The Chapbook Style

When Will Bradley started working at Cambridge Press, he would often visit the Boston Public Library and peruse the collection of colonial American chapbooks housed there. It is easy to see why a typehound would delight in the typesetting done for these cheaply printed books that were peddled by traveling chapmen. This particular example is actually British. One of the things I find interesting is the mixed posture of the letters in the word ELEANOR.

This flourished fraktur capital letter M was pasted into a sketchbook of romantic lettering that some wonderful British gentlemen put together during the nineteenth century. Exuberant hand-drawn scripts became popular after Gutenberg's innovative moveable type was introduced, 1450's. Scribes no longer were needed to copy texts, so they could go hog wild inventing letterforms for the new middle class to copy (in order to look and feel more upper class, of course.)