ANATOMY OFA TYPEFACE ALEXANDER LAWSON fib) HAMISH HAMILTON - LONDONHAMISH HAMILTON LTD Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 stz, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street. New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Vieworsa. Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, to Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Mav 382 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Fust published in the United States of America by David R.. Godine 1990 First published in hardback in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Led 1990 First published in paperback in Great Britain by Hamish Harnilton Led 1992 13579108642 Copyright © Alexander Lawson, 1990 ‘The moral right of the author has been asserted All nghes reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no ‘part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, of transinitted, in any form or by any means (electconic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise}, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book Puoto Creorrs . 46: reprinted by permission of Carolyn Hammer, p. 109: reprinted by permission of Martino Mardersteig; p. 128: reprinted by permission of Hermann Zapf: p. 228: reprinted by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; p. 336° reprinted by courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library; pp. 119, 348, 408: ‘reprinted by permission from the Melber: B. Carey, je, Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. Printed and bound in Great Britain by ‘Butler & Tanner Led, Frome and London18. 19. CONTENTS Preface Goudy Text and the Black-letter Types Hammer Uncial Cloister Old Style Centaur Bembo Arrighi Dante Goudy Old Style Palatino Garamond Granjon Sabon Janson Caston Baskerville Bodoni Bulmer Bell2. 22. 23. 25. 27. 30. 3 Oxford Caledonia Cheltenham Bookman Times Roman Newspaper Types Franklin Gothic and the Twentieth-century Gothics Clarendon and the Square-serif Revival Optima and the Humanist Sans-serif Types Futura and the Geometric Sans-serif Types Script, Cursive, and Decorated Types ‘Type Making from Punch to Computer Bibliography Index 253 Beggs 24 337PREFACE It may seem presumptuous to select for this book only thirty contem- porary printing types from the many thousands that have appeared since the fifteenth century, but I propose through the discussion of these thirty designs to present an overview of all the rest. As the typographic historian Harry Carter wrote so felicitously, ‘Printer’s types have generally been studied for the love of them) and, indeed, most of the books about type have been written from-that viewpoint. Of course, every printer harboring a fondness for types tries to justify this interest by citing practical considerations of use, but in most instances the printer is really seduced by the beauty of the letter forms themselves. The more such a printer becomes involved in the exciting history of typographic development, the more likely it is that he or she will continue to seek that perfection of form that represents the ideal. This book, then, is not written for the printer convinced that there are already far toomany typefaces. Its, rather, addressed to the person who believes the opposite —that the subtleties of refinement as ap- plied to roman letters have yet to be fully investigated and that the production of the perfect printing type remains a goal to be desired as much by contemporary as by future type designers. The reader will note that the specific types listed herein are placed, insofar as the roman forms are concerned, in the sequence of their classification, and that in many cases I have included other typefaces contemporary with those discussed. In two instances those of script types and decorated letters~I have not singled out a particular face, as both designations contain so many individualized designs. I must be admitted that the classification of printing types is a controversial subject and one upon which little amicable agreement may be expected..In my short study, Printing Types: An Introduction (Beacon Press, 1971), I compared some of the current systems thathave evolved internationally during the past forty years, and then I attempted to rationalize a nomenclature that would help to simplify the study of types. It is this method that I have followed in arranging the sequence of types for this book. The system begins with Blackletter (‘Gothic’ in European termi- nology) and continues into the romans with Oldstyle, subdivided into Venetian, Aldine-French, and Dutch-English. The romans con- clude with Transitional and Modern, followed by Square Serif and Sans Serif. The listing is completed with Script-Cursive and Display- Decorative. After using this system in the teaching of typography over a thirty-year period, I know that it is reasonably effective in the initial study of printing types. I am not disposed to consider it faultless by any means. A classification system, after all, is simply a tool, extremely useful in sorting out the myriad forms already avail- able, but not an end in itself. Its primary purpose is to help people become familiar with these forms preparatory to putting them to effective and constructive typographic use. ‘This book has been written during a period of tremendous tech- nological change in the field of typography. Since about 1950, when the first simplified procedure was evolved for the composing of type by photographic methods, printing from metal types has been in decline. This metamorphosis, continuing from simple mechanical typesetting through various stages to high-speed computer-oriented composition, has brought with it a transformation that promises to abrogate five centuries of traditional craftsmanship in the assembling of the printed word. The typesetting machine is now available in such multitudinous variety that the conventional methods of composing-room apprentice- ship are no longer valid. In addition, small firms are increasingly at- tracted to what is primarily a new industry using ‘word processing” techniques. Since all of the new devices are equipped with typewriter keyboards, little is required of an operator except basic typing skills. Such shifts in customary typographic practice inevitably have resulted in a decline of quality. This is particularly noticeable in book typography. Any comparison of contemporary trade books with those produced twenty or more years ago will reveal a retrogression in the standards of production, affecting such details as the proper selection of type style and size, the use of italics and small capitals, legible spacing between words and lines, and the like. Formerly the responsibility of skilled crafismen, these aspects of design are now 8too often disregarded. Frequently, these niceties of typographic de- sign are not even available. Some of these difficulties, which are to be expected in a transitory situation, may be alleviated through the efforts of trade associations to evolve and sponsor training procedures and promote standards of quality. To this end, there is an increasing need for the study of the history of printing types. Certainly, the current technology of type- setting has resulted in the manufacture of composing machines capable of maintaining all that is best in traditional typography. One other concern remains to be mentioned in this introductory note: the current lack of copyright protection for contemporary type designers and manufacturers of composing devices, who are under- standably reluctant to underwrite and produce new designs, fearing the immediate pirating of their more popular offerings. Such diffi- culties have been faced by designers over the past hundred years, but they have been intensified by the mushrooming of equiprhent manu- facturers during the past two decades and the mechanical ease with which such copying can be done. Once again, this is an industry-wide problem, requiring the most intensive effort on the part of all prac- titioners to seek reasonably ethical standards. The alternative is clear: a serious decline in the number of new designs and, even more im- portant, a reluctance on the part of designers to attempt the creation of new letter forms. Since 1966 I have conducted a department, “Typographically Speak- ing} in the periodical Printing Impressions, in which the content of much of the present book appeared in greatly abbreviated form. Iam most grateful to Irving Borowsky, publisher of Printing Impressions, for his kind permission to reprint these articles. I am also appreciative of the support of James F. Burns, Jr., the magazine’s former editor. Archie Provan, associate professor in the School of Printing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and long my colleague there, has been very helpfui with suggestions for improving the original articles. I have also been singularly fortunate in having for my pub- lisher David R. Godine, who, almost unique among his contempo- raries, is most knowledgeable about typographic matters and in addition maintains a personal involvement in the format and design of his books. I am also grateful for the support-provided by my editor, Hilary Douglass Horton, who has humanized my journalistic prose. David Pankow, librarian of the Melbert B. Cary, Jr., Graphic Arts Collection at R.LT., has been most helpful with the bibliography and 9in the selection of illustrations. Finally, my wife, Evelyn T. Lawson, has struggled valiantly in the preparation of the manuscript to over- come the numerous inconsistencies, particularly between American and British usage, that exist in typographic nomenclature. ALEXANDER S. LAWSON Jekyll Island, Georgia 10ANATOMY OFA TYPEFACEeR 1 WD GOUDY TEXT AND THE BLACK-LETTER TYPES Frederic W. Goudy, prolific type designer though he was, came rather late to the design of a black-letter type, just about midway, in fact, in his prodigious ourput of approximately 123 type designs. Goudy’s late arrival at such a basic type style was undoubtedly affected by the rather low esteem in which black-letter types, except as display, were held by the fraternity of printers in the United States during much of his active career as a type designer (1895-1945). But once his Village Letter Foundery was reasonably well established in Marlborough, New York, in 1927, Goudy came to realize that he possessed ‘no black-letter type among my stock of designs? Although there was in the 1920s no lack of black-letter types gen- erally available to the trade, Goudy’s inclination was to provide one that followed the tradition established by Johann Gutenberg about 1440, which had since been much deviated from, particularly during the nineteenth century. And though the use of black letter had declined, most American printers recognized that for general com- mercial printing they required at least one such style. It was Goudy’s intention to provide the perfect example of it. Aglance at some of the types of the genre then being displayed in printers’ specimen books indicates the astonishing variety of black- letter styles obtainable from typefounders and composing-machine manufacturers early in the century. The two American foundries then in operation, American Type Founders Company and Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, offered respectively five and six different models, and the composing-machine firms each had three or more. Several of these faces were reasonably sound interpretations of the historic black letters, but too many were hangovers from the nineteenth century, in which typefounders had apparently lost sight of the traditional forms and become possessed with the need to add superfluous embellishments for the sake of novelty.Goudy Text ABCDEFGHIJLRIMNOP QRSTUVWIPBZ abcdefghijkimnopgrstubtoxpz & fffnffn Goudy Text Goudy, however, was anchored to typographic tradition and con- sistently sought to honor its precepts. And since he had earned his living at hand-lettering and had become a teacher in the subject (about 1900), he was of course completely familiar with every style of letter form. As a type designer he favored the romans, but his skill with the pen along with his knowledge of historic letter structure assured the felicity of his approach to a black letter. In his rextbook Elements of Lettering, published in 1922, Goudy had drawn a black letter that he called Goudy Black. He returned to this virile alphabet for the foundation of the type that was completed in 1928. While Goudy Black had originally been cut for distribution through the designer’s own small foundry, its use in a Christmas card prompted the president of the Lanston Monotype Machine Company, Harvey Best, to request Goudy’s cooperation in making it available as a Monotype face, thus giving the new type distribution far beyond the confines of the tiny shop in Marlborough. In the intervening years Goudy Text, the name suggested by the Monotype firm, has become the most widely used type of its kind in the United States. To modern readers black-letter types are difficult to read. The illegibility stems primarily from unfamiliarity — the types are infre- 4quently used today—bur in addition the form has certain peculiarities, particularly in the construction of the capitals. During its long period of development, from the cleventh to the fifteenth century, the dual alphabet-the combination of majuscule (capitals) and minuscule (lowercase) characters—became fully established in manuscripts. Because capitals were frequently used for decorative initials, the scribes chose to embellish them; they also added lines and flourishes to fill in the counters (enclosed white spaces) of the capitals that appeared to be excessively open in relation to the narrower and heavier lowercase characters. This practice, although creating an art form, reduced the cohesiveness of the letters as units of an alphabet and made them difficult to distinguish. A study of the manuscripts produced in the late-medieval period discloses the enormous range of decoration in the construction of black-letrer capitals; resulting in almost no consistency of style. In the age of typography, the designers of printing types based on the scribal hands were thus faced with a problem, and their inability to come up with a uniform style meant that many of the contradictions of the copyists persisted. Goudy approached the problem by creating a second series of capitals, based on the roman scripts common to book hands of the eighth to the eleventh century. These he named Lombardic Capitals, and they were made available as an alternate for the standard Goudy Text capitals. Their romanized style permits greater legibility and at the same time they add a decorative touch otherwise lacking. Most ABCDEFGHITR LMNOPORSTC VO XVLY Lombardic Capitals 15printers who purchased Goudy Text also acquired the Lombardic Capitals, which are useful both as initials and also for the occasional headings for which a standard black letter would be inappropriate. Goudy Text adheres quite closely in overall appearance to the true textura letter of mid-fifteenth-century Italy. Textura is an Italian term derived from the ‘woven’ appearance of a page of black letter; it is quite condensed and avoids the excessive ornamentation that was later applied to the black-letter types. Goudy was evidently also influenced by French models, however, as he refrained from using the traditional diamond at the foot of the perpendiculars, except for the lowercase i and J. Here again, the result is increased legibility. Inhis autobiography, Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, 1895-1945, published in 1946, just a year before his death, Goudy con- fessed to a typographic faux pas in the addition of a tiny pointed projection at the left side of the stems of the letters b, b, k, and J; this spur belongs properly only to the letter J, to differentiate it from the figure 1. He noted that no one had mentioned the historic error to him since the type had been produced in 1928. Goudy need not have been overly concerned, as the recognition and proper identification of black-letter types has always been a sub- ject of great confusion among printers and even typographers. The classification of printing types is at best an imprecise subject, and in the area of black-letter types it can be chaotic, requiring an intensive study of sources not readily accessible to most typographers. As even paleographers and bibliographers have always found themselves at odds on the matter, it is unlikely that ordinary printers of the present era—when such types are rarely seen—will ever be able to arrive at satisfactory conclusions regarding black-letter nomenclature. Neither has there been agreement concerning the numerous appellations given to the letter form; in addition to black letter, it has been called gothic, text letter, textur, textura, English, and Old English. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to trace in outline the development of black letter, since at least there is general agreement among printing historians on the essential facts. ‘The northern-European gothic manuscript hand that in the mid- fifteenth century became the inspiration for the first printing types was the product of some four hundred years of change in the structure of letters. It is not necessary to go back further than the ninth-century reforms in writing promulgated by Charlemagne, for black letter evolved from this early book hand, now called Carolingian minuscule. 16Marea d ctacaobis oaabae oiaabie ap ube apes i ‘ib. Ee ioe ive! quelti- re aaa te erie Lite necaphehe widen qua vow? * aaa ora mits datenem fa er abana gee amin aura uta lonide arate rua sunt esi abe bs ofits peat efuistionibs onde ‘arn bel f ef inte pre iemparhtione mia oe Re ‘nun mia A enn Dede nobISDY ‘The 42-line Bible of Johann Gutenberg, Mainz, 1455 Carolingian writing was round and open, and indeed was the funda- mental inspiration for the style formulated by the humanist Italian scribes in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Eventually this humanist style resulted in the roman types of the closing decades of the fifteenth century. 7ret ene ae scien fornia po Siero tttnta ah confesses act ee ieee ap sas iabbesleaaane See ene ° sr resierssten aie ae pislaate aos Seat Sas Sean Seva ee Me diva "fama isifmeabtotuannio nm riieniein ve acy o... pone nee stir asc aes eStart Qian $Femuanti cure fcr meee rigerctie bee patefeesteadut- fu wots pare fii fice anal deae = & epee Letter of Indulgence, Mainz, 1455 North of the Alps, in the twelfth century, the roundness of the Carolingian script was giving way to letters considerably more con- densed and far heavier in stroke. This was because the monasteries, long dominant in the making of books, were at that time being displaced by the universities, which had different requirements, par- ticularly the production of textbooks. By the thirteenth century it had become customary for the university scribes, in the interest of conserving space and materials, to invent contractions, or joined letters, a practice that also decreased the time spent on lettering an entire text; in the letters themselves stub endings began to replace tapering strokes. By the fourteenth century the terminals of many lowercase characters were being ended in a compact diamond. Further standardization of the alphabet occurred when craftsmen outside the university writing rooms employed the written word. ‘These were the architects and artisans, such as goldsmiths and medal- lists, who produced inscriptions in stone, wood, and metal. Economy 8of letter production was essential to these crafts, and the resultant systematization affected the styles of the scribes. Architectural fetish in letter forms, rigidly adhered to, made the textura character so narrow as to be almost illegible. It was believed, for example, that the letter ¢ could be employed as the unit of width on which to build almost the entire minuscule alphabet. Thus, by 1440-the date upon which most historians agree thar Gutenberg began the experiments that resulted in the invention of movable type—the accepted form of writing had become reasonably standardized. Moreover, Gutenberg realized the importance, in print- ing the Bible and other liturgical works with which he initiated his art, of employing the particular textura of his own time and place, fifteenth-century Germany. When it became the punchcutters’ task to reproduce his letters in metal, they quickly recognized the standardized forms he had used. In addition, during this long period of the development of the gothic forms, there were a number of other variations that affected the construction! of black letter. Depending on the text to be copied, for example, scribes had been using different scripts: works of law, writings of the church fathers, commentaries of all kinds, and litera- ture in the vernacular, each requiring its own style. It soon became apparent to the printers that they too would be expected to supply different styles for particular applications. Evidence of this influence on type was almost immediate. In fact, during the period of the production of Gutenberg’s first Bible, he printed two indulgences that were set in slightly different types, though both had a textura for headings. (These Mainz Indulgences, incidentally, represent the first dated printing, 1454-55.) The types followed two variants of the style used by law clerks, and were excellent renderings of this almost cursive script; the letters are much more open and free of the conventions of the textura. The English typo- graphic historian Harry Carter has called them bastardas, another term used in the classification of gothics, which will be discussed below. Carter has high praise for the Mainz Indulgence types. The earliest attempt to create what might be called a book type- that is, a type more useful for classical (Greek and Roman) as opposed to liturgical works~was the letter cut by Peter Schoeffer for use in the Rationale of Durandus, printed in 1459. Now termed the Durandus type, this was the first gothic to be cast in a small size, a large pica. It has the rounded form of roman but lacks the serifs of that style. The 19ut confolarent“eas 2x fratre fuo. Martba ergo ut audinie gp ihefasveie occurvie ili: ‘marta aiie Domi febebat. zie engomartba ad ibeft. Domine-fifuifles bie Frater mene nd fuiffer momme. Sedaniiefao:q.que: cigs popofeens atvovabir bi true Dine iitvbus-Reieget Pater iwe .Biaestmar: tha. Seo. ‘Anrefurrectie mnoz tullimo bie Dice ithe. Egokirdurreats evita - Qu creditin me etiam fi menus faeneymer at ommis qu vies erediin meré monet menrrnit .Credis bocs Aut iiNeigg Die. Ego credidiep nies crftus Faciesilluis fudano erat igata. Dixie fus .Soluiee eum:cfinie abire. Nuts ‘ergo exiutns quivenerat admariaermar- thayarviderane quefeatibeluo:credidert in eum. Quidas att ex ipis abieft ad pba- rrifeos:et bixeTut eis que Feat belie. Colles geritergo ponshcesa pbania conciliizer Sietane Cid fecmta ¢Cluiabicbomo mula fignafact.Soipimicioms eum fe ‘ofnes erecierm ei. Erveniee roman focinoftrin gence Vrms: phasnomine:ci fet EP aIon clade ey mec cogieascter AABCDEFOHIELMOROPPaaay RSOTRVPX VS aiibeiibhcéladadamdraadodimetioce Fe Pi fotrhah ge ggs F gt DH bebe boiinc ih i im in w dt Pm him nitm os3ae pri PP RRP PR Raa d deg OSG rrimd aris CATH MMF GEE eed mom te vB ew Es AI-s Poms Blackletter of Peter Schoefier in his 1462 Bible lowercase g with an upper and lower bowl and an ‘car’ makes its first appearance in a printing type in this font. Schoeffer apparently wished to break away from the formal textura and return to the later book letters of the preceding century. Historians still differ about the provenance of the Durandus type and its classi- fication, but it is most frequently referred to as gotica-antiqua, or gothic-anrique, with antique here used in its European sense, meaning ‘roman’: hence, a type with both gothic and roman characteristics. Harry Carter, however, is of the opinion that since the Durandus type was a re-creation of a fourteenth-century northern-European book hand, it was not influenced by the roman forms, and thus he prefers to use gothic-antigue only for those faces in which the designer definitely leaned to the roman models. Schoeffer later improved upon this rype and used it for the edition of the Bible he printed in 1462. