ABSTRACT
The art of printing by moveable types involved a number of preliminary stages. Type-cutters engraved letter-punches which were then struck into softer metal bars to create matrices, and these, together with a specially invented mould, made possible the casting of types in sufficient quantities. The earliest printers reproduced the forms of the marks of punctuation which appeared in the manuscripts used for copy. In the sixteenth century as a wider range of marks became available to all printers with the supply of new founts from specialist type founders, there is less discrepancy between the practices of different printers. Some printers also used marks to indicate interpolations in different languages. At the beginning of the eighteenth century English printers transformed the comma-marks used for the diple into a new punctuation symbol which we may properly call 'quotation marks'. German printers used commas in the normal position on the line tor the diple in the left-hand margin.
