Note 171 — XVI

The phrase could be applied to the forms of the letters in the books, without regard to the quality or any peculiarity of the printing or the binding. Two forms of writing were then in use: one, a black angular, and somewhat condensed form of Gothic character, which is defined in Fournier’s Manuel typographique as lettres de forme, or letters of precision; the other, a round, light-faced, more careless and more popular form of letters, named by him as lettres de somme. To this day, carefully written but disconnected letters, whether upright or inclined, are colloquially known as print letters. The doctrinal which was put in form may have been written in lettres de forme. The phrase getté en molle could have been fairly applied to these precise letters, in contradistinction to the more careless shapes of the lettres de somme.