" Body type, that is, those classes ever
seen in ordinary print, aside from display and fancy styles, is in
thirteen classes, the smallest technically called brilliant and the
largest great primer.
In the reading columns of newspapers but four classes are ordinarily
used--agate for the small advertisements; agate, nonpareil, and minion
for news, miscellany, etc., and minion and brevier for editorials--the
minion being used for what are called minor editorials, and the
brevier for leading articles, as to which it may be said that young
editorial writers consider life very real and very earnest until they
are promoted from minion to brevier.
A complete assortment of any one of these classes is called a font,
the average weight of which is about 800 pounds. Whereas our alphabet
has 26 letters, the compositor must really use of letters, spaces,
accent marks, and other characters in an English font 152 distinct
types, and in each font there are 195,000 individual pieces. The
largest number of letters in a font belongs to small _e_--12,000; and
the least number to the _z_--200. The letters, characters, spaces,
etc., are distributed by the printer in a pair of cases, the upper one
for capitals, small capitals, and various characters, having 98 boxes,
and the lower one, for the small letters, punctuation marks, etc.,
having 54 boxes.
A few newspapers are using typesetting machines for all or part of
their composition.
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