![]() ![]() The first works which left the hands of the printers were astonishingly like the manuscripts of the same period. a radical change in the aspect of the book. Historian of print and typography Leo Olschki observes that “the discovery of typographic printing did not all at once produce. What can this capsule history of black letter tell us? First, it suggests that the earliest European printed documents emulated hand-written or scribal manuscripts. Morison writes that the first type engravers employed by Johannes Gutenberg—the German goldsmith traditionally credited with the invention of movable type and the printing press in Europe in about 1450—cut their letters in textus quadratus, and the first printing houses that appeared in England in the latter quarter of the same century imported French versions of the same typeface. with consequent deepening blackness of aspect in the page.†3 This “deepening blackness†is the scribal antecedent of black-letter print, and the varied economies of writing practiced in English, French, and German monasteries were eventually formalized in styles like textus quadratus and textus precissus. Under pressures of time and economy these scribes began to use a “frankly hurried version of the minuscule,†one in which “condensation becomes obvious.†The need to write quickly and in as little space as possible results in a “thickening of the strokes. The typographer Stanley Morison describes the reasons for this scribal change as practical and economic: busy scribes in monasteries and scriptoria needed to write quickly and condense letters to save parchment or paper. These new styles looked different from the rounded Carolingian: the letters were more angular and closer together, the pen strokes thicker. The Carolingian minuscule—a spacious, rounded style of calligraphy similar in appearance to modern roman—“spread throughout France, had a profound influence in Italy, Spain, and England, became the dominant handwriting of western Europe.†2 Over time, however, scribal styles began to diverge regionally, and a new style of calligraphy began to appear in the ecclesiastical documents produced in the medieval monasteries of England, France, and Germany. Black letter and roman are both descendants of the Carolingian minuscule, the style of writing that Charlemagne decreed be used in all church books in 780. A form of it is still in regular use in Germany, and in occasional use (under the name of ‘Gothic’ or ‘Old English’) for fancy printing in England.†1 As the OED’s definition suggests, black letter has come generically to identify “fancy printing in England,†but its evolution and use are more complex than this explanation indicates. ![]() ![]() The Oxford English Dictionary defines black letter as a “name (which came into use about 1600) for the form of type used by the early printers, as distinguished from the ‘Roman’ type, which subsequently prevailed. Pepys’s note raises at least two questions about the printing of broadside ballads: First, and most basically, what is black letter and why did Pepys attach such value to it? Second, if broadside ballads were set in black letter by English printers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, does this material fact tell us anything about the ways in which these ballads were read or appreciated, that is, the cultural uses to which they were put? The tenor of Pepys’s note suggests his preservationist bent: he has improved Selden’s original collection by adding many “elder†pieces the form “peculiar thereto†is one that dates to the sixteenth century, “black letter, with pictures.†Finally, Pepys finds it unfortunate that this format was abandoned by 1700†(for cheapness sake) wholly laid aside.†In this note that introduces his ballad collection, Samuel Pepys attaches particular importance to the visual properties of the ballads, particularly the black-letter type in which they were printed and the pictures that illustrate them. Selden, improv'd by the addition of many pieces elder thereto in time the whole continued to the year 1700, when the form till then peculiar thereto, vizt, of the black letter, with pictures, seems (for cheapness sake) wholly laid aside, for that of the white letters, without pictures.†–Samuel Pepys €œMy collection of ballads, begun by Mr. ![]()
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