Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

  There was yet another revelation to come. The logo was accompanied by red text, which explained what the initials HADOPI stood for: Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet. This appeared in the same font a week apart, beneath both the original and the new logo – by the London designer Jeremy Tankard. When was Bliss ordered? On the same day as FS Lola; its original use had also been unlicensed.

  Jean François Porchez says he partially enjoyed the irony: ‘It makes me smile.’ But only partially. ‘At the same time we need to find the best possible solution for this problem.’ In other words, his lawyers were on the case.

  Hermann Zapf will always be remembered for his dingbats. But the German designer is also responsible for some of the twentieth century’s most exacting typefaces, among them Palatino, Melior, and – the latter one of the most fluid and effective calligraphic fonts. But it is his Optima typeface that stands out.

  Zapf was born in Nuremberg, and when he was young he wanted to become a chimney sweep; he particularly liked the prospect of getting his hands black for a career. He worked as a cartographer in the war, and then established his reputation as a designer at the Stempel foundry in Frankfurt. His first hit was in 1949, influenced by classic Italian types and displaying the quirks of a stonemason and formal penman. It had regular serifs and strokes of fairly even width, but it also had a loop on the capital P that wouldn’t join up, and an e that had a bit chipped off on the right of its bowl. The font is consistently crisp and reassuringly humanizing; its digital version still works today as an appealing everyday text alternative to Georgia.

  But when Zapf published Optima nine years later, it looked as if it had come from another planet. It took him more than three years to design, and it was three more before the first sizes appeared in the Stempel foundry specimen book. It is a highly original piece of work, a hybrid between something respectfully Roman in stature and something modern and sans serif in form. There were thirty years between Futura and Optima, but they shared a distinct sharp-edged German modernism. Optima was originally designed as a display font, but it is also highly legible as a text face; the only disadvantage of viewing it small is a loss of subtlety at the tip of each of its straight lines, which have both a slight swelling and a gentle indentation. But it is this swelling and this rivulet that renders the type beautiful. It is comparable to Albertus in its ability to withstand a prolonged period of admiration.

  Optima – a perfect perfume font

  ‘Every single page is an absolute miracle,’ declares Sue Shaw in her office at the Type Archive – a converted horse hospital in Lambeth, south London. She is sitting in front of glass cases holding the sort of moulds Gutenberg would have used to make his Bible, while on the table in front of her are bills and a chequebook and architects’ plans.

  In her hand is an eighteenth-century German law book. It is eight inches deep, the index is 314 pages and the type is tiny, crammed into thin columns with no breathing space. Each letter has been cast by hand and then placed in a typecase with thousands of other letters, page by page, 3,000 pages in all. You would go blind reading just the first chapter. ‘I think this is just breathtaking,’ Shaw says. ‘The people who made this would have been paid awful money and worked almost in the dark. And this is what the Type Archive is about. It’s about the fact that human lives are here.’

  Matrices awaiting cleaning and cataloguing at the Type Archive

  Shaw is fond of saying that she has ‘been in recession for two decades’. The Type Archive is a uniquely valuable institution, but investment is needed if she is ever to realize the blueprint on her desk, and open it to the public.

  What would they find? A magical place – the history of writing in physical form, the uncelebrated hardware of our language. Everything here was once in clattering flow, all the 23,000 drawers of metal punches and matrices, hundreds of fonts in every size, all the flat-bed presses, all 600,000 copper letter patterns, all the keyboards and casting machines setting hot metal type, all the woodletter type collections and machines from the DeLittle company in York, all the steel history from Sheffield, all the hundredweights of artefacts that made the great libraries of the world. This is where it ended up when computers arrived. All quiet now.

  The collection arrived here in the mid-1990s, and it took Momart, the fine art movers, seven weeks to bring in just one part of it from Surrey, and when they were done they said they’d be glad to get back to the Henry Moores again. Recent visitors included Harry Potter film people in search of inspiration and inky atmosphere, and a large team from Google, who came to see where their world began.

  Sue Shaw gave them the brochures, exquisite hand-printed documents in black and red in Caslon and Gill Sans with perfect spacing and pilcrows (the traditional printers’ mark that denotes a paragraph break or pause for thought, ‘the backwards-facing P’). They tell of ambitious plans to open this vault not as a mausoleum but a place of training, where apprentices may come to learn the mechanical manufacture of type, a highly skilled manual endeavour. The first training manual, describing a process of facing, stamping, striking, lapping, coning, turning and side-milling for a 0.2” matrix, has already been produced, precise as its tools: ‘Test first matrix depth of character impression using depth-testing micrometer machine No 60. Depth reading should be +0.0045” to 0.005”. Check results with supervisor.’

  The Type Archive’s founder and director, Shaw is a combination of forceful pragmatist and proud elitist. In the pre-computer age she worked at Penguin, Chatto and Faber & Faber (‘where we even made a book on compost look good’). She is still involved in fine printing, and a guided tour of the Type Museum may take in a book that took six years to prepare for Paul Mellon and the Roxburghe Club: a facsimile of the Helmingham Herbal and Bestiary from 1500, containing 150 illustrations of plants and animals real and imaginary, the display text in 24pt .

