Figure 294
Page of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Royal Academy Discourse: Cadell, London
From a copy in Harvard College Library
1782
…though printed from old style type, by its arrangement has an effect entirely different from the printing of fifty years earlier. A collection of these addresses delivered by Reynolds between 1769 and 1783, some of them the work of Cadell, printer to the Academy, is (like similar Spanish occasional addresses that have been mentioned) illuminating because they were printed for a distinguished body of men, and represent the best taste of the day. The excessively spaced letters of the title-page, the large folios in spaced brackets, the open leading, the blank spaces between paragraphs, and the wide margins, show a style of work which—handsome in quartos like these—became very thin and faded in smaller books which copied them.