It has also opened up several new industries, and now photo-lithographs, collotypes, half-tone blocks, and prints from line blocks made by the swelled gelatine or other processes, can be so wonderfully like the original, that a page of old printing made by one or other of these methods will often deceive an ordinary purchaser. There are many such facsimiles in the market, and the best advice I can give as to them is that very great attention should be given to the _paper_ on which they are done, as this will often give the secret away. The texture and appearance of old paper is worthy of careful study, because nearly all the photo-mechanical processes need a paper which is radically different to the thick good rag-made papers which were used before cheap modern papers were thought of.
Type founding in England was first carried on in the sixteenth century, when John Day made some Anglo-Saxon types for Archbishop Parker.
Moxon, who wrote the “Mechanics of Printing” in 1693, issued the first English specimen sheet of types in 1669, and in 1776 William Caslon, “Letter-founder of London,” issued a specimen of his printing types.
[Illustration: Page from William Caslon’s “Specimen of Printing Types.” (_London_, 1766.) [_To face p._ 98.]
John Baskerville, who lived and worked about the same period, was also a very eminent typefounder, but Baskerville’s types were too thin in the up-strokes to be considered equal to Caslon’s. Since that time such sheets of types have become common.
Late in the nineteenth century William Morris revived several of the old English block-letter types, and called them by the old names, “Chaucer,” “Golden,” “Troy.”
AMERICAN ART REVIEW, I.--1880, pp. 75-80. _Boston._
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BUCHER, B.--Die Faiencen von Oiron. _Wien_, 1879.
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