PRINTING AND BOOKMAKING.
 

JAP
 

J
 

THE tenth letter of the English alphabet, is one
of those characters least used in the lower case.
Probably the letter e is employed fifty times to
one j. It is a thin letter, nearly always thinner
than a thick space, and is kerned at the foot.
For this reason it is preceded by a thin space at the be¬
ginning of lines in stereotype work, as otherwise the pro¬
jection might be cut off. In the capital form it bears a
great resemblance to I, from which it was divided. This
is particularly apparent in some old fonts. The capital
J is transposed out of its regular order in the upper case
and comes at the end of the alphabet, with the U, making
the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth letters, according to
their position. I and J were once deemed the same let¬
ter, and dictionaries and lexicons used them in supposed
alphabetical order, as, for example, ''Jamb " and " Iam¬
bic." In France the use of the j for the consonant and i
for the vowel was not established until the middle of the
seventeenth century, Jacques Pelletier, of Mans, is said
to have first placed the j at the beginning of words which
began with this consonant in his French Grammar (1550).
Gille Beys, printer in Paris, imitated him in 1584, The
confusion in English encyclopsedias and dictionaries
lasted until within sixty years. When it was introduced
there was very little uniformity in its use. Coryat, in his
Crudities, published in 1611, says: "J observed a cus¬
tome in all those Italian cities and townes through the
which j passed, that is not used in any other country that
I saw in my travels, neither do j thinke that any other
nation of Christendome doth use it, but only Italy, The
Italians, and also most strangers that are commorant in
Italy, do alwaies at their meales use a little forke when
they cut their meate."

In many books in Latin used by the Roman Church j
is not employed, words which in other printing would
require j being in them spelled with i. Many Latin
scholars of the present day print the classics in the same
manner, saying that as the ancients knew nothing of any
division of this letter it is fitting that the works of early
times should be printed as Cicero and Csesar would have
deemed proper. The pronunciation of j varies more
widely than that of any other letter. In English it is
dzh, in French zh, in German y, and in Spanish h. It
is a very frequent initial of proper names. - It is rarely
used for signatures, K following I.

Jacket.—A movable border around a letter or initial.
—Jacohi.

Jackson, Joseph, a celebrated punch-cutter and
type-founder in England, died on January 14, 1792, in
his fifty-ninth year. He is celebrated as the cutter of
several Oriental faces, as well as the character used in the
reproduction of the Domesday Book, His two-line Eng¬
lish, used in Macklin's Bible, is of the greatest symmetry.
James, Thomas, a type-founder in the early part of
the last century in England, whose letters from Holland,
whither he went to buy punches and matrixes, throw
a great deal of light upon type-founding at that time.
He furnished Ged, the British inventor of stereotyping,
to whom he appeared to have acted dishonorably, with
type which was worn instead of new, as it should have
been, and intrigued with the king's printers so that Ged
should not be successful.   He died in 1736.
 

Jansen, Reynier, the second printer in Philadel¬
phia, was originally a lace-maker at Alkmaer, in Hol¬
land. He probably came to Pennsylvania in 1698, Soon
after he bought twenty acres of land in the vicinity of
Philadelphia. In 1699 he purchased ninety-nine acres
in Germantown, being described in the deed as a mer¬
chant of Philadelphia. On October 20,1701, he sold the
same plot of ground, being then described as a printer,
A volume was issued with his imprint, entitled God's
Protecting Providence, in 1699, and it is believed that he
began printing late in that year. From the winter of
1692-3, when Bradford removed to New York, until this
time there had been no press in Philadelphia, His work
shows an untrained typographer, with a meagre font of
letter.    He died in the early spring of 1706,

Janszoon, Laurens or Louw^erijs, a Hollander
to whom some writers have attributed the invention of
printing. He was confounded with Lourens Janszoon
Koster, to whom the credit properly belongs, if to any
one in Holland.

Japanese.—The language spoken by the inhabitants
of Japan, a group of islands off the eastern coast of Asia,
rather larger than the British Islands. The speech is
classed by itself. There are two kinds of characters em¬
ployed by the natives. One is a very elaborate system
of word-signs somewhat like the Chinese. This has been
shortened into syllabic characters, there being four dif¬
ferent systems. They are printed in the same manner as
the Chinese, being engraved, the ink laid upon the blocks
by a brush, and pressure given to the paper by another
brush. Roman characters are also used, and the native
representations of words are also cut separately on wood.
They are arranged systematically in a huge case about
thirty feet long. Several men can work on this case at
once.    There are many thousand different characters.

The language of Japan is spoken by about forty mill¬
ions of people, and from their love of literature and in¬
tense national pride it is easy to see that there is a great
future before it. It does not bear any resemblance to
European languages.

The first printing executed with metal types for the
Japanese was by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century,
Roman characters were employed, A grammar and dic¬
tionary were printed in 1632 at the office of the Propa¬
ganda at Rome, In Yeddo, now called Tokio, the capital
of Japan, printing has been more or less done since 1785.
A type-foundry and various other printing requisites
were ordered by the Japanese government in 1874 from
Germany, but the impulse which caused this order dated
back to the time when Commodore Perry visited Japan,
some forty years ago. The Japanese have taken hold
of Western learning with great avidity, and thoroughly
instructed teachers and professors of every branch of sci¬
ence are now to be found in Japan, most of them being
foreigners. Colleges have been founded on the model
of those in Germany and this country, and many books
have been printed.

According to a recent census there are now in Japan
551 printing-offices and 3,588 booksellers. Of these 128
printing-offices and 591 bookselling-shops are at Tokio,
the capital. Next to it comes the district of Osaka, with
65 printing-offices and 356 booksellers.   Of newspapers,

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