusions, 1760, had attempted a modification of the usual practice. He there uses s medially for a z-sound, retaining ſ for an s-sound, thus: easily, visible, rais'd, &c., but verſes, purſuit, ſatiſfy.

In London printing the reform was adopted very rapidly and, save in work of an intentionally antiquarian character, we do not find much use of ſ in the better kind of printing after 1800. The provincial presses seem, however, to have retained it somewhat longer and it is said to have been used at Oxford until 1824.

The letters i, j, u and v

As a general rule, until early in the seventeenth century there was only one capital letter, I (in Roman) or (in black-letter), for the letters now represented by I and J; and only one capital letter V (in Roman) or (in black-letter) for the letters U and V. As was pointed out by F. W. Bourdillon, this has in early French books the odd result that a libraire juré is liable to appear in capitals as "I V R E." When reprinting a black-letter text in Roman it seems logical to represent these by I and V in all cases, though some editors have preferred to use J and U, perhaps because the black-letter forms approximate more closely to these letters in shape.

In lower-case most founts had i, j, u and v, but j was only used in the combination ij (often a ligature) or in numerals, as xiij, while v and u were differentiated according to position, not according to pronunciation; v being always used at the beginning of a word and u always medially.

Thus the following are the normal spellings: iudge, inijcere or iniicere (= lat. injicere), vse, euent, vua (= lat. uva). Certain printers varied the practice in a few books, but the rule followed by most was absolutely rigid. It is quite incorrect to say that the letters were used indifferently, or that the sixteenth-century usage was the converse of the modern.... Rimes and puns show that the Elizabethans called V by the name we now give to U (hence W is called double-u). I have failed to discover the originator of the modern name "ve...."

In England no example of the distinction [between i and j, u and v] seems to have been found earlier than J. Banister's History of Man, printed by John Day in 1578. The new method is followed in a few other books of Day, and in 1579-80 we find it followed by Henry Middleton in reprinting a Latin Bible from a Frankfurt edition in which the distinction had been made. From that time onwards to the end of the century we find a certain number of books following the new system either completely or with certain modifications, and thereafter the number gradually increased until between 1620 and 1630 it became the general rule.

The majuscule U at first employed was of the general design of the lower-case u with a small tail or serif at the foot (which has been revived in some modern fonts). The modern U begins to come into use in English printing about the middle of the seventeenth century.

The letter w

In early fonts this is often represented by vv. In later times the same is often found in fonts of extra large size (presumably of foreign origin), and in ordinary fonts when there happened to be a run on the w and the compositor had not enough.

Ligatures

Two or more letters joined together, or differing in design from the separate letters, and cast on one type-body, such as or ffi, are called a ligature. There were two reasons for their being so cast, custom and convenience.

In the early fonts the great majority of the ligatures were due to custom alone and represented a following of scribal practice which commonly joined together certain pairs of letters. Thus in the fount used by Caxton in the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers we find such ligatures as ad, be, ce, ch, co, de, en, in, ll, pa, pe, po, pp, re, ro, te, &c., all of which owe their existence solely to imitation of MSS. of the time. Many of these customary ligatures persisted throughout the sixteenth century, and even later in black-letter founts ... while a few have combinations with certain capitals such as Ch, Sh, Th, Wh.... Even in Roman founts we find , ꝏ, &c., of which has persisted until modern times. In Italic fonts we also find es, us, st, and others. (The original Aldine Italic had many more.)

When a letter part of which overhangs the body of the type, such as f or , happens to be followed by such an upright letter as l or h, or by an i, the overhanging part or "kern" of the first letter comes in contact with the top of the second, and either the two types do not fit together properly or the kern of the first letter gets broken off. To avoid this, most fonts even at present have ligatures of f with l, i and another f (the end of the curve of the first letter or the dot of the i being suppressed), and of ff with l and i. In early times these ligatures for convenience included also a set with ſ. The f and ligatures are also presumably copied from the MSS., where they frequently occur, though not in all hands....

Punctuation marks

/ In quite early fonts this sign is used for the comma, or perhaps we should rather say to indicate any short pause in reading.... The modern comma seems to have been introduced into England about 1521 (in Roman type) and 1535 (in black-letter). It occurs in Venetian printing before 1500.

? The query mark seems to have been used in England from about 1521.

; The semicolon seems to have been first used in England about 1569, but was not common until 1580 or thereabouts.

. The full stop was commonly used before as well as after Roman, and sometimes also arabic, numerals until about 1580. Thus ".xii." It was also used before and after i (.i. = id est) and ſ (.ſ. = scilicet), and I have found it once with q = cue: "as though his .q. was then to speake."

‘ and ’ were used indifferently in such abbreviations as th’ or th‘ for ‘the.’ It may be noted that ‘t’is’ or ‘t‘is’ (instead of ‘ ’tis’) was so common in the Elizabethan period that it should perhaps be regarded as normal.

" Inverted commas were, until late in the seventeenth century, frequently used at the beginnings of lines to call attention to sententious remarks. Modern editors have occasionally regarded such passages as quotations and completed the quotes, which is generally wrong. So far as I have observed they were not especially associated with quotations until the eighteenth century, although, owing to their use for calling especial attention to a passage, they often appear in passages which are actually quoted.

Even after they become clearly used to mark quotations they generally appear at the beginning of the passage and at the beginning of every line, but not always at the end. The practice of closing the quotation with two apostrophes seems to be comparatively modern. (I have found it in the middle of the eighteenth century, but it does not seem to have been regularly observed until much later.)

Inverted commas, as well as many other signs, Greek letters (sometimes inverted) &c., were used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printing as reference marks directing to side- or footnotes.

( ) were often used in the sixteenth century where we now use quotation marks, and were indeed the general way of indicating a short quotation, e.g.:

"she was neuer heard to giue any the lie, nor so much as to (thou) any in anger."—STUBBES, Christal Glasse, 1591.

They also seem sometimes to be used merely for emphasis, e.g.:

"What yesterday was (Greene) now's seare and dry"—COOKE, Greene's Tu Quoque, 1614.

[ ] Square brackets are common in some Elizabethan fonts, being used as we now use round ones. They were also sometimes used instead of round ones for the purposes mentioned above; e.g.:

"which is as much as [of olde] or [in times past]."—PLUTARCH, Morals, 1603.

COMPOSED IN CASLON 337 TYPES

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