  The names of other fonts may be found elsewhere in this archive in the bound records of Stephenson Blake, Britain’s oldest and longest surviving typefounder in Sheffield and London – or it was until it shut for good in 2004 and sold the Sheffield site to be made into flats. In its heyday, which covered 1830 to 1970, it swallowed up the punches and matrices of the vast majority of British typefoundries stretching back to John Day in the sixteenth century, and encompassing hallowed designs and equipment from Joseph Fry, the Caslon dynasty and William Thorowgood. Stephenson Blake manufactured typefaces for the world, and the names are regal, distant and grand: Ancient Black, Impact, Runnymede, Hogarth, Olympian, Monumental, Renaissance, Windsor. They even had a precursor of Comic Sans: Ribbonface Typewriter, created in 1894.

  But it was a wonder that the company survived into the twentieth century. Stephenson Blake supplied the Gutenberg method of typecasting, a laborious hand-built process that had changed little in four hundred years. A punch was still hammered into a softer matrix, a matrix was still placed in a mould. Lead, antimony and tin was still poured in. In 1845 a New York typefounder named David Bruce Jr patented the pivotal caster, a small hot-metal machine that produced any amount of the same letter. And then, forty years later, Linn Boyd Benton invented the pantographic punchcutter in Milwaukee. This was an ingenious router that cut steel punches for metal type (it was swiftly adapted for wood type, too), and led directly to the invention of two American machines that changed not only the way type was made, but almost everything about the way type was consumed for the next eighty years.

  The Linotype (1886) and Monotype (1897) systems of mechanical typesetting produced words on paper far more efficiently, cheaply and quickly than hand composition. Monotype machines cast single characters out of molten (hot) metal, while Linotype models produced solid bars or slugs containing more than 100 letters (hence line-o-type). Linotype text was faster to manipulate but harder and more wasteful to correct, and flourished primarily in large-scale newspaper composition, while Monotype found a home at book printers and local printshops throughout the worl
d. New publishers and publications flourished, which went some way to offsetting the loss of hand-compositors’ jobs. After Gutenberg, mechanical casting was the second great revolution in movable metal type, and it would be the last. Beyond it lay phototypesetting and laser printing, and the awakening of Silicon Valley.

  Both Monotype and Linotype enjoyed staggeringly rapid growth, and initially they loathed and feared each other. In November 1895, Black and White magazine, which was still composed the old-fashioned way, ran a full-page advertisement for Linotype that warned printers off its rival and dismissed the ‘completely untrue’ statements that the Linotype system was not already the machine of choice in the United States. The advert* listed more than 300 newspapers currently using the Linotype, from the New York Herald (which had fifty-two machines) to the New York Times (twenty-five machines), to the Gloversville Leader (one machine). ‘The machines that are now being offered for sale in England … are regarded by the associated bodies of American newspaper owners as anachronisms, and it is because they can get no foothold in America that they are trying to establish themselves in England. They can only cause loss and disappointment to all concerned.’ Too late: Monotype already had hundreds of orders for their machines, and soon it would be thousands.

  Revolutionary machines – Monotype (above) and Linotype (opposite) adverts from the 1890s

  Monotype, which was based in Salfords, Surrey, and grew so big that it needed its own railway station, also had another huge impact on the printing world: it transformed the design of fonts. Initially both companies relied on adapting old faces to their new technology, although they soon found that their clients wanted more than Garamond and Bodoni. When the traditional American and European type foundries amalgamated to head off the new competition, it was the great variety and durability of their designs that saved them. But soon it would be Monotype setting the pace, not least after it hired Stanley Morison as typographical consultant and Beatrice Warde as publicity manager (the company employed an unusually large amount of skilled women).

  Before Morison appeared, Monotype fonts were largely predictable and conservative – almost a third of the first fifty typefaces on offer were heavy German blackletters and the main consideration was taking popular fonts once used in hand composition and converting them for mechanical use. When Morison set to work in 1923, after stints in publishing, he too was concerned with the likes of Bembo and Baskerville, and their continued popularity today relied on Monotype’s finesse in modifying serifs and weights not just to the mechanical casting, but also to new printing techniques and the characteristics of machine-made paper. But his greatest contribution was the commissioning and purchase of new designs. He stayed with Monotype throughout his modernization of The Times in the 1930s and his editorship of the Times Literary Supplement in the 1940s, and a Monotype specimen book from the late 1960s reflects the extent of his influence.

  As well as Eric Gill’s Gill Sans, Perpetua and Joanna, there is Albertus, new versions of Bell, Walbaum and Ehrhardt, and Lutetia, Spectrum, Emerson, Rockwell and Festival Titling. And then there is the most widely used of all – Morison’s own classic font, , which he designed at Monotype for The Times. Although it is no longer used by The Times itself, the font rivals Helvetica and Univers for ubiquity. Thousands of books are still set in it each year and, rolled out with every version of Windows since 1992, it appears in millions of documents, emails and web pages.

  Large portions of the twentieth century breathed through Monotype’s fonts. Their impact was documented in the Monotype Recorder, Monotype Bulletin and Monotype Newsletter, each a vibrant combination of in-house journal, trade notices and academic treatises. The articles emphasize the immense expertise that good typesetting required. It took seven years to become a fully qualified Monotype operator and in this time one developed a spatial awareness – a sense of light, length and the justification of a line of type – that modern computers still struggle to match. Without this, letters and words would be as lost as musical notes without bars.

  Beatrice Warde contributed an essay to the Recorder called ‘Recent Achievements in Bible Typography’. Should they have a single column or two? Set in Bembo or Van Dijck? One thing was for sure: no one wanted a repeat of Christopher Barker’s Bible of 1631, which omitted the negative from the seventh commandment so that it read, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’.

  The worst typo of all time?

  In the 1940s there was an article about the old and new ways of learning to read, and how certain typefaces might assist. from 1938 was reckoned particularly good. and were clear and unconfusing too. In the 1950s there was the announcement of ‘designed for printers by a printer’. The printer in question, Dr Giovanni Mardersteig, was not only a printer: he was also a scholarly editor who understood the gulf between designing a type and engraving it, and he possessed a treasured comprehension of ‘the many subtle interrelationships between letterforms, without which no designer can draw types to combine perfectly into words’. Dante was just the most recent offering. There was a type for every occasion, and every month seemed to bring something new.

  And then in June 1970 came a sinister notice in Monotype Bulletin #81: ‘The general outlook for hot metal in the trade is bleak. The columns of the trade press are full of articles about filmsetting.’ A new technology was approaching, but Monotype reckoned it would cope: they had the new Monophoto 600, a machine using Monotype modules, an early example of digital type. But beyond filmsetting there was something else, captured in the same edition: a photo of a temperature-controlled room dominated by huge cupboards of computers. The Bulletin reckoned that hot metal would merely be programmed by these white machines; they never saw them taking over.*

  And so here they are, those redundant machines, in an old horse hospital in Lambeth – a priceless archive for those interested in tactile, precise and highly skilled methods of the past. There is the very first Monotype keyboard from 1897 (it looks just like a typewriter; the only other known example is in the Smithsonian). And here is its sister, a casting machine that ran on compressed air. There are a dozen more recent models that can be hooked up to laptops, the equivalent of the 1930s candlestick phone being plugged into fibre-optic cables. We miss these things – the old feel, the old look and the old smell, the old clunk, the use of our whole hand, not just the push-button part that wears away our fingerprints.

  But the craft is not quite dead. The Type Museum occasionally calls in a couple of the old Monotype operators to demonstrate mastery of their machines for those who might offer financial backing for the renovations of both the building and the art, and establish an enticing experience for visitors and apprenticeships to keep the craft alive. Sue Shaw remains optimistic. ‘Can there be anything more valuable?’ she asks. ‘And if there are no jobs at the end of it, that’s not necessarily a reason not to do it. There’s no jobs after reading poetry, either.’

  And how best to make a wonderful book now? The craft of the Kelmscott Press, Golden Cockerell Press or Doves Press has not been lost – there are hundreds of small presses in the UK, Europe and the United States. One of the newest is White’s Books, which in the spring of 2010 had just eight titles in its list, although as lists go it was a sound one: Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Treasure Island, Jane Eyre and collections of Dickens, Shakespeare and Conan Doyle.

  They are beautiful editions, and with their marker ribbon, coloured endpapers and clothbound jacket illustrations they feel like a product from a more considerate age. The person responsible for their appearance is David Pearson, who has worked extensively with Penguin, most famously on its Great Ideas series – the packaging of essays from Seneca to Orwell in slim paperbacks with great attention paid to the typography on the jackets.

  Keeping up traditions: typographic covers from Penguin’s Great Ideas series. The designers are, clockwise from top left: Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon, Alistair Hall and David Pearson.

  Jan van Krimpen’s original drawings for Ha
arlemmer

  These books, and the White’s classics, are notable too for a tiny detail on the preliminary pages. Alongside the copyright details and name of the printers, we learn a little about the choice and size of type. The Penguins, for example, are credited as Monotype Dante. The crediting of a font is a disappearing feature these days, and a dispiriting absence. A random selection from the shelves at the London Library suggests the pattern emerged with the move to digital. Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift asserted that it was set in Baskerville, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint appeared in Granjon; Laughing Gas by PG Wodehouse in Linotype Baskerville, while Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul was in Monotype Times. But recent hardbacks by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes? We can only guess. The same goes for John Richardson’s Picasso and Ian Kershaw’s Hitler – big, important, illustrated books, but with type not considered worthy of acknowledgement.

  For his White’s classics, Pearson chose Monotype Haarlemmer, setting it ‘11 on 15’ – 11-point type with a 4-point leading. The font is a modern interpretation of a serif conceived by Jan van Krimpen in the 1930s, its original production sidelined by the war. It has a tall X-height, creating a clean and airy appearance and achieving just the effect required for a modern take on a traditional text.