Alphabet de Lettres

A historiated initial is the large decorated letter that opens a chapter, with a scene worked into the letter itself. It began in illuminated manuscripts, where a scribe could spend days on a single capital, and it survived the arrival of printing by being cut into blocks: a printer who wanted the effect bought the whole alphabet at once and dropped in whichever letter the page needed.

Alphabet de Lettres Initiales Historiques, published in 1,846 under the name Ridolfo Fils, is one of those working sets rather than a book anyone sat down to read. Ornamental alphabets were trade goods, cut and sold from one printing house to another, and a set like this existed to be used.

Count them and there are twenty-four, not twenty-six. J is missing because for most of the history of the Latin alphabet it was not a separate letter at all, only a flourish on an I, so there was no reason to cut a second block for it. W is missing because in French it was barely a letter yet, a foreign import still being argued into the dictionaries around the time this alphabet was made.

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