Type

a right-angled, prism-shaped piece of metal, wood, or other material, having a raised letter or character on one end, used in letter-press printing. The raised end is called the face. A groove is cut across the opposite end to enable the type to stand erect more readily. One or more nicks across one side of the body, near the bottom, enable the typesetter to set his type right side out and up without looking at the face. As compared with an engraved plate, pieces of this sort, designed to be set together to form a page, are called movable type. The first type were cut in wood and, indeed, wooden type in the large sizes are still much in use for job printing, but ordinary type are now cast from an alloy consisting of three parts of lead, one part of antimony, and a slight addition of copper and tin.

There are many styles of type. Some of the styles in general use other than the regular body letter are the gothic, antique, Jensen, De Vinne, script, typewriter, etc. A complete assortment of the characters of a particular size and style is known as a font. Typefounders sell usually by weight. In a font of 1,000 pounds it is customary to allow 514 pounds for roman lowercase, 86 for capitals, 20 for small capitals, 40 for figures, 28 for points, 85 for spaces, 122 for quadrats, 5 for fractions, 73 for italic lowercase, 23 for italic capitals, and 4 for reference marks, etc. There are about 200 different characters in a full font. Then, too, there is more need of some letters than of others. Printers find that they need about 60 e's, 40 a's, 15 m's, and 32 h's to 1 z.

Type is cast in different sizes. The smaller sizes, known as brilliant, diamond, and pearl, are little used. The more common sizes are:

A font contains letters of one size only, and may weigh from one or two pounds upwards. What is known as job type used for display is generally put up in the smaller fonts. Job fonts are ordinarily arranged in series. Thus a complete series of Jensen or De Vinne would comprise fonts of 6-point, 8-point, 10-point, 12-point, etc., up to 72-point. A well equipped office requires many different fonts and frequently several fonts of each size. For use type are distributed in "cases" which have a box for each character. A separate case is required for type of each size. The body of this book is printed in 10-point of the style known as old style Cambridge. The extracts are in 8-point of the same series.

See Printing; Alloy; Stereotyping; Letters