American dictionary of printing and bookmaking

(New York :  H. Lockwood,  1894.)

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PRE
 

AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF
 

a ceux qui nous ont offenses ; et ne nous induis point en
tentation, mais delivre-nous de mal; car c'est a toi qui
appartient le r^gne, la puissance, et la gloire.    Amen."

The vocabulary of French is derived in the first place
from the language of Rome in classical days ; but many
of the words which were then rarely used in composition,
and of which only a very few examples are known, were
the roots of words at present much used in France. The
changes from both are most apparent when the middle
consonant is struck out, as in apotre, beaux and fr^le,
from apostolus, bellus and fragilis, and when the final
letters are gone, as in fait, figue, dette and nu, from fac¬
tum, ficus, debitum and nudus. One consonant is changed
for another, extraneous letters are forced in and prefixes
are added. There are a large number of Germanic words
and some of Celtic derivation. Greek added considerably
to the vocabulary, both in early times and after the re¬
vival of learning. Like all other languages, French has
borrowed much from other sources in late years ; theo¬
logical terms from Hebrew, musical ones from Italian,
and commercial and naval terms from English and Dutch
are numerous. Sporting words have chiefly come from
English.

French literature is very abundant in all light and
graceful works, and in those in which a clear exposition
of any particular matter is desired. Among those who
wrote in the reign of Louis XIV. or before were Mal-
herbe, Bossuet, Corneille, Descartes, Moli^re, Pascal and
Racine. Before the French Revolution and contributing
to it by undermining the faith and destructively investi¬
gating the commonly accepted views of the world in
religion and sociology were Voltaire, Rousseau, Montes¬
quieu and Buffon. During the Revolution and the Em¬
pire Madame de Sta6l and Chateaubriand were the most
notable writers, Delille being the poet of the same age.
At the time of the downfall of Charles X. and the plac¬
ing of Louis Philippe upon the throne a new school of
writers protested against the fetters imposed upon the
language and upon literary construction by the authors
of the periods of Corneille and Voltaire as interpreted by
the Academy, and dramas were produced with the same
disregard of time and unity of place that were to be found
in English dramatic works, while other writers began
adding to the vocabulary sanctioned by the Academy
and introducing new forms of sentences. Of these au¬
thors Victor Hugo was the most remarkable. Lately
France has produced many skillful dramatists, graceful
versifiers, tender poets, interesting novelists and thor¬
oughly able historians. Criticism is one of the arts in
which the French excel.

French is nowhere the possession of a large number of
people away from France itself. That country has had
many colonies, and its language has always been cur¬
rent wherever civilized man was found ; but the greatest
population speaking this tongue away from the mother
country is in Canada, where over one million of people
employ no other language. Some graceful poets, like
Frechette, adorn that land.   It has many newspapers.

The approved modern dictionaries in French are those
of the Academy and Littre, both large and expensive
works. The most usual French and English dictionary
is that of Surenne. John Bellows, of Gloucester, Eng¬
land, has compiled a pocket dictionary which is a won¬
der of condensation and is besides very accurate. For
learning the language an Ollendorff is perhaps the best
method. Either Virtue's or Jewett's, published by Ap¬
pleton, is as good as any of those arranged on this plan.
After one of these has been completed a grammar on
the scholastic method should be studied, and then an
average of an ordinary volume should be read every
month or two for years.

French Metal Blocks.—The metal mounting cores
or risers used for stereotype plates.—Jacohi.

French Metal Furniture.—Metal furniture used
in place of wooden—originally a French idea.—Jacohi,

214
 

French Pins.—Small wire nails or brads used for
fastening plates to blocks. An expression used in Eng¬
land.

French, Printing in.—The French characters dif¬
fer from ours in having no w and in having a great
number of accents. It is true that w is occasionally
used, but always in foreign words. The sorts for^ each
of the letters run in the following proportion : Q E K ^
(E W,g E K ^ CE w, 25 ; se^w 6 i li Y Z i y z * ^ 'i * [ §,
50 ; E X E X, 75 ; c k ce E J B F G H J Q 1 "^« ? !, 100;
fli6ilBFGHQcMPv(, 150;MPVADL]sroiis
T u 6 7 8 9 ^ •• : —, 200 ; ^ ii C D N U i 8 4, 250; y z ^
A I L O R S T 2 5 ; », 800 ; fi E 1 0, 850 ; «, 400 ; E, 450 ;
j X a ^, 500 ; b f g h V ' -, 1,000 ; q, 1,200 ; e, 1,500 ; , p,
2,000 ; c m, 2,500 ; d, 3,000 ; 1 o, 4,500 ; a n u, 5,000 ; i r
t, 5,500 ; s, 6,500; e, 10,000. Together, this font will
have about 100,000 letters, and will weigh in pica of a
large size 200 kilograms, or about 410 pounds. To a
hundred kilograms ten kilograms of spaces and ten of
quadrats should be added. The lower-case e is much the
most used, having half again as many letters as s, the
next used, and nearly twice as much as either i, r or t,
the next in frequency. In English e has only one-third
more letters than t, the next used, and one-half more
than each of the next five. A peculiarity of French fonts
is that there must be several superior letters, to use in
places like M^'^ The short & does not properly form a
portion of the font. Another peculiar sort is the guille¬
mets, or quotation marks, like « ». The spaces begin at
one point. Then follow one and a half points and two
points, and they rise by half points until they reach the
thickness of an en quadrat.

French type was the first cast on a mathematical sys¬
tem of proportion. As in all other countries, the larger
sizes were first made, and then the smaller, but the lat¬
ter were added without much regard to proportion with
the existing sizes. In 1737, Fournier, the type-founder,
conceived the idea of introducing regularity in the di¬
mensions of type, and made each size one point, or the
seventy-second of an inch, larger than the nearest smaller
size. The system obtained some currency, but was not
generally adopted. In 1811 Didot brought this theory
further into use, with some modifications. His type was
larger than that employed by Fournier, The basis is the
type called Cicero, which is considerably larger than our
pica, and is only a very trifle smaller than thirteen points
on the American system.

The old and new names, with their American equiva¬
lents, which are used because more definite than English
sizes, are shown upon the next page.

The French face differs considerably from our own,
and bears much resemblance to that of Italy and Spain.
Almost every letter in some of the fonts differs from the
English. In the excellent book on typography from
which the diagrams of cases have been taken, that of
M. Daupeley-(3ouverneur, there is a larger hollow in
the e; the o is larger, the 1 longer, the b and q have
widely different serifs, the double letters do not have the
f make a perfect join at the top with the other letters,
and throughout the whole there is adherence to other
standards than our own.

The two cases shown are both used largely, the old
form, or double case, in the country, and the new form,
or two cases in one, in the city of Paris, The govern¬
ment office uses the double case.

The internal economy of a French printing-office differs
much from that of an office in the United States. The
foreman of each department is known as the prote. He
has under him in the composing-room the requisite num¬
ber of weekly or conscience hands, and as many piece
compositors as will do the work. The hours of labor
are ten. In some establishments the men are paid every
week, but in others every two weeks. Many women are
employed in doing work performed in America by boys
and men, as, for instance, cleaning presses and washing
rollers.   There are a large number of apprentices, com-
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