Hansard's New Upper Case

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hair

†

thin

This English layout is that shown by Hansard: Typographia (1825), reprinted Thoemmes 1998, as the lay in use after the long s was discarded. It is also shown in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 9th edition (1888) and 11th edition (1911). It is almost the same as the Upper of Luckombe: The History and Art of Printing (1771), apart from using the long s boxes for spacing, and swapping ‡ and §. Johnson's Typographia of 1824 has a slightly different New Upper, in particular with numerals in different rows and with k still in the Upper case.

Note that the boxes with A,B, etc are small caps, and that all the caps are still in the top rows of the case. However, the Encyclopaedia Britannica also notes that the compositor picked out of the boxes seldom less than 1500 letters per hour, and distributed or replaced them at about 5000 per hour.

The empty case configuration is that of Moxon, and Smith (1755), Luckombe (1771), Stower (1808), Johnson (1824), Savage (1841), Tomlinson (1853), Mackellar (1870), Miller & Richard (1873), Southward (1882), Barnhart Bros & Spindler's News (1890s), Stephenson Blake & Co (1922), Caslon (1925) etc. The companion Lower is the Hansard New case.

Other empty cases ie with the boxes left blank		Other type layouts ie with characters assigned to boxes
Full Index of layouts	Glossary of terms used	Sources of the layouts	Introduction
Quantities in a fount of type		Quantities in a case of type
Notes about Job and Double Cases	Notes about Upper cases	Notes about Lower cases	Alembic home page

This page was written in 1998 by David Bolton and last updated 17 April 2015.