e paper as to price: so I had only to think about the kind of
hand-made paper. On this head I came to two conclusions: 1st, that the
paper must be wholly of linen (most hand-made papers are of cotton
today), and must be quite 'hard,' i. e., thoroughly well sized; and 2nd,
that, though it must be 'laid' and not 'wove' (i. e., made on a mould
made of obvious wires), the lines caused by the wires of the mould must
not be too strong, so as to give a ribbed appearance. I found that on
these points I was at one with the practice of the paper-makers of the
fifteenth century; so I took as my model a Bolognese paper of about
1473. My friend Mr. Batchelor, of Little Chart, Kent, carried out my
views very satisfactorily, and produced from the first the excellent
paper, which I still use.

Next as to type. By instinct rather than by conscious thinking it over,
I began by getting myself a fount of Roman type. And here what I wanted
was letter pure in form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid,
without the thickening and thinning of the line, which is the essential
fault of the ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read;
and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be owing to
commercial exigencies. There was only one source from which to take
examples of this perfected Roman type, to wit, the works of the great
Venetian printers of the fifteenth century, of whom Nicholas Jenson
produced the completest and most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476.
This type I studied with much care, getting it photographed to a big
scale, and drawing it over many times before I began designing my own
letter; so that though I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not
copy it servilely; in fact, my Roman type, especially in the lower case,
tends rather more to the Gothic than does Jenson's.

After a while I felt that I must have a Gothic as well as a Roman fount;
and herein the task I set myself was to redeem the Gothic character from
the charge of unreadableness which is commonly brought against it. And I
felt that this charge could not be reasonably brought against the types
of the first two decades of printing: that Schoeffer at Mainz, Mentelin
at Strasburg, and Gunther Zainer at Augsburg, avoided the spiky ends and
undue compression which lay some of the later type open to the above
charge. Only the earlier printers (naturally following therein the
practice of their predecessors the scribes) were very libe