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In "Edward Allde as a Typical Trade Printer", R. B. McKerrow distinguished two classes of early printers, the printer-publishers who published books on their own as well as printing for others, and trade printers who printed almost exclusively for publishers and produced "a very large proportion of the play-quartos, the smaller volumes of verse, the prose-pamphlets . . . many of whom, it may be said, give a great deal of trouble by their casualness in the matter of imprints and dates." Perhaps McKerrow inspired the few subsequent studies of printers by commenting that "a comparatively small amount of work devoted to such minor people as these would help us very greatly in identifying the house of origin of many books which bear no printer's name"[1]; however, the inspiration was short lived as bibliographers turned increasingly to studies of specific texts based upon now-familiar methods of analysis. Nearly a half-century later, Peter Blayney reiterated the need for
In general, printer identifications in both categories of books have relied upon the recognition of ornaments and decorated upper-case initials, a form of evidence with limited reliability and value because of the common practice of lending among printers and because of the large number of books in which neither appear. A practical limitation in shorter shared books, particularly play-quartos, arises from the fact that printer's devices usually are restricted to the preliminaries and first letter of a text; later shared sections simply continue setting the text without an opportunity to insert ornamental stock.[3] In contrast, evidence from a printer's type fonts exhibits no such limitations and, together with identifiable types, can be considered de facto proof of his identity.[4] Hence, such evidence can be used to identify a printer's work in assigned and shared books, and distinguish sections of shared books or books printed by a printer with two or more fonts. Furthermore, it can provide a more accurate focus for compositorial and presswork analysis since, if two fonts appear in a book, at least two sets of type-cases were used. In turn, this fact implies the possibility of two compositors setting simultaneously or alternately and the consequent need for casting-off copy, factors that are considered crucial in influencing accuracy in the textual transmission process. Unfortunately, the subject of font analysis and its uses have received very little attention, despite its potential importance in bibliographical research.[5] It seems that so fundamental a physical fact such as the type fonts used in a book could hardly be overlooked by scholars habituated to working with vast amounts of minute details. But that, in fact, has happened in many cases where the presence of two or more fonts in a book has been overlooked and bibliographical analysis has proceeded as if the book were printed by a single printer in one font.[6] It seems fair to say that the discipline as a whole has suffered from the lack of a practical method of analysing fonts for the purposes of distinguishing sections of shared books and of identifying printers. One hopes that this present introduction to a method of font analysis and its use in bibliographical study will enable textual scholars to assess more accurately the impact of various aspects of the printing process upon early texts. Font analysis, although simple in nature, requires attention to the enormous amount of detail that characterizes a particular font. My discussion of font differentiae perhaps draws attention to more detail than is necessary, but I think that too much is the best option in this case despite the potential tedium for readers and I apologize in advance. Likewise, I believe that this introduction would be incomplete without an explanation of the logic that underlies
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