Italic

This description of letter was designed by Aldus Manutius, a Roman, who, in the year 1490 (says Stower, in his “Printers’ Grammar”), erected a printing office in Venice, where he introduced the Roman types of a neater cut, and invented the letter which we, and most of the nations in Europe, know by the name of Italic.

Italic was originally designed to distinguish such parts of a book as might be said not strictly to belong to the body of the work, as prefaces, introductions, annotations, &c., all of which it was the custom formerly to print in Italics. In the present age it is used more sparingly, the necessity being supplied by the more elegant mode of enclosing extracts within inverted commas, and poetry and annotations in a smaller sized type. It is of service often in displaying a title page, or distinguishing the head or subject matter of a chapter from the chapter itself. The too frequent use of Italic is iiseless and absurd. It also very materially retards the progress of the compositor, who has the trouble of repeatedly moving from one case to another in composing. It is too often made use of to mark emphatic sentences or words, but without any rule or system, and so destroys, in a great measure, the beauty of printing, and often confuses the reader where it is improperly applied, who, pausing to consider why such words are more strongly noted, loses the context of the sentence and has to revert hack to regain the sense of the subject. Not only does Italic so confuse the reader, but the bold face of the Roman suffers by being contrasted with the fine strokes of the Italic; that symmetry and proportion is destroyed which it is so necessary and desirable to preserve, the former letter being cut in a parallel, the latter in an oblique position.