Font Facts
The letters "J", "U" and "W" were not
used in the first alphabet (Roman). They were later introduced to the Latin alphabet
at different times. The "U" was derived from the letter "V"
around the 10th century, the "W" is made from the partial overlapping of two
"U"s (thus double-u) and introduced in the 12th century, and the "J"
is a modified "I" which came into use in the 15th century.
The letters of the alphabet described by Dürer in 1535 do
not contain the characters of "J", "U" or "W".
In ancient Boustrophedon writing, every alternate line in the text
reads from right to left. Boustrophedon means "the way the ox turns", for
the u-shaped patterns of lines created in the soil by the plow pulled by an ox.
The Gothic typeface of the 42 line Guttenberg bible from 1455
survived in Germany as the national typeface with very few stylistic changes until January
3, 1941 when Nazi Germany decreed the Gothic type to be of Jewish invention. They
replaced it with Antiqua. (he was a bad, bad man).
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