Early printers made their own type. Subsequently typefounding became a specialist industry in its own right, though type continued to be made by hand until the Bruce typecasting machine was invented in 1838.

Typefounders produced type specimen books which showed not only the different designs and sizes of type, but also the ornaments, standard illustrations and borderrs which they could supply. Printers also produced ‘type specimen’ books to show customers the range of types they had available.

The British Printer published a short article on the origins of Scottish typefounding.

Scottish typefounders made a distinctive contribution to type design, one legacy being the Scotch Roman type family. In the 1740s, Alexander Wilson set up a type foundry in Glasgow in 1744, and the firm continued to produce type for a hundred years. William Miller worked for this firm, before establishing a foundry in Edinburgh in 1809. The firm became Miller & Richard in 1838, and remained in business until 1952 just off Nicholson Street, supplying type to firms all over the world. You can look at Miller & Richard type specimen books through these links:

• Miller & Richard Type Specimen, 1894
• Miller & Richard Type Specimen, 1902

In 1906, the British Printer published a description of the Nicolson Street works description of the Nicolson Street works.

‘Hot metal’ typesetting systems, of which the best known are Linotype and Monotype, were invented at the end of the nineteenth century. They cast the type needed to set a particular text, and once used, were melted down for re-use.

As well as the different type faces, in Britain the different type sizes, starting with the largest, were known as:

Name	Numbers of lines per foot
Canon	18 lines and a Great Primer
Two-line Double Pica	20¾ lines
Two-line Great Primer	25½ lines
Two-line English	32 lines
Two-line Pica	35 lines
Double Pica (two Small Picas)	41½ lines
Paragon (two Long Primers)	44½ lines
Great Primer (two Bourgeois)	51¼ lines
English (two Minions)	64 lines
Pica (two Nonpareil)	71½ lines
Small Pica (two Ruby)	83 lines
Long Primer (two Pearl)	89 lines
Bourgeois (two Diamond)	102¼ lines
Brevier	112½ lines
Minion (half English)	128 lines
Nonpareil (half Pica)	143 lines
Ruby	160½ lines
Pearl (half Long Primer)	178 lines
Diamond (half Bourgeois)	205 lines