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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
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
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.
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