Introduction

The purpose of this book is to supply a basis for the intelligent appreciation of the best printing types through the study of their history, forms, and use. As a preliminary we consider briefly the invention of printing, the cutting and casting of type, a font of type and its case, the measurement of type; supplementing this by a short account of the Latin alphabet and those manuscript book-hands which most influenced type-forms. This brings us to a study of the chief varieties of type in use in the fifteenth century, and from 1500 to 1800, in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and England. Coming to the nineteenth century, the types of Bodoni, Didot, and Wilson are discussed; the English and American revival of older type-forms, and the influence of this revival on printing at the present time. We now have a foundation for a reasoned judgement of type-design, and the practical application of this judgment is developed in suggestions as to the choice of types for a composing-room. Finally, some of the excuses made for not printing better to-day are—it is hoped—demolished in a paper on industrial conditions in the past.

It is a good thing to know about the ingredients of an ancient and modern type-metal; about the old manner of making types, and to what degree their manufacture has been improved; about the names and relative proportions of early types and the development of the system of nomenclature and measurement in use to-day. But it is also needful to have a knowledge of the effect of types on the eye—of how their shapes originated, were elaborated for simplified, were improved or deformed, why these changes were made, and, in short, the reason for types being in the forms that they now are. By the time these pages have been read, and the books alluded to have been examined, one should be able to distinguish the various type-families from one another, with the ease with which we recognize English, French, or Italian, when printed; and to choose intelligently the form of letter which, allowing for diversity in taste, is the most suitable to employ in any particular kind of printing; and should have, too, some knowledge of the skill and learning which, in successive centuries, men have devoted to this subject—a conception of how much there is to know, and an idea of how to know it.

The subject of type and type-forms follows a narrow path, a kind of “watershed” between biography and bibliography. I have not attempted to supply lives of printers or type-founders in any complete way, but merely to touch on those points in their careers which throw light on their types, and explain in part why they were what they were. This is equally true of books, which I do not try to describe bibliographically, but allude to only in so far as the types which were used to print them, or the manner of their use, illustrates my point. For, as Reed says of English Types, “the Catena on Job, Walton’s Polyglot, Boyl’s Irish Testament, Bowyer’s Selden, rank as type specimens quite as interesting as, and far more valuable than, the ordinary letter-founders’ catalogues.”

While access to all the books I have mentioned will not be possible to all readers, most of them will be found in any great library. Only by having the books in one’s hands and examining their types can a thorough training be acquired; for my illustrations, numerous as they are, merely show landmarks in the field under discussion. I have generally reproduced types in their actual size, composed in sentences, their exposition in alphabets and description of minute changes in letter-forms being intentionally avoided. Interesting as successive variations in the design of individual letters may be, it is the effect of these variations upon type in mass that is important for my purpose.

I have treated the technical side of my subject as briefly as is consistent with giving a clear idea of what is described. The historical literary, and artistic aspect I have accented, in order to suggest to the student that immense mass of facts related to typography, without some knowledge of which it can only be imperfectly understood—and to serve as a counterweight to the vast amount of technical instruction and mechanical description given in most treatises on type and printing. “I prefer no claim to originality,” said William Blades in one of his treatises, “but rather rest the utility of what I have to say, upon the advantage of bringing to one focus a number of facts hitherto scattered through a number of books, and by consequence but partially known.” That is what I have tried to do in these pages.

In spite of the increasing interest in the history of printing, and the attention paid in many quarters to the work of famous typographers, a knowledge of standards among the rank and file of printers is still greatly lacking. To the average printer of to-day, type is type, printing is printing—it is all about alike; and he concerns himself only with alleged labour-saving contrivances, or new type-faces that ensure convenience at the expense of proper design. In a more advanced class is to be found the printer who, knowing something of the historical side of printing and realizing intellectually that there is a standard of excellence, yet has never considered the question as applying in any practical way to himself or his work. What he has heard or seen of people who profess to hold such standards seems to him, sometimes very rightly, faddish and impractical; and this helps him to dismiss the subject with a plausible generalization on the impossibility of doing successfully to-day what (for unexplained reasons) was somehow easy in the past. Lastly, there are printers who are seriously in earnest, but who permit themselves to be discouraged by the indifference of their fellows, or who with their idealism do not combine that uncommon thing—common-sense. It is precisely because all these groups of men are constantly told, and will no doubt constantly continue to be told, so much about the advantages of modern mechanical contrivances, that I lay stress upon the artistic and idealistic side of the subject in an endeavour to show that the best printing can be done only when a man is familiar with standards to which the best printers have always adhered.

Typography is closely allied to the fine arts, and types have always reflected the taste or feeling of their time. The charm of the early Italian types has perhaps never been equalled; and the like is true of the Renaissance manuscripts on which they were based—and of many other departments of art in that same wonderful time. Note, too, the relation of the French manuscripts and the types of the Italian Renaissance. It is very much the relation of French work in the fine arts of that period to Italian work of a little earlier date. There is about the French characters, as in design, a certain excess of elegance which makes them seem weak in comparison with the more sturdy and classical qualities of earlier Italian types. If this is all true of French and Italian types, it is even truer of English types used in the middle of the eighteenth century and those used at the end of it. The mid-eighteenth century English types, of which Caslon was the designer, had precisely those honest, somewhat heavy, but workmanlike qualities exhibited in the early furniture of Chippendale and the architecture of Vanbrugh. The types of Baskerville (the influence of which subsequently found expression in the work of Bodoni and Didot) possess a fragile and affected elegance, which culminated in the light, clear, delicate characters used from 1780 to 1820—types reflecting, in their elegance, thinness, and weakness, the distinguished but fragile decorations and furniture introduced into England at the end of the eighteenth century by Robert Adam. For the same reason that one fears to use Adam furniture, one is afraid to use late eighteenth century fonts; for both seem in danger of breaking to pieces! Within the recollection of some of us, heavier types were revived by Mr. William Morris, and they were nearly contemporaneous with furniture forms rendered in lumber—“Mission” furniture, so “sincere” in trying to escape the imputation of fragility that it made “spring house-cleaning an affair of the derrick and wrecking-crane!” The latest development in architecture seems to be a revival of Georgian or early American architecture and ornament, and a movement toward what is absurdly called, nowadays, “period” decoration. This is reflected in printing by a return to the Georgian or early nineteenth century types for the greater part of contemporary printing, and the appearance of “period” types—reproductions more or less accurate of styles of type famous at different epochs. Thus type, which one things of merely as the characters composing a printed word, does, when examined as design, reflect to some degree the tendencies current in other departments of contemporary art.

Just as the music of great masters like Palestrina makes some familiar compositions seem thin and trivial, so, by studying the monumental characters of early typography, do we learn to place in true perspective our types to-day. This means the study of types from a fresh point of view, and no study is ever a wholly amusing process if it is to be a serious training. Those who seek will find; but to the reader skeptical of results and critical of the value of any detailed consideration of type-forms, such a survey will seem either beside the mark or destructive. None the less, each study is the only way I know to establish a standard of taste in type-forms, or to contribute to the progress of printing as an art. For “the Arts have no real enemies except the ignorant.”