Upper Case and Lower Case letters (Announce)

by jimashton , Saturday, January 17, 2009, 05:14 (5782 days ago)

In response to using Upper Case and Lower Case letters in: A Reminder of Posting Etiquette

David

William Camden 1551/1623 wrote a book "Britannia" - see Wikipedia. This is currently the basis of a very interesting programme on BBC1 Television in the UK. The presenter Nicholas Crane is walking along the principle areas featured in the book. On a recent episode he visited the publishers of William Camden’s 1586 book in Oxford.
He was asked to replicate the type cast method using metal letters as they were at the time. He took several minutes to arrange one line and considering the book was around 500 pages, tried to estimate how long the book took to print.
Whilst arranging the letters he was shown that the large or Capital letters were in cases on the top of a rack, the smaller letters were in cases on a lower level of the rack, immediately beneath the large letters. This is why letters have ever since been described as “Upper Case” and “Lower Case”
As Michael Caine would have said “There aren’t many people that know that.” now there are a few more !!

Jim Ashton