[asa] Wesley, Primitive Physic

This will be my final post on the Wesley thing.

It's usually easy to tell whether one has an "s" or an "f". As I stated, I
don't even notice the long "s" when I read a text, any more than readers of
German even notice some of the typeography used in those works, once they
get used to it. So I went back for one more look at my facsimile edition.

I studied a lot of letters in this particular edition, and it seems that
the printer had multiple characters for the long "s", somewhat depending on
the size of the character used (ie, the font size). The smaller "s" italic
type, which is used in this particular instance, has a half bar on it
halfway up the letter, on the left side. In the "f" character, the bar goes
all the way across. In the larger italic long "s," however, there is no bar
at all. The latter is much easier to discern and results in no confusion.
The smaller character, however, can be confusing. On the previous page,
e.g., the word "frankincense" is written using both the "f" and the long "s"
in smaller type, and you have to look at it closely to realize that the two
letters are different: it's really quite a subtle difference. If the next
letter is a "t," or even another long "s," you sometimes can't tell at all
simply from the typeface--context has to help.

Upon further examination and comparison, I would now say with confidence
that Wesley said "suck". But it's easy in this case to see why someone
might honestly misread what's written. If it were the larger typeface, no
problem; but the smaller italic is very hard to discern.

Ted

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Received on Mon Mar 12 09:15:29 2007