| Prices of Material for the Type-Foundry | ||||||
| Materials. | Tuscan Currency per pound. |
American Currency per pound. | ||||
| Steel, | lir. | 2 | 8 | 0 | $2.18 | |
| Metal, (Antimony?) | 11 | 0 | .50 | |||
| Brass, | 12 | 0 | .54 | |||
| Copper, | 6 | 8 | .30 | |||
| Tin, | 8 | 0 | .36 | |||
| Lead, | 2 | 4 | .10½ | |||
| Iron Wire, | 8 | 0 | .36 | |||
that of casting them in moulds and matrices of hard metal. There is other evidence which is even more direct. In the Magliabechi library at Florence is preserved the original Cost Book of the Directors of the Ripoli Press of that city, for the interval between the years 1474 and 1483.[1] In this book may be found, among other papers of value, a list of the prices which were then paid for the supplies or materials used in the type-foundry connected with the Ripoli Press. In this list we see the names of the metals that are used in all modern type-foundries. There can be no question of the statement that the types of this foundry were cast in metal moulds.
It would not be difficult to present additional evidence tending to prove that the punch, the matrix and the mould of hard metal were used by the earliest typographers, but this evidence will be given with more propriety in another chapter. On this page, it is enough to record, as the result of the future inquiry, that printing types have always been made by one method. The significance of this fact should not be overlooked. It has been shown that printing, as we now use it, could not exist without types, and that there would be no types if we did not know how to make them in adjustable type-moulds. In this type-mould we find the key to the invention of typography. It is not the press, nor the types, but the type-mould that must be accepted as the origin and the symbol of the art. He was the inventor of
- ↑ This book was edited and republished in the form of an octavo pamphlet of fifty-six pages, by Signor P. Vincenzo Fineschi, at Florence, in 1781. The equivalent in American currency of the Tuscan lira is calculated from a formula given with great minuteness by Blades in his Life and Typography of William Caxton, vol. ii. p. xx.
