Side with text

This handout was produced in summer/autumn 1964 to promote the United States presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, arguing that Goldwater could combat communism and listing countries which had become communist dictatorships in the previous quarter-century. I'm not clear whether the organisation which prepared this image, “Minnesota Citizens for Goldwater-Miller”, was part of the official Goldwater campaign. The map is credited to Robert G. Ridgway of Minneapolis, and an R. D. Ridgway at a residential address is the contact for reprints. According to directories Mr. Ridgway seems to have owned a local construction firm.

I believe this document was prepared using a Varityper, a proportional typewriter used for professional documents. A 1967 specimen is on the Internet Archive (I’m deeply grateful to its uploader “MacSimski” for making it available) and both text faces use match Varityper faces in distinctive ways. Varityper also had a phototypesetting system for headlines (“you compose by simply dialling”), developed by the brother of Kennedy and Johnson’s Secretary of Labor, funnily enough.

The sans-serif is Eton Sans, a copy of Gill Sans. Some details, like the very narrow O Q W, seem likely to be the result of some restrictive character-width system of the kind Adrian Frutiger later complained about on IBM Composers. The wide a suggests the designer might have had News Gothic or Trade Gothic on their mind. A sort of proto-Whitney, then? I’m not aware of other typewriter versions of Gill Sans or widely available American releases of it in any other format; IBM’s Selectric Composer manuals show nothing similar at all. (Really cheap choice of name, I feel.)

The serif is Tribune News, a rational serif in the style of Linotype's Legibility Group and the Century family. Even more here several distinctive, odd character widths in the italic suggest a constrained spacing system, especially the very narrow h n u. The roman is much better.

Incidentally, an odd characteristic of the Varityper specimen is large headings which often seem very different to the body text, more crisply printed, better spaced and almost different typefaces altogether. These were presumably printed using their headline-setting phototypesetting system, given that the specimen claims that “all type in this book was composed on VariTyper equipment.” I don’t have a specimen of these faces. Futura Bold or a copy is also used for the largest heading. Varityper did have a clone on their typewriting system but it’s much more condensed, so could this have been phototype, or metal type? The specimen’s heading does look the same as Futura Bold. Ralf Hermann has a video showing the very similar Berthold ‹diatype› machine if you want to get the general idea of how these first-generation phototypesetting machines worked. It looks like the headine repertoire was different to the typewriter face list, because for some faces the heading doesn't match the text face or just defaults to Times New Roman.

Richard Polt quotes a very knowledgeable message from a former employee: “One of VariTyper’s favorite selling points was their interchangeable type. You could have two fonts in the anvil at a time and could rapidly change a font if you chose.” A striking thing about the document is how it switches from serif to sans for emphasis frequently; the sans is often only used in all-caps in these sections. Two weights of the sans-serif are used for the table. Polt’s correspondent also writes that Varityper's system was overtaken rapidly by the better-known IBM Composer in the late 1960s and notes the spacing characteristics.

Here’s a description of Varityper's later system. (With contributions in the comment section from two fairly well-known authors, Derek Lowe and Charlie Stross-man, the early blogosphere seems to have been a small world.)

Other side, showing map by Robert G. Ridgway

Crop showing type more clearly. All this text seems to have capitals too low relative to the lower-case.

A specimen of Eton Sans regular.

Varityper’s Tribune News. Some unusual character widths suggest a constrained spacing system. The top line “Tribune News Italic” is totally different, presumably phototypeset.

Varityper’s text-size “Sans Serif Bold”, a Futura knockoff, doesn’t match the document. Again, the top line looks like true Futura Bold, and presumably was made on their headline phototypesetting system.

The Noord-Hollands Archief has begun to digitise materials from the archives of Joh. Enschedé of Haarlem, one of the longest-existing printing companies. One work this initiative has now made accessible everywhere is the monumental 1978 edition of Dr. Charles Enschedé’s 1908 book Typefoundries in the Netherlands, translated into English and edited by Harry Carter, Netty Hoeflake and Lotte Hellinga and printed by Bram de Does. (See discussion on TypeDrawers here, here.)

The book is handset in metal type, Jan van Krimpen's Romanée. Weighing in at 4.5kg, it includes extensive showings of historic metal types in Enschedé’s collections dating back as far as the fifteenth century, including full character sets and resettings of entire ornamented title pages and page layouts. These were mostly cast and typeset for the 1908 edition: due to the survival of the standing metal type they could be reprinted again for the 1978 edition. The paper was specified by de Does. It's an astonishing experience seeing historic typefaces cast and printed with modern technology, frequently revealing a staggering crispness the printing technology of their time often could not show.

De Does' design uses Romaneé with footnotes and section headings in the margin. A Lombardic capital-style C (see discussion below) is used as a bracket to mark additional information breaking into Enschedé's text. The body text is not set in columns.

Enschedé's 1893 commemoration of the foundry's 150th anniversary has also been digitised by Google.

Page layout, with footnotes at the bottom of the page.

Pages 404-5, display layout of modern-face types

Interlaced capitals of c. 1578, probably by Hendrik van den Keere (see John A. Lane’s 1995 article and 2004 book on the Plantin-Moretus collections, p. 42.) The Lombardic initial C is used as a bracket indicating an addition to Enschedé's original text. The translation uses ‘fount’, the normal use for metal type.

Engrossing initials, perhaps conceived by Willem Silvius. There were similar ‘secretary’ script types around the same time, both in the Low Countries and in London, and the James foundry had two in the spectacular “court hand” style. Both styles appear in an auction specimen of 1782; there's some more information in Carter and Ricks’ edition of Rowe Mores, pp. 112-3.

The oldest roman type for which matrices survive, Cologne, c. 1527. Enschedé were able to fill out the character set through electrotyping and cutting replacement characters.

New England, 1630: William and Katherine try to lead a devout Christian life, homesteading on the edge of an impassible wilderness, with five children. When their newborn son mysteriously vanishes and their crops fail, the family begins to turn on one another. 'The Witch' is a chilling portrait of a family unraveling within their own sins, leaving them prey for an inconceivable evil. — IMDb

An edition of the screenplay for horror film The Witch (2015) uses period typefaces DTL Flamande (with its roman caps) and DTL GrosCanon, both based on the work of Hendrik van den Keere. They are complemented by ABC Monument Grotesk Mono. Designed by Actual Source for film production company A24. Commentary: Creative Review, company website, designer JP Haynie on Twitter (and more in response to this post).

Their religious beliefs may indirectly connect the movie characters with Van den Keere’s type: Mayflower passenger and devoted Puritan Separatist William Brewster before emigrating to Massachusetts was a printer in Leiden, printing with types from Arent Corsz Hogenacker. Hogenacker had succeeded to part of Van den Keere’s type foundry. I don’t know if Brewster used van den Keere’s types (see this extremely thorough two-part article by John A. Lane on Hogenacker: part 1, part 2, although it's focused on types Hogenacker engraved himself). Hogenacker's foundry building still stands at number 86 Haarlemmerstraat in Leiden (more photos) with a 1630 statue he commissioned of Laurens Coster.

Patterns, a nightclub in Brighton, uses the glitchy, not-quite-monospaced Neue Machina and high-contrast-chiselled Cako in its iridescent poster and video art, designed by London-based Blixa Aguerreberry.

Seen on a visit to Brighton in January, I was instantly struck by these posters. Both typefaces felt striking and fresh, but it took me a while to pin down what the serif was! Oddly, Pangram Pangram do a couple of typefaces that look a bit like Cako, and I got sidetracked wondering if it might be some kind of early version of one of them. Schneider's Voyage typeface is very similar – I found it and then Cako – and it almost fills the gap of being a ‘Light’ weight, as Cako has big jumps from bold to regular to very light. The slight “looks like it was printed out and scanned back in again” texturing seems to be intentional –Aguerreberry uses it on his website.

Hardback cover

Alexandra Harris' collection of British nature-writing was published in an interesting mixture of fonts that refers to the past without quite reusing it.

The hardback edition (September 2015) uses P22 Cézanne Pro for the title, and the rest of the cover in caps and small capitals of English Grotesque, an industrial-style sans based on the many pieces of sans-serif lettering around the UK similar to (or preceding?) Johnston and Gill but not a direct copy (here’s a good example – sign painters in this style seem to have had a lot of fun with ampersands). The body text and a quote on the cover is in Carat, an Ungerish sharpened old-style from Dieter Hofrichter.

The same fonts are used throughout the book – rather neatly the numbers referring to endnotes are also English Grotesque, making them noticeably more solid than the text and easy to spot. It’s a well laid-out book, although perhaps Carat gets a little fragile when used for the blockquotes in a smaller size. Cézanne also recurs in the text – it's the font used for ornaments. The paperback (July 2016) uses a title in Perpetua (quite appropriately, as both Harris and Gill are from Sussex) and small text in Brandon Grotesque. The cover of the Australian edition uses English Grotesque and Carat.

I think the logo of publisher Thames & Hudson is based on Bliss but with the capitals and ascenders cropped a little.

Paperback cover

Detail from the interior, in Carat

Cover of the Australian edition

Source: www.flickr.com Médiathèque protestante de Strasbourg. License: Public Domain.

You’re not supposed to use swash capitals in a row, or throw them in whenever you feel like it. You’re not supposed to use terminal forms at the end of every word, or use an ‘ß’ to print French. You’re not supposed to change font size before you’ve even finished the first word of your title. And if you must do these things, the title page of an edition of Calvin is certainly not the obvious choice as a site to deploy such excesses.

Good job nobody told printer Jean Crespin, who does all of those things together on one page on his edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion and … well, I’m not sure I’m going to say he gets away with it, but presumably he didn’t get hauled off to prison, so we’re counting that as a success, right? Crespin clearly was keen to show off the increasingly intricate italics of his time in his typography to celebrate his friend’s magnum opus.

Source: books.google.de Hendrik D. L. Vervliet: The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance. License: All Rights Reserved.

The character set of Robert Granjon’s Paragon Italic. See also The Golden Compasses by Leon Voet, Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren

So what font is this? It looks a lot like Robert Granjon’s Paragon Italic (c. 20 pt), shown in Professor Hendrik Vervliet’s monumental Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance — it is the only font in the book that seems to include all the ligatures, terminal forms and swash capitals Crespin uses. (With two exceptions: it doesn’t include the ligature for ‘es’ and the second swash cap ‘M’ with a centre loop. Vervliet mentions but does not describe an alternate swash ‘M’ that was in circulation from the 1560s. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see a reprint of the specimen in which he mentions this appears.) Supporting this, he lists that the font reached Geneva and the printing of Jean Crespin in 1558, two years before this edition. The 'a' in the largest line of roman type also looks a lot like it might be font C in this picture, a 48pt, which Vervliet also mentions Crespin using. (One development in this period of printing Vervliet mentions is use of increasingly larged-size mixed case on title pages rather than exclusive use of titling capitals, although in this case the largest sizes are caps-only. And in practice, many of the example uses Vervliet shows do use letterspaced swash capitals, although this is one of the most ostentatious I've seen, and particularly in a font that — unlike many other italics of the period — included non-swash capitals as an option.)

Photo: Blythwood. License: Public Domain.

A remake in Hoefler Text and Cormorant Garamond. While Hoefler Text has not really the same colour on the page, it contains almost all the crazy alternates.

Can modern typographers replicate this? Very closely, actually. Shown above is a remake in Hoefler Text (and Cormorant for the largest type), which has almost everything you need, including both swash Ms, terminal forms, the ampersands and long s — pretty much the only things missing are the italic ‘at’ and ‘th’ ligatures. Two and a half decades on, it’s startling how comprehensive the feature set of Hoefler Text is in replicating the Renaissance style — in an interview Hoefler has mentioned as an early influence ATF’s legendary 1923 specimen which shows ATF Garamond’s many italic alternates — although the general build of Hoefler’s italic is darker and higher-contrast than this. Adobe’s Garamond Premier (below) is even closer in build but doesn’t include the ligatures for ‘es’ and (terminal) ‘nt’, nor the centre-loop swash ‘M’. More stylised digital fonts in this vein with a lot of loopy alternates are Garalda and (more condensed) Thesaurus, although I haven’t used either.

Florian Hardwig. License: Public Domain.

Another replica using Garamond Premier, with adjusted spacing. The italic display and subhead styles of Robert Slimbach’s revival are directly based on Granjon’s Paragon Italic (see Paul Shaw’s Revival Type) and thus come very close in regard to the shapes.

Crespin seems to have liked letterspaced swash capitals when he could get them — I add below an additional image of a different book printed by him the year before using what looks like the same italic. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any articles discussing his aesthetic choices and how they fitted (or didn’t fit) usual tastes in Calvinist printing of the period. I'll add anything I find at a future date in the comments section.

Source: books.google.com Google Books. License: Public Domain.

Accord de plusieurs passages des Saintes escritures … — a different book printed by Jean Crespin in 1559, using what looks like the same italic.

A slightly earlier edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (in Latin) was that printed by Robert Estienne, a leading printer of the period and another defector from Paris to Calvin’s Geneva, who had died the year before Crespin’s edition was published. Its use of roman only on the title page, like most early Calvin editions, seems more in line with what modern audiences might expect the printing of a Christian text to look like.

Source: archive.org Internet Archive/Princeton Theological Seminary. License: Public Domain.

Another edition of Institutio christianae religionis, printed in 1559 by Robert Estienne (Robertus Stephanus)

The Curwen Press of Plaistow, East London was a printing press known in the twentieth century for printing high-quality advertising material, although it began as a printer of religious publications. This 1936 advertisement for a special issue of a medical journal is very much of its time – minimal, with consistent use of two colours, and particular use of printed borders – the Curwen Press commissioned many custom borders for its own use around this time, as did Monotype. It’s reproduced in a 1938 article on the company in the magazine Art & Industry, digitised by IADDB. The article describes this as the cover of a folder and says that all the rules and decorations are "standard" materials.

The main heading face is Orplid, an attractively quirky shadowed set of sans-serif caps that was very popular in graphic design of the period. For the body text, most is in Walbaum, which had recently been revived by Monotype (although the Curwen Press had become known for using handset type from Berthold before that), and with a few lines of Baskerville italic. The lining figures in the largest lines in Walbaum are rather small, and I wonder if the compositor deliberately put in figures from a smaller size of font – looking at Monotype specimens their Walbaum revival seems to always have had lining figures that reach fully to cap height. The press continued to print publicity material in a similar style after the war, and specimens from 1938 and 1952 highlight Orplid as one of their main display faces.

Harold Curwen, then the company’s director, had studied with Johnston and drew his own Johnston/Gill-ish sans-serif. The Curwen Press anthology/history Songs and Words is a real pleasure to read if you can get hold of it, and contains many illustrations of similar jobbing work done by the company.

One of the most pulverisingly simple posters in the history of politics.

UK Conservative party posters would return to this format for their next eighteen years in government and beyond, with numerous parodies also made. Heavily discussed in books also (e.g. here, here and here).

Despite the iconic impact of the full-size poster, it originally only ran in twenty locations, so in fact most people would have seen a smaller-size version or a reproduction in a newspaper. (The ad was actually not directly created for an election campaign: it ran in 1978 to try to intimidate the Labour party in what was presumed to be the run-up to a 1978 election. But the election that placed Thatcher in power did not come until the following year.)

You'll be startled to hear that the new government did not, in fact, manage to reduce unemployment.

1987 poster from the Conservatives.

A parody from the other side of the political spectrum, using Knockout.

The album Stars by the band Simply Red and related singles use a light version of the De Vinne/Elzevir/Romana capitals.

This programme for festivities to accompany rowing races in Henley-on-Thames at the 1948 Olympics is mostly set in Granby, Stephenson Blake’s humanist sans. Released to compete with Gill Sans (which is used for the italic small matter), it’s very similar to Johnston, the metal type of which Stephenson Blake crafted. It’s not, though, simply a commercial release of Johnston - while it’s similarly quite monoline (see the ‘a’ and 't') and shares the diamond dots motif, details like the single-storey ‘g’ and Futura-ish 'R' are its own. Printed by the local printers Higgs & Co, who are still in business. A dinner invitation from the same week uses Gill Sans italics and a spindly Old Style, presumably Monotype's.

Images from the Thames River & Rowing Museum at Henley, whose John Piper collection is also worth a visit if you're in the area. They don't credit the invitation as also being printed by Higgs, but the colour of ink and style is very similar.

I’ve never been entirely clear what the deal with Granby was. It turns up every now and then in trade printing of its time I've seen, but far, far less than Gill Sans - so much so that you wonder why anyone used it at all. Presumably some printers or designers really liked it. Higgs certainly seem to have used Granby as a bit of a staple: searching the museum's archive of their work (not necessarily representative as it only shows front covers, and publicity matter rather than their newspaper work), I find Granby used quite a lot from 1936 through to at least the early 1960s regularly, and as late as 1979 in one case.

I still love how the Guardian used to look before their 2005 redesign, using Miller, very industrial, bold and tightly spaced Helvetica, and surprising amounts of white space for a newspaper.

Jonathan Safran Foer's 2002 parody of pretentious font writing is still, perhaps appropriately, one of the few pieces of the way it used to look hanging around as a pdf. It's still linked from an odd corner of the Guardian's website that I'm not sure is supposed to still exist. The heading is the display optical. (This is an extract from the Saturday culture and review supplement.)

The Guardian's banner used to be an attention-grabbing contrast of Garamond and Helvetica, created by David Hillman in 1988. The Garamond I've seen called ITC Garamond, and while close the 'T' isn't quite the same - custom redraw to match Helvetica's x-height? There's also small amounts of an agate font - it's just called "Agate" in the pdf metadata - that's some kind of News Gothic variant.

Cochin in regular and italic styles — with caps from Nicolas Cochin for the title, thanks to Mr. Hardwig for noticing this! — adds the flavour of an eccentric, hand-drawn engraving for this title page and body text of an edition of a rather silly 1782 poem by William Cowper.

Published by Ronald Davis (c. 1885-1931), an expatriate British bookseller and publisher in Paris. This was to be one of his last publications, according to an article on him, as he was killed by an accidental blow while practicing indoor golf in this year. (The article doesn't give any information on his family and background before he moved to France, although his obituary reportedly names his father as the late Herbert Davis of Sloane Street, London, and I haven’t found him in census records — any more details would be very much welcomed.) Art by the French lithographer Jean-Emile Laboureur.

Cochin, based on French engravings, may seem like an odd choice for a book set in England, 1782 (even if published in France) — mightn't Baskerville or Bell or Caslon or something be more fitting? — but it's actually a quite inspired choice. For comparison, a 1784 engraved map of the area where the story is set shows how British engravings of the 1780s also used spiky, stylish lettering quite similar to Cochin, with features like the single storey ‘g’ in italic — these styles hadn't made much impression in printing yet, Baskerville aside, although they would soon. You also see this kind of delicate, Mrs. Eaves-ish lettering in a finer setting on many contemporary tombstones (another example, and one with extended text). (From looking at pictures online, Cowper's poems seem to have been published at the time in the standard Caslon-ish fonts of the period.)

The poem seems to have caught the fancy of quite a lot of publishers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in the preceding decades as a fun subject to do illustrated editions of, although I think this has one of the nicest layouts of them from the few samples available. I guess "wacky eighteenth-century costumes" was a hard subject for book illustrators of the time to resist. It forms the basis of the medal for best American children's picture book.

For visual reference: A period sample of lettering on a map, engraved by Thomas Conder in 1784.

Monin is a French manufacturer of flavoured syrups used in coffees and milkshakes.

The design on the labels has changed slightly over the years, but the flavour names have consistently been set in Poetica by Robert Slimbach, with a choice of some of the swash alternates that come with this typeface.

I don’t see many display uses of chancery italic typefaces on their own (did the clunkiness of Zapf Chancery kill the style stone dead?) so it’s interesting to see a major display showcase of Poetica. I’m not entirely sure all the swashes are great ideas, but certainly you couldn’t not add some.

Most people wouldn't commission a custom font for their book to be printed in. Then again, statistician and data visualisation expert Edward Tufte is by all accounts a perfectionist. His earliest books were set in metal Bembo; for later books, unsatisfied with the first digitisation, he commissioned a custom digitisation, ET Bembo, co-credited to Dmitry Krasny and Bonnie Scranton. Gill Sans is also used in tables and headings. Generally Tufte's books are laid out with carefully spaced notes and references at the side of the page rather than in footnotes at the bottom.

Tufte's digitisation has been open-sourced as “ET Book”, although a limited character and feature set mean you'd have to be quite determined to use it yourself. Bembo Book or JY Aetna would for most professional users be a better option, I think. (His employer Yale has followed suit, commissioning a version from faculty member Matthew Carter.)

His cartoon parodying PowerPoint (available as a poster) uses the comic book font Wild and Crazy “which I found for $29 on the internet … [it] also comes with a nice set of thought balloons.” It does look nice, though the version on MyFonts has no accented characters (or even a dollar sign), so a redesign might be necessary if translations are planned.

Tufte’s wife, graphic design professor Inge Druckrey, is also interested in human perception of letterforms — check out the Beethoven poster in those links.

Visual Explanations. Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative was first published in 1986.

Envisioning Information (1990)

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1992, second edition 2001)

An example of the new trends in post-war British design and art was Penguin’s increasing use around the early 1960s of illustrated covers complemented by titles in first Akzidenz-Grotesk and then Helvetica Bold.

This replaced their era-defining (and very economical) covers with minimal illustration in the Monotype classics of Gill Sans, Perpetua, Bembo and later Joanna, that probably looked like a tired relic of the slump, wartime and the long period of austerity afterwards. The simplicity of Helvetica and Akzidenz-Grotesk also has a solidity that (as someone — I think Phil Baines or Claire Mason — has said) stands out well against full-colour illustrations in a way that it's hard to imagine Joanna or Perpetua doing. (Typographica — no, not that one — published an article on the logic behind the redesign of the crime series.)

Among the best designs in this style were Penguin’s New Shakespeare series of 1967 onwards, with custom art by David Gentleman for almost all volumes. The title is ranged left in Swiss style. The slighly eccentric, askew woodcut art (complete set here) feels like an interesting continuation of the traditions of the best editions of the 20s and 30s, like these covers by Eric Gill. (Sadly, like far too many landmark mass-market books printed in the UK, the budget didn’t run to acid-free paper.)

Edited by Terence J. B. Spencer and Stanley Wells, the edition was of high scholarly quality and very popular; my parents own a nearly complete set. Art direction was according to Gentleman the work of Penguin's art director Hans Schmoller, who with his wife Tanya maintained their own personal archive of almost twelve thousand Penguin books, now at the LSE.

New Zealand Railways timetable created by the New Zealand Railways studio to mark the arrival of electrified trains on the Johnsonville route. The electric trains introduced, shown on the picture, in fact remained in service until 2012!

The main font in the timetable is some kind of Cheltenham, presumably Monotype's Gloucester. It has a four-terminal W, which some styles of Cheltenham had too, although not in the bold weight (see "Wellington" for this). The Garamond uses text figures, although surprisingly not superscripts, for the dates.

I don't think Edward Tufte would like the superfluous box around “Wellington–Ngaio–Khandallah–Johnsonville”, and (if, as here, we’re not showing the times when a train stops at each station together on the same line) I think he might also suggest reducing the departure times to a stem and leaf.

Considering design of the front: it’s very 1930s British Empire: classical and regal, if a little dull, with a classical Garamond font, a crest and a lot of white space.

Source: books.google.co.uk Google Books (out of copyright). Detail from page 3. License: Public Domain.

You are looking at one of the first Latin-alphabet sans serif typefaces. Well, sort of. Published in 1786, Valentin Haüy’s Essay on the Education of the Blind (Essai sur l’éducation des aveugles) showcases in the entire main text his project, one of the first attempts to create a Latin-alphabet writing system for the blind. His approach was embossing simplified characters onto paper, which could be lightly inked to allow the sighted to read them also. This comes thirty years before the Caslon capitals-only “Egyptian” of 1816 that celebrates its two-hundredth anniversary this year and is the first sans serif typeface known to have been made for general-purpose audiences.

Haüy’s typeface is extraordinary — rooted in script writing, but with a wide spacing that makes it unmistakably print writing, it uses swashes on almost all the capitals, apparently to make them more distinguishable. It’s been discussed in many other sources, most notably by the great James Mosley, whose comments on the now defunct Typophile and The Nymph and the Grot on it and other early sans serifs are a must-read for anyone interested in where sans serifs come from, and also by Joseph Alessio. But the entire book is available for the casual reader to examine on Google Books now in two independent digitisations.

San Francisco Public Library. License: Public Domain.

Aesthetically, to my non-expert eyes, it looks remarkably unlike most anything that would be typeset (as opposed to engraved) in the Latin alphabet for about the next hundred years. What (to me) makes it look very modern is its general delicacy and text-face build (one could mistake it for a FontFont typeface from the 1990s) and the single-storey ‘a’ and ‘g’, making it, in effect, an upright italic. (Of course, script typefaces often have some sans serif characteristics, right back to the first.) Interesting details abound: the flourish on the the ‘d’ (c.f. early chancery italic typefaces), the flamboyant wide ampersand, the ‘i’ and lower-case ‘L’ with curls, the swashed upper-case ‘i’. The ‘s’ is a bit long-s-ish, but there doesn’t seem to be use of a separate long and short ‘s’. It looks forward to the early sans serif italics of the late nineteenth century and ATF’s Announcement Roman, and also looks a bit like modern handwriting-influenced upright faces like Sassoon and Andika, but most of all it’s totally unlike the galumphing sans serif display capitals that would come out of British and then German and American foundries starting around the 1830s. (The confusing swashed capital ‘I’ is not unique: it turns up in some handwriting and blackletter styles and even a few adaptations of Akzidenz-Grotesk.)

Source: www.perkinsarchives.org Perkins School for the Blind. License: All Rights Reserved.

Regarding its printing, the title page notes that it was printed not only for but by blind children in Haüy’s school. Celebrating this achievement, a copy was presented to King Louis XVI on Boxing Day 1786. Haüy describes this printing method from page 30 onwards.

Wikimedia/National Federation of the Blind (out of copyright). License: All Rights Reserved.

Unfortunately, of course, Haüy’s system with its low information density looks very nice but was pretty rubbish for actual blind people. One of his students, Louis Braille, at the age of just 15 … well, I think you know that story. Although Alastair Johnston’s judgment of the typeface as “illegible, even to sighted readers” seems a bit harsh. Haüy’s letters (or copies) were used for headings on an early 1829 Braille specimen, incidentally, and photographs of this show what it looks like without inking (essentially the same).

Source: www.aph.org American Printing House for the Blind. License: All Rights Reserved.

Title page of Braille’s 1829 specimen, featuring letterforms similar to those by Haüy.

The introduction and conclusion sections of the book are printed in conventional typefaces of the 1780s, that seem like early modern (or later old-style?) faces, going by the curled ‘R’ on many fonts.

You can see good photos of a copy of the book here put on sale in 2013 to give a general sense of what it looks like. Or, indeed, for the low price of €6,500, you could have purchased it. A digital revival of Haüy’s typeface can be had for less: In 2006, Harold Lohner created the very cute and quite faithful Valentin.

License: All Rights Reserved.

Harold Lohner’s digital interpretation Valentin (2006), with smoothed, regularized and re-spaced letterforms.

Blythwood is interested in things science, health, transportation, industry, Gill Sans and Monotype. An avid Wikipedia editor, Blythwood’s goal is to improve coverage of fonts and printing there. After having contributed a dozen choice posts to the Fonts In Use Collection, this is the first to appear in the Blog.

Since 2008 the Oxford World’s Classics series has used a standardised but minimal cover style. It's a nice design that recognises the need to have some kind of identity but reduces it to a white strip more minimal and brighter than what came before and showcases the nice matte coating used for the covers.

The font used is Gerard Unger's Capitolium. It's an interesting decision that bypasses the usual Monotype and Adobe choices.

One of the most famous articles on the history of printing ever published is Beatrice Warde’s 1926 article in the Fleuron. Written under the pseudonym of "Paul Beaujon", it proved that the “Garamond” Latin-alphabet typefaces in the collection of the Royal Printing office of Paris were not cut by Claude Garamond but by Jean Jannon, working more than fifty years later. Warde is critical of Jannon’s work, especially its eccentric italic in which the capitals have different slant angles.

The article was recently digitised by the French government, as part of its website on the history of Garamond and his work, and is still worth reading despite later research by Carter, Vervliet, and others proving some of its conclusions to be incorrect.

The font used is Barbou, Monotype’s more obscure attempt at digitising the eighteenth-century work of Pierre-Simon Fournier. It was not put into mass production, unlike their other “Fournier”, which became a common-ish book typeface in Britain around the 30s and 40s, and it hasn’t been digitised, although Stanley Morison preferred it - hence its appearance in his magazine. Monotype manuals distinguish it from their other try by its four-terminal lower-case ‘w’ and a slightly splayed 'M'. (Fournier itself seems to have rather dropped off the map in recent publishing, maybe because it doesn’t have a bold – if you wanted something like it but with one Berthold's Bodoni Old Face is actually quite similar.)

Besides a history of printing in France, Warde’s essay gives an assessment and specimen of many (all?) of the Garamond revivals then in existence. Based on Jannon comes that of her past employer American Type Founders (her colleague there, Henry Bullen, told her of his suspicions about this “Garamond”, saying that he had never seen it in a book from the right period), Monotype’s in America (Goudy’s “Garamont”) and in Britain (the one installed, in a horribly scrawny digitisation that emphasises all its most eccentric features, with Office). Based on Garamond's work (or his contemporaries) come Linotype Granjon (her favourite), the Fonderie Ollière in Paris (never digitised?) and Stempel Garamond (she wished that they could recut its descenders longer than common line permitted).

Speaking 30 years later to the BBC, Warde commented: “I wanted a pen name. I wasn’t quite sure at that time (which is a long time ago) that women would be taken quite as respectfully. I thought that if I was going to have a pen name, I might as well have a man, and I took a Frenchman’s at that, to make it a little more mysterious.

And they all thought this learned Frenchman wrote English remarkably well. They were particularly interested that he was quoting Lewis Carroll, they didn’t think that many elderly Frenchmen knew how to quote from The Hunting of the Snark.”

A closer look at that first page. Note that lovely four-terminal ‘w’. “GARAMOND” is set in Fournier, as Barbou was only cut in sizes up to 12pt.

10pt Barbou is used for this table. The main text is set in 12pt.

10pt Barbou in detail. Note stressless zero (at top) and Fournier’s trademark italic ‘z’.

Colophon page from the end of this issue of The Fleuron.

CD cover.

A really early use of FF Meta on the cover of Saint Etienne’s 1993 album So Tough. Definitely read the comments by designer Anthony Sweeney below.

Saint Etienne are a fairly “conceptual” group influenced by sixties pop and eighties house music — this album's a good introduction to their work — and the retro-sixties sleeve with the track names listed is quite characteristic of their aesthetic.

I hadn't looked at the sleeve closely for years and was quite surprised to see what now seems like a classic 90s font — I'd imagined it being something like Monotype Grotesque Condensed or Alternate Gothic.

The album title is probably in Bunny Ears, a lowercase-only version of Titanic/Hercules, with long alternates for ‘b f h k l’

[More info on Discogs]

LP front cover, Heavenly, 1993.

Promo poster.