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Schoeffer’s biographer, has called this Bible type Schoeffer’s masterpiece. It waswidely copied during Schoeffer’s time by such printers as Ulrich Zell and Giinther Zainer, but by the end of the century the style had given way to the rorundas, or round gothics. Nevertheless, its influence as a gothic book type persisted: four centuries later William Morris in England used it as the inspiration for his Troy and Chaucer types at the Kelmscott Press. ‘Another group of gothics to sanction a breakaway from the formal texturas came under the heading southern gothic, also called rotunda, or round gothic. As a letter form, emerging about the thirteenth century, rotunda had been favored by the Italian and Spanish scribes. Based like the textura on the Carolingian minuscule, the rotunda, however, took a different direction south of the Alps, retaining the openness of its progenitor but affirming the strength of the gothic stroke. When printing came to the Italian peninsula, in 146s, and quickly spread to numerous locations, rorundas were cut by many of the printers. The Venetian Nicolas Jenson, particularly—known in our time for his roman type—was highly praised by his contemporaries for his fine rorunda, which he used for law texts. His fellow Venetian Wendelin da Spira, along with several other Italian printers, also cut rotundas for books on canon law, making it difficult to determine which printer was actually responsible for establishing the rotunda for such texts. Pus boc opulculus finiti ae cOpletii-ctad eufebras tei mduftne im auitate Dagunty pr Jobanné fult aué-e fetri feboitiber oy clericii diogeh eiufdes eft confit: matit. Ammo incarnacois ditice- M-ecee-Ixn- ‘Javigilia afumpcois gfolevirgnns mane. Colophon of Schoeffcr’s 1462 Bible 21Almost immediately the rotundas found favor with the northern printers, quite possibly owing to the general admiration for Italian humanism. The style was adopted for a great variety of printing uses, particularly for works in Latin, and by the end of the fifteenth century it was being employed in Germany, the Low Countries, and France, as well as in Italy and Spain. The final development of the gothic hand as a printing type oc- curred with its adaptation to the cursive, or written, form, although this was restricted to northern Europe. During the last three decades of the fifteenth century, when the market for printing had been much enlarged, the printers turned to the vernacular hands that abounded, especially in Germany, as a source for types that departed from the formal gothics and semiformal rotundas. The great demand for in- expensive books—almanacs, dream books (interpreting dreams as omens), household books, and other popular literature prompted the cutting of these easily recognized types, which had broad appeal among the increasing numbers of people who could read. The classifiers of type place all the informal gothics under the French heading lettre batarde. However, numerous authorities believe thar this term should be used only in reference to the French national hand of the fifteenth century, which was converted to type soon after printing came to France, in 1470, and spread to the Low Countries and England when William Caxton began printing at Westminster, in 1476. A.F. Johnson, the English expert on early types, prefers simply to use the term bastard, although the Latinized bastarda is more generally employed by historians. The 1454-55 Mainz Indulgences exhibit the first types of this group. Nothing is known of these particular faces beyond that time, but by 1490 batardes were in wide use in Germany, where the name applied Terefore J, Wiffiam Carton, a spympfe personne, Fave endevopred me fo wrpte fprat over aff fhe said QBook of (Pofpcronycon, and sommetBat Gave chaunged the rude and ofd Engfiashe that is to wete, Certain words which in Bese days Be neiffer uspd ne understanden. Flemish Blacklerter types used by William Caxtonto them, apparently arbitrarily, was Schwabacher (there is no evident reason why the Bavarian town of Schwabach was thus memorialized, as there was no typefounding or even printing at that location). Until almost.the middle of the sixteenth century the Schwabacher style was what was most used for German-language printing; it was saliently used at Basel in Switzerland, then a center of scholarly print- ing. The next important batarde to be developed in Germany was the Fraktur design, which for the following four centuries served as the German national type. Fraktur is a more condensed letter than the Schwabacher, and varies from the earlier type in being more pointed, with sharply rapered ascenders; printers naturally had a fondness for this narrower form, which made the type more economical in book work. The design of Fraktur is credited to the Nuremberg calligrapher Johann Neudérfer, and at the request of Emperor Maximilian it was cut in metal for type in 1513. Within the next decade a number of other Frakturs were produced, and by the 1540s it was beginning to replace Schwabacher as the preferred letter for German printing. ‘At the same time that the Schwabacher types were emerging for vernacular printing in Germany, a French batarde was coming into popularity in wéstern Europe. It remained a little closer than the Schwabacher to the textura, but with the rounder features of the bararde letters. Its first appearance dates from about 1475, and within the next few years it came into wide use in Paris and Lyons and also spread to Switzerland and the Low Countries. It was this design, originally employed at Bruges by William Caxton, that became the first type to be used in England, when Caxton established his press there in 1476. For about sixty years it was almost the English national type, but by the middle of the sixteenth century the influence of the roman designs had begun to dominate English as well as French printing. One other French innovation in the design of black letter, occurring, during the last decade of the fifteenth century, had a strong influence in England, and it remains up to the present a basic contribution to the style of textura types. This design forgoes the narrowness of the original German models, and substitutes curves for the rather inflexible vertical strokes of the first texturas. One of the finest examples of this French textura was used by the Paris printer-publisher Antoine Verard. Caxton had acquired the type by 1490, and Wynkyn de Worde, who took over Caxton's business after his death, used a similar textura, as 2Bdid the English printer Richard Pynson. It was employed in the first printing of the Book of Common Prayer, in 1549, and in 1611 for the Bible printed at the command of King James. Joseph Moxon, in his Mechanick Exercises of 1683 the first English manual of printing~called this type the Black English Letter; his reproduction of it closely follows the Verard textura. In the eighteenth century William Caslon’s classic Black Letter was almost identical to that of Moxon, thus continuing the tradition of the fifteenth-century French textura into the standardized black letter of our own times. In the long run it was the classical influence of the Renaissance that spelled the end of the prevalence that the gothic hands had maintained in northern Europe since the twelfth century. Only in Germany did it remain a convention, where it survived as a text type even into the twentieth century. Elsewhere, by the close of the eighteenth century black letter was being used primarily for headings and for specialized liturgical printing. In every other instance the roman letter forms had taken over the world of printing. Even in Germany, where Fraktur was for so long the national type, the black letter has had a curious history. During the middle years of the nineteenth century, a great period of European nationalism, the use of Fraktur was inevitably strengthened—sufficiently, in fact, to offset the modernizing influence of the Industrial Revolution, particularly through the dominance of German technical and scientific literature. With the growth of international advertising in the early years of the present century, the use of roman type in Germany increased, but even as late as 1930 almost sixty percent of the new books being published were still composed in the German black letter (also called Deutsche Schriften), and almost every newspaper stayed with the Frakrur. When Adolf Hitler came to power, bis National Socialist Party decreed that the Frakrur be considered the only appropriate letter form for the German language. This resulted in a wider use of Fraktur in the twentieth century than in earlier times. In 1940, however, it was officially determined that Fraktur interfered with the German plan of world domination, since outside Germany the roman forms prevailed. Thus, the Nazis then issued a proclamation thar roman would henceforth be the German standard type, the explanation given being that Frakeur was a ‘Schwabacher-Jewish type? In postwar Germany roman has become the standard type, al- though with some difficulty, as the schoolbooks through which all 24Frakeur type in the Prayer Book of Maximilian I, Augsburg, 1513 adults had learned their alphabet were composed in black letter. But there is little likelihood that Frakcur will ever again be the national type; now less than one percent of German books appear in that hand. As a display letter, however, the face has been revived. 25om bein nah tome onset, ci gus. (Apocrypha. oes) rae Crely bamne are all men meee araroub| it cael me tin er aauoDieae matter, 2 ures st ere art iatee, on be Wats of] beau 0 ‘to be the gobs which gourrne| 3 roxb opotemt, seas le Same gt Sato the brit Author ofbeau-| aficefoenbingtbe_lcefnte of| Sea eee lle 'B Ani taking the bery refateamtonsy| ean oto fe oem pe me ra co a fe een Chap acy xiii I: vel ci) | parece emots)} jbexDt ruben berhad) fanebitby pe} eftaning., and ito: | 5) apegat sca elfeto oe, aun enietthenagectama: 14, D} made tt bbe fomeDite beast, gain te) lana oe bermilion , and) eth paint, caloucing reo, anbcoue engenecp 15 ind wientCoume! ae stad tity ‘Dehad madeaconue:| it ett ‘tna tall, an] tetas babi eee ites ie per eae anager oe — abate, ae bine toboe, Seber erie poe any CHAP. XIIIL + Though men doe norpray och 4 we ny actly haa | Wied Udo 6" Sisk e nouiel and fo are the maken of them. 14 The] ing ofTdolarie, 23 And the es Sat gases a feare ent a A reece ne el |acmernety for thou bad mab api the Sea, aba ze ran toaues: 4. Sberwing that thou cant Laue) com at bana © pea though aman} ments Sea toithout on boule nat § Meuccthetethe chon lestesbemorus otey enone Short 1am ere boca core Apocrypha. alte pepe er Baad. ‘The King James Bible printed by Robert Barker, London, 161Capitili Qhattum, ad fafcig cru tngt arbi tatem ad fd ed gé ofdinatur:n5 ddé nece Seles Soeceeetmenee eee et ‘Ze chadeopecptembuent lst erbar zien lit tin op Ex bin bocota 5 bots peeparari: et Cir tumsencdamouns egy srcflaabols oi. ([ cet caplr pre pparario booed grat nafnacque etfinulcam imal ed Jove Oude i peftmensoris ime. Od aroiat goad cafe ui beter ine @naei ad warti,¢.11. Lge Scocali amon z epbe iy. Clnicnigs chs pany Faas amen dobucerh oes sec feromegl ior oc daracb. Zo, a gratifacieneglO.iag Fo: a mined pres ond ao be cape ticipac babirumat tobscharepa vi. iad andica aminor fui ee ee Rotunda of Nicolas Jenson in the Summa Theologian, Venice, 1480 27To return to Goudy Text, in the half century since its initial appearance it has become the standard for the use of black letter in the United States. One other type, however, has also been extremely popular, and this is Cloister Black, cut by Morris Benton and Joseph W. Phinney for the American Type Founders Company in 1904. Cloister Black is a true English black letter, deriving from the late-fifteenth-century French style that was taken to England before 1500 and became so well established that it was used for the first setting of the King James Bible. Then through the later influence of William Caslon it continued in popularity. This is the type most frequently called Old English, a term more widely employed in the United States than in any other country. Like Goudy Text, Cloister is frequently used for newspaper titles, diplomas, certificates, and the like. In addition to Goudy Text and Cloister Black the most commonly seen black letter is Wedding Text, another Benton design (1906). Ir may be said of Wedding Text that in its time it was the best-selling black letter of all, and absolutely no printing shop would have done without it. If the definition of embellish is ‘to enhance with fictitious additions} then truly Wedding Text is a black letter with embellish- ment to spare. Its use was de rigueur for well over a generation of printers until it was superseded in the twenties by Park Avenue Script. Returning to the purer black letters, there are two that have re- ceived wide critical acclaim on the part of discerning typographers, and no account of black-letter types would be complete without them. Both are batardes but contain individual anachronisms that make it difficult to pinpoint their classification. The first of the pair, and undoubtedly the most admired all over the world, is Jessen Schrift, the design of which was begun in 1924 by Rudolf Koch. Originally named Koch Bibel Gotisch (‘Bible gothic’) — for its first use in a magnificent edition of The Four Gospels, printed privately at the Klingspor Foundry in Offenbach, Germany Jessen is an individualistic black letter that follows no particular historic model. A feature that has probably contributed much to its popularity is the romanized capital alphabet: these letters may be used indepen- dently as capitals, giving the font a strong utilitarian value, yet they blend so well with the lowercase that their roman form is not dis- tracting. The initial use of Bibel Gotisch in the United States was by the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco. The Grabhorn brothers, Edwin and Robert, may also claim this as the first commercial use of the type 2Bwinded closewithout,and thereafter came the clatter of arms about the door, and exceeding tall weaponed men came in,one score and five, & strode twobytwo up to the foot of the dais, and stood there in a row. i And Rallblithe deemed their warsgear exceeding ae they were all clad in ringrlocked byrnies, an ad steel helms on their beads with garlandsof gold wrought about them and they bore spears in their bands, and white shields bung at their backs. Now came the women tothem and unarmed them ; & under their armour their raiment was black; but they bad gold rings on their arms, and golden collars about their necks. So strode up to the dais and took their places on the high-seat, not heeding Haltblithe any more than if he were an image of wood. Never- theless that man wasnext tohim who was the chief- tainof all and sat in themidmost high-seat;and he i, bore bis sheathed sword in his band and laid it on the board before him, and he was the onty man of those chieftains who kept aweapon. But when these were set down, there was again a noise without, and there came in a throng of men armed and unarmed. G who took their places.on the endiong benches up & | down the hall; with these camewomenalso,whomost en bearing the meat, whereof no little was fleshsmeat, and all wasof the best |.@ Rallblithe was duly served like the others, but still none spake to bim or lool bim; though amongst ‘The Chaucer type of William Morris, 1891 outside the Klingspor Foundry. It was selected for The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt., a medieval text printed in 1928, which was illustrated by Valenti Angelo, who also hand-illuminated the initials. It is an alrogether beautiful book. The artist tells an amusing 29ee Thabie ‘vonfecm wese mie fenfftem gang mitfamnbe bei ecbai on mit dem wpher Snd codifes gefiele das f¥ gien” gen-rapbael fpzadye 38 thobiam- pm mit dit von der gallen des fifebes-voani ff wict notdtiefftig @arumbe thobtas name vo ber gallen-ond (9 giengen bpn-Ond ama faf taglich bep tem wege- auff tec bébe tes berges-Oauon {H motht gefelen vd fecze- Ond dof wartet vdper felben flat-fj fabe fein zihunfft v0 fecze-vii ze handt eckont fp 5hOmen frenfa neefy lteff oni vechtineet fre matt fagend-Giebe teft fune humbt~ Ond raphael fpzach 3a thebtam Ho on witft eingeen hr bet banh 3itban dt anbete teimen beczé got+ fond fage jm genad-vimd ndbue dich 38 einem vater-vri hiifis ju Ond z8bandt faite anff feftie aur gen v0 dec gallen tes fifchess die du tregft mit die-Waii wiffe daz zabandt werbent anffgeton fefne angennd teitt vatet wirt febe das liedt tes bHmels-vii fretiet fich in deine angeficht- Do fiie lief. dec bund bec mitjm was ge woetehay ber wege als ein bort- ond feeliet fich mit doer wadtang feines febwanges-‘Ond 6 bind vatet ftiind anff-er begunde 382 lanffen ond 38 ftoffen mit den Fag fen-ec gate die bmdt banrkynite- ‘ond lieffe entgegen fefnens fune- €c empfienge fn-onnd heiffet jn mit feier banffeawen-on fp be: Gunten bepte 3a wepné vor freti ten-Ynd do Bbetenan got nd beten gefaget-4P faffen fasii= cece’ men Oo name thobias von ke gallen des fifches-er fait die an gen feintes vaters-SOnd ec gedul det es febier ein baike ftund- ond vin wepffe als ein beiidtlein eins ofec-begunbe aah en ose augen-ond sibandt empfieng ec die geficht-Onod fy lobeten got er snd fein baufifrare- ond alle die die jn eckantten-Ond thobias fp tach-> berze got ffeabel-ich ger fegne dich- wari du baft mich ge heftignt- ond baft mic bebalten- Siekx-teh fiebe thobiam meinca ee wach fiken tagen- fara web feities funs gieng ein gefindt-ond alles jngefinte- vf auch vphe-wnd die hamelthper- ‘ond gat vil giits tes wetlbs-vit auch das gelt das et bet empfan get v6 gakelo-Ond ec faget fein emt water vnd milter alle giittac gotes-die et bet geton bep jm-du ech ten man ter jn bette gefiiret- Dnd achroz-ond nabath-die fcb- wfterftine thobie-‘hamen freti- wend3a thobiam- Of fretietend fich mitim von allen giiten din- nt die Got het geton bef fineDit fS wirtfcbafftten mit freaden du teh fiten tage-ond wut ecfcett wet ntit geoffer fretite- Bas sit Capitel Wie jas ond fein fune das bal 1 fres giits Kapbaeli wol ten geben-Ond wie er fich offen, baretund von fn fecbiete- Schwabacher type of Hans Schonsperger, Augsburg, 1490 30Cap Fonts ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO PORSTUVWXYZ &.,=':;()!2 Lowercase Fonts abcdefghijfkimnopgqrsetuo WXYZ.,='27()!2 1234567890 EXTRA CHARACTERS Rudolf Koch’s Jessen type AABY CL HD CE FF GG HG II FISK LLMUUNN OO PP OO RK SITT HUY WW EE YY 35 oabeddeefahifflmnopgrfsstuow Ey sae (eA A A fa fe ofc fia TA FTA ff ff ff ites fe Rudolf Koch's Wilhelm Klingsporschrift 3rIncoming Officers Pledge Jmproved Quality and Design Change Cloister Black (AT) story involving this book, indicative of the whimsical existence of Edwin and Robert Grabhorn: ‘Ed had a Stutz car, which he had bought to drive to California, selling his Kelmscott Chaucer to get the money. I bought it from him for $600. Bob used some of that money to go to Indiana for a visit. Later I sold the car to Bill Wheeler for $100 and a copy of the Maundevile? ; Finally there is Goudy Thirty, so named to represent the final Goudy type (the figure —30- on newspaper copy designates the end of a story). Requesting this last type design, Harvey Best, President of the Lanston Monotype Machine Company, wrote Goudy on March 31, 1941: “This face of course would not be used in your lifetime, but would be used by Monotype as tribute to you” Goudy accepted the commission, although even at the age of 76 he was in no hurry to do a ‘last type. During the next few years Goudy worked up his ideas and by 1945 he had delivered his drawings to the Lanston office in Philadelphia. His design was for a rotunda, or southern gothic, with romanized capitals, such as in Koch’s Jessen but lacking the ‘gothic’ weight. The type could thus lend itself to a broader application in book work. Of it, the designer wrote, ‘The type pleases me; it will please some readers; it may be execrated by others; I wish that I might know how it will be received —and maybe I shall!’ Bur at Goudy’s death on May 11, 1947, the type had still not been. produced, the primary reason being that it didn’t even come close to what the Monotype firm had wanted~a book type in the spirit of W.A. Dwiggins’s Caledonia, an extremely popular type patterned on 32THIS TYPE, SO FAR UNDER COVER AND IN COURSE OF REVISION TO ADAPT IT TO THE MONOTYPE DIE CASE, DATTERN MAKING, €TC., WAS BEGUN A YEAR or two ago to submit to a college in the West which was then seeking a type for its press; but due to war restrictions the commission fell through. When Mr Best of the Monotype Com- pany suggested that the Company might bring out a type after 1 had passed on, to be called “Goudy Thirty,” this design, which I had been working on at odd times, Struck me as particularly adapted for the purpose. As | worked on it | had determined to mokeit, as far as | was able, my last word in type design, a type in which | would give my imagination full rein, and a type by which as a designer of types | would be willing to stand or fall, even though not here in the flesh to defend its possible vagaries or idiosyncrasies. The type pleases me; it will please some readers; it may be execrated by others; I wish that | might know how it will be received; and maybe | shall! FWwG ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ € This insert, which tells in Mr Goudy’s own words the origin of Monotype Goudy Thirty, was printed especially for the Graphic Arts Review on mould-made Nideggen paper furnished through the cooperation of Stevens-Nelson Daper Company, New York. 12345 abcdefghifklmnopqrstuvwxyz 67890 Goudy Thirty(Hald Rings Silk Hosiery Brightest Star Regular Diplomat Wedding Text (ATE) Scotch Roman. The Thirty drawings remained in the firm’s files until John Anderson, proprictor of the Pickering Press and consultant to Monotype, decided to act as Goudy’s advocate. This effort resulted in the issuing of the design in 1953. That Goudy Thirty was not a financial success for Lanston was ‘owing to several factors: it was cut in only two sizes, 18- and 60-point (the latter for initial letters), the times were not right for a round gothic, and Monotype use in the United States was in a serious decline. Nevertheless, the face did attract the attention of many fine printers, particularly those who still occasionally hand-set books. The Grabhorn Press bought it, as did Dorothy and Lewis Allen for their California press. Bruce Rogers in his last years admired it and purchased fonts for a series of books he planned to produce; although only one of these (The Life of St. George) was printed before his death in 1957, Rogers stated that he believed Thirty to be one of Goudy’s best types. 34CK 2 WO HAMMER UNCIAL “With this uncial type face, I am aiming ata letter form which eventually may fuse roman and black letter, those two national letter forms, into a new unity. The impulse leading to this attempt came from a strong recognition of the difference between old and modern languages, as a fact which becomes obvious to anyone who tries, as I did, to write modern languages in an antique hand, acquired from the study of old manuscripts? So wrote Victor Hammer in 1943. Painter, sculptor, calligrapher, wood engraver, punchcutter, and printer, Hammer was in all these activities first of all a craftsman, and he preferred to be so described. The type that Hammer was discussing was American Uncial, the design of which he had completed at Wells College in Aurora, New York. An Austrian, he had come to the United States in 1939, fleeing the Nazi tyranny. The American, Uncial of Victor Hammer was his fourth type in this form, emerging twenty-three years after his initial tentative ap- proach to type design. Its first appearance was in 1946 in.A Dialogue on the Uncial Between a Paleographer and a Printer, written by Hammer and printed on his hand press for Chicago’s Society of Typographic Arts. This Dialogue is essential to an understanding of Hammer's philosophy, both as a printer and as a type designer. One sentence from it perhaps sums up the essence of his thought: ‘It is my con- viction that the type designer should do his work in the service of the language? Such an ideal to Hammer was represented by a single letter form— the uncial, which stems from the medieval writing hands of the fourth to ninth centuries. A transition from the early rigid inscriptional majuscules to the informal hand of the Carolingian minuscule (created in response to Charlemagne’s writing reforms and revived by the hu- manists in the fifteenth century, resulting finally in the roman printing types), the uncial had a rounder, more open appearance than the 38The art of book-producing was on the highest level at the time of the invention of printing. ABCDEFGHUKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY Zabcderghijk Lmnopqnstuvwxyz1234S67 890 FF/B.