eotype," a term derived from
two Greek words meaning literally "solidtype."

This method met one requirement. It prevented the "pi-ing" of the
type, but it had the disadvantage of holding in comparative idleness a
large and costly mass of type useless for any other purpose, and it
was not generally practiced.

This was followed in 1730, by William Ged, a goldsmith of Edinburgh,
who is credited with casting printing-plates in plaster-of-paris molds
for the University of Cambridge Bible. These plates, however, were
destroyed by jealous printers and thrown aside, resulting in the
process being abandoned for many years.

In the meantime several other improvements along this line were
undergoing experiment. Firmin Didot, (1764-1836), a printer of Paris,
cast type of a hard alloy, and when his book-pages were composed, made
an impression of them on a sheet of soft lead, thus forming a mold.
Molten metal was then poured into a shallow tray, and just as this was
on the point of solidifying, but still plastic, the lead-mold of the
book-page was pressed on the soft metal in the tray. This process
called Polytypage, was but partly successful; it could be used only
for small pages, and the plates were too often defective. A process
similar to this is what Lambinet thought the printers of the latter
half of the fifteenth century might have used as one of the probable
methods to cast their metal types.

These and other experiments, however, were leading to the real
stereotyping process which developed later.

Early in the nineteenth century, Earl Stanhope, of England,
re-introduced Ged's stereotyping process with many improvements.

One or more pages of type were locked in a chase, the surface of the
type being oiled to prevent the subsequent mold from sticking. The
mold was made by pouring a semi-fluid composition of plaster-of-paris
mixed with a little fine salt to make the plaster settle solidly.
While the plaster was still soft, it was carefully pressed down and
rolled smooth on top to give a uniform thickness to the mold and to
expel any air there might be in the plaster. When the plaster became
solid, it formed a perfect matrix of the type pages.

The moisture in those early plaster molds was expelled by baking them
in an oven for three or four hours. A later method for drying was
practiced by suspending the mold directly over the metal-pots or to
float them on the surface of the molten metal. By this means the
drying