Aesop's Fables, a 1479 edition now online

[William]

Some readers might like to know of the following.

http://www.wdl.org/en/item/28/

http://www.wdl.org/en/item/28/pages.html

This is a digital version of a 1479 edition of Aesop’s Fables.

The font is very interesting. Just having a general look, I noticed on page 14, line 2, the word haben which appears to have both an ha ligature and a be ligature.

William Overington

22 April 2009

[William]

In the thread http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/gutenberg-and-ligatures/1034/1 entitled “Gutenberg and ligatures.”, I wrote on 1 September 2005 18:44 the following.

@William

An interesting point is as to why Gutenberg had so many ligatures! With metal type in the twentieth century the making of an additional ligature was a lot of extra work in that an additional metal punch to make metal matrices had to be produced. Today, with electronic fonts, the constructing of an extra ligature glyph also takes extra work.

Yet was the same true for Gutenberg? Did ligatures in fact save Gutenberg work?

My reason for thinking that this is a possibility is as follows. In that television program about Gutenberg a researcher had made images of individual characters printed by Gutenberg and found that each character of a sort had small differences which meant that they could not have been made from the same matrix. It is possible that Gutenberg used matrices of whatever material such that the matrix was destroyed during the casting of a character, thus meaning that as many matrices had to be made as there were pieces of type: the invention of a reusable matrix being a later invention, perhaps by another printer.

So making a ligature character would mean producing at least one less matrix than would have otherwise been the situation! A two-letter ligature would save the production of one matrix, a three-letter ligature would save the production of two matrices. Gutenberg used many ligatures. Perhaps it was a money-saving idea as well as an artistic idea: thus, as one might say, “painting two birds on one canvas” in that one idea served two purposes!

On page 14, line 2 of the digital version of a 1479 edition of Aesop’s Fables mentioned in the first post in this thread, there appears to be an ha ligature in the word haben.

The book dates from after the time of Gutenberg.

The word before haben also appears to have an ha ligature.

The angle between the right side of the vertical of the h and the straight line that starts the outside edge of the curve around the h is noticeably different between the two ha items.

I have been experimenting with importing images of the two possible ha ligatures together into FontCreator 5.6 in the 0 cell and then copying and separating them as separate glyphs (encoded in the 1 and 2 cells). The artwork came from a section of the tiff file enlarged 400% both horizontally and vertically in Microsoft Paint. I found that I can measure the two angles (one for each glyph) and they are substantially different. Yet copying and pasting and moving one ha glyph over the other shows strong similarity of the outlines.

Whether this variation is due to something in the printing process, such as something to do with the ink flow, or whether one of the ha items is damaged, or whether the variation is evidence of the two sorts being made from different matrices I do not know. Indeed if they were made from two different matrices that does not necessarily mean that they were not reusable matrices.

Anyway, this is just something that I noticed and tried, using FontCreator 5.6 as an analysis tool and wondered if some readers might find reading about it interesting. Incidentally, I set the threshold value as 128 as the default 63 did not separate the letters from the background properly for this particular artwork.

I have also tried importing into FontCreator 5.6 from a Print Screen image made directly from an enlarged online display of the two ha items.

The font used in the book appears to have many interesting ligatures.

William Overington

22 April 2009