-:71?” aBcoefehbtiilakLrm NopqarRrstuvow XYZ ‘Hammer American Uncial ramfor-recretalasttemmenacs: NTINEMI con! eee ae sbnscerom cbhae ods (oe faperwichexscrams cwr-hellcponcriam Taf 4 Franpomo-‘Rullocty orumfollicrrado Sipmetor-roncurameeterequeralapokasrTayy Pofrremotah quod practer oxnomeamvel arione” WENTICAC RecefrTEnt fapcme mnt Pofcerrrerafeancronburaclier hectare ficefo co enccomacfin4r a ofpendoserenrenonbiaeldresd beearen ‘Half-uncial manuscript hand, 7th-8th century 36Nam merter cal nmier fupradiOurtic.aboy ob deprebendram“homerofiliat. &hefiodo -poianog bello-acmutrofupenar heroule mutes. lino. chirone:- horfeo. caftoze- polluce: etculapo lbervo-mercurno- apoUme. Kaspar: rot’ facrafque ueluanbur rpiiuf quogiout gorti quem grec Inarce chhumruufconloaprime; horinquam omnert quofenrumercummut 64am cacropem di fren. primum acnical furfYeconumemuf, Cacropem ai practent bitoziamoyti- cadcaneum oftendm— Kancecede reopoacpumbellum amor cecL;, Cpfoodnecin dubrum undeacur- fequenfrano fic probabrc: Li-anno hmpern auguhtixprnaair- wv abern x hareoefuret: Siqutigrurrérorin armorum fuppuacnrnumerum alcerum darn reqrperfarum querac annum -fubquocemplar Hieccad a bibl dindld quedababy Lona. erect » ‘Uneial manuscript hand, oth century black-letter forms, which were developed after the eleventh century in northern Europe. As a young man Hammer had adopted a broad pen for his personal writing, and his fondness for this period in history had influenced his desire to duplicate the manuscript hand of the era. ‘The term wncial is somewhat obscure, having no precise definition helpful to its description as a letter form. The Latin derivation is ‘ounce’ or ‘inch, the latter of which has been suggested as the amount of space an uncial character originally occupied, but no such specifi- cation exists. The letter was the principal book hand of the scribes in the period mentioned above. By the seventh century, in its evolution toward the Carolingian minuscule, the form was called half-uncial, in which the development of ascenders and descenders appears. The most notable extant example is the ninth-century Book of Kells, high- light of the golden age of Irish monasticism. Early in his life Hammer had been guided by the example of William Morris, and this influence was to be important in his develop- ment as a printer. Hammer's first approach to type design was the 7PRaccR 1ucobr Goseph caudae - Gsimoums nome; sororeserus hic pobiscumsuyc scundulreabagrair mio + eS Olcebanlasiti 1S quianoncec pRore - phearstiichonore NS TUparRiasuc, GU conqnoonesuc. _Gaudomusuc GHONpo Tarai urRaicem ulm pacere- HIST Pa OS THPTRMOs UCpPossi “Us muwbus cuRL, ule Gunirabomre eee TM corunEap GAG is—.. se CRoumbartafeelLan aroura te) oF Gumuowunc ducocam Gcoepra~* costniccercomos @adabar as poceftucem spin mimuudorum EgpRac—* aprcas1 requiccoU erent munagyforRgaM COTO NoupeRamM nonpavempeque-* FP won ccesccloaLaaxos scauidalis @ne~ The Book of Kells c. ate Sth-early oth century drawing of an uncial letter that was cut for him in rg2t by a Viennese punchcutter, A. Schuricht, and later produced by the Klingspor Foundry in Offenbach, which named it Hammer Unziale. But al- though the type was successful for the foundry, Hammer never liked or used it. The collaboration with Schuricht was fruitful, however, 38Of Discourse ome in their oiscourse ve- sirerathercommencvation lof witin Being asletoholoe allarguments/thenor uogemencin viscerning ‘whatis truesasifitcwerea praise toknow what might gesaiosano not whatshoulve see thought-some haue certaine com- mon places ano theames wherein they are goov/ano want varieties which xinove of pouertie is for the Most part tevious/anonoweano then riviculous-§the honouraslest partof talxesis to guioe the occasions ano againetomoverateano passe tosomewhatélse-sitis gooo to varie anomixe speech of the presentoc- casion with argument,cales with reasons/asKing of questions/witn telling ofopinions/anpviest with ear- nest-$But some Thinges are priul- Leogeo from iest/namelyg religion’ matters ofstate/great persons, any mans present Businesse of im- portancesano any case that veser- ueth pittie-gshe that questioneth much shalLlearne muchyvanocon- tent muchyspecially ifheeappliehis Samson for Hammer observed with great interest the punchcutter’s techniques and determined to acquire his own skill in the cutting of type. During the 1920s Hammer resolved to add the craft of printing to his artistic endeavors. He set up his first printing press in his home in Florence, Italy, beginning what eventually became his paramount 39ABpcoefghijkLmnopq RSTUVWXYZ AOUNF 1234567890 PARSIFAL CAnnhAuser meistersinger Unziale interest, and one that was to bring him considerable renown. In 1929 he moved to a larger house, the Villa Santuccio, which gave its name to his press —Stamperia del Santuccio, an imprint Hammer retained for all his books—in which he used only uncial types. The first work produced under this imprine—the first of thirty that Hammer de- signed and published—was Milton’s Samson Agonistes, composed in Hammer’s second uncial type, which received the name Samson. Samson was cut by Paul Koch, son of the famous German type designer Rudolf Koch, who was to become a longtime friend of Hammer's. As in 1921, Hammer chose to be the observer. He made his initial effort as a punchcutter in the production of several Greek characters for use in the Milton volume, and finally he put his punch- cutting apprenticeship to the test in the production of a third uncial, named Pindar, for the book in which it was first used, the Fragmente des Pindar of Hélderlin. Hammer later wrote that he had cut the letters without any previous attempt at drawing them and made only slight corrections after smoke proofs of the punches indicated necessary changes. Before his arrival in the United States in 1939, Hammer had been appointed to teach art and lettering at Wells College in upstate New York. There he turned again to the design of an uncial type, producing a set of punches that he took to the American Type Founders Com- pany. The foundry was not at all prepared to market an uncial type, but it did cast a font from which the designer printed a specimen showing. Although this uncial was never to be produced, Hammer was already at work on the design for another one, his American Uncial. ‘Hammer first cut the American Uncial steel punches by hand and then sought a founder who could prepare the matrices and cast 40—— oet wairvensoann hanoelt es sich um mehr als Unholoenaewehre und Bannzauser wie ven ganzen Tag Geer vor ven Sippen-Behausungens sei solch feierlichstem und oringlichstem An- rure aller guten Geister oes Wachstums;altler segnenven und spenoenven Krarte ves Las- sings gewinnt oas metaphusische BeodrFfnis ver Stammesgemeinschaft Ausoruck im UrsymBoL arischer Anschauung ves Weltwenvens- Da wireelt unter frostgrauem Winterhim- melLin evenso groGartiger als asweisenver Um- gevung orGuenven Schneegesirgs und nacht- ounkler WaLoer vas uralte Sinnsilo ves Sonnen- raves vierfach geschlangen seinen ténenoen Kreis oie madnnliche Gewalt ves Gestiznes Be- Pindar fu piéror come gt € Sector fruBioffgimo SEW ace € ci Efército arfeoi ella. profpeccivay & eBBe Buonifcina. cognizion€ Beuchider in canco ché cucct i gini cinarci NE conpi négolaxiy E chi méghio che aktao géomeena. intefer B i Maggio husi che Bi cal cofer ci fiano fono Si fu manor Andromaque the type. His search ended with the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago, which with the help of type designer R. Hunter Middleton raised funds for the project and suggested a founder, Charles Nuss- baumer, of the Dearborn Type Foundry. Another American who wasATYPOGRAPHIC SOLECISM * # THIS TYPE FACE has ween der signed By Fred W.Goubdy for his own. amusement. # It is, in a manner of speaking, a typographic solecism. # For his lower case letters he has drawn on the halfruncials of the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh cerv turies, eighth century uncials, sug’ gestions from types of Victor Ram mer, Rudolf Koch and others. With these he has attempted to comsine majuscules wased on square capir tals of the fourth century, and the rustic hands of thescrives, to which he has adved his own conceits. * If Goudy Friar most helpful to Hammer’s subsequent career in the United States was Joseph Graves of Lexington, Kentucky. Sufficient type was thus cast for the press at Wells College. It was in appreciation of the Society’s help that Hammer produced as a keepsake his Dialague mentioned earlier, set in American Uncial, in the 12-point size on a 14-point body. No American firm, however, was interested in marketing the new uncial, so Hammer returned to Klingspor, which produced it for sale in both Europe and the United States. In 1955 a 16-point size was added, along with a set of 30-point initials. Much of Hammer's magnificent printing has been produced from this cutting, which for the first time gave American printers the opportunity to use a type with an authentic medieval fecling. Although mostly employed by private presses, Hammer's uncial has also been frequently selected by commercial designers whenever an uncial is required. When theAWAY TO ETERNITY GOOS OF EGypT Solemnis aBcdoef-GhiyklLmn OPQRStUVWXYZ 1234567890 German Stempel foundry took over the operation of Klingspor the type was dubbed Neue (‘new?) Hammer Unziale, as the very first Hammer Unziale of 1921 was still available. Finally, in the 1950s Victor Hammer began work on his fifth uncial type. Called Andromaque (after the Greek legend), it is the first of the Hammer types to depart from the strong medieval letter forms with which the designer had been experimenting for more than thirty years. Andromaque is reminiscent of Greek cursive characters. It is also a truly minuscule form and may very well have been what Hammer had always been striving toward. It was cut in 1959 by the Paris foundry Deberny et Peignot in 2 10-point size, and was first shown in specimen in Hammer's Digression on the Roman Letter, printed the same year. Before Hammer's death in 1967, a 14-point cutting was begun, but it was only partidlly completed. Since then Dr. Middleton, workingSAPIENTIA FILIIS SUIS VITAM IN- Wisdom breathes life into her children spirat et suscipit inquirentes se and shelters those who seek her and she et preibit in via justitiz: et qui will go before them in the way of justice: and he illam diligi€ diligi€ Vitam: et qui who loves her loves life: andthose vigilaverint ad illam complec- who watch for her will embrace tentur placorem ejus. Qui tenu- her delight. They that hold erint illam vi€am hereditabunt: her fast shall inberit life e€ quo introibit benedicet Deus. and where she enters God will bless. Qui serviunt ei obsequentes er- They that serve her shall serve unt sancto: et eos qui ditigunt the Holy one: and God loves those eam diligié Deus. Investiga illam who love _ her. Study her et€ manifestabitur tibi e€ contin- and she shall be revealed to thee and American Uncial, from Victor Hammer’s Chapters on Writing and Printing, Lexington, 1963with Hammer's wife, Carolyn Reading Hammer, has completed the font. Mrs. Hammer plans to use the type for work that she continues to produce in her husband’s tradition. ‘The anachronism of American Uncial as a representative of the cighth-century style may be readily noticed by students of letter forms. The historical uncial alphabet was chiefly a minuscule, that is, there was no distinction between capitals and lowercase letters. ‘Hammer's uncial, however, has both forms for each letter, embodying his atrempr—fundamental to his dedication to legibility—to bring about the fusion of the black-letter and roman alphabets. The need for this fusion, Hammer said, derives from the fact that a language such as German makes abundant use of consonants, letters that often have ascenders and descenders. In printing this kind of language an open type with short strokes makes it easier to read than does, for example, the narrow, tight black letter (Fraktur) that evolved from the ‘verticaP German. Latin languages, by contrast, make greater use of vowel letters, which are rounded, so that the more open roman form was the natural outcome. In being combined with the constricted black letter, the roman serves as a relaxer. ‘The majuscule alphabet that Hammer thus devised for his American Uncial is very close to the humanist sans serif. It combines well with the rest of his font—so much so, in fact, that the reader is hard put to notice the incongruity of standard capitals in an uncial alphabet. Frederic W. Goudy designed an uncial font similar to Hammer's, named Friar, in 1937. Goudy, however, considered the mixing of capitals and lowercase in an uncial alphabet a ‘typographical solecism; and so attempted a ‘pure’ version. Nevertheless, he credited the Hammer uncials as the inspiration for his design. Unfortunately, but few fonts of Friar were cast before the fire that in 1939 destroyed the contents of Goudy’s workshop. Inaddition, there are two other uncial types seen in contemporary printing. Libra, designed by S.H. de Roos for the Typefoundry ‘Amsterdam in 1939, is probably the most widely used of all uncials. A minuscule alphabet with no accompanying set of capitals, Libra gives the effect of pure lowercase. The other uncial is Solemnis, designed by G. G. Lange in 1953 for the Berlin foundry Berthold. Also a twenty-six-letter alphabet, Solemnis differs from Libra in that most of the characters favor the majuscule form. The Hamsher type has become the first choice among the available uncials for book printing, since it seems to represent the uncial char- 45acter at its best. It has been used by numerous private-press printers for short works that call for a medieval appearance. Although it is obvious that today the uncial letter is a distinct departure from the standards by which we measure typographic legibility, we can none- theless admire the vigorous character of Hammer's interpretation. It has provided modern bookmakers with the opportunity to produce period printing of authentically orthodox flavor but more legible~ hence accessible - than its prototype. And Victor Hammer himself led the way, by virtue of a lifetime of devotion to standards of craftsmanship that, alas, seem to be, like his type, anachronistic in the world of contemporary printing.RK 3 WD CLOISTER OLD STYLE When printing became established on the Italian peninsula in about 1465, the first types to emerge were transitional between the black- letrer (gothic) northern-European manuscript hands and those forms now called roman. It was owing to the humanist influence early in the fifteenth century that the scribes who were engaged in copying the ancient Greek and Roman texts turned to the letter styles that had emerged as early as the eighth century in the writing reforms insti- gated by Charlemagne (from which developed the writing style now known as Carolingian minuscule). By the mid-fifteenth century the tradition had been set for the later printed editions of the classics to appear in this transitional form: the early printers, naturally enough, were guided by readers’ familiarity with certain letter styles in the development of their types. It was thus logical for the Italian printers to turn to the humanist manuscripts as models, and to use these models to continue the manuscript tradition via typography. It is rarely possible for modern observers to determine which manuscript models were used by the first fiftcenth-century punch- cutters; those printers who entered the craft after it had been estab- lished simply copied the type that had already proved successful. By contrast, the task of identifying more recent sources is much simpli- fied, for types, rather than manuscript hands, serve as the inspiration for later revivals. The creator of such a revival—the first step in the evolution of Cloister Old Style-was William Morris. Writing in 1895, a year before his death, he summed up his ideals as a printer in A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, in which he dis- cusses the rationble behind his first choice of a type for his printing venture: By instinct rather than by conscious thinking it over, I began by getting myself a font of Roman type. And here what I wanted was a letter pure in 47CLOISTER LIGHTFACE IS THE LATEST ADDITION TO THE CLOISTER FAMILY AND IS AN HISTORIC TYPE DESIGN BEAPBEGEBEIEGRBERBE TEENIE LOISTER LIGHTFACE is formed afterthe original type model of Nicolas Jenson of France, created and used by him in his printing house inVenice in the year 1470, whom it made celebrated in his own timeand famous forall time. Now, in this year 1925, it has been conscientiously adapted to twenti- eth century uses and for many kinds of papers un- known to the said illustrious Nicolas Jenson by the chief type designer of the American Type Founders Company, Morris F. Benton. Cloister Lightface will be acclaimed by many authorities as being the ideal Jenson type face. It is incomparable for rich beauty combined with great dignity. Mr. Benton has very faithfully adhered to the Jenson model, maintaining its original purity insofar as possible. BOBEBOIGERIEGOGTEITOSBOBEIE Cloister Oldstyle (ax) form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line, which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read; and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be, owing to commercial exigencies. There was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type, to wit, the works of the great Venetian printers of the 1sth century, of whom Nicolas Jenson produced the completest and the most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476. It may be observed that Morris had an extreme dislike for the roman types of his own era, types that indeed lacked individuality 48KINGDOM Encounters Soldier OBNOXIOUS Question Announced Lining Jenson Oldstyle No. 2 (ATF) and character, and resulted from the diminished aesthetic standards of type design that accompanied the inexorable demand for cheap, fast printing engendered by the Industrial Revolution. These late- nineteenth-century types, generally referred to in our time as ‘modern romans, were the product of the newly industrialized atmosphere of the printer’s craft, representing decades of deterioration in the print- ing process. Morris named the design that resulted from his study of fifteenth- century typographic letter forms the Golden type. The name is asso- ciated with the three-volume edition of the medieval manual The Golden Legend, which had been planned as the first production of his Kelmscott Press (although its ambitious length delayed its publication). For the model of his design, Morris turned to a pair of Venetian books, the Historia naturalis of Pliny, printed by Nicolas Jenson in 1476, and Aretino’s Historia Florentina, printed by Jacobius Rubeus in the same year. Morris has stated, however, that his inspiration stemmed from the types of several Italian printers of the same period. The cutting of the type was turned over to the English punchcutrer Edward Prince, It may also be noted that Morris depended for tech- nical advice on his friend, the commercial engraver Emery Walker. 49‘What sprang from this collaboration was not, as Morris remarked, a ‘servile’ copy of Jenson, but one that suited the concept Morris had evolved for the individualized printing he planned to produce. The Golden type and that of Nicolas Jenson are alike only in generalized details; the Golden is noticeably heavier. So successful, however, was this use of the Jenson-inspired type in the magnificently printed Kelmscott editions that it stimulated other private-press printers to embark on similar efforts. More important, it aroused an interest on the part of type designers in general in reexamining fifteenth-cenrury sources for models upon which to base new typefaces. The commercial typefounders, for example, took note of the wide- spread appeal of the Golden rype and began to produce, not versions of the original Jenson, but undeviating imitations of Mortis’s type. But whereas William Morris required only one size of the Golden type, the founders, to mect the demands of their printer customers, had to cut a complete range of sizes, and it is here that the eccen- tricities inherent in this type—the slanted scrifs, for instance ~became most noticeable. These copies, obtainable under a variety of names (Jenson, Kelmscott, Ancient Roman, and others), were nevertheless purchased in great quantity. The Golden design also influenced numerous similar styles cut for printers, mostly amateur, who wished to produce books in the Morris manner, but none of these types (Vale, Essex, Merrymount, Village, and so forth) had any lasting effect on the typefounders. ‘The next step in the process that eventually resulted in the cutting of Cloister Old Style came about with the establishment in 1900 of the Doves Press in London by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, who was also animated by the Morrisonian ideal. The Doves type began, like the Kelmscott, with Jenson, and was cut by the same punchcutter, Edward Prince. It should be noted that a partner in this press was Emery Walker, who had earlier advised Morris on the selection of a type. But Cobden-Sanderson eschewed the strongly decorated Kelmscott pattern and turned instead to pure typography. This breakaway from the medievalism of Morris better suited the requirements of the nascent twentieth-century art of the book. Still another development leading to the more modern aesthetic judgment of the types of Nicolas Jenson occurred about the same period. The American typographer Bruce Rogers—then designing books for the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts —had examined in the Boston Public Library a copy of the great Jenson sofidem fupplices confugnemus nibtL na inverelt vrrum fubrtlo lear fabio prefidio Locros e¢ nans anira 7” bi expoenss ad fupphiceum dedams. Hon poftalam” ut Lo nolis de-abfence india cacredans Cora tpleandiee vemarrole daluar figed feelers quod. foro hommes ocinnos pr. fe non- vecufamns gn ernos wrcadee ten pen pote mus erille omni duno bumanog: tebererur feelere. Hecoum a Legans dita cone. quefilleng ab nS. fabus, denshienene-eas quevelasad.P. fapro nem. derunrmiffos legares ee. & eum belh as —— ee. africamaur varermecffet ane imera pauicos dues ranedbunem ex began gana eee, AMPATOTEM LOCy S ee cum interenmer serene rerun nvanculaconecens. le rem fonvem aut sex mea porate rehig B [utisexederecxemnpb Legae on lomo eo Bee few ney ‘onal; Lacenart. Ante oms fabs nésun eumad corrumpendam difaiphinam aren. arquere’ Sie etn bufpamta plas ppe P fed sonemmirmim q bello amffum excterno evregiemo reerindulgere lcenuemtsum er Leurre in ee Sen. vennam dem .equetrucem_oranontadient plemma umnéumromam. deportan. plarere.erene anarks cam Fifteenth-century humanist manuscript hand suoffem dicete.Porro ci duzx fint céfuetudines quz uirtuti fubicduntzalia qdem quid quodg enuiti fie if(picitzalia ue ro quid uoceturzatq: in,hunc modu de rdali philofophiz p tedifferunt.Enimuero moralé philofophiz ptéi fubiectos diuidunt locos:uidelicet de appetitione:de bonis & malis : de prurbationibus:deuirtute:de fine:deg prima extimatd ne:& deactibus ac de offictis:de adhortationibus & hortati onibus:in huncautem modi fubdiftingat Chryfippus ar chedemus Zeno tarfenfis Apollodorus Diogenes Antipa’ ter & Poffidonius. Na cittieus Zeno & cleanthes utantiqr ores fimplicius ita tractarunt. Athi & ronalé naturalemq; philofophiz pté diuiferunc. Prima auté hancaiantis appe titioné faitfe dicunt feipfum tuendi atq feruandi : natura fibi ipfi ab initio ita coaliatezut chryfippusait i prio de fiv nibus:primai pprium cuig; afanti dicés (ut ipfius fuiffeco- mendationé huiufg; notioné. Neg eni fas erataial ipfum. uel ab fealienti fieri:uel ofo id fieri:uel non fibi maxie ppi qui fieri.Reftat utdicamus hancipfum fibi maxia concor dia & caritate deuixiffe.Ita eni & noxia propellit:& quaad fui conftantid funt utilia fufcipic.Quod auré dicunt quida prima appetitioné animatibus ad uoluptaté fieri falfum p fecto eft. AccefTioné enim dicunt fi quid fie uoluptaté effe : ci ipfam p fe natura ingfierit:& quz comendatéi fux fae accomodata pcepit : queadmodii exhilarefaunt aialia uire {cunt arbores: Nihilg; aiuunt differt natura iry arboribus &aialibus quado deillis abfq motu uoluntatis acféfu dif ponit:8in nobis queda eadé ratée fiunt.Cé uero ex fuper fluo appetitio animantibus accefferit: qua uteutes pagant que fuafuntzin eis quidénaturali coftatia appetinoné ila difponi-Caterti ci roalibus pfectiore precepto data fitrs fecundii ed uiuere.Crette fieri his qua fecundé natura fae ea qppeartifex accidit moderatrixq; apperitdis . Quocirca Roman type of Nicolas Jenson, Venice, 1475in her bely, and remayned vyrgyn after the chyldyng. And when he hadso sayd hewasancneall hocle parfightely. And thenne saide peter to hym @ Take that palme of the honde of oure broder Johan, and feye it on the peple that be blynde, and who that wylle bileue shalle receyue his e. And they that wylle not byleue shall neuer see. And thenne thappostles bare marye vnto the monument, and satte by it, lyke as our lord had commaunded, and at thethyrdde day Jhesu crist cam with a grete multytude of Angels and salewed them and saide pees be with yow. And they answerd, god, glory be to the Ghiche onky maleest chegrete myracles and merueyles. And oure lord sayd to thappostles (| What is now youre aduys that I ought now to doo to my moder, of honour andof grace? Syre, itsemeth to vs thy ser- uauntes that lyke as thou hast vanquysshyd thedeth ®nest world. withoute ende, that thou reyse also the body of thy moder, & sette her on thy ryght side in perdurabylyte. And he graunted it. And thenne Mychael the angel cam & presented the sowle of Marye to oure lord. And the saueour spacke and sayde ([Aryse vp, haste the my culuer or douue, tabernacleof glorye, vessel of lyf, Temple celestyal, and lyke as thou neuer feltest conceyuing by none atouchement, thou shalt not suffre in the sepulcre no corrupcion of body. And anon the sowle cam ne to the body of maryeand yssued gloryously outeof the tombe, and thus was receyued in the heuenly chambre, and a grete company of angels with her. And saynt Thomas was not there, and whan he cam te wolde not byleue this. And anone the gyrdell with whiche her body was gyrde cam to hym fro the ayer, whiche he receyued, and therby he vaderstode that she was assumpt in to heuen. { Andalle this here to fore issayd &called Appocriphum. W hereof saynt Jerom sayth in a sermon to paula and Eustochium her doughter € That book is said to be apocryfum, sauf that somme wordes whiche ben worthy of feyth & ben approued of seyntesastouchyng nynethynges, that is to wete, that the comforte of thappostles was promysed and ‘The Golden type of William Mortis, 1892 book, Eusebius’s De Praeparatione Evangelica, printed in 1470. Excited by the desire to re-create this beautiful design, Rogers then sought out other Jenson books. He reproduced their pages in what he later described as ‘the search for what I fondly thought would be the ideally perfect type; not knowing then that it was something like the quest of the Holy Grail? In 1901 Rogers had progressed to the point of having the Riverside Press authorize the cutting of his designs, which was done by John Cumming, a punchcutter working in Worcester, Massachusetts. Origi- 83oxen, So the service was prepared, and che priests stood in their place, and the Levites in their courses, according to the king's commandment. And they Kalle the passover 6 che piss sprinkled the blood from their hands, and the Levites flayed them. And they removed the burnt offerings, that they might give according to che divisions of the families of the people, to offer unto the Lord, asit is written inthe book of Moses. And sodid they with the oxen. And they roasted the passover with fire according to the ordinance: but the other holy offerings sod they in pots, and in caldrons, and in pans, & divided them ly among all the people. And afterward they made ready for themselves, & for the priests: because the priests the sons of Aaron were busied in offering of burne offerings and che fat uncil night; cherefore the Levites prepared for themselves, and for the priests the sons of Aaron. And the singers the sons of Asaph were in their place, according to the commandment of David, and ‘Asaph, and Heman, and Jeduchun the king's seer; and the porters waited at every gate; they might not depart from their service; for their brethren the Levices prepared for chem. So all che service of the Lord was prepared the same day, to keep the passover, and to offer burnt offerings upon the altar of the Lord, according to the commandment of king Josiah. And the children of Israel thac were present kept the passover at that time, and the feast of tnleavened bread seven days. And chere was no passover like to that, kept in Israel from the days of Samuel che prophet; neither did all the kings of Israel keep such a passover as Josiah kepe, and the priests, and the Levites, and all Judah and Israel chat were present, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. In the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah was this passover kept. ({ After al this, when Josiah had prepared the temple, Necho king of Egypt came up to fight against Carchemish fy Euphrates: and Josiah went oue against him. But he sent ambassadors co him, saying, What have I to do with thee, thou king of Judah¢ I comenot against thee this day, bur against the house wherewith have war: for God commanded me to make haste: forbear thee frommeddling The Doves type, in the English Bible of the Doves Press, 1903~05 nally intended for a notable edition of the Essays of Montaigne, and thus named Montaigne, the Rogers type was actually used for the first time in another book designed by Rogers, Sir Walter Raleigh’s Last Sea Fight of the Revenge, published in 1902. Rogers, however, was not satisfied with the face and some years later improved on it in a new design named Centaur, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The activities of the numerous private presses of the period 1900-1910 aroused the interest of both commercial printers and typefounders — William Morris’s concept of returning to the historic typefaces had begun to take effect. The earliest big venture in type 54IN PRINCIPIO CREAVIT DEUS CCELUM, ET terram. