Casse Générale (Gauthier)

This French case lay is shown in Audin: Histoire de l'imprimerie par l'image (1929) as being the Casse Générale of A. Gauthier. The Upper case section has four rows of eight boxes, rather than three (or four) rows of seven boxes. Eight of the boxes are subdivided. There are thus 72 boxes in the Upper section, and 129 boxes overall. In contrast, the case shown later by Hostettler in Technical terms of the printing industry (1949) has only 114 boxes.

The boxes labelled em are cadratins, en are demi-cadratins, fn are espaces fines, sp are espaces (presumably moyennes) and thicks are espaces fortes. The ¦ should be a vertical bar and not a broken one. The box labelled hell is diable (i.e. broken type) and lettres is lettres etranges, i.e. outside sorts. The m etc. are superiors, but the engraving is very indistinct in places, and some of these are wrong, as letters appear replicated.

The empty case configuration is Gauthier.