One discussion that comes up during our Metal Type Composition workshop is the placement of the capital J and U which fall at the end of the alphabet in the job case. The explanation is that they are late-comers to the alphabet we know today.

James Mosley in his blog Typefoundry lists that the J and U appear in the first quarter of the 17th century. The W came into existence in the mid-17th century, bringing us to our current total of 26.

Given those dates, we wonder why the W isn’t at the very end except that the W originally was a double V (VV) and that keeping the V and W together was just too logical. It is interesting to note that of the 2,000 job cases containing type we’ve bought over the years, we’ve never found one of the California job cases where the previous owner rearranged them in complete A - Z sequence. Actually, that’s pretty nice.

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