The Main Street of Erin Village backs on to a millpond that
was flooded in the mid-nineteenth century to further the commercial
interests of Mundell Lumber, which continues to retail dry goods into the early part
of the twenty-first century. West of the millpond and rising above
it 250 vertical feet there is a sizeable glacial `moraine' -- millions
of tons of dolomite (mostly) furrowed out of the Credit River Valley
ten thousand years earlier and pushed up into a modest sequence of rolling hills.
Elke and I walked those hills, frequently, in the fall of 1971, and one day we happened
on the stone foundation of a barn
that had fallen into ruin. In the foundation there were boxes,
and boxes, and boxes of books.
Hundreds of copies in fact of John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress amongst other titles that were
of little interest except that some of
the multiple editions of Pilgrim's Progress had been typeset
rather well, with intriguing ornamental initials such as you see here.
The Devil's Artisan intends to present an ever-larger
digital library of these images, available at no charge for
download as shareware, for the favour of which we would appreciate
a credit to `Walter Inkster, the Devil's Artisan'.
It amuses me, some, that these images are now to be made available
on the World Wide Web, and that my father was prematurely
dismissed in the 1970s for insisting that the future of Bell Telephone
lay in the direction of fibre optics.
My father, as it turns out, was correct.
This alphabet is, of course, incomplete. Whether this is a function
of the limitations of my source, or because the other letters never existed, I wouldn't know.
To download what you see here, right-click on any letter, which should give
you the option of viewing it in a rather large scale or saving it to your
local machine. This stratagem works fine in Netscape, Mozilla and Konqueror.
I'm less sure about Explorer. You may also be interested in
Headpieces or perhaps
Tailpieces?
The originals are about an inch and a half high, and were
scanned at 600 dpi.
Questions, comments or suggestions about this web page,
e-mail publisher Tim Inkster.
I would be particularly grateful to hear from anyone who knows what
this letterform is called, or anything about its likely origins.
For story suggestions for the Devil's Artisan or other editorial concerns
please e-mail editor Don McLeod.
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ISSN 0225-7874