"In 1844 the Chiswick Press printed for Messrs. Longmans 'The Diary of Lady Willoughby,' and revived for this purpose one of Caslon's founts. This was an important step in the right direction, and its success induced Messrs. Miller & Richard of Edinburgh to engrave a series of 'old style' founts, with one of which this catalogue is printed. Most other type-founders now cast similar type, and without doubt if their customers, the printers, demanded it, they would expend some of the energy and talent which now goes in cutting Japanese-American and sham seventeenth-century monstrosities in endeavouring to produce once more the restrained and beautiful forms of the early printers, until the day when the current handwriting may be elegant enough to be again used as a model for the type-punch engraver.
"Next in importance to the type are the ornaments, initial letters, and other decorations which can be printed along with it. These, it is obvious, should always be designed and engraved so as to harmonise with the printed page regarded as a whole. Hence, illustrations drawn only with reference to purely pictorial effects are entirely out of place in a book, that is, if we desire seriously to make it beautiful.
As the material naturally modifies the shapes of the letters cut or formed on its surface, and as the object bearing the inscription affects their arrangement, it is essential that the inscription cutter make himself familiar with various stones, metals, woods, &c., with the various chisels and gravers which are properly employed on them, and with fine inscriptions or examples of good pieces of lettering (see pp. 388, 237).
A knowledge of penmanship will be found useful, and the pen may be appealed to to decide questions of abstract form in regard to letters which have come from pen forms (_e.g._ Roman Small-Letters, Italics, &c.). And in this connection it may be noted again that the "slanted-pen forms" (pp. 305, 43) are generally the most practical.
_Engraving on Metal._--Letters incised in metal may most nearly approach pen forms, as the fine grain of the metal and the comparatively small scale of the work allow of fine "thin strokes." The engraver, however, while following generally the "thicks" and "thins" of the penman, allows the metal and the tool and, to a large extent, his own hand, to decide and characterise the precise forms and their proportions.