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrz erant super faciem abyssi; et Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona; et divisit lucema tenebris. Appel- lavitque lucem Diem et tenebras Noctem; factumque est vespere et mane, dies unus. Dixit quoque Deus: Fiat fir’ mamentum in medio aquarum, et dividat aquas ab aquis. Et fecit Deus firmamentum, divisitque aquas, que erant sub firmamento, ab his, que erant super firmamentum. Et factum est ita. Vocavitque Deus firmamentum, Coe, lum; et factum est vespere et mane, dies secundus. Dixit vero Deus: Congregentur aqua, quz sub ccelo sunt, in lo cum unum, et appareat arida. Et factum est ita. Et voca- vit Deus aridam, Terram, congregationesque aquarum appellavit Maria. Et vidit Deus quod esset bonum. Et ait: Germinet terra herbam virentem, et facientem semen, et lignum pomiferum faciens frudum juxta genus suum, cujus semen in semetipso sit super terram. Et factum est ita. Et protulit terra herbam virentem, et facientem se- men juxta genus suum, lignumque faciens fructum, et ha- ‘Merrymount design of Bertram Grosvener Goodhue revivalism, the recutting of Bodoni by Morris Benton for the American ‘Type Founders Company, occurred in 1910, and it proved stich a suc- cess that the foundry planned further such projects. One of these was Benton’s Cloister ‘Old Style, first produced in 1913. This face fulfilled the broad demands of the trade for a type employing the same historic sources as those of the esteemed private presses. Morris Fuller Benton had become a type designer through the circumstance of having for a father Linn Boyd Benton, a typefounder and the inventor, no less, of the pantograph device, patented in 1885, which had mechanized the craft of punchcutting. It was this machine that freed typefounding from the laborious procedure of cutting by SSee BOOKE Il. CHAPTER XI. 97 ‘the world knoweth, and especially such things as have drawne-on ‘publike effects, and of such consequence, it is an inexcusable defect, tor as I may say wi nable oversight.* To conclude, whosoever ‘desireth to have perfect information and knowledge of King Fran- ‘cis the first, and of the things hapned in his time, let him addresse shimselfe elsewhere, if he will give any credit unto me. The profit he ‘may reap here, is by the particular deduction of the battels and ex- ‘ploits of warre, wherein these Gentlemen were present ; some privie ‘conferences, speeches or secret actions of some Princes that then ‘lived, and the practices managed, or negotiations directed by the * Lord of Langeay, in whom doubrlesse are verie many things well- ‘worthie to be knowne, and diverse discourses not vulgare.” THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER. Of Crueltie. IE thinks vertue is another manner of thing, and much more noble, than the inclina- tions unto goodnesse which in us are ingen- W dered. Mindes well borne and directed by themselves follow one same path, and in their actions represent the same visage that | the vertuous doe, But vertue importeth and 1 EH) soundeth somewhat, [ wot not what, greater S EBB) and more active, than by an happy com- plexion, gently and peaceably, to suffer it selfe to be led or drawne to follow reason. He thar through a naturall facilitie and genuine mildnesse should neglect or contenme injuries received, should no doubt performe a rare action and worthy commendation; but he who, being toucht and stung to the quicke with any wrong or offence re- ccived, should arme himselfe with reason against this furiously blind desire of revenge, and in the end, after a great conflict, yeeld himself master over it, should doubrlesse doe much more. The first should doe well, the other vertuously ; the one action might be termed good- esse, the other vertue. For it scemeth that the verie name of vertue presupposeth difficultie and inferreth resistance, and cannot well ex- ercise it selfe without an enemie. It is peradventure the reason why we call God good, mightic, liberall and just, but we terme him not ‘Montaigne type designed by Bruce Rogers in Ess of Montaigne, 1902,hand every letter in a font of type, a practice that had not changed since Johann Gutenberg invented it in 1440. Before Benton, the only other procedure used for the production of matrices was electrotyping, which was developed about 1840. Electrotyping, however, was em- ployed primarily for the copying of existing typefaces rather than for original designs; the method in fact encouraged the pirating of type designs (a custom common in our own time when phototypesetting machines were being developed). When the younger Benton graduated from Cornell in 1896 as a mechanical engineer, he went to work for the American Type Founders Company as assistant to his father. The senior Benton had been given, the responsibility of organizing the type-production facilities of that recently formed combine, put together in 1892 — despite loud protests in the printing trade—by the merging of some two dozen separate typefoundries. Morris Benton’s duties were related to the mechanical aspects of typefounding, particularly the adaptation of the American Point System of typographic measurement, which had been instigated in 1886. But as the chaos and pressures that resulted from the vast amalgamation subsided, the young engineer began to develop an interest in letter forms themselves. As carly as 1898 he produced the first of what ultimately became a list of more than 180 types, making him the most prolific type designer who has ever lived. This first type was originally named Buddy, but when it was employed by Elbert Hubbard it was renamed Roycroft, after Hubbard’s craft center and printing establishment in upstate New York. Benton next became involved in the development of the various additions to.the Century family of types, on which his father had collaborated with the great scholar-printer Theodore L. De Vinne. By 1904 Benton was fully established in type design with the production of the Cheltenham family of typefaces, based on the original face drawn by the architect Bertram Goodhue, which became the most widely known of all American types. In 1909 Benton turned to his first important revival of a classic type, that of Bodoni. Then, attracted to the Venetian letter forms favored by the private presses, he came to an appreciation of the work of the fifteenth-century Italian printers. Cloister Old Style became the hallmark design in the revival of the Venetian old-style types in the present century. The face followed the spirit of its Jenson original in the blunt, solidly constructed serifs, but it had fuller bracketing than is apparent in the earlier letter. In 7Cloister Italic, available in fourteen sizes ranging from six up to seventy-two point, sounded a new note in italic design. As no italic types were made in the first century of printing which would harmonize with the roman type of Jenson, it was necessary in designing this series to follow the shapes of the earlier sixteenth century italics of Aldus of Venice and certain French italics ofa third of a century later. The resulting design isa vigorous italic that harmonizes excellently with the Cloister Oldstyle and is an admirable series on its own account Cloister Oldstyle Italic (AFT) this respect Stanley Morison, the English typographic historian, has discussed the lack of brackets (often called fillets) in all Venetian types before 1495; he wonders whether the craftsmen lacked the proper tools with which to refine serifs. More recently another English typographic historian, Harry Carter, has suggested that the invention in the 1470s of the jeweler’s eyeglass provided the means of more exact seeing and therefore cutting. Another feature of the Venetian types captured in Cloister Old Style is the avoidance of strong contrast between thick and thin strokes. Some authorities believe this shows that the Italian punchcutters during the first thirty years of printing were attempting to reproduce exactly the pen-drawn humanistic roman, rather than striving to cut original type letters. The most distinctive of Jenson’s lowercase letters is ¢, with its angled crossbar, a style followed by practically every Italian designer of the period until the appearance of the types of Francesco Griffo, cut for the press of Aldus Manutius in 1495. 86 And both I and my Sages grew aware of sunset, by my shadow vanisht thence, when we had made brief trial of the stair. 7 Andere within one dim circumference the wide horizon mingled sea and shore, and Ni ight held sway with all her influence, 73 Each of us.on a stair was bedded; for the mountain-law deprived us of the will and of the power of there ascending mote. 7 Just as, while ruminating, goats grow still, however bold and nimble they had run over the heights before they browsed their fill, 79 Husht in the shade while blazes hot the sun, watcht by the herdsman leaning on his rod, who, leaning thus, attends them every one; 8 And as the shepherd, stretcht upon the sod, watches by night his quiet flock beside, that no wild beast may scatter it abroad: 8s Even so did we at such an hour abide, Like the goat, they shepherdlike, all three hemmed in by lofty rock on either side. Cloister Lightface, in the edition of Dante printed by John Henry Nash, San Francisco, 1929 The capitals of Cloister retain the full height of the Jenson font, a factor criticized by Morison as detracting from the legibility of the face. Both M and N have the slab serif typical of the Venetian types; that is, the upper serifS center on the stems of the letter. In many of 59ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP QRSTUVWXKYZ& abcdefghijklmnopqrstu vwxyz 1234567890 Eusebius (Ludlow) the types favored by the Italian printers this feature was also carried over to the A. In his design of the italic for Cloister Old Style, Benton encoun- tered the problem faced by all modern type designers who return to the Venetian letter forms: there is no model to follow. Italic type was not cut until 1500, and when it finally did appear, in the Virgil of Aldus printed in 1sor, it was used as a type completely independent of roman. It was not until the 1540s in France that italic was cut in a form that was complementary to the roman, and a good deal later before the two styles became, as they are today, inseparable. Thus, type designers have had to invent and design italics to go with any roman that appeared between 1470 and 1500. Benton was among the first to confront this difficulty, the early private-press printers having ignored it by employing roman alone. He elected to create a cursive form that he believed to be in the spirit of the roman. Other type designers, by contrast and as will be discussed later, have pre- ferred an italic with a strictly historic relationship to the upright form. This has resulted in the italics called chancery, based on Renaissance calligraphic sources, in which the letters are narrow and spiky. Cloister italic, by comparison, is a pleasantly rounded and sloped letter, certainly retaining the feeling of the roman. Although lacking the aesthetic impact of some of the later Venetian revivals, Cloister has proved to be a most successful cutting, and has found its way into printing offices the world over, either in its foundry 60(ATE) version or in the adaptations produced for the various type- setting machines. Those cut for the slug-casting machines (Linotype and Intertype) are identical to the Benton version except for the inevitable lack of kerning —not obtainable in a slug-casting machine matrix—which is most noticeable with the lowercase f ‘The Ludlow Typograph Company, manufacturer of a slug-casting device used for display typography, brought out a type drawn by Exnst Detterer in 1923 that is quite close in spirit to Cloister Old Style. This face was first called Nicolas Jenson, but later changed to Eusebius. (The name has historic analogy, for Pamphili Eusebius was the author of the book that Jenson so splendidly printed in 1470, thereby establishing the printer’s reputation for the design of the ro- man type that has come to be the standard for all those that followed.) The italic of Eusebius differs from that of Cloister in that it follows the chancery style. It was drawn by R. Hunter Middleton, who, after Morris Benton and Frederic W. Goudy, has been one of the most prolific American type designers. Although most American printers were enthusiastic about Clois- ter when it fitst appeared, the redoubtable printer-historian Daniel Berkeley Updike treated it somewhat condescendingly in his great work Printing Types (1922): ‘Cloister Old Style Roman was based on a study of Nicolas Jenson’s long-suffering and as yet unrivalled font, and its italic is of an interesting early form. It is a practical type; not very inspired, perhaps, yet quiet and satisfactory because not attempting too much. . . .” At present, Cloister Old Style as 2 book type has lost ground to some of the later Venetian old styles. But in commercial printing and for advertising display it continues to be popular, particularly in its boldface version encountered daily in the consumer periodicals. For examples of its use in distinguished book making, the reader is urged to examine the work of the San Francisco printer John Henry Nash, who was very fond of the type and employed it frequently. The great book from his press, the four-volume Dante published in 1929, is completely hand-set in Cloister Light, one of the weights produced by the American Type Founders Company. oxeA 4 WS CENTAUR In 1915 there was issued from the Montague Press at the Dyke Mill in Montague, Massachusetts, a slim quarto volume printed in an edi- tion of 135 copies. The designer of this book was Bruce Rogers and the printer was Carl Purington Rollins. For bibliophiles who collect the work of Rogers, The Centaur, by Maurice de Guérin, is one of the most desirable items. The little volume seldom appears in the booksellers’ catalogues, though, as most of the copies are held by institutional libraries. The reason for the book’s demand, aside from being designed by Rogers, is that it represents the first appearance of a type esteemed the world over as one of the finest ever produced in this century. Named for the book, Centaur was its designer’s third and final ap- proach to the design of a printing type (the first was the Montaigne of 1901, followed by the remodeling of a Caslon for a book published in 1909). Thereafter Rogers restricted himself primarily to book typography, although from time to time he did alter various charac- ters of the fonts that he had selected for some of his important works. ‘The reputation of Bruce Rogers is secure as the most accomplished book designer that America has yet produced, and this high regard has spread far beyond our shores. The English typographic authority Sir Francis Meynell has stated unequivocally that Rogers ‘was the greatest artificer of the book who ever lived.” He was born on May 14, 1870, in Linwood, Indiana. As a boy, Rogers had ambitions to be an artist and enrolled at the age of fifteen at Purdue, then a twelve-year-old land-grant college located just a few miles from his home. Entering with him was his friend John T. McCutcheon, who was later to be a prominent cartoonist. The two boys were the only males in the art course. Although the art curriculum of Purdue at that time was not particularly distinguished, Rogers did manage to become aware of fine books, and he contributed to the design of the publications of the school—the first Purdue yearbook 62ABCDEFGHIJKLMN OPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghij klmnopgrstu VWXYZ 1234567890 AftAlfh fal Centaur (English Monotype) was produced in 1889, with Rogers and McCutcheon providing decorations, headings, and illustrations. After several jobs of no consequence following his graduation, in 1890, Rogers became in- volved in commercial design in 1894, when he was asked by Joseph M. Bowles, publisher of the periodical Modern Art, to contribute artwork to that publication. Bowles showed him several books pro- duced by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and like other young designers of this cra, Rogers was animated by exposure to these works. For a book.published by Bowles, Rogers created an alphabet of initials that, with sundry headbands and tailpieces, was reflective of Morris’s work. Rogers’s career began to take direction when the Boston lith- ographer Louis Prang offered to publish Modern Art, a proposal that Bowles accepted, prompting his removal to Boston. At Bowles’s suggestion Rogers. also went East in 1895. Not long after his arrival in Boston he met Daniel Berkeley Updike, who had recently estab- lished his Merrymount Press after having spent a number of years at the Riverside Press of the publishing house Houghton, Mifflin & Company. Updike introduced Rogers to George H. Mifflin, who offered him employment as a designer at Riverside. Rogers remained 63Ret Soh Drawings of Centaur type by Bruce Rogers there until 1912, a seventeen-year stint during which he fully estab- lished himself as a book designer of remarkable ability. About 1900 Houghton, Mifflin engaged in an ambitious publish- ing program of fine books and placed Rogers in charge of their production. The first opportunity to design a printing type came quickly. As described in chapter three, at an exhibition in the Boston Public Library Rogers had examined a copy of the De Pracparatione Evangelica of Eusebius, printed at Venice in 1470 by Nicolas Jenson. Fascinated by the type in which the book was composed, he sought 64,out its owner and received permission to photograph a page. (Rogers eventually acquired a copy of the book, which can be found in the Newberry Library in Chicago, along with the photographs of the type.) He thereupon began work on what he thought would be the ideal type, having no idea that the endeavor would be so difficult. Rogers soon persuaded his employer to let him proceed with drawings for a new type to be used for an important forthcoming publication, a folio edition of Montaigne’s Essays. Using the Jenson lerrer as his model, Rogers completed his design and~at the sugges- tion of Joseph W. Phinney, manager of the Boston branch of the ‘American Type Founders Company—he secured the assistance of John Cumming of Worcester, Massachusetts, for the cutting of the punches. Rogers was not particularly happy with the outcome of this initial venture into type design, feeling that the punchcutter, though highly skilled; had not quite preserved the flavor of either the Jenson original or his own drawings. But the publisher was most enthusiastic about the new type and Rogers agreed to use it for the Montaigne edition, from which it took its name. Privately, however, Rogers decided that his search for the perfect type would be continued at a later date. It was to be a dozen years before the opportunity arose to pro- duce another typeface. Midway in his Riverside employment Rogers had come to a decision concerning his career, turning full time to typography at the expense of illustration and painting, fields which had also always attracted him. The decision was doubtless owing largely to the acclaim his Riverside books had brought him, along with numerous new friends who were to influence his subsequent career. Among these was Emery Walker, whom Rogers finally met in 1912 when, having left Riverside, he made his first visit to England. Walker was the engraver who had been a strong force in the design of the Golden type of William Morris and of the Doves Press type of T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. Rogers had also previously established a friendship with Henry Watson Kent, the Bostonian who in 1903 had become librarian of New York’s Grolier Club and two years later was made assistant secretary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Walker and Kent were to prove instrumental in the development of Centaur type: Walker for his experience in adapting Jenson’s design for Morris and Cobden-Sanderson, and Kent for the support he pro- vided in his capacity at the Metropolitan. 65Se 7 sy Ag Noe é a ie THE CENTAUR. WRITTEN BY MAURICE DE GUERIN AND NOW TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY GEORGE B. IVES. 4G Was born in a cavern of these mountains, Like the river in yonder valley, whose first N\ drops fow from some cliff thac weeps in.a deep grotto, the first moments of my life sped amidst the shadows of a secluded re- treat,nor vexed itssilence.As our mothers AN, draw near cheirterm,theyretiretothecav, ‘ R erns, and in the innermost recesses of the CS RLY wildest of them all, where the darkness is most dense, they bring forth, uncomplaining, offspring assilent.as themselves. Their strength-giving milk enablesus to endure with our weakness or dubious struggles the first difficulties of life; yet we leave our caverns later than you your cradles. The reason 1s that there isa tradition amongst us that the early days of life must be secluded and guarded, asdays engrossed by the gods. My growth ran almost its entire course in the darkness where I was born. The innermost depths of my home were so far within the bowels of the mountain, that I should not have known in which direction the opening lay, had it not been thae the windsat times blew in and caused a sudden coolness and confusion.Some- times, too, my mother returned, bringing with her the perfume of thevalleys,or dripping wet from the streamstowhich she resorted. Now, these her home-comings, although they told me naught of the valleysor che streams, yet, beingattended by emanations there- from, disturbed my choughts.and I wandered about, all agitated, arnidst my darkness. “What, I would saytomyself,‘are these places towhich my mother goes and what power reigns there which sum, mons her so frequently? To what influences is one there exposed, Page from The Centaur, The Montague Press, 1916 66While at the Grolier Club, Kent had developed a keen interest in typography that prompted him, after his move to the Metropolitan, to become personally involved in the operation of the museum’s small printing plant, which actively produced exhibition labels, posters, announcements, and the like. During his long tenure there, Kent built this little shop into the Museum Press, which achieved renown for the high quality of its productions~many of which were designed by Kent himself. One of the projects that particularly interested Kent was improving the quality of the exhibition labels, and with this in mind he asked Rogers to consider the design of a type exclusively for the use of the Metropolitan. Thus encouraged, Rogers returned to his interpretation of the Jenson type, trying to provide the suitable model he believed had not been accomplished with the Montaigne delineation. Ina letter to Daniel Berkeley Updike written later, in 1922, Rogers explained the reason for his seeming dependence on a single original type: So much has already been written about Jenson’s Roman and its derivations that nothing more seems necessary or even perhaps, advisable—but it is, T believe, much nearer to its MS prototype than most people suspect. When I made the Centaur type I enlarged Jenson’s and wrote over the prints with a flar pen —just as rapidly as I could —then I selected the best (?) of my characters and touched them up with a brush and white—(no black) just about as much as a punch-cutter would do with a graver—and the type was cut from these patterns. It proved to my own satisfaction, at least, that the lower-case (with the exception of the s) of Jenson, was cut directly from a MS hand~and not drawn—as the caps of course were. I enclose a bit of the writing and the ‘trued-up’ letters—I wish now I hadn’t ‘trued” them so much — Will one ever learn? Rogers now discussed with Frederic W. Goudy the transfer of his drawings to matrices for the casting of type. Goudy recommended commissioning the Chicago matrix engraver Robert Wicbking for this purpose; Wiebking had cut several of Goudy’s earlier types most successfully, using the matrix-engraving machine. Rogers agreed, and when the work was completed in 1914, he felt that the new type was a good deal closer to the original Jenson than was the Montaigne for which the punches had been cut freehand. He was also convinced that it came closer to his own ideals of a reconstructed Venetian roman type. The original size chosen for casting was 14-point, this being the only size for which a lowercase alphabet was required. In addition,the Metropolitan required several sizes of caps for display purposes; these were cut in 12-, 14-, 20-, 24-, 30-, 48, and 60-point, and were named Muscum Press Capitals. Rogers agreed to sell his design to the Museum for $500, the type to become its property except that he would retain the privilege of ordering for his own use (not for sale) such quantities as he required of the 14-point, the only size for which the lowercase had been cut. Rogers was delighted when in April 1914 the Metropolitan im- mediately accepted his offer and assented to his terms. He wrote to Kent expressing his pleasure that the trustees liked his type well enough to want to own it. In another letter to Kent, written in May 1914, Rogers mentioned that the name ‘Centaur’ was associated with this type only in my own mind; so far and inasmuch as the type and the design is now yours I would be glad to have you label it as you will and not accept ‘Centaur’ unless you care to. The only point in calling it ‘Centaur would be to print that little piece as its first showing, and as that may have to be indefinitely postponed there is no reason why it should not be called anything you prefer. Why not call it “Kent, which is a splendid name for a type and never used to my knowledge. Pll take the responsibility of re-christening it if you have no objections. Kent apparently did not reply to this suggestion, and the typefoundry that held the matrices for casting dubbed the design Bruce Rogers. When Wiebking had completed the cutting of the matrices they were shipped to the Western Type Foundry in St. Louis, a firm established in 1901 to compete with the American Type Founders conglomerate. In 1919 Western went out of business, transferring all of its equip- ment and holdings to Barnhart Brothers & Spindler of Chicago. When Kent received word of the sale of the St. Louis foundry, he became concerned about the Centaur matrices. Officials at BB&S, not at all awed by the prestige of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, replied that they would require proof of ownership and payment for the matrices. They also suggested that the foundry keep them in storage for further casting as required. Following an exchange of letters, all parties agreed to the matrices’ remaining in the BB&S vault, although a year and a half later a nervous Kent wrote to Rogers asking him whether he felt it safe to leave the