A Note on the Type in Which This Book Is Set
⁂
This book is set (on the linotype) in Original Old Style. Of the history of it very little is known; in practically its present form, it has been used for many years for fine book and magazine work. The design of its lower case letters would indicate a derivation from English and Dutch Old Styles of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the period which reached its culmination in the work of William Caslon. The blackness of its capitals shows clearly, however, that their design was modified in imitation of the Modern faces which so completely displaced the Old Styles during the first half of the nineteenth century. Original Old Style possesses in a high degree those two qualities by which a book type must be judged; first legibility, and second, the ability to impart a definite character to a page without intruding itself upon the reader’s consciousness.
Set up and electrotyped by Vail-Ballou
Press Inc., Binghamton, N. Y. plates
engraved by Beck Engraving Co.,
New York. Paper furnished by
Tileston—Hollingsworth Co.,
Hyde Park, Mass. Printed
and bound by the Plimpton
Press, Norwood, Mass.
