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The single lay
The earliest evidence, illustrations of printing houses, suggests that the single lay preceded the divided lay. The first illustration of all, which shows a French printing-house at the end of the fifteenth century, is unambiguous in its representation of the compositor's case: it is a single case, not a pair, and it is more square than oblong[1] (Fig. 4). Since French printers were using the divided lay by the early eighteenth century, not the single lay, the implication of this picture is that the single lay is the earlier. The illustrations of the sixteenth century, poor as they mostly are, tend to confirm this suggestion: all appear to represent single cases, not pairs.[2] The best of them, Froschauer's cut of 1548,[3] certainly shows a single case, but this does not tell us as much as the French illustration, since Froschauer printed in German-speaking Zürich, where the single lay remained in use. One other pointer to the priority of the single lay (although admittedly a slight one) is that Plantin in his Dialogues of 1567 referred to 'la casse' in the singular, not the plural,[4] and (as will be shown later) the divided lay subsequently became standard both in the Low Countries in general and at the Plantinian printing house in particular.
The single lay was first shown in detail in Georg Wolffger's New-auffgesetztes Format-büchlein, published at Graz in 1672.[5] Wolffger actually illustrated two single lays, one for gothic and the other for roman type. The gothic lay (Fig. 5) is closely paralleled by two more single lays for gothic type shown in the Leipzig manual of J. F. Gessner, published in 1740 (Figs. 6, 7).[6] In each of these lays the boxes are arranged in four groups, and Gessner's plates show that the groups were divided by structural bars thicker than the ordinary divisions between the boxes. The top group consists of three or four rows of boxes running the full width of the case, and containing the capital letters, figures, suspensions, etc. Then in the centre are three rows of four large boxes (one of them subdivided) for the more frequently-used small letters of the alphabet (a d e i m n o t u r v w) and for spaces. The other two groups of boxes, on either side of the centre group, contained the remaining small letters, with ligatures and punctuation marks outside them and quads in the lower right-hand corner. The total number of boxes is 109 in Wolffger's lay, and 102 and 108 respectively in Gessner's two lays. One of Gessner's plates also gives the dimensions of his case: it measured 47½ by 29½ in. (1.210 by 0.750 m.).[7]
Wolffger's lay for roman type was essentially similar to the gothic lay, but it needed a larger number of boxes to accommodate the additional small capitals and accented sorts (Fig. 8). These were provided by further subdivision of the boxes, and by including extra rows of boxes at the top and bottom of the case, making a total of 158. Another single lay for roman type was illustrated soon afterwards in the Frankfurt manual of Vietor and Redinger;[8] and although Frankfurt is 400 miles away from Graz, this lay with its 151 boxes is strikingly similar to Wolffgers' roman lay (Fig. 9). Vietor and Redinger do not illustrate a gothic lay, saying merely 'Der Teutscher Kasten ist fast wie dieser
The capital letters in the top rows of all these single lays are in alphabetical order; and it is not very difficult to see that the small letters are also arranged in an approximation of alphabetical order. Thus the bottom row of small letters has b c a, then e d, then g f (or f g): in other words the letters a to g rearranged to get the commoner letters into the centre. The next line up has k h l, then m i n o, then p q, which similarly gives the letters h to q with the commoner letters in the large central boxes. Lastly the upper line of small letters has s t u, then r, then v (w) x y z, completing the alphabet and getting r into the middle. The underlying alphabetical order of the small letters therefore reads from left to right, and from bottom to top, just as the compositor reads type in his stick.
It is tempting to suppose that there may originally have existed a primitive single lay, with the capital letters across the top and the small letters arranged alphabetically beneath them in three rows of eight boxes (Fig. 10). Of course this 'ur-lay' is entirely hypothetical; and, even if anything like it did exist, it cannot have been long before printers saw the convenience of making the changes that would have resulted in the single lay of the seventeenth century.
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