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A Celtic, illuminated S includes knot-work and animal heads. |
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A simple illuminated capital "S" with plant designs. |
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A very ornate illuminated capital "S" includes: owl, dragon and peacock! |
Additional Illuminated letter "S"s will be uploaded here in the future. Please read the
Terms of Use for images found on this page. All letters are restored and sometimes redrawn by Kathy Grimm.
S (named 'ess
, plural esses
) is the 19th letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
The minuscule form of 's' was 'ſ', called the long
s,
up to the fourteenth century or so, and the form 'S' was used then only
as uppercase in the same manner that the forms 'G' and 'A' are only
uppercase. With the introduction of printing, the modern form 's' began
to be used at the end of words by some printers. Later, it was used
everywhere in print and eventually spread to manuscript letters as well.
For example, "sinfulness" would be rendered as "ſinfulneſſ" in all
medieval hands, and later it was "ſinfulneſs" in some blackletter
hands and in print. The modern spelling "sinfulness" did not become
widespread in print until the beginning of the 19th century, largely to
prevent confusion of 'ſ' with the lowercase '
f' in typefaces which had a very short horizontal stroke in their lowercase 'f'. The ligature of 'ſs' (or 'ſz') became the German
Eszett, 'ß'.
It is commonly believed that it was the London printer John Bell
(1745–1831) who popularized the modern "round s", in place of the
elongated 'ſ', although exactly when he did this is unclear. In his
multivolume series,
The British Theatre, he began using the short
form instead of the elongated letter circa 1785, not entirely at first
but in later years more and more consistently. His edition of
Shakespeare, in 1785, was advertised with the claim that he "ventured to
depart from the common mode by rejecting the long 'ſ' in favor of the
round one, as being less liable to error....." In the field of more ephemeral publications, Bell began a London newspaper called
The World, of which it has been said that a "vital change ... first made in
The World,
entitled No. 1 of that paper (for Monday, January 1, 1787) to be
chronicled in any kalendar of typographical progress: the abolition of
the long 'ſ'...."
Bell may have popularized it, but he did not invent it; in his letter
of March 26, 1786 to Francis Childs, Benjamin Franklin wrote "the Round s
.... begins to be the Mode, and in nice printing the Long 'ſ' is
rejected entirely."
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