esolved upon. By the middle of August, 1890, eleven punches had
been cut. At the end of the year the fount was all but complete.

On Jan. 12th, 1891, a cottage, No. 16, Upper Mall, was taken. Mr.
William Bowden, a retired master-printer, had already been engaged to
act as compositor and pressman. Enough type was then cast for a trial
page, which was set up and printed on Saturday, Jan. 31st, on a sample
of the paper that was being made for the Press by J. Batchelor and Son.
About a fortnight later ten reams of paper were delivered. On Feb. 18th
a good supply of type followed. Mr. W. H. Bowden, who subsequently
became overseer, then joined his father as compositor, and the first
chapters of The Glittering Plain were set up. The first sheet appears to
have been printed on March 2nd, when the staff was increased to three by
the addition of a pressman named Giles, who left as soon as the book was
finished. A friend who saw William Morris on the day after the printing
of the page above mentioned recalls his elation at the success of his
new type. The first volume of the Saga Library, a creditable piece of
printing, was brought out and put beside this trial page, which much
more than held its own. The poet then declared his intention to set to
work immediately on a black-letter fount; illness, however, intervened
and it was not begun until June. The lower case alphabet was finished by
the beginning of August, with the exception of the tied letters, the
designs for which, with those for the capitals, were sent to Mr. Prince
on September 11th. Early in November enough type was cast for two trial
pages, the one consisting of twenty-six lines of Chaucer's Franklin's
Tale and the other of sixteen lines of Sigurd the Volsung. In each of
these a capital I is used that was immediately discarded. On the last
day of 1891 the full stock of Troy type was despatched from the foundry.
Its first appearance was in a paragraph, announcing the book from which
it took its name, in the list dated May, 1892.

This Troy type, which its designer preferred to either of the others,
shows the influence of the beautiful early types of Peter Schoeffer of
Mainz, Gunther Zainer of Augsburg, and Anthony Koburger of Nuremberg;
but, even more than the Golden type, it has a strong character of its
own, which differs largely from that of any mediaeval fount. It has
recently been pirated abroad, and is advertised by an enterprising
German firm as 'Die amerikani