The Catalog of Distinctive Type (1660-1700)
If, like me, you spend a lot of time worrying about who printed what in later seventeenth-century England, then the Catalog of Distinctive Type (CDT), compiled by Christopher Warren and Sam Lemley of Carnegie Mellon University, will be an invaluable resource. It has long been known that broken or damaged type can be used to identify the printers of anonymous books. Subtle imperfections occur naturally as metal type wears over time and can thus serve as a kind of fingerprint for individual printers and workshops.
The CDT aggregates over 15,000 distinctive character-images derived from more than 1,900 digitised editions of later seventeenth-century English imprints. The images can be filtered by date, printer, and character, making it easy to locate, for instance, all chipped or deformed uppercase Ts used in books dated between 1680 and 1682. The data is limited to uppercase, non-ligature characters in books that name their printer in the imprint, which has some drawbacks. But as a springboard for bibliographical research, it is fantastically useful. Happy hunting!
Joseph Hone, Council member
