Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

  The world’s first font – Gutenberg’s Textura

  Gutenberg’s and Schoeffer’s first texts resembled – in fact imitated – handwritten scripts, in part because this was what people were used to, and in part because he believed it would be the only way for his books to achieve the same market price as the ones they were replacing. The type used for their famous Bible has come to be known as Textura – taking its name from one of the ‘writing hands’ of the time, part of a group known as Schwabacher (blackletter) script favoured by monkish scribes. But for other work, including the Mainz Indulgences (church documents purchased by a ‘sinner’ marking a suitable period of penance), their type had a more open and human feel which has become known as Bastarda.

  At the British Library in London, a copy of Gutenberg’s Bible lies under thick glass in a dimly lit room on the first floor, where it shares hushed space with other treasures, including the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Sherborne Missal, as well as Captain Scott’s diary, a manuscript by Harold Pinter and handwritten lyrics by the Beatles. The Bible is printed on paper (the Library has another printed on vellum) and has a provenance shrouded in intrigue and crossings out on title pages. It is one of just forty-eight known surviving copies (most of these are incomplete – only twelve intact paper copies and four complete vellum copies exist), and each has variations in text, lineage, spacing and illumination. Spectroscopy has revealed the exact pigments used in the illuminated capitals and opening lines, a combination of lead tin yellow, vermillion, verdigris, chalk, gypsum, lead white and carbon black.

  These days, digitization enables us to view the copies online without the need for a trip to the Euston Road, although to do so would be to deny oneself one of the great pleasures in life. The first book ever printed in Europe – heavy, luxurious, pungent and creaky – does not read particularly well on an iPhone.

  Fonts were once known as founts. Fonts and founts weren’t the same as typefaces, and typefaces weren’t the same as type. In Europe the transition from fount to font was essentially complete by the 1970s, a grudging acceptance of the Americanization of the word. The two were used interchangeably as early as the 1920s, although some whiskered English traditionalists will still insist on ‘fount’ in an elitist way, in the hope that it will stretch their authenticity all the way back to Caxton, the great British printer of Chaucer. But most people have stopped caring. There are more important things to worry about, such as what the word actually means.

  In the days when type was set by hand, a font was a complete set of letters of a typeface in one particular size and style – every different a, b and c in upper and lower case, each pound or dollar sign and punctuation mark. There would be many duplicates, the exact amount dependent on their common usage, but always more Es than Js. There is still debate as to the derivation of ‘font’. Some believe the word stems from ‘fund’, the fund (amount) of type from which the letters are selected. Others maintain that it comes from the French ‘fonte’, which translates as ‘cast’ – a letter cast in lead. These days a font refers usually to the digital, computerised form of a particular typeface. Each typeface may have a family of several fonts (bold, italic, condensed, semi-bold italic etc), each weight and style on the page a little different. But in common parlance we use font and typeface interchangeably, and there are worse sins.

  Definitions should not cloud our appreciation of type, but some classifications can be useful in understanding the subject’s history and usage. Just as it is entirely possible to have a pleasant afternoon in a gallery with no knowledge of art theory or an artist’s place in the firmament, one can wander around the streets admiring typefaces on signs and shops with not a care for their history. But it may increase our love of them if we know who made them, and what they were aiming for. And for this we need to define a few words in the typographic language.

  In 1977, the Guardian ran an elaborate and now famous April Fools’ Day hoax marking the tenth anniversary of the independence of San Serriffe: a republic whose every name was taken from the world of fonts. Floating freely in the Indian Ocean, the state had undergone a period of rapid prosperity (due in no small part to its phosphate reserves), and the seven-page supplement was full of intriguing information about the benign union-busting activities of General Che Pica and the port of Clarendon, and the Caslon-speaking, theatre-going activities of the native Flongs.

  San Serriffe’s archipelago: the islands of Upper and Lower Caisse. Note the enticing beach of Gill Sands in the sweep of the lower isle.

  The hoax was a cross between Woody Allen’s Bananas and the BBC radio game ‘Mornington Crescent’ – a parallel world where only the most steel-hearted would litter its beaches (Gill Sands) with cynicism. Some readers, it is said, tried to book a holiday there, though travel agents were unable to locate Bodoni International Airport, the quaint inlet of Garamondo or the vaste swathe of uninhabitable Perpetua. They even had trouble locating the islands themselves, both the round Caissa Superiore and the curlier Caissa Inferiore, which together formed the shape of a semi-colon. San Serriffe drifted into legend, and it may have caused those readers unfamiliar with type lore to dig out the dictionary.

  and are both serif fonts, while is a sans serif. The difference lies at the feet or tips of the letters, with a serif typeface carrying a finishing stroke often appearing to ground the letter on the page. This could be the base of an E, M, N or P, but it could also be the left-upper flick of an r or the roof of a k. It makes the letters look traditional, square, honest and carved – and their lineage can be traced back as far as the Roman emperor Trajan, whose Column in Rome, completed in 113, bears an inscription in his honour and serves as the most influential piece of anonymous stone carving in 2,000 years.

