small capitals) to lay a font which rarely weighed over ten
pounds was obviously a waste of case and stand space. Who was
the first printer to devise a single case to hold both upper and
lower case letters as well as figures, points and spacing
material will probably never be known, but it is easy enough to
reconstruct the probable reasoning behind the action.
By 1836 the general plan of the job or double case had
become standardized in Britain and the U.S. External dimensions
were the same as for the traditional upper and lower cases of
the country of use. The case was divided into equal thirds by
crossbars, the left and center thirds given over to the
appropriate lower case lay and the right thirds devoted to 49
equal size boxes for the capital letters and miscellaneous
characters. Why the capital side of the new case was put at the
right is an unanswered question, for the capital letters were
laid in the left side of the traditional upper case both in
America and Britain at that time.
But the capital letters side of the job case had a serious
shortcoming. Its 49 equal size boxes, each about 1" by 1" inside
dimensions in Britain and 1" by 2" in the wider American case,
were not large enough to hold some of the most frequently used
capitals (E, A, N, O, R, S, T) of job fonts of size greater than
double pica or 24 point. This deffciency was particularly
troublesome in the case of heavy or wide letter faces. Moreover,
the top two rows, devoted to signs, accented letters and
fractions in the traditional upper case, were largely unused in
the job or double case as these characters were seldom if ever
included in display letter or job fonts.