matrices with the foundry. Rogers reassured him on the matter. However, carly in 1925 Rogers received a letter from the well- known Baltimore printer Norman T. A. Munder, stating that he had been asked by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler to write to Rogers on 68Fy RAO OUE ee Ee AOE Ca CURSOS Vine rate MS Aer raed COL ea CS eras a a eee Bae “ay te kac RS RSE OA By y PEAS > SH A Centaur title page by Brace Rogers, 1933II Maccabees that it was manifest to them that looked upon him, what sorrow he bad now in his heart G8 Others ran flocking out of their houses 10 the general supplication, because che place was liketocome incocontempe. (19 Andehe women, girt with sackcloth under theic breasts, abounded in the sereets, and che virgins chat were kept in xan, some to the gates, and some to the walls, and others looked oue ofthe windows. (20 And all, holding their hands toward heaven, made supplication. Cat Then it would have pitied a rman to se the falling down of the mulcicude of all sorts, and the fear of che high priest, being in such an agony. (22 They then called upon the Almighty Lord to keep the things com- mitted of trust safe and sure for those that had committed them. (23 Nevertheless Heliodo- rus executed that which was decreed, €24 Now ashe was there presenc himself with his guard about the reasury, the Lord of spirits, and the Prince ofall power, caused. gteat apparition, so thacall that presumed tocome in with him were astonished a che power of God, and fainved, and were sore afraid. €25 For there appeared unto them an horse with a ecrible rider upon him, and adorned witha very fai covesing,and heran fercely, and smote at Heliodorus with his fore- Feet, and seemed chat he chat sat upon the horse had complere hamess of gold. (26 Moreover ‘wo other young men: before him, not able in excellenein beauty, ad comely inapparel, him on either side, and scourged him coneinually, and gave him many sore stripes. €27 And Heliodorus fell suddenly tunto the ground, and was compassed with great darkness: bucthey chat were with him took him up, and put him inco liccer, €28 Thus him, chat lately came with 2 great train and with all his ‘guard inco the said treasury, they carried ou, beiog unable tohelp himself with his weapons: and manifestly they acknowledged che power of God: (29 For he by the hard of God was cast down, and lay speechless without all of life. €30 Buc they praised the Lord, that had ‘miraculously honoured bis own place: for the temple, which a litle afoce was full of fear and trouble when the Almighty Lord appeared, was filled wath joy and gladness. (31 Then staight- ways cerain of Heliodorus friends prayed (Onias chat he would call upon the most Fiigh Chapter 4 to grant him his life, who lay ready to give up the ghost. (32 So the high priest, suspecting lest the king should misconceive that some creach- ery had been dove to Heliodorus by the Jews, offered a sacrifice for the health of the man. G3 Now as the high priest was making an ‘atovement, the same young men in the same cloching appeared and stood beside Feliodoeus, ‘saying, Give Onias the high priest great thanks, insomuch as for his sake the Lord bach granted thee life: (34 And seeing chat thou hast been scourged from heaven, declare urco all men the mighty power of God. And when they had spoken these words, they appeared no mote. Gs So Heliodorus, after he had offered sacri- fice unto the Lord, and made vows unto him that had saved his life, and saluced Onias, returned with his host to the king. (36 Then testified he to all men the wotks of the great ‘God, which he had seen with his eyes. (37 And swhen the king asked Fieliodorus, who might be a ficrnan to be sent yet once again to Jerusalem, he said, (38 If chou hase any enemy oc taitor, send him thither, and thou shalt receive him ‘well scourged, if he escape with his life: for in that place, no doubs, chere is an especial power of God. 39 For he that dwelleth in heaven hath his eye on that place, and defendeth it; and he beateth and destroyech them that come co burt it (go And the things concerning Heliodorus, and the keeping of the treasury, fell out on this = CHAPTER 4 afore, having been a bewrayer of the money, and of his country, slandered Onis, as if he had cerrified Helicdorus, and been the worker of these evils. €2 Thus was he bold to call him a traitor, that had deserved well ofthe city, and endered his own nation, and was s0 zealous of the laws. (3 But when theic hatred wene so fat, chat by one of Simon's fae- tion murders were committed, (4 Oniss seeing the danger of this contention, sad char Apollo nus as being the governor of Celosyria and Phenice, did rage, and increase Simon's malice, G5 He went to the king, pot ro be an accuser of his countrymen, bu seeking the good ofall, both publick and private: €6 Foc he saw thac ic was 965 The Oxford Lectern Bible, 1935 7othe company’s behalf, although ‘I am almost afraid to do so? Munder was to find out if Rogers would be willing ‘to give the printers of the country approval to use your Centaur’ He said that the foundry, hoping to supply it nationally, wished to begin immediately adver- tising the type and hoped that Rogers would accept the commission to design such materials. Alarmed, Rogers sent the letter to Kent, saying, ‘It looks very much as though Barnhart Brothers & Spindler were planning to “seize” the Centaur type—by right of eminent domain, if not by any other’ Rogers added, ‘If they decide to do it, I don’t know any way of preventing it. Valuable as such a design is in the market, there has never been any satisfactory way of preventing its being stolen? He recommended that the Metropolitan ask for the return of the matrices, and that in the future it hire a private typecaster to produce the type when required; he pointed out that Fred Goudy might be willing to do this, as he had recently set up his own foundry. Kent was not at all enthusiastic about Centanr’s being used by ordinary printers for run- of-the-mill printing, and said so in reply. He immediately requested BB&S to return the matrices to the Museum, and also wrote to Robert Wiebking to send pattern plates to either the Museum or Bruce Rogers. By the end of January 1925 the Centaur matrices were in storage at the Museum Press. During the next few years there were so many requests that Centaur be made available to the printing trade that Rogers seriously began to consider such a project. So when the Lanston Monotype Machine Company, in Philadelphia, asked permission to cut the letter for machine composition, Rogers decided to allow the transfer, Kene’s disapproval notwithstanding. But because Rogers was returning to England for a protracted stay, the decision was made that the Lanston Monotype Corporation of London would undertake the task. This English firm had at one time been fully connected with the American Monotype company, but later became independent of it. The firms had agreed to work together in the matters of machine development and the exchange of types. When Rogers arrived in England in 1928, the work of adapting Centaur began and was completed the following year. As Rogers had not supplied an italic for his original design, it now became necessary to provide one. The designer, however—referring to himself as ‘an indifferent calligrapher’ —felt that a proper italic was beyond his ability. He therefore persuaded his fellow American Frederic Warde, nmwho a year or two carlier had produced a very fine chancery italic named Arrighi, to permit its use as the italic for Centaur. Warde acceded and offered his privately cut rype to the Monotype firm for this purpose. Centaur thus entered the domain of the ‘ordinary printer? enabling that person to produce typography that, if not always up to the stan- dards of a Bruce Rogers, did provide a distinguished addition to the type cases. Certainly in the past half century the letter has been used in the production of a good deal of distinctive printing, not the least being some beautiful machine-set books designed by Bruce Rogers himself. Without doubt the most exalted commercial use of Centaur has been in the magnificent folio Bible produced by Oxford University Press, by all accounts the masterpiece design of Rogers and one of the monumental books in five centuries of English printing. This lectern Bible, begun in 1929 and six years in production, is composed in 22-point, and since it is entirely without decoration there is nothing to interfere with its acceptance as an outstanding example of pure typography. Before the Oxford Bible was completed two other Rogers works were produced, each using Monotype Centaur and each also high on the list of his accomplishments as a designer of books: The Odyssey of Homer, in the translation of T.E. Shaw, completed in 1932, and Fra Luca de Pacioli, printed at Cambridge University Press for the Grolier Club of New York in 1933. The eminent American printer Joseph Blumenthal, in his chapter on Bruce Rogers in The Printed Book in America (1977), wrote of these three books as ‘imperishable? Centaur has been one of the most widely praised roman types of our time. Even so conservative an observer as D.B. Updike said of it, in Printing Types, It appears to me one of the best roman fonts yet designed in America ~and, of its kind, the best anywhere? And at the level of that ‘ordinary’ printer, Centaur has been advertised for many years in the trade periodicals by the San Francisco typesetting firm Mackenzie & Harris as ‘The Noblest Roman of Them All.’ Happily, although considered the finest recutting of Jenson’s type, it has never been subjected to the type-family idea so beloved by suppliers. And it is to be hoped that in the transfer to film its grand proportions will not be the victim of the distortions of weight and width manipulation that accompany the concept of the type family. In 1930 Rogers was beginning to be plagued by financial prob- lems. After his eight-year stay at the plant of William Edwin Rudge 72in Mount Vernon, New York—which constituted his most active period.of book making, with almost a hundred titles designed—he was back to free-lancing. But the books that he was working on in England were lengthy projects, and this kept his income at a minimum. (Such financial strictures were what had, in the end, prompted him to release his Centaur design to the English Monotype firm.) His wife then became very ill, requiring expensive medical care, and so he sought further relief by offering the original matrices for sale. Writing to the San Francisco printer John Henry Nash, he inquired if Nash was interested in buying them, provided that Henry Watson Kent and the Metropolitan Museum agreed to the sale. Nash replied to Rogers that the matrices would no longer com- mand a high price, since the machine version was now available. Rogers differed, stating that the matrices represented the eal Centaur and were therefore more valuable than before; he then remarked that after consultation with Fred Goudy he had decided to fix the price at $2,500. But nothing came of this attempt to dispose of the matrices, and thus they remained in storage at the Metropolitan Museum printing office. Henry Watson Kent retired from the secretaryship of the Metro- politan in 1940, and died in 1948. The Museum Press languished without his guidance, closing its doors in the 1950s. Exactly what became of the Centaur patterns is not known, but the matrices for I2-, 20-, 24-, 30-, 48-, and 60-point are now in the Melbert B. Cary, Jr., Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology. ‘The drawings are in the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 1948 Rogers was prevailed upon to modify Centaur for the Justowriter machine, one of the strike-on devices that came into prominence in the immediate post-World War I period. More ad- vanced than other typewriters of the period, this instrument provided three character widths instead of the single unit. Centaur’s design refused such strangulation, however, and though key bars were manufactured and the style was renamed Rogers, it is doubtful that many machines were ordered with this particular arrangement. But Centaur type itself, by virtue of its cutting by the Monotype Corporation, will continue to provide printers with what is probably the most admirable of the numerous revivals of the fifteenth-century type of Nicolas Jenson.CR 5 N&O BEMBO During the 1920s the English Monotype company~Lanston Monotype Corporation under the direction of Stanley Morison, embarked upon a program that was the most ambitious of any composing-machine manufacturer to date: the recutting of numerous historic typefaces. From this enlightened undertaking came such revivals as Bodoni, Garamond, Poliphilus, Baskerville, Fournier, and Bembo. All of these types have since become part of the repertoire of book printers throughout the world. The last design of this group, Bembo, appeared in 1929 and has proved to be one of the most popular types of our time for the com- position of books. In Europe, where Monotype composition has been the principal method of book typesetting, Bembo quickly became a dominant letter form. In the important Exhibition of British Book Production it continues to be seen in a remarkably high percentage of the books chosen each year. Since well over a hundred titles are selected for each show, it is evident that Bembo receives prime con- sideration from British designers. In the United States in a similar exhibition-che Fifty Books of the Year, established in 1923 and sponsored by the American Institute of Graphic Arts—some eighty books composed in Bembo have been chosen since 1938, when the type first appeared in this country. And this despite the great majority of books exhibited having been set on slug-casting machines (Linotype, Intertype), as opposed to the Monotype (single-type) method of composition, from which Bembo is set. Of the two Italian Renaissance types selected for his typographic revivals, Morison favored Poliphilus (cut in 1923) over Bembo. But he later acknowledged that this opinion was due principally to the then relative obscurity of the types of Aldus Manutius, the Venetian publisher-printer, and the absence of ‘critical approval of Aldus’s typographic merits? 14The great historic typography resurgence engendered by William Morris and the private-press movement early in the twentieth century had placed such emphasis on the types of the mid-fifteenth-century Venetian Nicolas Jenson that the contributions of other Italian punch- cutters were being ignored. It was not until the quickening interest in printing scholarship during the 1920s—prompted in part by the publication of such books as Daniel Berkeley Updike’s superb Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use (1922) and the seven volumes of the periodical The’ Fleveron (1923-30) —that-typographers became more aware of the later Venetian types and especially those of Aldus. Aldus Manutius (1450-1515) was a scholar of Greek and Latin who had taught at the University of Ferrara before becoming tutor to the Pio family at Carpi. (He had changed his name from Teobaldo ABCDEFGHIJKL MNOPQRSTUV WXYZ& abcdefghijklmnop qrstuvwxyz 1234567890 75explicabo;nort tangrecenfeatur. Igi- cuir,cum illum muleain umbrafedencem comperiffem ; ita initium interpellandi eumfeci. PETRVS BEMBVS FIL! VS. Diuquidem piter hic fedes:& certe ripahaecuirens; quam populi tuae iftae denfiffimaeinumbrane; & Auuiusalie;ali quanto frigidior eft fortafle,g fitfatis. BERNARDVS BEMBVS PATER. Ego uerofili nufpiam effelibentiusfoleo; gin haccumripae, tum arborum cum. etiain fluminisamoenitate:negeft,quod uereare,nequid nobisfrigus hoc noceat, praefertim in tanto aeftatis ardore: Sed fecifti cu quidem pérbene; qui meab iis cogitationibusreuocafti;quas & libencif— fimefemperabiicio ,cumin Nonianum uenitur;etnticquidem nobisnefcio quo pacto furtim irrepferantnon modo non uocantibus, fed etiam inuitis. BEMBVS FILIVS. | Derep.fci licet cogitabasaliquid ,autcertedetrium. Page from De Aina, Venice, 1495 Manucci to Aldo Manuzio, later Latinized to Aldus Manutius, a common practice among classical scholars of the time.) His great love for Greek literature inspired him to print the important Greck texts, which he planned to salvage, edit, publish in Greek, translate 76into Latin, and make available to the growing audience for the classics. ‘The wealthy Pio family agreed to finance the project, which proved to be most costly, since it was necessary to assemble a staff of editors and translators, in addition to commissioning the cutting of Greek types. Aldus chose Venice as the location of this major venture in Italian publishing, to be called the Aldine Press. The city, the great center of trade berween Europe and the East, provided a cosmopolitan market for the books. Another essential factor in this choice was the availability of craftsmen with the skills required to-establish a complete printing office in a period when every item required for production bad to exist on the premises (as opposed to today’s diversified printing operations). Of vital importance, too, was the large Greek colony in Venice from which editors and proofreaders were obtained. Aldus arrived in Venice in 1490 and began his labors, first assembling a staff that eventually included some of the great scholars of the age, one of them being Erasmus of Rotterdam. It took five years before the first book, a Latin and Greek grammar, issued from the press. But though devoted to the classics, Aldus had no intention of neglecting current literature, and in the same year, 1495, he published De Ztna, an account of a visit to Mount Etna written by Pietro Bembo, then but twenty-five years of age. Bembo was destined to become one of the most popular of the Renaissance writers (he later took holy orders and became a cardinal). Aldus expressed his philosophy as a publisher in an introduction to his edition of Aristotle’s Organon: ‘Those who cultivate letters must be supplied with the books necessary for their purpose; and until this supply is secured I shall not rest” Indeed he did not rest. He neglected everything but his work, resulting in a decline into poor health that hastened his death in 1s15—he was worn out and not at all enriched by his endeavors, owing primarily to the pirating of his texts by competitors. Bur his contribution to literature was magnificent. It resulted in the early dissemination of knowledge through the study of the classics. It made available the Aldine innovation of the in- expensive small-format book (so successful that it was widely plagia- rized in Italy and France). The pirated editions not only stole the carefully edited texts but imitated the types used by Aldus and even affixed his pressmark, the famous dolphin and anchor-the dolphin signifying speed and the anchor stability. The pirate editions even frequently included Aldus’s motto, Festina lente, ‘make haste slowly?THE ROMAN TYPE OF THE POLIPHILO (ALDUS) 1499 DESIGNED BY FRANCESCO GRIFFO. NOW RECUT FOR USE WITH THE “MONOTYPE” COMPOSING MACHINE ETTER design owes much to the famous types cut by Nicolas Jenson in 1470 and used by him to such magnificent effets. A remarkable and permanent influence u the whole of subsequent uypostphy fted. Within a year or two of its appearance his ae Gy toman was copied all over Italy. Neverthe- less it is possible that some exaggeration has crepe into our estimate of its influence and that we have not taken into sufficient account the importance of Aldus. The latter’s a€tivities as a scholar and a publisher have pethaps to some extent overshadowed his merit as a printer and we have contented oursclves with recognising the importance of his usage of the first italic, ror. It should be noted however that from the time of his eftablishment as a printer until his death he never employed types which were immediately based on the Jenson model. Whether or not the Aldine leters are an improvement upon those of his illustrious predecessor is a matter of tafte, but it will at leaft be agreed that they differ in such important respeéts as set and cut of serif. The type of this present announcement is a “Mono- type” reproduétion of the famous letter used in the Poliphilus of r499, and it may be in place to emphasize its producer’s claim to credit for a design beautiful in itself and important in its influence, To our eyes it possesses a much more “present day” feeling than is conveyed in the letters of the earlier mafter. It symbolises Poliphilus (English Monotype) ‘The roman type in which De Ztna was composed (called simply the De tna type), on which Bembo is based, was cut by Francesco Griffo, sometimes styled Francesco da Bologna. Aldus was most for- tunate in obtaining the services of such an inventive punchcutter, who produced all of the types for the Aldine Press, including the famous italic of 1500-1. A former goldsmith, like many of the early punchcutters, Griffo had already cut types for several other Venetian printers—the brothers di Gregori in particular—since arriving in the city from Padua about 1480.‘Ie QUOT SINT GENERA PRINCIPATUUM ET QUIBUS MODIS ACQUIRANTUR jutti fi stati, tutti e’ dominii che hanno avuto et hanno imperio sopra li uomini, sono stati e so- no 0,republiche o principati. E’ principati sono © ereditarii, de’ quali el sangue del loro signore ne sia suto lungo tempo principe, o e’ sono nuovi. E’ nuovi, © sono nuovi tutti, come fu Milano a Francesco Sforza, © sono come membri aggiunti allo stato ereditario del principe che li acquista, come é el regno di Napoli al re di Spagna. Sono, questi dominii cosf acquistati, o con- sueti a vivere sotto uno principe, 0 usi a essere liberi; et acquistonsi, o con le arme d’altri o con le proprie, o per fortuna o per virtd. -II- DE PRINCIPATIBUS HEREDITARIS © lascerd indrieto el ragionare delle republiche, per- ché altra volta ne ragionai a lungo. Volterommi solo al principato, et andrd tessendo li orditi soprascritti, e disputerd come questi principati si possino governare e€ mantenere.. Dico, adunque, che nelli stati ereditarii et assuefatti al sangue del loro principe, sono assai minori difficulta a mantenerli che ne’ nuovi, perché basta solo non prete- tire Pordine de’ sua antinati, e di poi temporeggiare con Ir ‘Use of Bembo type by Giovanni Mardersteig, Verona, 1967 79When jobs have type sizes fixed quickly margins of error widen unless the determining calculations are based upon factual rather than hypothetical figures. No variation in the amount of copy can affect the degree of error once that error has been made. If instead of the required ten point the ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ‘Bembo Condensed Italic (English Monotype) Griffo also cut the roman type that was used for Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna, printed by Aldus in 1499. This re- markable work, believed by many bibliophiles to be the finest printed book of the entire Renaissance, was, ironically, far removed in content from the scholarly texts normally published by Aldus. It was evidently ajob he had taken on, in the manner of countless printers who followed him, merely to keep his shop busy. The type of the Poliphili was long considered superior to that of the Bembo book, but during the last half century typographic taste has favored the latter design. Most Venetian types from the time of Jerson had been rather closely adapted from the humanist manuscript hand, and therefore tended to be somewhat heavy in stroke and serif. (It was of course this feature that so much attracted William Morris when he sought a replacement for the anemic book types of the nineteenth century.) Francesco Griffo must receive much of the credit for the departure of the punchcutter from slavish dependence on the pen-drawn characters. ‘The engraving of a steel punch, utilizing files and gravers, requires precision skills and allows refinements beyond the scope of the reed or the pen. It is evident that Griffo realized the potential of his tools in the creation of letter forms at once livelier and more precise than those of the scribes. Another significant departure from the Jenson type is noticeable in Griffo’s capitals, which he shortened in relation to the lowercase ascenders. Serving as his model, however, were the same majuscules cut in stone by the Romans that Jenson had followed. Griffo’s concepts apparently took several years to develop. The 80WHEREVER CIVILIZATION EXTENDS TYPOGRAPHERS WILL BE REQUIRED ABCDEFGHJKLMNOPORSTUVWXYZ OF ALL DOCUMENTS JUDGED SIX WERE GIVEN AN AWARD ABCDEFGHJKLMOPORSTUYZ THE BANK RECOGNIZES OUR CLAIMS AS VALID ABCDEGHJLMNPOWXY ABDEGHJKMNQRST ABCDFHLNOPUVW Bembo Titling (English Monotype) great twentieth-century printer-scholar Giovanni Mardersteig noted of the Griffo types that they were first a modification of the Jenson letters but then they showed a ‘gradual evolution from the earliest Venetian types, and they constantly improve until they reach their finest shape in the Bembo type which he cut for Aldus? The Monotype cutting of the De Atma type, although an excellent rendering, could not be other than an approximation of the original. There are always both aesthetic and economic problems in the adap- tation of the early types. For example, there is the difficulty of determining the allowance to be made for ink squeeze in the original (owing to the weight of the impression), or the exact shape of char- acters that were badly printed or poorly cast in metal. In the redesign arPROFESSIONAL TYPOGRAPHY In All Classes Of Printing Reflects Merit in the product advertised and yields $12345 Bembo Italic of Griffo’s type there was also the problem of which variant of cer- tain characters to select. For it must be remembered that during the incunabula period printers were still in competition with scribes in the production of books, and they frequently followed the scribe’s inclination to provide several variations of a particular character. Discussing these variations in his essay on the De Atna types, Dr. Mardersteig listed eight lowercase characters for which Griffo provided alternates. For example, there were five variants of ¢ and three of a, These alternates have proven useful in determining the origin of some of the French types, modeled on those of Griffo by Claude Garamond and Antoine Angereau some thirty-five years after Griffo had designed them. In addition, the modern pantograph machine necessarily mecha- nizes a design, particularly in its inability to vary a face from size to size, a factor that to the eye of the typographic purist removes much of the individual charm of the historic fonts. Finally, a major predicament in the production of Monotype Bembo was the selection and cutting of an italic to complement the roman, a quandary previously discussed in the chapter on Cloister Old Style. A partial solution in this case was to supply two italic forms for Bembo. The first, cut by the noted English calligrapher Alfred Fairbank, was judged too independent of the roman, a decision deplored by its designer. It has since been marketed as a separate type, a true example of the chancery style. Originally named Narrow Bembo Italic, now called Bembo Condensed Italic, it is an exceedingly fine type in its own right and justly popular as such, Upon the rejection of the Fairbank italic the drawing room of the company prepared a more conventional italic, based on the designs of the Venetian printing master Giovantonio Tagliente. 