  Sans serif faces may appear less formal and more contemporary, but they can be as redolent of tradition as a brass band. Many have a very classical and Roman form – indeed sans serif lettering existed in the Ancient World – and when they appeared on buildings in fascist Italy between the wars they fitted right in, as if they had been there for centuries. They are durable and may be monumental, and while Futura, and are the best known, there are countless numbers in our daily lives. The oldest sans serif type is probably from 1816 and through the nineteenth century they became popular mainly as display fonts, for use on posters.

  It’s all in the feet and tips: remove those dark areas (the serifs) and you get a sans serif

  Trajan’s Column – the classic (serif) font of the classical world

  However, in the following century sans serif type took on a very different character, as a new generation of designers fused the Roman and display traditions with modern style. Nothing looked so good stuck on the side of a new machine, or, as with Edward Johnston’s typeface, on the London Underground. The roots of this new sans serif lay in Germany, in a font known as , released in 1898. But it was given a new life in Britain by Johnston and by Eric Gill’s , and by others in Germany, Holland and – most notably – in post-war Switzerland, where Univers and arose to spearhead modernism’s spread across the world. So we’d best think of the type now as European.

  Because there are so many typefaces, there have been many attempts to classify them into definable groups. But type is a living element, and it will resist absolute categorization until it is worn thin; a good single letter in a vivid typeface has enough energy in itself to leap free from any box. Still, a few loose categories can at least make visible the host of variations in type, and help us cope with the possibility of explaining a font to someone who can’t see it (which, before email attachments, was a real bonus).

  The key system of type classifications is called Vox, after its French originator, Maximilien Vox. It appeared in the 1950s and was the basis for the 1967 British Standards Classification of Typefaces. This delineated nine basic forms, from Humanist, Didone and Slab-serif to Lineale and Graphic (Lineale was another word for sans serif). It tried to be strict in its definitions, but often reverted to v
agueness: ‘The R usually has a curved leg,’ it observed of the Grotesques. ‘The ends of the curved strokes are usually oblique,’ it said of the Neo-grotesques.

  More recently, the big suppliers of digital type, such as Adobe and ITC, have attempted their own systems of clarification. This is intended to help with searches and sales at their online sites, but generally shows the near impossibility (and perhaps futility) of accurate categorization.

  Lesson one in the anatomy of type: ascenders and descenders (top), ligature and x-height.

  Within each typeface, a single letter has its own geography. This requires an exact language that is charming and unforgiving, jargon which began with the punchcutter from the fifteenth century and has resisted all attempts at digital corruption. We have already encountered some of these – counters being the enclosed or semi-enclosed areas of a letter, within an o, b or n, for example; while the bowl is the curved shape of the g, b, etc; and stems are the main constructional elements – which may be thick or thin depending on design.

  A bracketed serif has a curved element like a tree trunk, an unbracketed one is a straight line, while a wedge serif falls at a geometric angle. The x-height of a letter is the distance between the base line (the line in an exercise book) and the mean line (the top of a lower-case letter); an ascender rises above the mean line, a descender below the base line.

  Some type vocabulary has an internal beauty of its own (or it did when all type was metal). Much of this is anthropomorphic, treating letters as living life-forms: the whole character is known as the body, the blank space below the raised letter is the beard, the flat side of the metal type is the shoulder, while the whole raised letterform is the face. At the San Serriffe hospital you could have a ligature, and the result would often be grotesque. Traditionally, a ligature has meant a light linking flourish between two letters that are joined together (such as fl or ae, which require less white space between them than if the letters were used on their own). These days, commonly, a ligature (a feature of both serif and sans serif faces) refers to the two letters themselves, used as if they were one.

  A depth scale – once a key part of a typographer’s toolkit

  A grotesque face is not necessarily an ugly one; a grot is a name applied to a certain type of sans serif type, usually from the nineteenth century, with some variation in the thickness of letter strokes. A neo-grotesque is more uniform, has less of a square look to the curved letters, and works very well in lower case in small point sizes.

  And then there is maths. The point size can be used both as a unit of measuring type and the space between it. For regular newspaper and book text, 8pt to 12pt usually satisfies. There are 72pts to an inch. 1pt is 0.013833 inches. Typographers group them in picas: 12pts to a pica and 6 picas to an inch. There have been many historical and national variations, and metal and digital measures differ slightly, but today we almost have an international standard: in the US, 1pt = 0.351mm; in Europe 1pt = 0.376mm.

  But the maths, geography and vocabulary of type should never obscure the most basic fact of all: regular or italics, light or bold, upper or lower case – the fonts that work best are the ones that allow us to read without ruining our eyes.

  Eric Gill is remembered for many things: his engravings in wood and stone, his lifelong passion for lettering, his devotion to English craftsmanship – and his typefaces, notably Gill Sans, one of the twentieth century’s earliest and classic sans serif fonts.

  And then there is that other thing: Gill’s scandalous and ceaseless sexual experimentation. In 1989, Fiona MacCarthy published a biography of the artist that featured stomach-curdling detail of his dramatically outré meanderings with his daughters, sister and dog, as recorded in his own diaries. The photographs of Gill in his full-length smock were unsettling enough, but then came the descriptions of his incestuous and canine arousals (‘Continued experiment with dog … and discovered that a dog will join with a man’).

  MacCarthy argues that priapism was as much a product of an inquisitive mind as his exquisite craftsmanship, that ‘the urge to try things out, to push experience to limits was part of his nature and part of his importance as a social and religious commentator and an artist’. Possibly true, although some still shudder with revulsion at the mention of his name – a recent online forum at Typophile debating a boycott of Gill Sans on account of its creator’s past. Most have taken a more bemused view. Indeed, the American designer Barry Deck, who achieved fame for Template Gothic, a fancifully fluid sans font, in 1990, designed a loose tribute to Gill called Canicopulus.

  Oddly enough, Gill Sans is itself a curiously sexless font. It began to take shape when Gill was living in the Welsh mountains in the mid-1920s. Here he tried out sans serif forms in his notebooks and on signs to guide tourists around the monastery in Capel-y-ffin. In his autobiography, Gill explained that sans serif was the obvious choice when ‘a forward-minded bookseller of Bristol asked me to paint his shop fascia’. The long wooden sign in question, for Douglas Cleverdon, led to something else – for after seeing a sketch of these letters, Gill’s old friend Stanley Morison commissioned him to design an original sans face for Monotype.

  Its impact was instant and is still reverberating. Gill Sans appeared in 1928, when its creator was forty-four. It was the most British of types, not only in its appearance (spare, proper and reservedly proud), but also in its usage – adopted by the Church of England, the BBC, the first Penguin book jackets and British Railways (where it was used on everything from timetables to restaurant menus). Each showed Gill Sans to be a supremely workable text face, carefully structured for mass reproduction. It wasn’t the most charming or radiant, and not perhaps the most endearing choice for literary fiction, but it was ideal for catalogues and academia. It was an inherently trustworthy font, never fussy, consistently practical.

  Gill Sans begins to take shape on a Bristol shopfront

  Despite his big hit, Gill never thought much of himself as a typeface man. His gravestone, which implores the visitor to ‘Pray For Me’, casts him merely as a stone carver, one of the rarest representations of modesty in the world of graphic design. In fact, Gill designed twelve other typefaces, including the popular classical serifs Perpetua and Joanna, as well as Felicity, Solus, Golden Cockerel, Aries, Jubilee and Bunyan.

  Joanna was named after his youngest daughter, with whom, MacCarthy suggests, he had less of a dubious relationship than with his other two. He used it beautifully to set his Essay on Typography, which was really a treatise on the effects of mechanization on the purity of the soul. It reveals a demonstratively exact character (‘The title page should be set in the same style of type as the book and preferably in the same size’), and his pronouncements elsewhere suggest a wholly unromantic one. ‘The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences,’ he wrote. ‘No one can say that the O’s roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or of a girl’s breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things.’

  The first Penguin book, printed in 1935, with title and author set in quintessentially British Gill Sans. The Penguin logo here is Bodoni Ultra Bold but was itself later changed to Gill Sans.

  Eric Gill in his smock, c. 1908

  Gill died in 1940, just as his most famous font began appearing on the Ministry of Information’s wartime warnings about blackouts, careless talk and the recruitment of the Home Guard.

  In a wood, somewhere in England, rifles in hand, you have been watching

  (proud, pompous walk)

  (leafy camouflaged helmet, looking nervous)

  (brave gaze, cold steel)

  (anxious, doomed)

  (crafty draw on cheeky fag)

  (may need to be excused)

  (blue scarf, mum’s insistence)

  This is the closing sequence to Dad’s Army, Britain’s much-loved TV comedy about the Second World War, produced in the late 1960s/early 1970s and repeated ever since. The actors’ credits
are in Cooper Black, which sells not only things we now consider to be retro and classic, such as or , but also anything intended to be warm, fuzzy, homely, reliable and reassuring, like .

  The lettering on the side of planes had rarely implied fun (‘we’re one of you! climb aboard!’) before easyJet tried it, and so strong is this typographic branding that no one has successfully imitated it. (Although the budget airline’s chief rival, Ryanair, once used – attracted perhaps by its name – before moving to a proprietary font.)

  EasyJet’s branding soon extended to the easyGroup’s other products, and was discussed in the company’s mission statement:

  Our visual identity, known as the ‘Getup’, is an essential part of the easyJet Brand Licence and is cast in stone! It is defined as: a) white lettering on an orange background (Pantone 021c on glossy print materials; on other surfaces the nearest practicable equivalent), and b) in Cooper Black font (not bold, italics, outline nor underlined), the word ‘easy’ in lower case, followed (without space) by another word …

  Cooper Black was a good find. It is rare for a new company to select a pre-digital unmodernized classic face from the shelf and not revive or tweak it in some way, but here was an exception. Like so many fonts that have stuck, it was designed in the 1920s, and became instantly popular. Oswald Bruce Cooper, a former Chicago advertising man, was commissioned by the foundry Barnhart Brothers & Spindler to make something that they could sell to advertisers (and something that looked suspiciously similar to Pabst Extra Bold, designed several years before by Frederic W Goudy for the American brewing firm).