"Black letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... former date was probably left unfinished, when the husband placed the inscription to his wife, and after his death it was neglected to be filled up, as in many other instances. The numerals would be in black letter.- ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... by their author, pen in hand, until, at the end of a long succession of revisions, the pages came to be cobwebbed over with a wonderfully intricate network of blots and lines in the way of correction or of obliteration. Several of the leaves in this way, what with the black letter-press on the white paper, being scored out or interwoven with a tracery in red ink and blue ink alternately, present to view a curiously parti-coloured or tesselated appearance. As a specimen page, however, will afford a more vivid illustration upon the instant of what is referred to, than could ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... degree scarcely imaginable. They have no pavement, and the earth is full of holes. The seats are rude benches; the Altars have no rails. One of them has a breach in the roof. On the desk, I think, of each lay a folio Welsh Bible of the black letter, which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... or chapters, on verso of the title page, under the heading of "Katalogos et Epigraphe Decem Voluminum De Re Popinali C. Apitii" are both in Greek and Roman characters. German names and quotations are in Gothic type (black letter). The book is well printed, in the style of the Froschauer or Oporinus press, but bears ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... a large black letter "F" under each nail to designate the edge of footings. They now took their picks and dug a small score in the ground directly under all the lines, thus marking out correctly on the ground the outer and inner edge of the footings. As the elevation of the ground ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... printing. This great and admirable writer had one constant fault, which is so vulgar and trivial that it remains as much of a wonder as it is of an offence. He seeks emphasis by the expedient of big type and small type, of capitals and small capitals, of italics and black letter, and of tawdry little illustrations. Long before the reader arrives at the point at which it is intended that his emotions shall be stirred, his eye warns him that the shock is coming. He knows beforehand ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... third cut about 1482; one of Double Pica, good, which first appears 1490; and one of Long Primer, at least nearly agreeing with the bodies which have since been called by those names. All of Caxton's works were printed in what are called black letter. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... bookish enthusiasm. They were such volumes as Mr. Pendennis ran up accounts for at Oxford. Narcissus had many other points in common with that gentleman. Such volumes as, morning after morning, sadden one's breakfast-table in that Tantalus menu, the catalogue. Black letter, early printed, first editions Elizabethan and Victorian, every poor fly ambered in large paper, etc. etc.; in short, he ran through the gamut of that craze which takes its turn in due time with marbles, peg-tops, beetles, and foreign stamps—with probably the ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... enable me to substantiate the present charge with a variety of facts one tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic, who has or has not made a collection of black letter books—in itself a useful and respectable amusement,—puts on the seven-league boots of self-opinion, and strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme judge, and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial at ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir Martin returned ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... equal vertical bands of red (hoist side), yellow, and green; uses the popular pan-African colors of Ethiopia; similar to the flag of Rwanda which has a large black letter R centered in ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the fifteenth century go by the name of incunabula. [7] Of the seven or eight million volumes which appeared before 1500 A.D., about thirty thousand are believed to be still in existence. Many of these earliest books were printed in heavy, "black letter" type, an imitation of the characters used in monkish manuscripts. It is still retained for most books printed in Germany. The clearer and neater "Roman" characters, resembling the letters employed for ancient Roman inscriptions, came into use in southern Europe and England. The ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... an' read an' preach, Few men knew mair or better, An' nearly all the bukes he read Were printed in black letter. ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... said to have taken place in 1678, when 97 persons were burned together. The earliest recorded burning of a witch in England is in Walter Mapes' De Nugis Curialium, in the reign of Henry II. An old black letter tract gloats over the execution at Northampton, 1612, of a number of persons convicted of witchcraft.[32] The last judicial sentence was in 1736, when one Jane Wenham was found guilty of conversing familiarly with the devil in the form of ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... we are all indebted for promoting and systematising our studies—that a miscellaneous, but yet in some points valuable collection of old vellum manuscripts was left, at the beginning of the present century, by a poor peripatetic Scottish tailor, who could not read one word of the old black letter documents which he spent his life and his purse in collecting. Being a visionary claimant to one of the dormant Scottish peerages, he buoyed himself up with the bright hope that some clever lawyer would yet ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... 15th—-We are now in Hungary and just outside of Buda Pesth "the wickedest city in the world," still in spite of that fact I am going on. I am very glad I came this way— The peasants and soldiers are most amusing and like German picture-papers with black letter type— I shall stop a day in Paris now that ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis |
