Dorothy Parker famously said of some actress or other that she ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B: Dorothy Brown from Sutton now asks me about the origin of gamut.
All the notes used in medieval music could be presented in a `great scale', as it was called, the creation of an Italian, Guido d'Arezzo. The lowest note in this scale was represented by the Greek letter gamma. The ancient scale had seven notes: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. These were from certain syllables and initials in a hymn for St John the Baptist's Day: `Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labil reatum, Sancte Johannes' the gamma-ut, or gamut (it was later called doh). It wasn't long before the name of the note which began the scale was transferred to the scale itself, and then it acquired the meaning of the whole scale, range or compass of anything.
Margaret O'Brien from Ranelagh sent me a copy of a page from Vanity Fair of December 1881 which backed a cartoon of Gladstone. Margaret was tickled by advertisements for Cadbury's Cocoa Essence (`it is often asked, Why does my doctor recommend it? It contains four times the amount of nitrogenous or flesh-forming constituents than the average in other cocoas!'): and for The New Remington Type-Writer (`It gives relief from all of the physical troubles engendered by the pen, such as pen paralysis, curvature of the spine and lung troubles: the blind, the partially paralysed, and maimed can use it. It opens a new and wide field of congenial labour to educated women'). The New Type-Writer could copy the italic manner of penmanship, so it could: and the ad prompted Margaret to ask what Italy has to do with this.
In 1501 Aldus Manutius of Venice published the works of Virgil, using a type newly-designed by himself, imitating the handwriting of Petrarch. This type became the distinguishing feature of the works published by the Aldine Press. Aldus dedicated his edition of Virgil to Italia hence the description `italic'. It differed little either from the modern fount or from the handwriting of the great poet who loved the splendid Laura, a lady who could, methinks, in a later age, have made a blooming fortune advertising Cadbury's Cocoa Essence.