Southward Old Upper Case

«»

{

ffl

7
8

1
3

2
3

...

]

fist

Per

1
8

3
8

5
8

...

¦¦

1
4

1
2

3
4

hair

...

This English layout is given in Southward: Practical Printing (3rd ed 1887 and 5th ed 1900), as the old-fashioned book work lay, and its companion lower is Southward Old. However, the lay has the caps and small caps in the bottom rows, whereas earlier (and thus Old) lays had these in the top rows, as indeed does Southward's Old Upper shown in his Modern Printing of 1898, and his Bookwork Upper shown in earlier and later editions of Practical Printing. This suggests that the 3rd edition has used the wrong illustration, or has given it the wrong title, and that the lay shown is actually an Improved lay. Certainly, moving the caps down was an improvement, as they became closer to the compositor's hand, and thus allowed for quicker setting. For example, Timperley's New Upper of 1838, and Hazard's Upper in Stower of 1808, both with the caps moved down. A subsequent further improvement, later than these two, but shown in Southward's lay, was to swap the caps to the right hand side. Southward also shows the change of placing figures and some ligatures into the Lower case, using the vacated boxes in the Upper for fractions and signs. His lay does not include accents, but his Improved lay also shown in the 3rd edition does provide for accents, and keeps the figures in the Upper.

Note that all the boxes should be the same size. The boxes with A, etc are small caps. The box ¦ represents a single dagger, and ¦¦ a double dagger. The boxes « and «» and » are bottom, centre, top of a three piece brace.

The empty case configuration is the normal Upper of Moxon (1683), Smith (1755), Stower (1808), Miller & Richard (1873), Mackellar (1885), Barnhart Bros & Spindler's News (1890s), Stephenson Blake & Co (1922), Caslon (1925) etc.

Other empty cases ie with the boxes left blank		Other type layouts ie with characters assigned to boxes
Full Index of layouts	Glossary of terms used	Sources of the layouts	Introduction
Quantities in a fount of type		Quantities in a case of type
Notes about Job and Double Cases	Notes about Upper cases	Notes about Lower cases	Alembic home page

This page was written in 1997 by David Bolton and last updated 14 April 2009.