The Fell Types.

No book in One Hundred Books Famous in Typography had as long a gestation period as Morison’s work on the Fell types. This exhaustive account of John Fell (1625–86) and the types he procured for the press at Oxford University was commissioned by the University in 1925, but the volume was not published until forty-two years later.

The Fell types themselves are a rather incongruous accumulation, including fonts cut by Garamond, Granjon, Hautlin, Van Dijck, Walpergen, and others; a real hodgepodge. The quality of the Fell fonts varies greatly.

This folio volume was handset in several of the types Fell had acquired. Running to more than 300 folio pages, it is one of the last great monumental letterpress books to be handset; in that regard it is perhaps only rivaled by the folio English translation of Charles Enschedé’s Typefounderies in the Netherlands, printed eleven years later at the Enschedé type foundry in Haarlem.