82Bembo was a slow starter in the United States, even though the Lanston Monotype Machine Company of Philadelphia made it avail- able in the 1930s. (The American and English Monotype firms, as noted earlier, were separate but maintained a working arrangement until the demise of the American branch several years ago.) The problem was the strong competition in the United States from the slug-casting machines, Linotype and Intertype, which obtained much the larger share of the market for composing machines. Thus, the single-type-casting Monotype system was not nearly so well repre- sented in American books as it was in English and European. Bur with the recent increase in phototypesetting for book compo- sition such types as Bembo will undoubtedly see wider use. Several of the manufacturers of film-setting devices have already made the type available, which assures its continuing success almost five centuries after its appearance. 83eK 6 WD ARRIGHI One of the finest examples of the early use of italic types appears in Coryciana (1524), a collection of Latin poems written by Blodius Pal- ladius, Like many another printed book, this volume is admired today primarily as an example of printing rather than for the beauty of its thought or language—justifying the observation of George Bernard Shaw that the survival of a book can more frequently be credited to its printer than to its author. The elegance of the Coryciana type was not just happenstance. It was the product of a printer who had already established his repu- tation as a writing master and who was the author of the first book that taught the nonprofessional writer how to pen the style known as the chancery cursive: the justly famous Operina, published in 1522 by Ludovico degli Arrighi. Employed as a scribe in the secretariat of papal briefs, Arrighi had written his text in pen and then had it copied in a wood engraving for printing. The work is still used as a basic calligraphic text, owing largely to the skill of John Howard Benson, who translated the work from Italian, lettered the English translation in Arrighi’s style, and matched the original line for line. The chancery cursive was a calligraphic development stemming from the humanist revival of the fifteenth century. In the various chanceries, or administrative offices, of both church and court, the responsibility of the scribes was the preparation of letters of com- munication. In the papal chancery in Rome these communications were called bulls, so termed because of their round seals, bullae. The bulls, written in a gothic hand, frequently required supplementary information in separate form, which was written in a contemporary style of ‘round hand,’ a cursive form of roman. ‘This informal ‘round hand? became standardized for less impor- tant papal business, and the documents themselves became known as briefs. The sloped writing -cancelleresca cursivn (‘chancery cursive’) — common to these briefs was to become the model for the styles that 84ABCDEFGHI] KLMNOPORST UVWXYZ abcdefghijklmno parstuvwxyZ fiffflfifilessyzy SE p:3!? 1234567890 Anighiobtained the name italic in 1s01, when they were first reproduced as printing types by Francesco Griffo for the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius. ‘The historic development of italic itself has long been known to modern printers, but the more distinctive cancelleresca cursiva was practically unknown in printing types until the 1920s—that most productive and innovative period of typographical research. Daniel Berkeley Updike’s Printing Types, first published in 1922, mentioned Asrighi not at all, but in the second edition of 1937, the author acknowledged the Italian printer-scribe in the nores in which he described the increasing interest in typographic history that had developed since 1922. But despite the efforts of modern scholars (Stanley Morison, for one), many printers remain confused about the distinctions between the ordinary italic types and those sloped forms based on the chancery cursive. Both styles are currently in use, but the chancery is generally restricted to accompanying roman types modeled on forms that developed before 1500. Te was at that time that Aldus Manutius had begun the production of editions of the classics that would find a ready market among scholars and students. To accomplish such an objective he necessarily had to depart from the established practice of printing books in large format, a practice making them both bulky and expensive. To con- serve space it appeared reasonable to use a type that was closer fitting than the roman, or upright, character. His punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, chose the informal cursive writing styles as a model, producing a font that was used by Aldus to print a small-format edition of Virgil in 1501. This was the first book to be set in an inclined letter, a style later given the name italic, from ‘Italy? its place of origin. This earliest italic differs from later models in the lack of the sloped form of capitals, roman being used in their place. Probably the need for being economical with space, especially space related to character width, was foremost in Griffo’s mind when he selected the cursive style. But another theory, and a fairly logical one, holds that earlier editions of the classics were beyond the means of penurious scholars, who frequently resorted to copying the books themselves. As their style of writing was the cursive, cursive print to them would be as legible as roman print. It is immaterial which theory is correct. The fact remains that italic immediately became extremely popular for composing books, 86design of Ladovico degli Arrighi, is used; it has never appeared before. An earlier version of the fiace, called Arrighi, was used int the small privately printed edition of the Poct Laureate’s new verses,“ The Tapestry,” published in London Last E year. The “Crito” will be printed at the Offtcinia Bodoni at Montagnola di Lugano, Switzerland, a press which by reason of its perfeftion of technique is justly considered to rank among the foremoSt in Europe. Later there will appear the intereSting MEMOIRS OF THE AUTHOR OF A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN ly William Godwin, transcribed and with an Introduftion by John Middleton Murry. The reprint follows exaftly the rare second edition of this im- portant “Memoir” published in 1798. The details of design and produftion have been entruSed to Frederic Warde who is well-known to: amateurs of fine printing on both sides of the Atlantic. The first cutting of Arrighi, called Vicenza, as used in the announcement for an edition of Plato’s Crito, printed by Giovanni Mardersteig, 1926 87DE FALSA SAPIENTIA. fe fisaq; confirmer: nec ulli alteri fapere concedit; ne fe defipere fateatur. fed ficnt alras tollit ; fic ipfa quogs ab alijs tollitur omnibus . Nihilo manus enim philofophi fork, quicam flultitie acnfant . Quancing landa~ ueris neramgs dixerissd philofophis uituperatur ut fil facredemns ne igntur unk fefe fuamg; doctrinam lau= danti; an mulns unius alterivs ignorantiam aulpan- tibus?Rethys ergo fit neceffe ef? quod plurinn fennunt, ‘The italic cur for Aldus by Francesco Griffo, 1501 and entire works, especially classics, were set in italic. The Aldine Press, carried on by Aldus’s sons following his death in 1515, continued this tradition. The English bibliographer A.F. Johnson called the sixteenth century the Age of Italics, stating that south of the Alps, particularly in Italy, almost as many titles were produced in that style as in roman. Owing to its use in the influential Aldine classics, italic soon became established elsewhere, first in the pirating of the Venetian printer’s texts, and then for other original books. By 1525 italics were being employed by German printers and had appeared in the scholastic center in Basel. Following a cutting by Simon de Colines in Paris about 1525, they were taken up by other French printers. Further impetus was given to the use of the italic letter in French printing by the appearance of Arrighi’s book, whose types were a great aesthetic advance over the 1501 italic of Aldus. It was probably the combined influence of the Aldine and the Arrighi italics that led French punchcutters after 1530—Colines, Claude Garamond, Robert Granjon—to create an italic different from both, one that would complement the roman instead of being an independent type. From the mid-fifteenth century this increasingly became, and remains, the accepted practice everywhere. Harry Carter, the late typographic historian, in his Lyell lectures at Oxford in 1968, assigned to Francois Guyot of Antwerp the credit for actually matching romans with italics. Guyot was for many years a 88supplier of type for the famous French printer Christopher Plantin, and had in addition justified many of the matrices that Plantin had purchased in France for use in his Antwerp shop. Guyot died in 1570. In this area A.F. Johnson takes issue with Updike, who had originally stated that the Aldine italic was the model for all subse- quent italic types. Aldus, however, in his dedication to publishing inexpensive texts, was under no compulsion to demand a beautiful model for his cursive type, nor did he make any attempt to produce ‘beautiful? books with ir. As a scholar, his principal concern was with the subject matter, and as a publisher, with the economics of the market for books, particularly textbooks. Thus, the Virgil of 1sor shows a somewhat cramped page, made even more difficult to read by the employment of numerous ligatures; Updike noted some sixty- five tied letters in this one book alone. The case for the Aldine italic as the one model for all subsequent italics is therefore weak. The full development of type in the chancery form had to await the awakened interest of the writing masters whose talents were manifested in the numerous books on letter forms that appeared during the first half of the sixteenth century. The newly ubiquitous nature of the printed word had, naturally enough, created keen interest on the part of scribes in the alphabetic forms being utilized by printers: the English calligrapher James Wardrop has written, ‘Printing, which killed writing as a trade, favored its development as an art. It is in this respect that we now recognize the contributions of the Italian writing masters, who inspired the cutting into printing type of the finest of all italic forms, the chancery cursive. In our own time, a number of excellent copies of this style are available and the best of them, named Arrighi, properly calls attention to the man who first used such a design—the calligrapher Ludovico degli Arrighi, originally from Vicenza, who hence occasionally styled himself Vicentino. Having become interested in the printing craft during the pro- duction in 1522 of his Operina, Arrighi set up a press at Rome with the intention of doing fine printing. For his type he drew an italic etter patterned on those same chancery forms shown in his calligraphy book. He employed an engraver of seals, Lautitius Perusinus, for the cutting of his punches. The delicate kerning of so many of the written characters required outstanding skill on the part of the engraver, and Perusinus, whose talents have been praised by no less an authority than Benvenuto Cellini, supplied such skill. 89~: Deo optimo Fret auf pee ~ abedeefggbik Imnopgrsfeurar , xy, PRES J oftua iffiatobronan:Chi wef fere inife! ( if corfo fuo, &i lina if ue -virtu dora forte’ horrida se atern. met oad fi € : « fingeret artis , opus . Adelon Virgo parens , nec virgo parens , nats A neposes I dem ga cust Tis ft peter bic refidet € fe poteft quich manus , te wdce’, rerum ? Sunt hee de’ ccelo myftica miffa tibi « ?P ilippus Beroaldus funior CUobis orycins maxima numind H as ponit t flatuas : non fbi flags A mplé arbtria regi > Motiorem aut titulum ambiens > Noa gus’ veftra bomini fan ta dedht manus Sat letum facinnt - Vos rogat vt dis Hisquy poffidet »vti & vita incolumi queat , And i facra cobors coclitum , et accipe? Quas fert (orycius fippleter ‘preces Si euum puriter ogit 5 G fi-voscoluit pie Page from Coryciana, printed by Arrighi, Rome, 1524 93MARCI HIERONYMI VIDAE CREMONENSIS SCACCHIA LVDVS. V dimus effigies belli, simulataque I ueris P relia, buxo acies fitas, et Indicra regia « V t gemini inter fe reges albusque, nigerque Pro laude oppofiti certent bicoloribus armis, Diiite Scriades Nymphe certamina tanta Coarminibas prov fis watum illibata priorum, Nulla uia eft. tamen ire iauat, quo me rapt ardor, I nuiague audaci propero tentare tuucnta. V os per inacce(fas rupes, et inbospita euntem Saxa Dee regite, ac fecretum oftendite callem , V os buins ludi imprimis meriniffe neceffe cft. V os prinse Fludsa bec Italis monStraflis in ovis K ‘The second italic of Artighi, Rome, 1527 94and Morison struck up an instant, if short-lived friendship (at least on Frederic’s part). But it was through Morison that Warde became acquainted with Arrighi’s Coryciana, obtaining a copy from a book- seller in Paris. It was also at Morison’s suggestion that Warde under- took the design of a modem version of the Arrighi type. Warde turned apparently to the Parisian punchcutter Charles Plumet for the engraving of the punches from his designs. There has been, however, some controversy concerning the cutting of the punches. Morison wrote in 1953 that Charles Malin, another French punchcutter of the period, had made them; Morison stated, ‘I think that I was solely responsible for the negotiations and began discussion with Malin. . . .’ Yet in 1934. Warde had written a letter to Henry Watson Kent of the Metropolitan Museum in New York (which had purchased Warde’s matrices and punches) saying that Plumet had cut the punches; this is corroborated by Morison’s biographer, Nicolas Barker, who in his 1972 study of Morison quored from letters between Plumet and Warde. Morcover, in the only biographical article written on Warde after his death, in 1939 (published in Print magazine), Will Ransom declared that Plumet was the punchcutter. The matter was cleared up in 1981 when the Melbert B. Cary, Je. Graphics Arts Collection at the Roch- ester Institute of Technology acquired the punches and matrices for Arrighi. The name of Charles Plumct is inscribed at the foot of each punch in the fone. Arrighi type was first used in 1926 in a book entitled The Calli- graphic Models of Ludovico degli Arrighi, Surnamed Vicentino, printed by Hans (later Giovanni) Mardersteig at the Officina Bodoni, then Jocated in Montagnola di Lugano, Switzerland. The introduction to this book was written by Morison. Warde then produced a second version of Arrighi, with standard treatment of serifs on the ascenders. In the colophon of the first book in which this new type was used, in 1926—-Crito: A Socratic Dialogue by Plato, also printed by Mardersteig — the face was called Vicenza. The final version of Arrighi, and the one that is best known, is that of England’s Lanston Monotype Corporation. In 1929 Bruce Rogers had gone to Oxford to plan the printing by the University Press of his great masterwork, the lectern Bible (which was finally completed in 193s). It was composed in his own Centaur type in the 22-point size. Centaur—first cut as a private type in 1914—did not, however, possess a companion italic. Thus, when the Monotype firm adapted Centaur to machine-casting for use in the Bible, it was‘Amongstbemtook me sito is Beat {should dissolee before fis strengthof Being. For beauty’ s noting but the birthof terror, Whi weendure but barely, and, enduring, Mustwonder ait in hott disdains ‘Tocompass our destruction, every angel Isterriblesandobusin seffcontrol Lerushtbeoppeoltht rues wit my sobs Oftwhom,olas, of whom shall we bave need? Neier ofangel nor of men ofeody “The segacous annals bao founds ot, How litle atour ease wefioeand move Inchismelligible world. maybe Wekeeptheimage of ose ree tbat bangs Abooea slope, that daily oe Bebold: Ortwerealltepahof yeerday, And our indulgencetotheconstancy (Ofsome dear babi hat remained wits 4 ‘Edward Johnston’s italic type in the Cranach Press edition of Rilke’s The Duneser Elegien, Weimar, 193necessary to provide an italic. Rogers was of the opinion that he lacked the skill to produce a competent chancery cursive to accompany his roman, and he therefore persuaded Frederic Warde to design such a type. Warde thereupon made a third version of his Arrighi design, this time supplying inclined capitals, which had not been available in the first two cuttings, which followed the Aldine tradition of roman capitals. He also shortened the ascenders to conform more closely with Centaur, a type that Rogers had adapted from the 1470 original of Nicolas Jenson. Since its introduction as a Monotype face, Arrighi has been con- sidered by many typographers to be the best current example of the chancery-cursive style, and thus has been widely used by many of the great printers of our time. Rogers called it ‘one of the finest and most legible cursive letters ever produced, and proclaimed it a fitting com- panion for such a calligraphic roman as Centaur. Warde sold his original punches and matrices to the Metropolitan Museum in 1934 (his critics have since claimed they were not his to sell). More recently, the English printer Will Carter requested the matrices and received permission to recast several fonts, which was done at the foundry of the Oxford University Press. The whereabouts of the punches is now unknown. Arrighi in its best-known adaptation, the Monotype cutting, has many of the features of all the chancery italics: the compact set width, the wide kerning, and a slighter incline than the conventional italics. However, several distinctions may be noted. Perhaps the easiest char- acteristic of this type to remember is the lowercase g, in which the ear has been removed.CK 7 &D DANTE Readers may very well be mystified as to why such a handsome roman letter as Dante has not achieved the degree of popularity in the United States accorded other Renaissance printing types, such as Bembo, Centaur, and Palatino. This less-frequently encountered revival was designed in 1954. by Giovanni Mardersteig. Although the craft of the printer contributes to the scholarly aptitude of most of its practitioners, the fact remains that since the first century and a half following Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, the appellation scholar-printer could be reasonably applied to very few people who labored in the printing office. And this is particularly true in the present century. Only three American exceptions come immediately to mind- Theodore L. De Vinne, Daniel Berkeley Updike, and Joseph Blumenthal. All these men were first practical printers, in the sense that they were responsible for the operation of printing plants (although only one of them, De Vinne, had learned the trade as an apprentice). But long after their firms have been disbanded their names remain widely known for their singular contributions to the printing craft itself, in which each of them tran- scended the mere management of a business. A European example of this genre was Dr. Mardersteig, whose name is instantly associated with the great traditions of typography by those who have known him, and whose work at his Officina Bodoni has provided constant and distinguished service to scholarly printing. Future typographic historians will probably be surprised that his efforts to maintain the scholarly heritage came at a time when tech- nological change was creating an atmosphere uniformly antithetic to the continuance of this old printing tradition: it is because of the success of his efforts that this great tradition was preserved. What are Mardersteig’s credentials as a scholar-printer? In the course of a lecture on his work presented several years ago, Alan Fern, of the Library of Congress, put them into a succinct statement: 98‘His profound scholarship was reflected in the choice of works he printed. His texts were the result of his reading in a number of languages. Upon them were bestowed the most careful editorial attention and the finest possible typographic form? ‘The printer preferred anonymity, but he did write a short expo- sition of his philosophy, which might be defined as a credo: ‘First, service to the author, searching for the form best suited to his theme. Second, service to the reader, making reading as pleasant and light for him as possible. Third, the giving of the whole an attractive appearance without imposing too much self-will.” In an account of his first six years as a printer, Mardersteig wrote: ‘All texts before being set up are thoroughly examined. The best critical edition is chosen and if it does not agree with the latest research, a new revised text is established by comparison with the original manuscript or the first edition? Few private printers could even begin to match such rigorous standards of production. Born in Goethe’s city of Weimar in 1892 and christened Hans Mardersteig, he was fortunate to be a member of an extremely lit- erate and artistic family. Although he earned a degree in law, he declined to follow that profession and instead became a teacher. However, an association with Count Harry Kessler, proprietor of Weimar’s distinguished Cranach Press, rurned Mardersteig’s thoughts to publishing. He then became an editor and production supervisor for the publishing house of Kurt Wolff, first in Leipzig and later in Munich. In 1922, because of declining health, Mardersteig moved to Mon- tagnola di Lugano ‘in Switzerland to establish himself as a printer. Upon his arrival he commissioned the construction of a hand press; for his type he was most fortunate in having obtained permission from the Italian government to resurrect matrices produced by the great cighteenth-century printer Giambattista Bodoni. Mardersteig was given exclusive use of the original types, which had been pre- served at Parma. During the next five years he produced twenty-one books, most of which were hand-set in Bodoni. Of these early volumes, two became landmarks in Mardersteig’s progress as a printer of scholarly attain- ments, and both were in fact a departure from the Bodoni pattern. First was The Calligraphic Models of Arrighi (1926), written by Stanley Morison, set in a cutting of the Arrighi cursive by the American type designer Frederic Warde. A year later Mardersteig produced A Newly 99Discovered Treatise on Classic Letter Design Printed at Parma by Dami- anus Moyllus circa 1480, edited and introduced by Stanley Morison and composed in the Poliphilus and Blado types. Several of these early editions were produced for other publishers, and in doing this Mar- dersteig established a tradition that he followed for the rest of his life —-printing on commission as well as to please himself. Mardersteig’s work at Montagnola was interrupted in 1926 when he won a competition to produce the entire works of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. For this huge project he found it necessary to remove his establishment, Officina Bodoni, to the large modern press of Arnoldo Mondadori in Verona, where the D’Annunzio work was to be printed. The forty-nine volumes took five years to complete, a trying time for the printer, as the theatrical poet often demanded to see the work page by page at his home on the shores of Lake Garda. Some of these books ran to more than five hundred pages, all hand- set in Bodoni types. Two hundred ninety copies of the set were printed, all on the hand press. Following this rather harrowing experience, Mardersteig spent 1933 in Glasgow, Scotland, as adviser to the Collins Cleartype Press. When he returned to Verona, he refused an offer from Mondadori to become art director and chose instead to take his press into his own home, on a hillside overlooking the city. He now expanded his typo- graphic resources to include such historic faces as Garamond, Basker- ville, Bembo, Janson, and Centaur. Mardersteig had met the English typographic historian Stanley Morison as early as 1924. The two shared an interest in the fifteenth- century Italian letter forms, particularly the types of the punchcutter Francesco Griffo, who had produced for Aldus Manutius the types of two of the great works to issue from the Aldine Press, Bembo’s De Zina and the Poliphili of Colonna. About 1929, at Morison’s urging, Mardersteig began his research into the Griffo types that resulted in a new design. He secured the assistance of Charles Malin, a highly skilled punchcutter residing in Paris, who had cut the trial size of Eric Gill's Perpetua design. For the next twenty-five years Malin was t0 collaborate with Mardersteig in the cutting of all of his types, offering numerous suggestions in their design that proved invaluable to the printer. This initial venture into type design in 1929 was named Griffo. Similar to the Monotype Bembo, which was also inspired by the De Zina, Griffo may very well be a closer rendition of the original. 