Pantographia

Bastard and Bengali print in Fry's Pantographia

Pantographia, with the full title being Pantographia; containing accurate copies of all the known alphabets in the world; together with an English explanation of the peculiar force or power of each letter is the title of a 1799 work on writing systems and typography by Edmund Fry, one of the most learned of the English typefounders of his day.

Fry provided a description of each alphabet on the right-handed pages with a specimen of the full range of the alphabet on the left. Fry spent sixteen years researching the book, which contains more than 200 specimens; writing systems from Abyssinia to New Zealand, including 20 varieties of Chaldean, 39 of the Greek, 8 Egyptian, 11 Hebrew, 7 Irish, 6 Malayan, 7 Persian, 7 Phoenician, 7 Samaritan, one Tibetan, and 2 Welsh.

Extant copies of Fry's Pantographia are exceedingly rare but at least one sound specimen is preserved in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society.[1][2]

References

  1. Koopman, Harry Lyman (Mar–Aug 1910). "A pilgrimage to a typographic shrine". The Printing Art 15 (6): 430–432. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  2. Brigham, Clarence S. (1921). Report of the Librarian (AAS, 1921) (PDF) (Technical report). American Antiquarian Society.

External links

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