STA
 

AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF
 

any attention to what other founders were doing, and the
consequence was that at the opening of this century each
of the foundries in Great Britain differed from the others
in most of their bodies, nor did any one of these bodies
bear any relation to any other, except that in most in¬
stances pica was of twice the size each way of nonpareil.
Double pica was not two lines of pica together, but two
lines of small pica; minion from one foundry would take
 

3 Point.
 

12 Point.
 

3J^ Point.
 

4>^ Point.
 

5>^ Point.
 

5>^ Point.
 

6 Point.
 

6 Point.
 

7 Point,
 

42 Point.
 

18 Point.
 

18 Point,
 

7 Point.
 

8 Point.
 

24 Point.
 

28 Point.
 

60 Point.
 

10 Point.
 

11 Point.
 

30 Point.
 

72 Point.
 

SIZES of type by the point system.
 

a thousand words in a page, and from another only eight
hundred, and no reason could be discovered why minion,
brevier and bourgeois were huddled together while small
pica and pica were far apart. The sizes of type bore no
relation to the foot, inch or metre, nor did they follow
each other in any regular measure of progression. As
the type were cast in England, America following the
same plan, there were seven sizes for ordinary work, and
these were doubled and quadrupled for large letters, and

520
 

halved for those which were very diminutive. Nonpareil
was the smallest and pica the largest regular size. The
sizes rose from nonpareil to minion, brevier, bourgeois,
long primer, small pica and pica. Were the progression
regular in regard to surface each size descending from
pica would take a very little more than one-fourth more
matter. Thus a page which contained 1,000 words in
pica would contain, if the increase was one-quarter, 1,250
in small pica, 1,562 in long primer, 1,953 in
bourgeois, 2,441 in brevier, 3,051 in minion,
and 3,814 in nonpareil. If the proportion
was very slightly enlarged bourgeois would
contain 2,000 words and nonpareil 4,000, the
other sizes also gaining a little; but in ex¬
perience this was found not to be the case,
and when buying type it could not be said
with certainty whether type from a new
foundry would be small or large.

Similar difficulties were long ago encount¬
ered by the French printers, and it led to
their devising a system which now seems
likely to prevail over the whole of the civil¬
ized world. Instead of attempting to cause
each size to be a certain degree larger than
one preceding, taken geometrically, the origi¬
nator solved the difficulty arithmetically.
Cicero was divided into twelve parts, and
each size was indicated by the number of
twelfths of which it consisted rather than by
its former name. This system was devised
in 1737 by Pierre Simon Fournier, called le
Jeune, who put it partly into operation, tak¬
ing as a standard the king's foot, at that
time the legal unit of measurement. He con¬
structed an apparatus which he called a pro¬
totype, divided into two hundred and forty
points, which was preserved in the chamber
of printers. His new sizes corresponded,
as to the nonpareil, brevier, long primer and
pica, prettv closely to the sizes used by Eng¬
lish and American founders of the present
day. In 1789, however, Frangois Ambroise
Didot discovered that Fournier's sizes did
not exactly conform to the standard king's
foot, either because that had changed or be¬
cause it had been incorrectly copied at the
beginning. He therefore increased Four-
nier's point nearlj'^ one-twelfth, making the
Cicero of the latter about one point larger
than the former. This was not a final settle¬
ment, for in 1795 the metric system was in¬
troduced, and with the view of obtaining a
fixed and exact standard by which founders
could adjust their matrices Didot, then the
most renowned of French printers, construct¬
ed a gauge somewhat similar to Fournier's
prototype, which he named a typometer, and
which contained 288 points. This created
great confusion in France, There were then
the old sizes, made by founders who had not
yielded to Fournier ; the Fournier sizes ; the
Fournier as improved by Didot; and it was
now proposed to introduce a metric system.
The printers were all up in arms. To pla¬
cate them Didot was obliged to retain the
old nomenclature instead of denominating
the sizes by the number of points as at pres¬
ent ; but he reduced the number of points in each.
Cicero became eleven point, and so on. His system has
now become general in France, and has spread through
the South of Europe as well as to Germany and some
other countries, but with modifications. The Fournier
system is largely used in Belgium. There are two Ciceros
in use in France, one the Cicero de douze, or of twelve
points, which is taken as the gauge for all furniture and
measures, and the other is the actual type, a pica, which