ANATOMY
OFA
TYPEFACE
ALEXANDER LAWSON
fib)
HAMISH HAMILTON - LONDONHAMISH 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
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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 London18.
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
Bell2.
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
337PREFACE
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 thathave 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
8too 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
9in 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
10ANATOMY
OFA
TYPEFACEeR 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-
4quently 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
15printers 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.
16Marea 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.
7ret 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
8of 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
19ut 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 waswidely 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
21Almost 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 Caxtonto 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
2Bdid 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
24Frakeur 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.
25om
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, 161Capitili 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
27To 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
2Bwinded 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
29ee
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
30Cap Fonts
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EXTRA CHARACTERS
Rudolf Koch’s Jessen type
AABY CL HD CE FF GG HG II
FISK LLMUUNN OO PP OO RK
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Rudolf Koch's Wilhelm Klingsporschrift
3rIncoming 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
32THIS 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
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€ 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.
34CK 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
38The art of book-producing was on the highest
level at the time of the invention of printing.
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‘Hammer American Uncial
ramfor-recretalasttemmenacs: NTINEMI con!
eee ae sbnscerom cbhae
ods (oe
faperwichexscrams cwr-hellcponcriam
Taf 4
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Pofrremotah quod practer oxnomeamvel arione”
WENTICAC RecefrTEnt fapcme mnt
Pofcerrrerafeancronburaclier hectare
ficefo co enccomacfin4r a
ofpendoserenrenonbiaeldresd beearen
‘Half-uncial manuscript hand, 7th-8th century
36Nam 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
7PRaccR 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,
38Of 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
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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 wasATYPOGRAPHIC 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 theAWAY 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, workingSAPIENTIA 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,
1963with 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-
45acter 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
47CLOISTER 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
48KINGDOM
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
sofidem 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
suoffem 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, 1475in 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-
83oxen, 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
54IN 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
SSee
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
7Cloister 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.
86 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
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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.
oxeA 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
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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
63Ret
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.
65Se 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
66While 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
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A Centaur title page by Brace Rogers, 1933II 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
7othe 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,
nmwho 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
72in 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?
14The 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
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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
76into 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
79When 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
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‘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
80WHEREVER CIVILIZATION EXTENDS
TYPOGRAPHERS WILL BE REQUIRED
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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
arPROFESSIONAL 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.
82Bembo 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.
83eK 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
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Anighiobtained 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,
86design 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
87DE 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
88supplier 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.
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Page from Coryciana, printed by Arrighi, Rome, 1524
93MARCI 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
94and 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, 193necessary 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
99Discovered 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.
100DANTE
Charles Malin, Paris
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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
102THE 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
103PACIOLI
Charles Malin, Paris
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‘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
TOS1950-1. 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
107American 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.
108The 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 MardersteigeR 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.
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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.
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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 hisVillage 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
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NEW TYPES
print far better
Goudy Light Old Srjle No. 38 (Monotype)
13received 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.
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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 yearsbetween 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
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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
7THIS is sixteen pt. Deepdene Roman, designed and cut by
Fred W. Goudy. It was first shown in September, 1927.
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‘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.
m8More 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
m9eK 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
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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.
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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
12distribution 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
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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.
14Zapf 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
wswith 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
26types 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)
27Hermann 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.
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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
0148 AND. VESALIT DE CORPORIS
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43
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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
132Colines 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
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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.
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Garamond (English Monotype)
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