I was looking at the Wikipedia entry on Bell and some of what it says seems a bit weird. First of all, it describes it as "the first Scotch Roman face". Does that seem right? I thought Scotch Roman specifically referred to descendents of Miller's mid-nineteenth-century Pica Roman No. 2 and close facsimiles. Bell is a late-eighteenth-century transitional with many features in common with Scotch, but I wouldn't personally classify it as one.
I know Richard Austin is often credited with designing the Miller face (although as far as I can tell this is entirely based on T.C Hansard, who made the claim with little or no substantiation). I wonder if whoever wrote this part of the Wikipedia article was confusing this latter type with Austin's much earlier Bell type.
(It also lists one of Bell's characteristics as "square dot over the letter i"... ???)
That brings me to the article on Scotch Roman itself. Um. It actually barely says anything (a travesty on its own), and what it does say seems quite inaccurate:
These typefaces were modeled on an original 1839 design by Samuel Nelson Dickinson, founder of the Dickinson Type Foundry in Boston, who had the design cut by Richard Austin, and cast by Alexander Wilson and Son in Glasgow, Scotland.
The quoted sentence cites this Typefoundry article as a source. Yet a careful reading of the latter actually contradicts it almost entirely:
- The 1939 Dickinson design, which is nowhere said to have been cut by Austin, is only the origin of the "Scotch face" name, but is not the model for the Scotch Roman typefaces themselves.
- The actual model, Miller Pica Roman No.2, is the one claimed by Hansard to have been cut by Austin, but the article specifically casts doubt on that claim.
I get the distinct impression that the Wikipedia article author just hastily skimmed the source article without properly understanding what it said.
I'm hardly an expert on these matters, so I'm reluctant to simply start editing the Wikipedia articles myself... not at least without getting some informed opinions. Can anyone comment?
