[Robb_K]

I've seen and read several English-language books from the 18th Century, and am well used to the archaic small "s", which, incidentally, is NOT the same as the small "f". You can see that easily in this very book. It is interesting that the use of that archaic lower case "s" was standard in English, Scots, German (Hochdeutsch), Frisian, Plattdeutsch, and Dutch, at fairly similar times. But also interesting that English, like Deutsch (standard German) still does today, used to capitalise ALL nouns, as opposed to Dutch, which in all the 18th Century books I remember seeing, only capitalised proper nouns, and first words in a sentence, and other "important words", and still today only capitalises the first word in a literary title.

Link to the book: A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible [1789]

[crashryan]

I've been fascinated by the use of the "upright" s. It was used at the start or in the middle of a word, but not at the end, where the "modern" s was used. Double s's used two uprights if inside a word but one of each if at the end of a word. I notice several ligatures using the upright s, like st and sl. The si combination, with the top of the s replacing the dot over the i, still shows up occasionally in the fi combination in English books set in serif type. I've seen the ct ligature in books as late as the 1920s, but it always seemed like an affectation rather than the use of an obsolete standard. The similarity of the upright s and the f became a joke in Stan Freberg's historical satires when one of the Founding Fathers reads about the right to "life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff."