A set of three views of the interior of a French foundry, from an _Encyclopædia_[191] of about this date, presents a few interesting points of contrast between foreign and English methods. In the first view the process of punch-cutting is displayed.[192] One man is finishing a punch with his file; another is striking a counter-punch (with perhaps undue energy) into the steel face of a punch; while the third, at a large forge, is hammering a piece of steel in readiness for the engraver. The second view shows metal making, casting, breaking-off, and { 117} rubbing, in operation. There are two men at the large furnace, one watching the melting of antimony in a crucible, the other pouring off the mixed metal into ingots. At the small metal pot with three divisions, in the centre of the room, are three casters, one of whom is about to cast, another has finished his “throw,” and the third is loosening his spring so as to open the mould. At the table in the rear sit two girls, one breaking off, the other rubbing. The third view represents a dressing-room, where a girl is setting up the rubbed types on a stick. The dresser is ploughing the “break” from the foot of a stick of types, which is placed in the blocks, not lengthways along the bench, but across it. An apprentice sitting at the table completes the dressing, holding one end of the stick tilted while he passes his scraper over the front and back of the row of types. Drawings of all the tools and parts of tools used in typefounding complete the illustration.
Fournier, the French Moxon, in 1764 devoted the latter part of vol. i of his _Manuel Typographique_[193] to the appliances and instruments used in type-casting. His work enters in detail into the form and use of every tool used in every department of the trade, from the cutting of the punch to the storage of the finished types, giving careful and accurate woodcuts of each. Allowing for a few national peculiarities, and certain improvements in casting, there is scarcely anything but the date of the book to distinguish it from a mechanical handbook to typefounding in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The operations of punch-cutting and justifying appear to have been kept a mystery from the earliest days of the trade. To lay minds, the one work of the founder was to cast types; but the preliminary operations on which his whole reputation as a founder depended, were little understood by any but the founder himself. And even he, as in the case of the first two Caslons, carried on this part of the mystery stealthily, and with closed doors even against his own apprentices. In many cases, especially with the originators of the great foundries, Caslon, Cottrell and Jackson, it was the master himself who designed and cut his own punches. It was not till the unusual demand for artists at the close of last century broke down this exclusiveness that outsiders arose to work for the trade in general. And even these, it was the policy and endeavour of each founder to attach to himself, treating him as a gentleman at large, and free from the obligations imposed on his other workmen.