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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
In 1763 the Clarendon Press at Oxford issued a Greek Testament printed from a fount newly cut for them by John Baskerville of Birmingham. It was the beginning of a new era in Greek typography in England. For the crabbed and curly abbreviations which perpetuated in print the obscurities of manuscript, following the sixteenth-century type of Robert Estienne, were substituted clearly formed letters pleasant to see and easy to read. Some abbreviations there still were, for the basis was still a written hand of not a century later than Estienne, but they were not obscure. Estienne, printer to the King, Francis I, had taken as his model the letters drawn for him by the King's scribe, a Cretan, Angelos Vergetios: Baskerville borrowed from the school library of Coventry a manuscript written by an English schoolmaster, Euclid's Harmonics copied by Philemon Holland, and ‘partly formed his characters from it’.