Pica Roman Type in Elizabethan England

During the second half of the sixteenth century roman type face replaced blackletter as the standard and most widely used face in printed English books. The most widely used size of type was pica. The aim of Professor Ferguson's book is to show the reader how to identify the printers of books and also how the types of a single common size and face are differentiated. The book starts in the early 1550s, because this was when punchcutters first came to England, and it ends at 1610, for soon after that date the shops were flooded with new Dutch faces which give an entirely different appearance to later seventeenth-century printing. - - Professor Ferguson's clear explanations and comprehensive tables provide the reader with an invaluable tool with which to identify individual printers and the date of books by known printers, thus countering a number of problems facing the student of Elizabethan texts. - - Professor W. Craig Ferguson teaches at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of 'Valentine Simmes' (1968) and articles in 'Studies in Bibliography' and 'The Library'.