The divided lay
English printers were referring to 'pairs' of cases as early as 1588,
but the earliest certain evidence for the existence of the divided lay is in a
fine plate of a Dutch printing house of 1628[9] (Fig. 11). Two pairs of cases are
clearly
shown, and even the shapes and sizes of the boxes are indicated without
much diagrammatic simplification.
Next comes Joseph Moxon's less artistic but even more informative
plate of 1683[10] (Fig. 12), the first
illustration to show the divided lay in detail. Moxon's lay, although
certainly intended for roman type, is unusual in that it lacks small capitals
(Moxon has accented letters and zodiacal signs instead), and it will be
convenient to consider it in connection with the next English illustration of
the divided lay, which was included in Smith's manual of 1755,[11] and which is probably more typical
of
English practice (Fig. 13).
The two cases of the divided English lay each measured about 33 in.
by 16½ in. (0.838 m. by 0.419 m.), and each was divided into halves
by a vertical structural bar. Each half of the upper case was divided into
seven rows of seven boxes (making 98). The lower case was not arranged
in halves but as a unit, with about 56 boxes of various sizes. The total
number of boxes was thus about 154, much the same as in the single-lay
roman cases. The upper case contained capitals on the left and small
capitals on the right, all in alphabetical order (with the exception of J and
U, the alternatives in Latin of I and V), together with figures, various odd
sorts and symbols, and the small letter k. The lower case had the rest of the
small letters, the punctuation marks and the spaces, arranged so that the
commonest letters come in the middle.
The next illustration of the divided lay after Moxon was the French
version of Fertel, published in 1723[12]
(Fig. 14). This lay is very like the English divided lay, except that W is
omitted from the upper-case alphabets; the figures are in the lower case; h
is put out beyond g; short s is down beside long f; and i is in Moxon's
h-box. This French lay is shown again, with minor variants, in the
Encylopédie;[13]
and
it seems likely that a version of the divided lay similar to the French pattern
— that is with i, not h, in the middle of the lower case — was
also
used in Spain, although it was not illustrated until 1811.[14]
We have already seen that a divided lay was used in a Dutch printing
house in 1628; and the fact that Moxon (who trained as a printer in Holland
from 1637 to 1643 and who was an admirer of Dutch printing technology)
did not mention the single lay also argues for the general use of the divided
lay in seventeenth-century Holland. There were no early Dutch printers'
manuals, however, and the earliest evidence we have of the details of a
Low Countries lay is in the old type cases preserved at the Plantin-Moretus
Museum at Antwerp. All of them are divided lays, with a general similarity
to the French version, but they fall into two groups which differ from each
other chiefly in the upper case. One, which appears on the evidence of the
age of the cases to be the younger of the two groups of lays, differs very
little from the French lays shown by Fertel and in the
Encyclopédie. The other Plantinian lay, which would
appear
to be the older, again has a 'French' lower case, but the upper case has
only six rows of seven boxes in each half, with the top two rows on the
left-hand side subdivided and laid with small capitals (Fig. 15). This
immediately suggests a comparison with the Haarlem plate of 1628, where
the same unusual pattern is seen in the upper case of the left-hand pair; and
it may also be significant of early date that the supposedly older Plantinian
lay has accented letters in the right-hand half of its upper case in much the
same way shown by Moxon.
[15]
Virtually nothing is known about the lay of the case in Italy during
the hand-press period, which is particularly regrettable in view of the
importance of the Italian contribution to early printing technology. A
divided lay is shown in a manual of 1873; it is of course poor evidence of
early Italian practice, but it is worth considering because it differs from the
other divided lays[16] (Fig. 16). The
upper case, which is smaller than the lower, has only four rows of eight
boxes in each half (some of them subdivided); but it is the lower case which
has the most remarkable variants, with r and s in the middle row, and o in
what elsewhere is the e box, e being moved to the right; h and i are in the
'French' positions, while a and the space box are interchanged.
Just as a general alphabetical pattern was found in the single lays of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so the early divided lays show
analogous patterns. The capitals and small capitals in the upper case are
straightforwardly alphabetical, but for J and U and (except in England) W.
The lower case is less obviously organized, but once again the pattern is in
fact based on alphabetical order. Considering first the French lower case
(Fig. 14), which is virtually the same as the Plantinian lower case, we find
in the next to top row b c d e f g h, with intrusive s and long f; then in the
next row the series i l m n o p q, altered only by the placing of the i in the
middle. The order in the bottom row, surprisingly, runs from right to left,
not from left to right, completing the alphabet with r t u v x y z, the space
box and
a being intrusive. Three further letters, not used in Latin, are out of series:
these are j k and w.
The English version of the divided lay (which also makes special
arrangements for j, k and w) differs in two major respects from the French
pattern: h, a commoner letter in English than in French and most other
European languages, is kept in the centre of the lower case, the i being in
what is otherwise the s box, and s going into the top row; and y, also
common in English, is moved to the middle.
The fact that the English version of the lower case departs further
from alphabetical order than the French may suggest that it is the later of
the two. By a similar process of reasoning, the position of r and s in the
middle row of the nineteenth-century Italian lay, which brings it nearer to
alphabetical order, might be an indication of early origin.
But we should not be tempted to postulate a primitive form of the
divided lower case. A single origin it may have had, but hardly one that
was strictly alphabetical. If, as the evidence suggests, the divided lay was
developed after the single lay, then it may well have been deliberately
designed for its purpose by a practical man who put the letters of the lower
case in the most convenient places, taking alphabetical order as his starting
point but altering it wherever necessary.
What then can have been the purpose of developing a divided lay?
Here we can only speculate, but it has been mentioned that the single lay
case was very large; Gessner's was 4 ft wide, and it would have weighed
about 75 lb (34 kilos) when it was full of type. To divide it into two would
be an obvious device, and indeed there survive in Sweden some old cases
of the single-lay pattern which are divided vertically up the middle.[17] But this could be inconvenient
— each
half of such a pair contains only half the capitals and half the small letters,
and would be useless by itself — and a horizontal division of all the
capitals into one case and all the small letters into another would commend
itself as being more practical. The result, at any rate, is a pair of cases
which are each of a convenient size and which weigh, when they are full,
no more than 30 lb (13 kilos) apiece.
