Pantographia – Edmund Fry (Black Letter Press)

Pantographia by Edmund Fry, London 1799, contains more than two hundred alphabets.

This book is full of curiosities, like Chaldean 1. Fry traces this to the French scholar and astrologer Jacques Gaffarel (1601 – 1681). There is a woodcut depicting the hemispheres and their constellations, from which Fry drew his Cælestial alphabet. Gaffarel in turn borrowed the alphabet from Guillaume Postel (1510 – 1581), the polyglot French linguist, astronomer, Christian Cabalist, and di­plo­mat. However, Postel was not its creator; it first appeared in the third book of Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia.

Many of the characters were expressly cut by Fry for his book. Pantographia has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature.

Foreword by Jan Düsterhöft.