[Calvin Locke]

...miſſpellings.

Yes, and no.

Back in the day, printers had a finite set of type. So, they had to make do with what they had. "f" for "s", etc. I'm sure if they had enough "s", the printer would have used them.

Otherwife, can you imagine the nightmare of collation, if the printer waf to print juft enough of the page for with the available correct type, then to go back and finifh printing the pagef after drying time?

[AnAmericanMother]

Actually, not true.

The type was not a limiting factor. Early typography took over from Classical and medieval Latin the difference between the terminal and medial letter "s".

A medial "s" was written on a long stroke, the terminal "s" had a little curlicue.

German Fraktur never got the message and is still using the medial "s" - that's where I first encountered it.

[AnAmericanMother]

And it's not the same as the letter "f" (although you'll sometimes see a horizontal stroke, if you look carefully, it's only on the left side of the vertical line).

In fact, to avoid confusion, when a medial "s" adjoined the letter "f" some typesetters would use a terminal "s" instead.

[KarlInOhio]

Actually those weren't "f". They were a special form of "s" called the "long s" which was used at the beginning and middle of the word, but never at the end.

ſ f ſ f ſ f.

It is clearer in italics: ſ f ſ f ſ f

The ſ doesn't have the bar all the way across (or at all in some typefaces). It is not interchangeable with an f (well, maybe by fome cheap printfhops which juft didn't care).

I did find some websites which tracked "misspellings" in scanned old texts and the long s quickly disappeared around 1800.

http://polymath07.blogspot.com/2011/06/we-now-have-one-s.html is one such site which graphs the usage of wish vs. (what the OCR sees as) wifh over the years.