Addendum: Type Sizes in the Eighteenth Century
The following article from William Savage's A Dictionary of the Art of Printing (London, 1841), pp. 247-248 makes it clear that, in Savage's time at least, it was normal to cast founts of titling types with the lowercase descenders kerned:
FULL FACED LETTER. Types, in which the capitals, and the ascending letters of the lower
case, fill the whole square of the shank, so that the descending letters project beyond the bottom
of the shank.
This clarifies a point which puzzled me when writing the note on titling types for the last volume of Studies in Bibliography (V, 147-151). In the case of Caslon's wood letter, however, it is improbable that kerning could have been used.
Philip Gaskell
