I have been showing an image of 3 Aldine (Griffo) r shapes around. You may have seen them.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebensorkin/2416920076/in/set-72157604556594...

But today I noticed something else. All three of the bases are quite different too. This is starting to look less & less circumstantial to me now. What do you think?

I also read that Aldus in the same period “clearly had no less than seven varient forms of the letter “nu”, five of “alpha”, “phi” and “omega”, four of “beta”, and “tau”: in all, the twenty-four letters of the alphabet appear in seventy-five forms, while contractions, abbreviations, accents and breathings carry the total number of sorts well into the hundreds. The quote is from the Lowry book “The world of Aldus Manutius : business and scholarship in Renaissance Venice”.

Obviously this again proves nothing but it builds a picture in my mind where alt r shapes may have seemed even that much more plausible.