Fuzzy Beginnings

So how did the classical Latin become so incoherent? At first, McClintock claimed that a 15th century typesetter likely scrambled part of Cicero's De Finibus in order to provide placeholder text to mockup various fonts for a type specimen book.

As McClintock  in the Before & After Magazine to explain his discovery:

“What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book;