A final typographical interlude

Having set and printed a poem during my letterpress course, I next wanted to try something more challenging. A dictionary entry seemed perfect as it is justified and contains different fonts.

One of the first things I discovered was that there was no bold Caslon, the typeface I was using, so I needed some other way to make the dates, which marked the start of a new quotation, stand out. In the end the instructor found a Gill typeface for me to use. It turns out that bold wasn’t used much before the 19th century and first became popular with dictionary makers for whom space is at a premium.

The entry I chose to typeset doesn’t yet appear in the OED, as I wanted to print something which hadn’t been published before. I also liked the contrast of a 21st-century tweet rendered with the technology of the past.