"The university's John Carter Brown Library has long held the "Roger Williams Mystery Book," a book that purportedly belonged to Roger Williams, the radical religious thinker and founder of Rhode Island. The book is missing its title page and thus has little identifying information (besides a subtitle, "An Essay Concerning the Reconciling of Differences among Christians") -- but it's covered with extensive shorthand marginalia suspected to have been written by Williams himself sometime in the mid 1600s. The students, who include history and math majors, are using this semester to decipher the writing and to determine whether or not the shorthand handwriting was Williams's hand."

"So who was responsible and when is it from? Since the sheet is neither signed nor dated, we can only make this assertion thanks to the sleuthing done by earlier scholars, most importantly by John Dreyfus for his collection of type specimen facsimiles, and the source of much of the information I give here.1 This sheet can be connected to its type caster thanks to the detailed records kept by the Dutch printer Christophe Plantin and the remarkable longevity of his press, now the home of the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Plantin’s 1575 inventory of fonts includes the double pica italic typeface shown on this sheet (it’s the largest size of the italic face, on the right-hand column), with a note on the facing page identifying it as “Ascendonica Cursive de Guiot.” François Guyot was a type caster in Antwerp who worked from the 1540s until his death in 1570, and who was the main caster for Plantin from 1555 onwards; he also seems to have worked briefly for John Day in London."

Quotable Montaigne