La Casse Raçon

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This French case lay is shown in Audin: Histoire de l'imprimerie par l'image (1929) as being the Casse Raçon proposed by [François] Pitrat in les Annonces typographiques 1 September 1892. The Upper case section has three rows of eight boxes, rather than three rows of seven boxes. Five of the boxes are subdivided, and thus there are 37 boxes in the upper section, and there are 74 in the lower, a total of 111 boxes. Audin shows various other lays, for example the Casse Générale (c.1929) with 127 boxes, and in 1949 Hostettler in Technical terms of the printing industry shows one with 114 boxes.

Unusually, Pitrat's lay puts W into the normal alphabetic order, but brings L M out of order and into the lower case section, along side A B C D E F. The ç has moved into the upper case section. The letters l m e r o s are superiors. However, the figures 5 4 3 2 1 0 should be the same size as 6 7 8 9, but are shown here as smaller in order to preserve the box construction, the box for 5 being smaller than the box for b, and also smaller than the box for fl.

The empty case is Raçon.

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 2013 by David Bolton and last updated 29 August 2013.