Note 154 — XV

This taste for variety in the shape of letters was more clearly exhibited in Greek and German than in Roman types. The Greek types of the sixteenth century are so full of ligatures and variants, that they are undecipherable to the scholar who has been taught the language only in modern text books. So far from trying to make letters readable, the literati of that period tried to make them obscure: they were evidently determined not to make the acquisition of the language easy for their successors. When Francis I of France established the royal printing office, he engaged a skillful Greek penman to design additional varieties of contractions. Two centuries afterward, Pierre Fournier, the younger, a type-founder of Paris, commended the Greek types of his own manufacture as much less complicated than any Greek types then in use. But I count 776 characters in the font. More than 300 of Fournier’s contractions, once esteemed as admirable graces, have been rejected by modern type-founders. Blades, who has made a careful analysis of the characters used by Caxton, shows that in the face described by him as 1 there are at least 167 distinct characters. But 24 of these are capitals and 81 are double letters. In faces 2 and 2* there are 380 [anc299] characters, exclusive of figures, spaces and marks of punctuation.