Explore a new digital edition of "Printing Types" from 1922
openculture.com34 points by bryanrasmussen 4 days ago
34 points by bryanrasmussen 4 days ago
TIL that "uppercase" and "lowercase" come from the actual cases where the types were stored. When I saw this picture https://cdn8.openculture.com/2025/09/23222831/OC-Printing-Ty... from the article, it all became clear. Even the numbers (for which you don't have to press "shift" on the keyboard either) were also stored in the lower case (which was obviously for the most often used types). Which then translated nicely to the typewriter: no shift for the more commonly used characters (lowercase), shift for the less common (uppercase).
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Terminology
Yes. However in the US at least, the California job case was much more popular in the 20th century and it moved the capitals to the right of the "lower case" letters rather than above them. Nevertheless during the years when I was a typesetter we still called them "upper case" and never "right case".
If you buy an old typecase at an antiques store in the US, 99% of the time it will be a California job case.
I was looking into early letter forms and found this delightful book on sign-painting from 1878.
https://ia600606.us.archive.org/32/items/artofletteringsi00b...
One thing I found interesting is the terminology around types were not serif and san-serif but roman style and egyptian style. roman is still sort of used this way but I had never heard the term egyptian to refer to san serif letter forms. I wonder when we lost it.
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