Johnson New Lower Case

_[ ]aeoe'je mid( )?!; fl
&bcd isf gthin ff
hairthinfi
ffilmnh oyp,wenem
ffl
zvu    t    space    a    r q:quads
x.-

This English typecase lay is that of Johnson: Typographia (1824), being the 'new' lay after the long s, etc had been discarded. There is an almost identical lay given by Gaskell, The Lay of the Case, in Bowers, Studies in Bibliography (1969), referring to Southward & Powell, Practical Printing (1892) except that they replace thins with mids, and insert .... next to fl. Savage: Art of Printing (1841) also has thins and not mids in his New Lower case, as does Tomlinson: Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts (1853), who includes 3 piece braces in place of the empty thin boxes of Johnson. Note that Johnson still has the letter k in the Upper case. As Davis & Carter note (in Moxon), Johnson is the first to show the spacing split into separate boxes in a standard case, eg by comparison see Johnson Old Lower case, and the 1825 Hansard New case lay. However, Stower in 1808 had shown split spacing in Hazard's revised Lower.

Johnson's companion upper is the Johnson New lay. Johnson himself proposed a very different configuration, and lay.

Note the 8th box from left in top row is wide, for mid spaces, unlike most US Lower cases, where it is divided into two. The empty Johnson case is the English Lower.

Other empty cases
ie with the boxes left blank
Other type layouts
ie with characters assigned to boxes
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This page was written in 1997 by David Bolton and last updated 2 February 2006.