“Let’s look at this together when I get back, okay?”
“Sure,” he says. “It’ll be done by then. I just wanted to make sure you were okay with the direction I’m going.”
“I’m more than okay,” I say gently, too late. “And, Erik?”
“Yes?”
“The design is amazing, really it is.”
A UTILITARIAN ART
Hugh emails me a scan of a trial page set in 18-point Garamond.
“The type’s a bit big,” I email back. “Actually, it’s a lot on the big side. Is there a reason you want the words so large?”
“I’m like a grade six student required to write a two-page essay. I print big and double-spaced,” he replies, adding a smiley face with a wink. “Seriously, I will try a smaller face and then we can live with them both for a while. The smaller face may well reduce the format size and change the artwork. I find that working out the design of a book is much like composing music for an orchestra—everything needs to fit together and complement each other. This is the reason I do trial pages.”
Point size is a way of measuring the height of type as it appears on the page or screen. The system has been in use for a long time, with every type manufacturer producing its own version of a point size, give or take a millimetre or two. The advent of desktop computing forced a standard: 72 points to an international inch. Twelve point—roughly 1/6 of an inch tall—is the default size in most digital word-processing programs. It is also the requirement for many grant applications and publisher submissions. Not coincidentally, 12 point was also the size of the type on the typewriters I grew up with.
A point is 1/12th of a pica. In other words, 12 points make up a pica. Six picas make an inch.
Which part of a piece of 12-point type is 1/6 of an inch high? None of it. It’s the body that is 12 point, the square within which the letter sits. We never see that outside margin, just as we never see the “em,” the virtual quad within which a digital letter sits.
If you think size doesn’t matter, take a look at the current lawsuit between Microsoft and Apple. The issue is Apple’s trademark of the term App Store, but what’s interesting is that one of Microsoft’s complaints is that the Apple brief is not only too long, it’s in too small a font size!
Twelve point is not the most comfortable size for reading, and it’s not the most common size either. Nearly every book, newspaper, and magazine you read is set smaller than that. Cost is a consideration: the bigger the point size, the more paper is required to print the words. But slightly smaller type is also easier on the eyes for those with normal vision. In print, the optimal size for body text is somewhere between 10 and 12 point. Even so, legal disclaimers and forms granting power of attorney are often required by law to be in 12-point type. This is no guarantee of readability, as not all 12 points are created equal. For instance, 12-point Avenir is much smaller than 12-point Cambria.
On digital screens, the optimal type size for reading is fifteen to twenty-five pixels (12 point is roughly sixteen pixels). In the early days of computers, poor screen resolution meant that type had to be fairly small or it would break up. That’s no longer the case. In fact, for most people, digital text needs to be slightly larger than the same text read on paper because our eyes are generally further from what we are reading.
When Hugh returns from the next Wayzgoose, he tells me he showed around the trial pages set in 18 point and everyone agreed with the fellow who said, “I like it. The type block has good texture and justified on both right and left it makes a strong statement.”
Hugh is armed. “Saying a typeface is too large may be based on a subjective tradition of right and wrong,” he goes on. “It’s as if, because everyone else uses a certain type size, we don’t want to appear to be different so we fall into line and that’s how we develop cookie-cutter books. You might try looking for a good use of a large face.”
Is he right? Have I been conditioned by reading some 8,000 books set in 12-point type to think that this is the right size—the only size—in which a printed word must be read? And maybe it is. After all, print books today are the product of 500 years of refinement in form and function. I try to think of a book published in large print, other than those produced specifically for the visually impaired. I can’t.
And the truth is, it doesn’t matter what I think. Hugh is on a roll.
“As you know I always write the colophon in the first person in an effort to take responsibility for the artistic quality of the book. To take this responsibility I need to have artistic control. That is not to say that I won’t accept suggestions or consider requests. We will work this all out, but as you can tell I prefer that we are both out front with one another.”
In other words, back off.
A few days later, he sends me trial pages set in 12-, 14-, and 18-point Garamond. “Consider the visual statements rendered by each size. I will do the same and I’m sure one will rise to the surface and the others will sink.”
Choosing the type and the paper for The Paradise Project has been a tandem process. The summer was taken up with Emily’s endpaper experiments and her visits to my garden, so it is October, the air already crisp, when Hugh sends me “Stone” set in 14-point Garamond, as if a decision had been made.
The title is flush left, set in Garamond Italic. The text of the piece is set in roman, justified left and right. The words roll over onto a second page, where two turtles squat between words.
I write back immediately. “The 14 point is perfect.”
Hugh’s Garamond is old. He found it half a century ago in the same place he found his first press: in a back shed behind a local print shop that was slowly going out of business.
At the time, Hugh was editing a quarterly journal for the Canadian Association of Prosthetics and Orthotics. The journal was printed at Hanson & Edgar, a local printer, then mailed out to orthotics professionals across the country. “A small, select group,” Hugh says wryly. At the printer’s, he caught a glimpse of an old, retired proofing press, abandoned and filthy in a back shed. Poking around, he found archaic trays and tools, drawers filled with type.
“‘I’ll take that,’ I said. ‘And that, and that!’” Hugh gleefully recalls, all but hugging his rescued type cupboard.
No printer is satisfied with just one typeface. The holy grail is an exquisitely beautiful, legible, distinct alphabet that draws the eye irrevocably to the printed page, but in the meantime, in pursuit of perfection, they collect a variety of faces. One of the first that Hugh added to his stash was Goudy Old Style, designed by Frederic W. Goudy. All but forgotten now, Goudy was a household name in print shops in the first half of the twentieth century. From 1915 to 1940, he drew more than 125 distinct typefaces, including the inside type for Life magazine. Goudy Old Style, he claimed, was inspired by the lettering on a Hans Holbein painting. His biographer, Peter Beilenson, calls the face “a happy blend of French suavity and Italian fullness, marred by the supposed commercial practicality of shortened descenders.”
Beilenson makes type sound like wine.
Goudy was a bit of a renegade. He drew all his typefaces freehand, without a compass, a straight-edge, or a French curve. “Printing is essentially a utilitarian art,” he said, “yet even utilitarianism may include distinction and beauty in its type forms. To meet the demands of utility and preserve an aesthetic standard is the problem I set myself.”
He took his inspiration from the artists of the Renaissance. “The old fellows had the good ideas,” he said.
Hugh grins. “That’s the quote I like best from Goudy.”
The financial and marketing benefit of a distinctive typeface design was clear from the beginning. The first patent on a typeface was issued just fifty years after Gutenberg invented his press. And the very first design patent issued in the United States was for a “new and improved printing type”—U.S. Patent DI.
In Canada, perhaps the best known type designer is Carl Dair. When Hugh was in his thirties, he came across a magazine called Wrong Font, the brainchild of Carl Dair and Bill Poole, the man who published Hugh’s first and only book. Hugh never met Dair, who died during a flight from New York City in 1967, but the designer’s spirit was very much part of Hugh’s early initiation into typography and letterpress printing. He shows me a first edition of Dair’s book, Design with Type, in which Dair sets out his Seven Typographical Contrasts—size, weight, form, structure, texture, colour, direction—as a way of designing and critiquing type. Originally published in 1952 and revised in 1967, the book is still in print, a classic introduction to the notion of contrast in design.
Dair studied metal type and hand-punching at the Enschedé Foundry in Haarlem, Netherlands, where he created a silent film called Gravers and Files that documents one of the last great punch-cutters, P. H. Radisch. In 1967, for Canada’s centennial, Dair was commissioned by the Governor General to create a new and distinctively Canadian typeface. The result was Cartier, a serif based on hand-lettering that has become what some call “our national type.”
That notion is not as old-fashioned as it sounds. In 2014, Sweden created a national typeface called Sweden Sans. The starting point was the Swedish flag, a yellow Scandinavian cross on a blue background, in use since Gutenberg’s day. The designers developed “mood boards” with different fonts and pictures, drawing heavily on old Swedish signs from the 1940s and ’50s. Then they started sketching to the music of Bob Marley and contemporary electro beats. Six months later, Sweden Sans was unveiled: a basic sans serif to be used on all government materials.
Designers are working on typefaces to brand other nations. Corporations are getting into the typeface-as-brand act, too. In 2014, Amazon was criticized for launching its Kindle Voyage without bothering to add fresh typefaces to be viewed on its new screen. Lack of choice was one thing, but the ereader still force-justified every line, without hyphenation, creating great gaps between words. As one blogger lamented, “Amazon has invested all of this effort in improved reading technology only to find itself completely at sea when it comes to typography. A device that’s dedicated to words on a page, one with a screen this beautiful, deserves better type options.”
The following year, Amazon unveiled Bookerly, an exclusive font for Kindle devices, designed by one of the world’s top typemeisters, Dalton Maag. Developed specifically for digital reading, the font is described by Amazon as “warm and contemporary . . . inspired by the artistry of the best fonts in modern print books . . . hand-crafted for great readability at any size,” claiming it “outperforms other digital reading fonts to help you read faster with less eye strain.”
Unsubstantiated claims aside, it is interesting that even the great Internet warrior, Amazon, refers back to traditional print technology to boost the reputation of its digital type. Designers, it seems, have always kept a keen eye on the rear-view mirror. In 1502, the designers of the very first patented typeface modelled it on the lovely, flowing script of Petrarch, who was writing 150 years before.
Erik sees digital typography going in a different direction.
“Check out Titillium,” is all he says.
Titillium was born in 2012 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino, an Italian city in the foothills of the Apennines near the top of the boot on the Adriatic side. It began as an assignment in the Fields of Vision course offered as part of the art school’s master’s program. The project: to collectively create a family of fonts that would be open source, shared freely with the world through a web platform. Each academic year, a fresh crop of a dozen students works on the project, developing the face further so that now it is available in several fonts: light, roman, italic, sans serif.
Graphic designers are asked to send images of how they’ve used Titillium for a growing database of case histories. Type designers with a yen to amend or revise the face are invited to co-operate with the student team or to develop their own versions of a character. Three years into the project, this innovative exercise in collective creativity shows no sign of slowing down.
I think of the definition of a camel: a horse designed by committee. This isn’t exactly typeface by committee, but it’s not individual innovation, either.
“It’s the way of the future,” my son says.
Meanwhile, when Hugh needs an accented vowel, he creates the piece of type himself, sawing a groove into the body of a vowel and inserting a short length of 2-point lead to create á, é, or í. He’s also been known to create his own diphthongs or to tighten the kern (the spacing between letters) by filing down the body of one letter so the next one can tuck in close.
“If I don’t have it, I make it,” says Hugh. “What else is a person to do?”
CHARACTER STUDIES
I learned to print in grade one. I loved the slender blue lines, the dotted line that held the bowls of the vowels, the faint lines above and below that set limits for the ascenders and descenders, the red margins that defined exactly where to start and stop. At the top of each page was a sample letter. “Trace the letter first,” Miss Goetz would say, and I’d grip my fat red pencil. I’d track the loop and slide until I was sure I got it, then I’d carry on along the line, drawing the letter again and again, each identical to the one I’d traced. I don’t remember when it dawned on me that what I was doing wasn’t drawing, it was writing.
I had already fallen in love with words. Putting them together was like a party in my mouth. Words like filigree or Dumbo could make me laugh just from the contortions of my lips. I don’t know when exactly my mouth connected to my eyes and I could say the words I saw, but I do remember the first time I held the point of a sharpened pencil to the page and traced that bulbous a. Suddenly, the letter wasn’t only in my eyes and my mouth, it was in my arm, my hand, my fingers; in my tongue that stuck out of the corner of my mouth; in my body leaning against the sharp edge of my desk; in my bum that lifted up off the seat; in my toes in their brown Oxfords that didn’t quite touch the floor. My whole body was wrapped up in that a and in the b, c, and d that followed and in all the words I’ve written since.
In time, we learned capitals, then cursive. Cursive and capitals go back to ancient Romans, who carved letters in stone using square-shaped capitals for inscriptions and emphasis. Cursive or “running” characters were reserved for correspondence and less formal documents.
In the fifth century, the squared-off capitals were modified and rounded with lighter ascenders into so-called rustic writing. The letters were large, much larger even than my grade one printing.
Economy shaped the letters that seem normal to us now. As parchment became more difficult to procure, the size of lettering shrank, becoming even more compact as scriptoriums worked to produce books en masse. Capitals are too slow to print by hand in any quantity. Small characters are much faster, which led to a new style of writing called minuscules, as opposed to the large majuscules. Under Charlemagne, the Caroline minuscule became the most influential in Europe, a revival of the rounded, open Roman cursive.
In high school, I had a British pen pal. As much as I enjoyed her stories of England in the early days of the Beatles, it was her handwriting that I looked forward to. My characters sloped like chubby shrubs caught in a steady west wind, but hers spiked up and down, sharp and assured, sometimes leaning back ironically. Everyone I knew—my mother, the aunts who sent birthday cards, my teachers, my friends—wrote with the same chubby cursive hand. The unfamiliar shape of my pen pal’s letters confirmed that beyond my small town in Southwestern Ontario, other worlds flourished.
At one time, exquisite calligraphies spoke subtly of national character: Lombardic, the national hand of Italy; Merovingian, the national hand of France; and Celtic, the national hand of Ireland. Mechanical movable type did away with all that. Cartier and Sweden Sans notwithstanding, typeface is not generally national, and it’s not personal.
I could love my hand-printed a, but a machine-printed a is anonymous, generic.
And maybe that’s an advantage. At my school, the kids with pretty penmanship were considered “good at school” in general. The students who were less coordinated, slow to connect eye with hand, fell behind. Today, cursive writing is no longer taught in most schools; kids use computers to write their essays. No blotted copy-books to frustrate the student and irritate the teacher. Nothing to stand in the way of the meaning of the words.
Given all the variations in writing, formal and informal, personal and business, even national, where did Gutenberg turn for the shape of his alphabet? The Romans, of course, which is to say, the Italians, who in their formal writing had preserved the roundness of the Roman alphabet, never succumbing to the extreme angularity of northern European Gothic writing. And so fifteenth-century Italian handwriting became the standard for the printed word in Gutenberg’s day. Half a millennium later, roman (the upright fonts) and italic (the sloping fonts) are still the standard.
Gutenberg’s first type was based on manuscript forms because that’s what fifteenth-century readers were used to. Otherwise, the printed version wouldn’t look like a real book. Before long, however, the printer unchained himself from the scribe. One letter shape was as easy to print as another, so the focus shifted from letters that were easy to write to letters that were easily read.
Gutenberg's Fingerprint Page 8