History of Old English Letter-Foundries. By Talbot Baines Reed.
Stock.)—This is a very interesting and unpretentious book, which it has taken several years to prepare. "Letter-founding bidding fair," Mr. Reed says, "to break all her old ties and take new departures undreamed•of by those heroes of the punch and matrix and mould who made her what we found her," it has seemed to him "not undutiful to attempt to gather together into a connected form the numerous records of the Old English Letter-Founders scattered throughout our literary and typographical history, with a view to preserve the memory of those to whose labonrs English printing is indebted for so much of its glory." Mr. Reed's book has been very methodically prepared. In the first and second chapters, he discusses fully the origin of the various English type-bodies and faces, and of learned, foreign, and peculiar types, such as Greek, Arabic, type for the blind, &c. In the third chapter, he sum- marises the investigations made by William Blades, to whom he makes all acknowledgment, into the lives of Caxton and his more immediate successors. Of the chapters that follow this, the sixth, which tells the story of the Oxford Press from its foundation in 1468, is exceptionally readable. Special founders, English and Scotch— not all " pious " in the theological sense, as the life of Baakerville proves—such as Moxon, Carden, Wilson, Cottrell, the Frye, Jackson, Martin, and the minor founders of the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the early part of the nineteenth, century—are dealt with in independent chapters. No doubt some epecialiste in this subject will object to certain of Mr. Reed's theories, such as his view of early printing by means of " sculptofusi" characters, and possibly others may discover him to be not absolutely accurate in all details. But the ordinary uninitiated reader will find this work, which is provided with a most ample index, not only quite enough for his purposes, but eminently enjoyable besides. The number of illustrations, which reproduce, among other things, the various kinds of type used in the past, add greatly to the value and general interest of the book. The specimens from what is known as the Glasgow Homer of Double- Pica Greek, cut by Alexander Wilson in 1756, ought to excite the envy of modern type-founders, and amply justifies the description of that Scotch artist as egregius ille typorum artifex.
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