At 03:52 AM 2/22/2001 -0800, William Overington wrote:
>Am I right in thinking that in the days when hand set metal type on printing
>presses was the only method of printing that there were fonts of musical
>type? I have never seen any font of such type myself, though I have seen
>fonts for such non-text matters as chess sets and crossword puzzles.
Oh yes, definitely. Music was printed from metal type from quite an early
stage in the development of print. There is a good book by Mary Kay Duggan
on the printing of music in renaissance Italy, _Italian Music Incunabula:
Printer and Type_. There is also a useful bibliographical volume by Guy
Marco, _The Earliest Music Printers of Continental Europe: A Checklist of
Facsimiles Illustrating Their Work_, which will point you toward more
samples from the early period.
Interestingly -- well, interestingly for type geeks like me -- the only
surviving examples of counter punches in a public collection are for music
types: two small but very important pieces steel at the Plantin Moretus
Museum in Antwerp.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks |
Vancouver, BC | All empty souls tend to extreme opinion.
www.tiro.com | W.B. Yeats
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |
