Comparative Account of Fount Composition from 1598

An edition of the letters of the geographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-98) was published in 1887 from a manuscript collection at that time in the possession of the London Dutch Church. ¹ This manuscript had been assembled in the seventeenth century by Ortelius's nephew Jacobus Colius ('James Cole' in English, 'Jacob Cool' in Flemish) (1563-1628), called Ortelianus, a prominent merchant, naturalist, and poet resident in London throughout his adult life, and comprised many letters to and from both Ortelius and Colius. ² Alas the Ortelius/Colius letters were finally withdrawn by the Dutch Church from the Guildhall Library in 1955 and dispersed through subsequent sales. ³

This short note presents an uncollected letter from the famous printer Franciscus Raphelengius Junior to Colius, dated 13 February 1598, not published in the 1887 collection and indeed unnoticed until now. Raphelengius Junior, also known as Raphelengius II (1568-1643), was one of the illustrious Antwerp/Leiden family of scholar-printers of that name ('van Ravelingen' in Flemish, 'Raphelengien' in French). ⁴ His father, also Francis cus Raphelengius (or Franciscus Raphelengius I), had been the son-in-law of the great printer Christophorus Plantinus and assisted with his most famous typo graphical feat, the Antwerp Polyglot (1568-72). The letter has been unnoticed until now because, unlike other known pieces of the Colius correspondence, it was never associated with the Dutch Church manuscript, but was instead inserted by Colius into a youthful manuscript composition of his own on cryptography, now in the Sloane Manuscript Collection in the British Library. It passed to Sloane via another, later London merchant, linguist, and member of the Dutch Church, of French-Flemish extraction, but naturalized, Francis Lodwick (1619-94). ⁵

The letter is worth bringing to light because it is an early discussion from the point of view of a prominent printer of fount composition, or the letter frequencies within given founts. Printers typically ordered by total number of letters or weight, and left it to the type founders they employed to work out the most suitable frequencies. ⁶ In the sixteenth century, for instance, the Plantin press ordered type merely by the total number of letters, leaving the type founders themselves to apply their 'registers', or fount schemes. This total number was equivalent to a given number of complete formes of set text. ⁷ Actual discussions of registers are very rare, and, as the editors of Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises state, printed schemes only appeared in English from John Smith's Printer's Grammar of 1755. Consultation of that work shows that even at that late date Smith was rather vague, providing sample tables for an English fount without further explanation, and only a few rules-of-thumb about what to expect if setting in French or Latin. ⁸ Moxon himself had discussed founts solely by total weights; ⁹ and a roughly con temporary letter of 4 February 1669 from the London type founder Joseph Leigh to the Oxford Architypographus Samuel Clarke, noted by Harry Carter, commented on fount composition in a singularly vague fashion: 'imperfections' in the (here a new Greek) fount will only be detected when actual typesetting commences, 'and then you will perceiue what sorts yo ur worke runns most vpon and so you must cast ouer such sorts (which shall soon be done on notice) which hee [the London bookseller Robert Scott, Clarke's agent in London] knows is ordinary and always in all founts of letter.'

In assembling the new fount Leigh had clearly implemented his craft knowl edge as a type founder and expected the Oxford printers, who also acquired his punches, to fine-tune the proportions of his fount by actually deploying it and casting extra sorts as their work required. ¹⁰

Colius's earlier cryptographical work had concentrated on exploiting differences in orthography between the west European vernaculars to ascertain the language of the plaintext below the cipher text. Colius, as his method implies, was as a young man a keen reader of Giovanni Baptista Porta's seminal De furtivis literarum...