A HISTORY OF THE OLD ENGLISH LETTER FOUNDRIES.
PREFACE. 
N this age of progress, when the fine arts arerapidly becoming trades, and the machine ison every side superseding that labour of headand hand which our fathers called Handicraft,we are in danger of losing sight of, or, at least,of undervaluing the genius of those who, withnone of our mechanical advantages, establishedand made famous in our land those arts and handicrafts of whichwe are now the heritors.
The Art of Letter Founding hesitated long before yielding tothe revolutionary impulses of modern progress. While kindred arts—andnotably that art which preserves all others—were advancingby leaps and bounds, the founder, as late as half a century ago, waspursuing the even tenor of his ways by paths which had been troddenby De Worde and Day and Moxon. But the inevitable revolutioncame, and Letter Founding to-day bids fair to break all her old tiesand take new departures undreamed of by those heroes of the punchand matrix and mould who made her what we found her.
At such a time, it seems not undutiful to attempt to gathertogether into a connected form the numerous records of the OldEnglish Letter Founders scattered throughout our literary and{vi}typographical history, with a view to preserve the memory ofthose to whose labours English Printing is indebted for so muchof its glory.
The present work represents the labour of several years in whatmay be considered some of the untrodden by-paths of English typog