PRINTING 



641 



1670 



sents the letter m : a is the face, b the body, and c the nicks or notches. Whatever 

 size of type is used, each letter must be perfectly true in its angles, otherwise the 

 form could never be locked up. Besides letters, there are types for 

 commas, periods, quotation-marks, semicolons, and all other charac- 

 ters used in printing. 



Type-metal is an alloy of lead and antimony, the usual propor- 

 tions being one part of antimony to three of lead ; but a superior 

 and harder kind is sometimes made by alloying two parts of 

 lead with one of antimony and one of tin. Both of these alloys 

 take a sharp impression from the mould or matrix, owing to their 

 expansion on solidification, and they are hard enough to stand the 

 work of the press, without being brittle or liable to fracture. 

 Roman and Italic types are the letters most commonly used in print- 

 ing books in Europe and America, and these have undergone every change in form 

 that fancy or taste could suggest : fat-faced, or those which print black ; skeleton, 

 or those which print with a fine, uniform line; antique, or those with an almost uni- 

 form thickness, but strong and heavy ; clarendon, a modification of antique ; expanded, 

 or letters widened horizontally ; Elzevir and compressed, or tall thin letters ; Basker- 

 ville, a good, round, bold face ; Italic, inclining to the left, as well as to the right ; and 

 all the varieties of church-text, German-text, Gothic, and Elizabethan ; old cut and old 

 style ; script, &c. The scale of sizes given on p. 642, from Savage, shows the varia- 

 tions in the depth of the type cast by the different founders. 



BILL OF PICA. WEIGHT 800 POUNDS. ITALIC ^TH. 



VOL. ill. 



TT 