100DANTE Charles Malin, Paris abegdefghiijkImnopqrstuvwxyzacFhAfimMB 123457890—71".; ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZEG ABCDEFGHIJKLMN Madame & Monsieur Charles Malin présentent au Docteur Giovanni, MARDERSTEIG et sa femille leurs meilleurs verux é soubaits de abcdefgbiijkimnopqrstuywxyzzaacer fis Ff f aéeou ECHO BOCCACE OIEH £G@ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWKYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Milf Hx Ee ¢ 1234567890 abide 4€id4 agi60 aeisH ABLOU E AGO. r2K[-— ABC DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ahedefghijblinnopgrsinvwaye FARGM Be Ea fice 1234567890 agioa aetau ABIOU B AOD .,"::21(- ABCDEEGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abedefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 TAN M He Eo Co BAK eer. 5:1(L-— ABlOU E AOT ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQBSTUVW XYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyg 1234567890 FAAfl He Ee oi pwr» [+= aeidn déidd aéida aeion EIOU E AOU ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQ RSTUVWXYZ £G@ Dante Monotype, Officina Bodoni Toret tu reuerfi f{umus;ut de Aetnaeincendi- is interrogaremus ab iis , quibus notum eftilla nos fatis diligenter perfpexiffe ; ut eatandem moleftiacareremus;placuitmi hi eum fermonem conferibere’ ; quem cum Bernardo parentehabui paucis poft The type of Francesco Griffo, Venice, 1495 Unaccountably, it was not used at the Officina Bodoni until 1939, for the edition of Due Episodi della Vita di Felice Feliciano, the forty-first book produced at the press. After the war the type was revised. In 1967, when Mardersteig printed his own edition of De Zima, he chose Griffo for setting the original Latin and Monotype Bembo for the English translation, making for a most interesting juxtaposition of the two types. He also wrote an erudite account of the types” origin. ‘The association with Stanley Morison, as well as the one with Frederic Warde, had definitely increased Mardersteig’s desire to investigate the development of classic typefaces. But though his predisposition was to remain in the era of Aldus for inspiration, he did break away on at least one occasion. During his year’s residence in Scotland with the Collins Cleartype Press, Mardersteig had super- vised the production of a type for that firm that was based on the English Roman No. rof the nineteenth-century Scottish typefounder Alexander Wilson. It was named Fontana and was cut for Monotype composition. Fontana was used by Collins for thirty years before the firm released its exclusive rights. About 1934 Mardersteig drew Zeno, which was cut in Paris by Malin in 1936-37. The design harks back probably to one of Nicolas Jenson’s contemporaries of mid-fifteenth-century Venice; it retains the solid strength of the Venetian types but without the somewhat cumbersome slab serifs so prevalent in those styles. In the 16-point 102THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SAINT MARK CHAPTER I THE BEGINNING OF THE GOSPEL | of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; asit is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, gBy) which shall prepare thy way before U RAS) thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. And there went out unto him all the land of Judza, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins. And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey; and preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than | after me, the latchet of whose shoes | am not worthy to stoop down and unloose. Lindeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost. And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: and there came a Il Mardersteig’s Zeno design as used in The Four Gospels, Verona, 1962 103PACIOLI Charles Malin, Paris ABCDEFGHILMNOPRSTUVZ BOLZANO CHARLES MALIN MARDERSTEIG ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPRSTUV FILOSOFIA CRITICA STORIA MCEURS ZUKUNFT ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP RIME TRIONFI POESIE CORSO LIRE ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST UVWXYZ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP QRSTUVW XYZ Pacioli TitlingABCDEFGHIJKLM NOPQRSTUVWXYZ z& E abcdefghijklmno pqrstuvwxyzeet 1234567890 ABCDEFGHIFKLM NOPQRSTUVWXTZ AGE abcdefghijkimn opqrstuvwxyzee 1234567890 i ff ‘Fontana size, Zeno was first used in an edition of Sax Zeno Vescovo, Patrono di Verona, by Lorenzo Montano, printed in 1937. Later Mardersteig revised this face and employed it in one of the great books of his press, The Four Gaspels, printed in 1962. Still another ‘Renaissance type came from Mardersteig’s hand, in TOS1950-1. Named Pacioli, it was a titling font for which the model was the majuscule alphabet drawn in the fifteenth century by Fra Luca de Pacioli. Mardersteig first used this beautiful rendition, appropriately, in his edition of Pacioli’s De Devina Proportione, published in 1956. Dante was Mardersteig’s last and finest type, cut in 1954. Here again, the Verona printer became involved with the fifteenth-century Italian types. It is unfortunate that Mardersteig never managed to find the time to write extensively about his five types; it would be interesting to compare the drawings, for example, with the models that he was adapting for his personal use at the Officina Bodoni. Without such explication, we must look to the letters themselves, and. Dante appears to have been influenced by the Aldine types, although it retains some of the vigor of the earlier Venetians. Malin completed the punches for the 12-point size just one year before his death, in 1956. Unlike Griffo and Zeno, which were not used immediately, Dante was chosen for, and received its name from, the edition of Boccaccio’s Trattatello in Laude di Dante that Marder- steig printed in 1955. The type quickly became a favorite of its designer, being selected for another two dozen books during the next twenty years. Although produced for a private press, Dante is by no means over- refined, a condemnation that may be applied to so many types of similar conception. As a book type it has few idiosyncrasies to inter- fere with its readability. Its crisp and sparkling contrast of stroke is eminently suited both to the antique finish of most book papers and to the dull-coated stocks, used for illustrations. The height of the capitals falls slightly below that of the ascenders, but the reduction is not quite so abrupt as in the Bembo series. Recognizing its usefulness as a book type, the Monotype Cor- poration of London arranged in 1955 to issue Dante for machine- composition. The firm used the 12-point size as produced by Charles Malin, which with but few changes was adapted for the range of sizes that would make the design most serviceable to printers. The italic is a chancery, marching beautifully the spirit of the roman; in this case Mardersteig departed from the carlier concept of the cursive form he had given to Griffo, which is more closely related to the first italic cut for Aldus (in 1501) than to the chancery style associated with the designs of Arrighi. Since the introduction of Dante, Monotype has added a semi-bold weight, along with a series of titling capitals, both of which broaden its usefulness in book production.its poet. Even our aforementioned D’Annunzio, by training per- fectly equipt, cannot do much more than moan ornately. O sinuous, moist and burning mouth, where my desire is intensified when I am sunk in deep oblivion, and which relentlessly sucks my life. © great head of hair strewn over my knees during the sweet act. O cold hand which spreads a shiver and feels me shivering. Yet in che moment that our situation seems to have become impossible (as bereft of hope as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando has imagined it to be), deus ex machina: we recollect the honest mas- ters of our tongue, and in them, on occasion, we find the problem solved, the tribute paid, the vision pure, the writing done. In Ben Jonson, for instance: Have you seene but a bright Lillie grow, Before rude hands have touch’ d it? Ha’ you mark'd but the fall o” the Snow Before the soyle hath sreutch’d it? Ha’ you felt the wooll of Bever? Or Swans Downe ever? Or have smelt o' the bud o the Brier? Or the Nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the Bee? O 0 white! O so soft! O so sweet is she! Initially I wrote of displacement as if it went from thing to thing—phallus to flower: Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prison’a in a gacl of snow, Or ivory in an alabaster band; So white a friend engirts so white a foe... but I have been dropping hints all along like heavy shoes thar the (42) TT Page of Monotype Dante from On Being Blue by William Gass, 1976 107American book designers regret the restricted availability of Dante, in which mechanical composition is confined to the Monotype, a type- setting machine no longer in wide use. Up to the time of this writing it has not been adopted for phototypesetting by any of the American manufacturers, although it seems only a matter of time before alicensing agreement will be worked out with the Monotype Corporation that will add the face to the library of fine book types currently obtainable on phototypesetting machines. Although Dante was the last type to be designed by Giovanni (as he was now called) Mardersteig, his career as a scholar-printer con- tinued unabated. It was in the last three decades of his life that his reputation extended far beyond the circle of connoisseurs of fine printing. ‘An astute observer of the changes that were bound to come in printing technology, Mardersteig had realized that he could not depend on the hand press for economic survival, and in 1949 he founded a modern printing plant. Located in Verona, his Stamperia Valdonega quickly established itself in the production of first-quality printing. The Officina Bodoni, meanwhile, continued in Mardersteig’s home, issuing distinguished books, every edition of which was sold ‘out upon the announcement of its publication. There now followed exhibitions of Mardersteig’s work in the major cities of Europe, along with honors in profusion on both sides of the’Atlantic. He received the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz in 1969; his biographer, Hans Schmoller, commenting on this fitting award, has stated, ‘If ours is to be the last century of the traditionally printed book, how fortunate that a printer like Mardersteig lived in it and created such an incomparable body of work. In 1968 the American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded Mardersteig its Medal, which has gone to most of the great printers of our time. Then in 1972 thé School of Printing of Rochester Institute of Technology brought him to the United States-for what he knew would be his last visit to these shores—to receive its Frederic W. Goudy Award. R.LT.’s Melbert B. Cary, Jr., Graphic Arts Collection contains one of the most complete holdings of Officina Bodoni books in the United States, a number of which were obtained in Verona by Cary in the early days of that press. During the visit of 1972 Dr. Mardersteig addressed an enthusiastic audience at the Morgan Library in New York City. His concluding remarks were: ‘What the future of typography will be, nobody knows. 108The invention of phototypesetting will have a decisive influence. But we who don’t belong to the big industry believe that itis necessary to aim for the highest standard, which could be a model for others, so that our crafts will not lose their importance. The art of printing should never die? Giovanni Mardersteig died on December 27, 1977. It is perhaps fitting to remember him as, in the words of his good friend Stanley Morison, a printer who ‘acted on the belief that to confer fine typo- graphical form upon a fine piece of literature is a justifiable use of time and labor, material and skill? It may be noted here that Martino Mardersteig is continuing the tradition of his father in both printing establishments in Verona, the Officina Bodoni and the commercial press, Stamperia Valdonega. Giovanni MardersteigeR 8 WD GOUDY OLD STYLE ‘If there were an individual, readily recognized quality or characteristic which the type designer could incorporate in drawings that would make any one type more beautiful, legible, or distinguished than another, it is obvious that only type of that kind would be designed.’ ‘This statement was made by Frederic W. Goudy, a man who spent more than fifty years of his life in pursuit of that ‘recognized quality’ in a printing type. Nobody seems to know exactly how many types Goudy produced (even he couldn’t recall every design), but a reason- able estimate would be upwards of 125. Many of them are now nearly forgotten, a factor due probably to his persistence in ‘going his own way’ and designing letters primarily for hand-composition, rather than to the quality of the types themselves. Another circumstance was the loss by fire in 1939 of the accumulated drawings and matrices of many years of his type production. In addition, those types thar he produced for the composing machine were limited to the Monotype single-type system, which in the United States never attained the popularity of the linecasting machines. Frederic Goudy died in 1947, and since then the appreciation of his types has been in decline. There has also been a tendency to dis- regard his influence as one of the great type designers of this century, although few disputed this reputation during his most active years of type production, 1915 to 194.0. Indeed, the name Goudy was, during the last quarter century of his life, a household word in printing offices in every part of the United States and in a number of other countries as well. A primary reason for this fame was not just his numerous types but also the fact that Fred Goudy was a very accessible man, who willingly appeared on countless lecture platforms from coast to coast to discuss the great love he had for letter forms. His warmheartedness toward his fellow printers caused him rarely to refuse a request to talk about type. moABCDEFG HU KLMN OPORSTU VWXYZ abcdefghij Imnoparst UVWXyZ __ 1234567890FRED: W-GOUDY AND WILL: H: RANSOM THE VILLAGE PRESS: PARK RIDGE- ILLINOIS HIS is the first showing of a new type designed by Mr. Goudy for the exclusive use of the Village Press. The matrices were cut and the typecast by Wiebking, Hard- inge & Co. of Chicago, to whom credit is due for the faithful ren- dering of Mr. Goudy’s drawings. The designer's aim was to produce a letter generous in form, with solid lines and strong serifs, and “with- out preposterous thicks and thins.” Legibility of the text as a whole was the first consideration, & the found- ers of the Press trust that the letter will prove accept- able to the readers of their productions. @ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUV WXYZ &$ Gabcdefghijkimnopgrstuvwxyz& ze fh thi Actst—1234567890.,:;1?"73() SOF seventy-six impressions—the first production of the Press—this is number « 3 Park Ridge, July 24th, 1903. The Goudy Village type, 1903 Born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1865, Goudy was over thirty before he designed his first typeface, Camelot, in 1896. By 1900 he was an instructor of lettering in Chicago and beginning to make a reputation as an advertising designer. With the establishment in Chicago of hisVillage Press, in 1903, he also became active as a printer and gradually began to build his reputation as a type designer. Goudy’s earliest types were display faces, reflecting his commercial- lettering experience. Even the type he called Village, first used for his own Village Press, was originally created in 1903 for Kuppenheimer & Company, a Chicago clothing manufacturer. In 1908 he ventured to design a book type for the old Life magazine. Cut for Monotype composition by the Lanston Monotype Machine Company, it was officially named 38-E, although it is often called Goudy Light or Goudy Old Style (0¢ to be confused with the subject of this chapter). Possibly Goudy enjoyed this excursion into the design of a com- mercial type for a periodical and the challenges it brought (such as the need to study Renaissance forms), but there is no doubt that he was also excited by the private-press movement—then at its height— in which he took an active part. In any event, in 191 for the New York publisher Mitchell Kennerley he produced Kennerley, his first important book type and first popular success. This effort was immedi- ately followed by the titling letter Forum, which was enthusiastically OLD STYLE TYPES will always be $67890 USE THIS OLD style letter in ads NEW TYPES print far better Goudy Light Old Srjle No. 38 (Monotype) 13received and fully established his reputation as a type designer. Both of these types were cut for private use. The American Type Founders Company thereupon became in- terested in Goudy, commissioning him to do a type. He agreed, on the condition that his original drawings would not be subjected to “interference by the foundry’s drawing room? Goudy then began work on the face, which eventually became the most widely used type he ever designed. Called Goudy Old Style by ATF, it first appeared in 1915 and was an instant best seller for the foundry. There have been numerous accounts of the origin of the type. One of the reasons for its success was the renewed interest in the classic typefaces, which Goudy had already begun to satisfy with Kennerley and Forum, and which ATF had fed with the Bodoni revival in 1910, followed by Cloister Old Style two years later. Goudy at one time stated that his inspiration derived from the lettering on a Hans Holbein painting, but he later admitted that he couldn’t trace the exact source. Most type designers would sympathize with Goudy in this, as it is easy to grow enthusiastic about a letter form and then when a type idea germinates to be confused about its specific sources. One of Goudy’s biographers, Peter Beilenson, said of Goudy Old Style that it was a ‘happy blend of French suavity and Italian fullness, marred by the supposed commercial practicality of shortened descenders’ Goudy apparently agreed with this criticism, for just be- fore his death he wrote that he had—albeit under protest—‘allowed ATF to inveigle’ him into using such abbreviated descenders. It was, however, these short descenders that helped endear the type to the commercial printers, allowing as they did an economical use of vertical space, particularly for the composition of advertising. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQ RSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 Goudy Bold (Morris Benton-aT) m4ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQR STUVWXYZ abcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyz 3) ?$€efthth fiffloee(EAicts&t 1234567890 Kennerley Old Style Goudy Old Style was thus an immediate success in the ‘ad alley; as newspapers refer to their advertising section. In the 1917 supplement to the famous ‘Big Red’ ATF specimen book of 1912, an addition to the Goudy ‘family’ was announced Goudy Title. The 1920 supple- ment introduced Goudy Bold. In 1921, Goudy Catalogue was ready, followed by Goudy Handrooled in 1922. Goudy Extrabold was added in 1927, and that year ATF issued a separate 124-page specimen book containing nothing but Goudy Old Style and its derivatives. Although this promotion of the Goudy types was most remunera- tive for the foundry, it didn’t enrich the designer, for Goudy had sold the original design for just fifteen hundred dollars instead of entering into a royalty agreement based on sales. His relationship with the American Type Founders Company naturally deteriorated, particu- larly after 1920, when Goudy was named art director of the Lanston Monotype Machine Company and he began to produce a notable group of types for thar firm. For ATF he designed but one other face, Goudytype, plus a series of initial letters named Cloister Initials. All of the variants of Goudy Old Style were cut for ATF by its resident type designer, the talented Morris Benton. Wadsworth A. Parker, another ATE house designer, aided Benton in the cutting of Goudy Handtooled. In its original form, Goudy Old Style was widely used for adver- tising and job printing. Its beautifully drawn classic capitals became a favorite of book designers for title pages and chapter headings, but it hhas not generally bec used for book-text composition, although it later became available for Monotype composition. In the fifty yearsbetween 1923 and 1973 only once has it appeared for an entire book in the annual Fifty Books of the Year Exhibition, in 1933. It has, however, been selected for innumerable title pages during the same period. Iv is the boldface version that keeps Goudy Old Style alive and healthy, despite the chagrin of the designer at ‘not being allowed to draw the boldface” The American typographer Lester Douglas showed the writer a drawing Goudy had given to him, captioned: ‘How I would have drawn-Goudy Bold? In actuality there was not a great deal of difference between this sketch and that of the bold’s designer, Morris Benton. Goudy was justifiably piqued, of course, by ATP’s refusal to give him further compensation for the huge success of the Goudy family. Inhis autobiography, A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, 1895-1945, Goudy mentions avisit to ATF by members of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. While leading a tour, Henry Lewis Bullen, the typographic historian and librarian of ATF’s Typographic Library, stopped at a casting machine. Bullen informed the group that the types being cast there had been designed by one of the Institure’s own members and further stated, ‘Here is where Goudy goes down to posterity while the American Type Founders Company goes down to prosperity? EXPERIENCES WHICH REVEAL DISCOURAGING DIFFICULTIES PRIMITIVE NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER HAD TO CONTEND WITH My father had already beena printer it for his life’s calling, without much fora number of years,and some time in the early thirties had led a forlorn editorial struggle in a West Virginian hamlet, with the monthly periodical which he printed himself and edited with the help of his sister. As long as. he remained in business he remained simply country editor and country printer. He had started the study of medicine when quite young but in due time abandoned regret,and though with his inventive and speculative nature he was often tempted to experiment in a number of other things, I do not think that he wouldever have thought of forsaking his newspaper work. In truth, the call of printing was in our blood, though it brought to us neither honor nor profit and we were planning and dreaming most of the time how we could break away fromit ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abedefghijkimnopgrstuvwxyz $1234567890 Goudy Handtooled (Morris Benton- a) 16,There appears over the past decacles to have been a noticeable reliance on Goudy Bold in the advertising of distillers: this writer has listed some fifteen different alcoholic beverages promoted by Goudy Bold. But the, type also remains a prime favorite for all advertising appearing daily in consumer periodicals at every level. In fact, it seems that whenever the requirements are for a solid, legible roman letter, the layout is marked for Goudy. All of the photographic devices currently available for the setting of display composition offer fonts of Goudy Old Style, assuring its wide use for a fong time to come. Frederic W. Goudy and his types may seem dated to the younger typographers of today, but there is not much question about his influence during a good part of this century. He was never an ivory- tower designer, always retaining the common touch, even though in his later years he designed fewer display types and became more and more involved in his personal investigations into the purity of the Tralian Renaissance letter forms. All of Goudy’s types were drawn freehand—without the use of compass, straightedge, or French curve. Early in his career of designing types for the composing machine, Goudy objected to the methods employed by the Monotype firm to transfer his drawings to matrices; he believed that this compromised his artistic principles. He therefore in the midtwenties withdrew to his workshop in Marlborough, New York, to produce his own matrices for what he called the Village Letter Foundery. Here for some fifteen years he tuned out many of his best designs, but offered them only in fonts for hand-composition. In 1939 the workshop was destroyed by fire, with the result that the types produced here during this prolific period were lost. Fortunately, however, the types Goudy had continued to draw for Monotype, such as Deep- dene and Goudy Text—two of his most successful designs —were not among these. ‘Thus, during the last quarter century of his life, although Goudy maintained his connection with the Lanston Monotype company, he spent more time on his own production of types. These were of less commercial application than his earlier designs, but they satisfied his instincts as an independent type designer. The many romans Goudy designed in his home workshop during the period up to 1939 have been rejected by his critics as look-alikes. His numerous friends and admirers, however, could distinguish them 7THIS is sixteen pt. Deepdene Roman, designed and cut by Fred W. Goudy. It was first shown in September, 1927. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ& abcdefghijklmnopqrstuywxyz GABEN A 234567890 J}j] QQQ THIS is Deapdene Italic designed and cut by Fred W. Goudy in February, 1929. ABCDEMPRIRQNR J ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ & abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzz PPADS LP TPH Peck cb gga ‘Deepdene and Deepdene Italic as the products of his continuing quest for perfection of the roman letter forms. The fruits of that quest were destroyed in the fire. The idealistic Goudy’s essential practicality is evident in a lecture he gave before the annual convention of the International Club of Printing House Craftsmen in New York in 1939. He stated: ‘My craft is a simple one. For nearly forty years I have endeavored constantly to create a greater and more general esteem for good printing and typography, to give printers and readers of print more legible and more beautiful types chan were hitherto available. Printing essentially is a utilitarian art, yet even utilitarianism may include distinction and beauty in its type forms. To meet the demands of utility and preserve an esthetic standard is the problem I set myself years ago, and now, at 74, with over one hundred and cight different type designs to my credit, I am proud to say that I have never consciously permitted myself to use the print presenting a worthy message to serve as a mere framework or scaffolding upon which to exploit my own skill, or even, to allow my craft to become a means in itself, instead of a means only to a desirable and useful end. During his lifetime Frederic W. Goudy made a lasting contribution to American typography, and though never adequately rewarded financially, he received broad personal recognition, resulting in three honorary degrees from American colleges and numerous medals, including that of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. m8More important, Goudy acquired countless friends, who never ceased to respond to his humanity. Attesting to this are the three biographies published during his lifetime and four others that remain unpublished. There is also a Goudy Society, which meets annually to celebrate his birthday, March 8. No other designer of printing types in our times has beén so warmly remembered. Frederic Goudy m9eK 9 NS PALATINO In 1950, with the design of Palatino, a young German calligrapher- type designer named Hermann Zapf came to the attention of the world’s typographers. Although the type took a year or two to circu- late, its thirty-one-year-old creator made an immediate impact. For that year Feder und Stichel (Pen and Graver in its English version) was published, employing the new type in its introductory text. A product of the Stempel typefoundry of Frankfurt am Main, for which Zapf was serving as art director, this book consisted of twenty-five pages of alphabet designs. These had been lettered by Zapf in 1939 anid were cut in lead printing plates by August Rosenberger in his spare time during the war years (it was Rosenberger who had introduced the young designer to the cutting of punches). Feder und Stichel was published in an edition of only 80 copies on Japan paper and in s00 copies on Fabriano. The supply was quickly exhausted, as the revival of calligraphy that had begun in London early in the century under the influence of Edward Johnston was well under way, and most practitioners were avid for fine examples—the magnificently printed slim volume quickly achieved renown as an outstanding manual of the calligrapher’s art. The introduction in the new Palatino font, representing the type’s first use, was hand-set. A further personal touch was that all the copies of this edition were hand-bound by Gudrun von Hesse, Mrs. Hermann Zapf. In 1951, Cooper Union in New York became the first American institution to recognize Zapf’s talents, and mounted an exhibition featuring his work along with that of Fritz Kredel, the famous wood engraver and book illustrator. Zapf at this time made his first visit to the United States, captivating American audiences with his charm and his very obvious love for and skill with letter forms. Through the efforts of the American calligrapher Paul Standard, who had arranged the show, the English edition of Feder und Stichel was planned (the German edition had gone out of print). Thus in 192 the printing 120ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRS TUVWXYZ abcdefghijklm noparstuvwxyz 1234567890 Loi?” S&fFfifl-Qu Palatino office of Stempel produced 2,000 copies of the new version, which, like the first edition, were disposed of very rapidly. Both editions now command high prices from booksellers fortunate enough to locate copies. What is considered remarkable is that this beautiful, classic book was lettered by a man just twenty years of age and self-taught as a calligrapher. Apprenticed at fifteen as a color corrector in a lithographic plant, Zapf a year later visited an exhibition of the lettering of Rudolf Koch. He was so much inspired that he immediately purchased supplies and began the experiments that quickly brought him to professional competence. Later he described his long hours of practice, when he was frequently admonished by his parents for overuse of the electric lights in the small hours of the night. He sometimes despaired from Jack of guidance —discovering, for example, that after three years of effort, he was holding his pen in the wrong position. In 1950, Zapf was extremely busy in the production of printing types. To accompany the Palatino, he added a titling font, which was named Michelangelo. He also drew two italics, one to serve as a complement to the Linotype version and the other for single-type composition in foundry type. This second italic, closer fitting than the first, is a chancery cursive and is one of the best available types in this category. The next addition to the Palatino family was a bold titling letter called Sistina, soon followed by a boldface version of Palatino itself and a font of swash capitals for the foundry italic. Michelangelo and Sistina today enjoy frequent use, independent of Palatino, wherever fine capitals are required. raDiewefle lt a ray Le nia OL HW UE me u Bree A ey ra ene nae aD Pana CE RCLOLL SERN Zapf calligraphy, from Pen and Graver, 1952 This vast output within such a short time recalls the virtuosity of Frederic W. Goudy, and Hermann Zapf would be quick to recognize and appreciate such 2 consanguinity. He has long harbored great admiration for Goudy’s ability as a type designer and also for his espousal of craftsmanship. In still another way Zapf has followed Goudy —in his readiness to be of help to his fellow typographers, no matter how inconvenient to his personal life. Zapf did not begin his career as a type designer with the creation of Palatino. After three years of his apprenticeship as a color etcher the creative urge was so strong in him and his lettering studies had progressed to such a point that in 1938 he applied for employment with a Frankfurt lettering studio. Shortly thereafter he became a free- lance letterer, at which time he began the serious study of printing types that would lead to the experiments resulting in his first type by 1939. Understandably, this was a Fraktur, for much of Zapf's early calligraphy had been in that style. Zapf later wrote that it was through his reading of Writing and Ilkuminating and Lettering, Edward John- ston’s famous manual of 1906, that he drew away from the ‘highly individual style of Rudolf Koch’s lettering and expanded his knowl- edge of the wider tradition of letter forms. Gustave Mori, the German historian of European typefounding, who was directing the Stempel foundry, learned of Zapf’s presence in Frankfurt and in 1939 retained his services for the firm. The punch- cutter August Rosenberger took Zapf’s drawings and hand-cut the test size of the type, which was called Gilgengart (honoring-a German sixteenth-century book of religious texts). The type was not ready for 12distribution until 1941, and it unfortunately coincided with the govern- ment decree branding Fraktur a Jewish concoction? It was not until after the war—during which Zapf served as a map designer —that he produced a roman type, drawn with a broad pen, which was named Novalis. However, after the cutting of a normal weight, a boldface, and an italic, the decision was made for commercial reasons not to issue this type; nevertheless, its designer had acquired invaluable experience in the effort. In 1948 Zapf started work on another roman, but one that he felt was more attuned to the times. This was the design that finally became Palatino. In its drawing Zapf applied the rationale he was to bring to many of the fine types he has produced since that time: the concept of adapting types to printing processes, as well as to their methods of manufacture, from that of single-type casting to composing-machine matrices. He later employed this approach to meet the exigencies of transfer to film grid and disk, and eventual digitizing for cathode-ray- tube (CRT) typesetting devices. ‘The open counters that make Palatino such a legible letter were provided to overcome a then current printing problem in Germany, poor-quality paper. The weight of the type was also thickened beyond that of a normal roman in order to adapt to the lithographic and gravure printing processes of that period. As a boy Hermann Zapf had been determined to become an electrical engineer. Although he was won over to the practice of calligraphy, his scientific bent has kept him sympathetic to the techni- cal requirements of modern type design—he strongly believes thar the ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRS TUVWXYZ _ abcdefghijklmnop qrstuvwxyz 1234567890 wil? GEfffifl-2 ThQu Palatino Italic with swash charactersDON CARLOS HEIDELBERG Michelangelo designer must temper artistic judgment with technical understanding. Because he has pursued a study of the newest technologies, engineers in turn respect his capabilities and are most willing to collaborate with him. As a result, his types remain true to his concepts of typographic harmony. Zapf also believes that the typographer, and not just the type designer, must in the furure become ‘an analytical designer who must hew to strictly logical sequences in the course of his work? Along with many of the best type designers of this century, Zapf returned to the letter forms of the Italian Renaissance in the preparation of Palatino. Although he wished to call the new face Medici, it was the decision of the foundry staff that it be named Palatino, after Giovanbattista Palatino, a sixteenth-century calligrapher and con- temporary of the punchcutter Claude Garamond. Palatino’s writing manual, Libro Nuovo d’Imparare a Scrivere, was published in Rome in 1540. Although a controversial figure among his fellow scribes, Palatino has been called by the historian of calligraphy James Wardrop a ‘calligrapher’s calligrapher? Following his work on Palatino, Zapf went to Italy, visiting Florence, Rome, and Pisa in order to study firsthand the Roman inscriptional letters found there in such profusion. The sketches he made at this time later became the basis for the Palatino titling fonts Michelangelo and Sistina. The influence of the classical lapidary majuscules is evident throughout the Palatino family, markedly in E, F, and L, which retain the riarrow proportions. The swash variants he produced for Palatino italic stem particularly from studies in the Laurentian Library in Florence and the Vatican Library in Rome. 14Zapf has steadily maintained that as he did not create Palatino as a book type but rather as a commercial face, he has always been somewhat distressed by its use for book work. As his intent was to produce a display type, he leaned to a calligraphic treatment of certain letters, which to some extent interferes with the legibility of Palatino when considered as a type for continuous reading. Nevertheless, such a stricture has seemingly not discouraged book typographers in the United States. One response to the legibility factor was the suggestion of the well-known American type designer William A. Dwiggins to design a number of ‘alternate’ though normal characters to replace the elaborate letters in question (E, F, S, v, », y, and others), a process that of course represents a reversal in the usual procedure of cutting alternate letters —it is the fancier characters that are ordinarily cut as alternates to the original ones. In addition, Zapf conceived of a weight to be called Palatino Book, which he cut, but the salespeople at Stempel and German Linotype preferred to produce it as a separate type, to be called Aldus Buchschrift (a decision that annoyed Zapf, as the basic design had little relationship to the types of the scholar-printer Aldus Manutiu3). Never cut in display sizes, Aldus has been used primarily in Germany for machine-composition. The success of Palatino was international, despite some modest criticism of the serif endings of such letters as 4, n, and m, and the ‘unusual lowercase ¢, which rises to almost full ascender height. In Aldus, this letter was brought back to normal proportions. The favorable opinion of typographers unfortunately brought MALKUNST LEONIDAS Sistina wswith it difficulties that have plagued Zapf artistic life ever since, and fora time had him at the verge of quitting his work as a type designer. Plagiarism scems to be the price of popularity. The unauthorized copying of types has harassed type designers throughout the soo-year history of printing, and it seems destined to remain one of the hazards of the profession. Palatino appeared simultaneously with the emergence of photo- typesetting as a replacement for the standard hot-metal operations. While the composing-machine manufacturers were themselves adapt- ing to this trend, a number of firms with no previous exposure to the printing trade decided that this changeover represented an opportune time for them to become involved in the growing graphic-arts market. The newer firms quickly equipped themselves with facilities for the preparation of types, but they had little interest in the development of their own styles. Printers who purchased the new devices naturally wanted to have the popular type styles, and this demand inevitably resulted in a wave of imitation of existing types. Under the law, the name of a type could be registered but the design itself was unparentable, and therefore considered by the new entrepreneurs to be in the public domain. Palatino is thus currently known as Elegante, Malibu, Andover, Paladium, and Pontiac, depending upon the sup- plier. The designer receives no financial return from any of these ‘adaptations? Unquestionably, Hermann Zapf is the most conspicuous victim of the widespread pirating of type styles in the post-World War II era. His later types, Melior and Optima in particular, were also broadly appropriated. To add insult to injury, the new composing equipment not only stole the designs but also invaded the market of conventional machines, further reducing the designer’s income from his royalties in the sale of matrices and foundry types. Since Zapf received no remuneration from the firms that usurped his designs, it was manifest that type design could not be profitable for him, which discouraged him from pursuing his calling. Moreover, he had to suffer the artistic anguish of witnessing the wide use of badly produced renditions of his creations. For a time during the 1970s there was speculation that these abuses of artistic property would be curtailed by the passage of a new copy- right act, but the United States Congress refused to give protection to the design of printing types. However, within the industry itself there have been heartening signs that unauthorized appropriation of 26types will at least be discouraged. A firm representing designers, the International Typeface Corporation, was founded in 1970 and has been most successfull. Its method is to work with a type designer in the preparation of a new font and to license the font’s use to the various composing-machine manufacturers. ITC will supply the original art, obviating the manufacturer's need to produce — often inadequately — its own copies, thus assuring the integrity of the original. The subse- quent sales by the manufacturers will bring royalties to the designer through an arrangement with ITC. This concept has been accepted by the great majority of firms engaged in the production of typesetting equipment with the wholesome result that the design of printing types may once again offer a reasonable financial return to their creators. KE mitt p durchschossen L140 top. The art of book-producing was never on a higher level than at the time of the invention of printing. The power and har- mony of what Gutenberg and his associates in strict adherence to the sound tradition of Gothic scripts cut, founded, set and printed has been surpassed by none of their followers either in their own country or in other countries. A second culmi- nating point of German graphical art was reached in the early Renaissance when masters like Diirer, Holbein, and Cranach were using the woodcut which had had its origin and been put TO THE TEST IN GERMANY, FOR BOOK-ILLUSTRA cit p curcnschossen Liat t2p Die Kunst, ein Buch als Ganzes schén zu gestalten, hat nie héher gestanden als zur Zeit der Erfindung des Buchdrucks. Was Gutenberg und seine Genossen im Anschluf an die sichere Tradition der gotischen Handschriften geschnitten, gegossen, gesetzt und gedruckt haben, hat keiner ihrer Nachfolger daheim oder im Ausland an Kraft und Harmonie iibertroffen. Den zweiten Héhepunkt erreichte die deutsche Buch- kunst zur Zeit der frihen Renaissance, als Meister WIE DURER, HOLBEIN UND CRANACH Aldus (Linotype) 27Hermann Zapf worked closely with ITC, producing a number of new types. He now works out of his home, designing typefaces and type programs for a number of companies, bringing his unique skills in the construction of beautiful letters to a marketplace in which traditional inventiveness is far too often in short supply.@& 10 WS GARAMOND The types thar currently bear the name of the great sixteenth-century French punchcutter Claude Garamond have been in popular demand for about seventy years and are thus available from a variety of sources, including foundries and composing-machine manufacturers. These many versions do not always have the same characteristics, a dis- concerting factor that interferes with their ready identification. ‘The Garamond types have a rich past, stemming as they do from the most influential era of French typography, the 1500s. New in- terpretations of the historic sources continue to appear from time to time, and though these may be confusing to younger typographers, they do attest ro the universality of the French old-style types and offer a challenge in the pursuit of their origin. During the first century of the printer’s craft, each printing office was more or less independent, there being practically no outside source for supplies other than paper. In order to secure a supply of type, it was necessary for the master printer to hire a punchcutter and a typecaster. (The two occupations could be embodied in the same person, but the cutting of a punch required both technical and artistic ability, whereas the caster’s job demanded less skill and was lower on the scale of printing-office employment.) After punches had been cut, it was necessary to drive matrices of copper or brass, and these had to be carefully justified in order to achieve the proper fitting of the character struck and assure its alignment with the other letters of the font. A mold had to be constructed, and following the casting operation each letter had to be dressed, which included removing the jet caused by the type metal entering the mold, the rubbing of each character to remove burrs, and finally the planing of the foot to climinate the jet break. ‘The printer also had to obtain a supply of type metal, consisting of tin, lead, and antimony, and such supplies were difficult to procure in many localities. 9ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO PQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPOQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopgrstuvwxyz 1234567890 Garamond (ATF) It was sometimes possible to purchase punches and matrices from the spouse of a deceased printer or, on occasion, to bargain for them with a competitor. This practice, however, provided no guarantee of a sufficient supply of type if the cutting and casting skills were not available within the shop. Another method of obtaining matrices was to purchase strikes from another printer who would, of course, be reluctant to sell the punches. Such sales often rook place at fairs where printers congregated to trade and sell their books. Punchcutting, along with matrix adjustment, was a skill chat required a good deal of training and experience. There never seemed to be an adequate number of such craftsmen to keep printers happy until the establishment of typefounding as a completely separate craft, in the 1500s. By the mid-sixteenth century typefounding was making a tentative start, primarily in the form of shops that had accumulated stocks of punches and matrices and which employed casters who produced types for other printers without such filities. Into this printing scene entered Claude Garamond, who had been born about 1500, the exact date being uncertain, as are the facts of his early years. It is probable that he was apprenticed to the punchcutter 0148 AND. VESALIT DE CORPORIS & parem inibi cum offibusfaperficiem conlticuencesjllorum gibbum,quod depreflsm magiscplanum, quam teres ceritur;neminimum quidem exce duneaded,uequemadmodum ulnam & radium attentisipfiscedereoftendi- usmufeulis fic quog;poltbrachialis ofa ecundim logitudinem angulot, ELlineis quibufdam pulchré excuberancia fpe€tencur, pro mulculorum vide- ficen qui pfisexporrguncur,ratione.ntienam poftbrachalisosndicem ili ‘hens, in interna manus fedem, qua! brachiali articulatur, notacu dignum edu- Gi proceflum,cui'inufeulus brachiale mouentium fecundusinferitur.Dein +. fea. shore oftbrachialis cs paruo prapoficam digito,qui brachiali committiturjexter- Poo liere, vel tii bachal protuberat,uccOmodé tendinisinfercionem e7-. admitteret" mufculi brachiale moueritium cercij.Infaper offa indicem & me j432* dium digicosafflcenta,pforum externa ede ad brachiale" ampla quog;& "aft ope afpera funt, ut biEdumexapiant rendinem” mufculi brachuale mouentium are, quiideo potifsimum uideturbipartin, & dean lateleere, qué fimplex * 9m Krereumni alice procella pact infereretur, qui extra brachialis Bepolt- $y, falis exteriorem gibbamépfeclem extuberaffet, seme on DE OSSIBVS DIGITORVM MANVS fame Capue xx vin Lam FIGURA UIGESIMI SEPTIME Caririh thes Com ' sins tbe, PRIMA TA SECVNDA. TERTIAL bella, TRIVM. TABELLARVM HVIVS CAPITIS figura, S¢earundem charaéterum Index. Os s1 130 digiarem friem dae prove fre, alain igfniguine Ca te common fran: feel rl ines esa lbrecalcerslocane a erence diene. Harun e. seompromachan exon ofc garam deram A infin cf pole acidiressndcem “BB badianr ci promey por ee fale -aladpfiredclse, dineeron 6 Beda legion arc fp. xm perenne p fr, D iD ean prog fgnitumexcapcar, 7 ER ‘Seande any ct moan froma Fiebre HE sfondi fe pe: ena amg o> H deaindcantcapicla ike id mee Kf fof daa promi ieflrencL nen fom, : gfiasinmediocapalornprimi enn omen aa fae BK maarspramnerisee FE ur. NO. Feral tions ofan, eri vactumprapoi rc gir call chat, Garamond type as used in The Anatomy of Vesalins, printed by J. Oporinus, Basle, 43 BLABCDEFGHIJKLMN OPQRSTUVWXKY&Z abcdefghiklmnoparstuvwxyz 1234567890 Garamond Roman (Stempel) Antoine Augereau, from whom he learned the craft that wasto establish. his reputation into the twentieth century. Garamond apparently then worked with other punchcutters before embarking on an independent career. It was probably in the late 1520s that Garamond was approached by the Parisian scholar-printer Robert Estienne to cut a series of new roman types. Estienne was continuing the press founded by his father, Henri, about 1502, and he was turning it into one of the establishments thar helped mark the era as noteworthy in the history of typography. Garamond’s roman first appeared in Paraphrasis in Elegantiarum Libros Laurentii Vallae, by Erasmus, printed by Estienne in 1530. That year Estienne produced several other books with Garamond’s type. The first complete showing of the types came in 1531. Typographic scholars have long debated the design origins of Garamond’s types, but there is general agreement now that they derive from the types cut for Aldus Manutius in Venice by Francesco Griffo. OF particular interest in this respect is the 1495 edition of De tna by Pietro Bembo, much more than, for instance, the Aldine Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499. Garamond was a friend of Geoffroy Tory, the first French imprimeur du roi (royal printer) and a notable force in the aesthetic development of the printed book. It is known that Tory possessed a copy of De Hina, which could have been passed to the punchcurter for study. The matter becomes complicated as three others—Simon de Colines; Antoine Augereau, Garamond’s former master; and the printer Christian Wechel—produced similar types at about the same time. There is no conclusive evidence thar 132Colines was a puncheutter, but he was certainly a good printer, who, having married Henri Estienne’s widow, had continued to produce the fine Estienne books. According to Nicolas Barker in an article in The Library on the Aldine romans in Paris, Garamonc’s and Augereau’s versions were almost identical. There is no doubt, however, that the De ditma type was the inspiration for the French copies. The reader will recall, in the chapter ‘on Bembo type, that it possessed eight variants of certain lowercase fetcers, In the type that he cut for Estienne, Garamond used seven of these variants, in all instances selecting the more eccentric renderings, according to Barker. Since these alternate characters appeared only in De tna and not in later Aldine publications, the evidence points to this type as the model for Garamond. In later romans, Garamond frequently departed from his earlier copy and refined the type to better reflect his own artistic concepts. One particular such letter is the capital M, which in the early models lacked the serif at the top of the right stem. ‘The relationship that Garamond maintained with Robert Estienne was mutually beneficial. The punchcutter was most fortunate to be working in a cultural climate that encouraged scholarly printing —it ABCDEFGHIJKLMN OPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdelghijklmnopqrstuvmxyz 1234567890 Garamond (Ludlow)was the regime in France of Francis I, who enthusiastically promoted the art of the book-but Garamond could scarceiy have advanced his reputation without the assistance of a printer such as Estienne, of marked superiority in the practice of his craft. And Garainond’s growing skill gilded Estienne’s name. ‘The Garamond types brought attention to their designer, prompting the king to commission from him a font of Greek. Garamond’s Grec du Roi further enhanced his celebrity, although later Greek scholars deplored his models, which continued the tradition of the informal Greek script originally cut for Aldus Manutius. Nevertheless, the Garamond Greek served as the standard until the present century. Upon Garamond’s death in 1561, his punches and matrices were sold, a principal purchaser being Christopher Plantin, whose printing office in Antwerp was to become the largest and finest in Europe before the end of the century. This establishment still exists as the Plantin-Moretus Museum, where during the past thirty years typo- graphic scholars have catalogued the thousands of punches and matrices in its possession. Many of these are now attributed to Claude Garamond. ‘The Garamond punches also found their way to the typefoundries being established in the sixteenth century. In 1592 the Frankfurt foundry of Egenolff-Berner issued a broadside specimen that has since become an important source of information concerning the types of the era, and in it are several fonts ascribed to Garamond. There is some doubt whether these punches were acquired directly Qui sequitur me, non ambulat in tencbris: dicit Dominus. Haec sunt verba Christi, quibus ad- monemur, quatenus vitam cjus & mores imite- mur, si velimus veraciter illuminari, & ab omni caecitate cordis liberati. Swxmum igitur stud- ium nostrum sit, in vita Jesu Christi meditari. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijkImnopqrstuvwxyz é st Garamond (English Monotype) Be