3 ms·
Interesting that the book uses the old-fashioned "long s" (that somewhat looks like an "f") despite being from 1847. The "long s" was already falling out of fav
by jhbadger 8y ago
Interesting that the book uses the old-fashioned "long s" (that somewhat looks like an "f") despite being from 1847. The "long s" was already falling out of favor by the late 1700s.
- chj 8y agoI find it very hard to get used to. Could have been easier.
- madhadron 8y agoI used to work out of a lot of 16th century Italian manuscripts. After a couple of hours you don't notice it anymore.
- tokai 8y agoThe publisher William Pickering was apparently a publisher of high quality. But I have seen Byrne been described as eccentric. Maybe he demanded the use of the long s. It was still used in handwriting regularly that century.
- leoc 8y agoOddness and lavish mid-Victorian colour printing did seem to go together, yes: https://books.google.ie/books?id=SugpRWf_FB4C&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=%22the+invention+of+tradition%22+%22any+method+of+colour-printing+subsequently+invented%22&source=bl&ots=Ne-uOhqRFR&sig=y4woaYEzLPKgLSbZBzYTV3DJF_g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjYp_Gj7qbfAhUCqXEKHbOwAzYQ6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22the%20invention%20of%20tradition%22%20%22any%20method%20of%20colour-printing%20subsequently%20invented%22&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=SugpRWf_FB4C&pg=PA35&lpg=PA... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestiarium_Scoticum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestiarium_Scoticum . Like the frilly initial letters it's clearly an archaising choice meant to hark back to early printed Euclids (see the one in https://www.c82.net/euclid/about/ https://www.c82.net/euclid/about/ ): part of the nineteenth-century craze for style revivals.
- kiliantics 8y agoIn German text, it was still very fashionable, even into the 1900s. It is also the reason for the "sharp" or double s, ß, which is the result of a ligature between two of the long s letters.
- wirrbel 8y agoIt is still part of the orthographic rules for Frakturschrift, i.e. not using a long s in fraktur would have been an orthographic mistake. Since Fraktur was used into the 1940s, people were very much used to it.
- tlb 8y agoThe font is impressive. If you search for "ct", some of them have a fancy curlicue ligature. They're true to the original (compare https://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/euclid/book2/images/bookII-def1.html https://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/euclid/book2/images/bookII-def... with https://www.c82.net/euclid/book2/ https://www.c82.net/euclid/book2/). And they seem to obtained merely with the css: font-feature-settings: "clig", "dlig", "liga", "onum"