Damaged Type and Areopagitica's Clandestine Printers

Abstract

Milton's Areopagitica (1644) is one of the most significant texts in the history of the freedom of the press, and yet the pamphlet's clandestine printers have successfully eluded identification for over 375 years. By examining distinctive and damaged type pieces from 100 pamphlets from the 1640s, this article attributes the printing of Milton's Areopagitica to the London printers Matthew Simmons and Thomas Paine, with the possible involvement of Gregory Dexter. It further reveals a sophisticated ideological program of clandestine printing executed collaboratively by Paine and Simmons throughout 1644 and 1645 that includes not only Milton's Areopagitica but also Roger Williams's The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, William Walwyn's The Compassionate Samaritane, Henry Robinson's Liberty of Conscience, Robinson's John the Baptist, and Milton's Of Education, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion.

Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with Computational Bibliography? New Angles on Printing Thomas Hobbes’ “Ornaments” Edition

“…19 Some of our earlier work using the historical Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool Ocular to inspect examples of a given letter, or "sort," had given us hope that we could supplement Malcolm's findings with typographical evidence. 20 We were able to confirm Malcolm's finding that Darby's shop used Roman fonts similar to the two fonts in the body text of Ornaments-the first in books like Toland's Life of Milton and Harrington's Oceana (F1) and the second in Calamy's Sermons and Nye's Historical Account (F2). Despite these similarities, however, it remained difficult to match any particular sort of type from Darby's output to any of the roughly 200 distinctive sorts we identified in the Ornaments edition.…”