typeface

     I thought that it was really interesting, and funny, about that long s that appeared in the old printing of “The Flea.”  I decided to look up older letterform and find out more about why texts appeared this way.  The practice of using the ſ in place of s died out before the 1800s in Roman and Italic type faces.  The International Phonetic Alphabet uses a similar symbol: ʃ to represent the “sh” sound.  There is even an example of a long s in the United States Bill of Rights. 

Some times French and German printing still uses ligatures for s’s though. berlin 2002

In calculus a version of the long s symbol is used to stand for the latin word “summa,” or sum.  The way it made us laugh in “The Flea” others have used the confusion between the long s and the letter f for humor.  The long s was never used to end a word.  For example the word sentiments would look like fentiments. 

            Another letterform used in the past was the “half r” or r rotunda, which was used to replace the letter r if it followed another letter.  This may have been to save space.  It certainly would not be able to give words double meanings like the long s though. 

Here you can see the half r and long s in the title Hystoriae ecclesiastica: