typography

/tuy pog"reuh fee/, n.

1. the art or process of printing with type.

2. the work of setting and arranging types and of printing from them.

3. the general character or appearance of printed matter.

[1635-45; < NL typographia, equiv. to Gk týpo(s) TYPE + graphía -GRAPHY]

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Design or selection of letter forms to be organized into words and sentences and printed or displayed electronically.

Typography originated after the invention of printing from movable type in the mid 15th century. The three major type families in the history of Western printing are roman, italic, and black letter (Gothic). All had their origin in the scripts of the calligraphers whose work was ultimately replaced by printing. In the succeeding centuries typographers have created some 10,000 typefaces (a complete set of letter forms of a particular design). Depending on the style of their letters, typefaces are categorized as old style, transitional, and modern. Commonly used typefaces include Caslon, Baskerville, Bodoni, Garamond, and Times New Roman. See also John Baskerville; Giambattista Bodoni; Stanley Morison. The selection of a typeface is an important part of the aesthetic process in graphic design.

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Introduction

      the design, or selection, of letter forms to be organized into words and sentences to be disposed in blocks of type as printing upon a page. Typography and the typographer who practices it may also be concerned with other, related matters—the selection of paper, the choice of ink, the method of printing, the design of the binding if the product at hand is a book—but the word without modifier most usually denotes the activities and concerns of those most involved in and concerned with the determination of the appearance of the printed page.

      Thus understood, there was by definition almost—but not quite—no typography before the invention of printing from movable type in the mid-15th century; and, thus understood, it is only by analogical extension that the term can be applied, if ever it can be, to “reading” in which the material at hand is something other than words that remain stationary on flat firm surfaces. The electronically created letter that lives out its brief life while moving across the face of a signboard or a cathode-ray tube is not a typographic item. Typography, then, exists somewhere between the extreme of manuscript writing, on the one hand, and the transient image on the electronic device, on the other hand. Whether the letter be made by metal type or photographic image is no longer important in defining the subject; whether the finished item is a book or a page influences its inclusion as typographic not one bit.

The nature of typography

Typography as a useful art

      An overview of typography suggests that a number of generalized observations may be reasonable:

      First and most important, typography and printing, the mechanical processes by which the plans of the typographer are realized, are useful arts. Though there is indeed fine typography, typography is not a fine art. Books, the primary source of typographic examples, are written in the main by people with something to say; they are selected for printing in the main by publishers who see merit and hope for profit in disseminating the statements of the writers to an audience; properly they are edited and designed and printed in the main by craftsmen whose boundaries are fixed for them by considerations germane to the needs of the writers to communicate and the needs of the readers to understand and appreciate. The typographer exists not to express his own design preferences, his own aesthetic needs, but to provide a useful (because usable) connection between someone with something to say and someone to say it to.

      But to say—as did the late Beatrice Warde, one of England's great typographic authorities—that printing ought to be invisible is not to say that the typographer has no contribution to make; to say that typography is a functional art and as such ought not to get between the writer and the reader is not to say that there is only one solution to every typographical problem, that aesthetics, taste, personal judgments, and imagination cannot find room for expression in the typographic studio.

      Nonetheless, there are limitations to what the typographer may and may not do; for, in addition to being a useful art with the generally accepted first use of transmitting information, typography for at least three reasons is a secondary art.

      First, it is secondary in that its basic materials, the alphabets or other similar notational systems with which it works, are not of its own invention. The influence of this fact on the art form is obvious. Generally speaking, Western writing, or printing, is accomplished by the use of a relatively small number of individual letters capable of being grouped in almost infinite numbers of meaningful permutations. Even in the face of language differences, there is a wide carry-over of letter shapes and typefaces from one language to another. Because the number of images (letters) to be designed is limited and entirely manageable, the type designer's job is made less difficult. The language carry-over makes possible the establishment of meaningful typologies, the evolution of international styles and conventions, and the development of criteria and traditions of taste by which typographers improve their work. As the result, it is fairly certain that in a little more than 500 years of printing history since Gutenberg, at least 8,000 and very probably 10,000 or 11,000 typefaces have been designed. The practicing typographer has, then, a vast number of types to choose from, and, because the best of those types have evolved within cosmopolitan traditions and have stood the test of judgment by many people in many places over many years, there are, within the several thousands of types available, many that are of unquestioned excellence.

      By way of contrast, the Japanese (arts, East Asian) method of writing and printing involves a combination of systems—some 3,000 kanji (symbols based on Chinese characters), seicho (based on the brush-written Kana), and two groups of phonetic symbols (hiragana and katakana), each of which consists of 46 separate symbols. The problem of individually designing some 3,000 symbols, some of them of incredible complexity, is not one that many designers are able to surmount in a lifetime. As a result, to all intents and purposes, Japanese typographers have had only two typefaces to choose from—mincho, roughly equivalent to the West's roman, and Gothic, functionally a Japanese sans serif. In the 1960s a group of Japanese designers produced a third typeface called Typos.

      Second, the typographer is limited by reading conventions over which he has little or no effective control. The appearance of a book page, whether well or badly designed, is governed more by the fact that Western readers begin at the top left of a page and read right, a line at a time until they get to the bottom, than it is by the aesthetic desiderata of the designer. Many typographers have long been attracted to the clean and uncluttered look of so-called sans serif type (the two little bases on which the vertical elements of the lowercase “n” rest are serifs, as is the backward pointing slab atop the lowercase “i” or “l,” and sans serif types are those in which such embellishments are lacking [T I]). But the difficulty is that almost every study ever completed has indicated that sans serif type is less easy to read in text than is type with the serif. It may well be that if Western texts were printed vertically, from the bottom of a page to the top and read upward so that each letter occupied a separate line with no horizontal connection to those before and after it, the apparent advantage of serif types in this regard might disappear.

      To consider another example of the restrictions put on the typographer by the necessity of working with the reading conventions, it is arguable that the appearance of the printed page would be changed and one of the petty annoyances of reading—“doubling,” in which the eyes finish a line and then return to the left margin and begin the same line all over again—could be eliminated if people could be persuaded to accept the following reading pattern:

Typography as an art is concerned with the design,

into organized be to forms letter of ,selection or

words and sentences to be disposed in blocks of type

.page a upon printing as

      or

Typography as an art is concerned with the design,

otni dezinagro eb ot smrof rettel fo ,noitceles ro

words and sentences to be disposed in blocks of type

.egap a nopu gnitnirp sa

      But the fact, of course, is that the problems involved in winning acceptance of any change as fundamental as this one would appear to be so numerous and so substantial as to preclude its further consideration by any but writers of typographical journal articles or textbooks. Basic changes in the format of written text attributable to the typographer or, his earlier form, the printer-typographer, have been few, though occasionally dramatic, as in, for example, the practice of separating succeeding sentences with periods or of separating paragraphs (which in handwritten manuscripts were separated only by the insertion of the scribe's paragraph mark without the initiation of a new line or indentation).

      Third, it would appear to be reasonable to call typography a secondary art because, just as the typographer uses letter forms and reading conventions over which he has had little control, so too what he contributes comes into being only through the intervention of a mechanical process that, as often as not, in the 20th century at least, has become the province of the printer, so that the typographer practices his art at least once removed from its final production. The extreme example of the consequence of such a situation may have been seen in the early years of computer-generated typefaces (computerized typesetting) in which, many felt, most faces revealed quite clearly that they had been developed by specialists whose first capabilities were not in the field of typography. And when typographers were later introduced into the process, they found that they had to work through the electronics expert, even as, for many years, those unable to cut their own type had been forced to work through typefoundries.

      It will already have become apparent that there is, at the worst, some confusion and, at the least, some lack of uniformity involved in talking about typographers and typography. The words themselves are of relatively recent origin and have been used self-consciously in their contemporary sense only from about the mid-20th century. The difficulty is, of course, the matter of the process involved. Gutenberg (Gutenberg, Johannes) was his own typographer. It may well be, in fact, that his major personal contribution to the invention of printing was the development of a way to cut and cast type so that after the shape of the letter had been fixed and the molds prepared each letter form might be replicated over and over again in one relatively simple process. He was also the publisher, who undertook to risk capital in the selection and preparation of material to be printed for sale; he was presumably the man who designed the layout of each page; he may have done whatever editing was required, and he certainly either printed or supervised an assistant in the printing of the finished product. In the course of years many of the functions at first performed by one man came to be divided among several. Quite early, some printers employed men to cut type to their design; others employed men to design and cut the type; some held their services out for hire to others who became publishers; editors were separated from the process, though not always from decision-making roles in the appearance of the final product. After the introduction of bound volumes, trends were initiated that led eventually to the creation of binding designers as separate artists; it became not uncommon to find persons performing services as book designers and, as such, responsible for coordinating and leading the work of type designers, layout artists, binding designers—all who were in any way responsible for the appearance of the book as a whole. The situation became further clouded by the great variety of practice as to the status of each of the persons who perform one or more or, in some cases, all of these functions. They may be professionals retained by printing concerns for a single project; they may be full-time members of a corporate printing staff; in some very few cases they may be a single artist-craftsman-patron carrying out all of the functions in operations (usually necessarily small) devoted self-consciously to the production of “fine books.”

      Parenthetically, it is significant to note that, in general, the major examples of really fine typography—the significant developments that have raised the possibilities for the improvement of the typographic arts and, in fact, a preponderance of the typographic examples held up as outstanding—have been produced by publisher, printer, and typographer all working within the normal day-to-day requirements of their regular operations. Such a statement must not, however, be taken as dismissing the outstanding services rendered by the best work of the so-called private presses and by the valued demonstration volumes produced in limited numbers by major presses such as the Cambridge University Press in England, in holding up to view the best that the craft is capable of and thus serving as models for the craft itself.

Aesthetic qualities of the typographic page

      Confusion notwithstanding, the typographer as he is most generally understood is responsible—whether or not he does all of the work himself—for the appearance of the printed page, and his work is best seen in the several examples of the printed page that are used to illustrate the present article.

      The typographic page may be considered in terms of two aesthetic qualities. The first of these has been called “atmosphere,” “feel,” “impress,” “sense,” and other similar terms. It is easier felt than defined, and it depends in large measure on such things as the size of the block of type, its placement on the page, the kinds of display letters used for titles, running heads, and subheads, and the size of the margins—all elements that in the hands of a competent typographer create an expectation regarding the contents (possibly even the purpose) of the page and lead to a sense of the time of its production, its seriousness, and its function.

      The second aesthetic quality is that of colour, the darkness or lightness of the block of type sensed somehow as a whole rather than as a collection of individual letter forms with substantive meanings. Colour is the result of letter shapes, distances between letters and between words, the amount of space left between lines, the inking of the type, the printing process employed in making the impression on paper, and the paper itself.

      Of all elements the design of the letters is, in the dominant view, the most important. It is important that early typography was in fact overtly engaged in the explicit search for typefaces that would mechanically reproduce the written scripts in which, before the invention of printing, books had been prepared. For most of its life since the invention of printing with movable type in the mid-15th century, typography in the West has been dominated by three type families— roman, italic, and black letter (see below). All are easily recognizable as refined and regularized versions of letter styles first developed and standardized by scribes. The debt of sans serif, more a subclass than a family, is apparent but less unequivocal.

      To divide the several thousand typefaces that have existed since Gutenberg into three major families is only the grossest type of classification, and historians of typography, like teachers of typography, have found it useful to set up other classifications. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, they have not found it possible to agree on a system of classification. The variety of proposals has been so bewildering as to defeat one of the first purposes of classification. Some have concentrated on the influence of seminal workers in the field and talk of “Caslon's,” “Bodoni's,” etc. Others have concentrated on the major uses or types of literature from which various dominant types have come and talk, for example, of Humanistic faces. Other systems have employed nomenclatures that emphasize the early manuscript models from which a face evolved or a national influence. In attempts to meet a growing need for standards that can be applied more rigorously in legal and commercial and technical bibliographical uses, some countries and some craft associations have tried to develop classification schemes based on precise, in some cases almost mathematical, descriptions of the various elements of letter shapes. These schemes are not as yet worked out to the satisfaction of all concerned and are matters of some controversy, even among those who applaud the aims.

      The system that has enjoyed the longest general favour and seems to be about as useful as any other divides typefaces into four classifications. Unfortunately, though the classifications are based as much on differences in letter styles as on chronology, the names given each suggest a temporal alignment and one that is, at first glance, confusing.

      The first of these is called in most places old face—though Americans sometimes call it old style. In general, old faces were largely those types developed from c. 1722 to c. 1763 (dates of William Caslon and John Baskerville). Their letter forms had marked affinities with the penned letter styles of the scribes: they tended to squareness, there was little contrast between the thick and thin strokes, the stresses (the thickest part of the curves in a letter) were heavy and tilted or slanted, and the serifs tended to be full or thick and had brackets—gracefully rounded curves where they joined the letter body proper.

      The second classification is usually described as transitional and, as its name suggests, came more or less between—and had letter styling midway between—old face and modern.

      So-called modern types were produced between c. 1788 (when Giambattista Bodoni introduced the typeface that retains his name) and approximately 1820, when type design almost everywhere went into a major decline. Modern faces in general share characteristics resulting from the engraver's tool rather than the pen. There is a marked contrast between the thick and thin strokes of the letter, the thins in particular being almost exaggeratedly thin, and the change from thick to thin is sudden and pronounced; serifs tend to be thinner and somewhat longer, and the stresses are less pronounced and are vertical rather than tilted. The effect is that of a letter less square, more up and down, than old-face letters, with lines more sharply defined.

      The classification called old style or, in America, modernized old style is reserved for revivals of old faces undertaken by contemporary type designers, a practice typified by the important work of one of England's truly prestigious type designers, Stanley Morison (Morison, Stanley). It is necessary to establish a special classification for such types because in each case the modern reworking, while it owed much to the original, was in fact sufficiently different to be a new creation in its own right.

      It is worth pointing out once more that typefaces are assigned to one or the other classification on the basis of the style in which their letters are drawn and not—despite their time-oriented designations—by the year of their creation.

      Finally, and although this is not the place for a detailed history of the evolution of the written letter forms on which printing depends, it is significant that models for all three major type families were in use before the invention of printing by movable type: in England and Germany, a handwriting that was symmetrical, elongated, spiky, magnificently decorative, and difficult to read, not unlike certain parts of letters called today Old English, German script, and Gothic, was to be the origin of black (black letter) type; in Italy and Spain, a free, open, square, uncluttered writing, not too far from the letter forms regularized by a decree of Charlemagne in the late 8th century, is recognizable today as the seed source of roman type; and a slanted, cursive, more hurried form of the same—from which it evolved by chancery scribes whose work required speed in handwriting—is easily seen to be the origin of italic.

      The ready availability of serviceable letter models freed typography from the necessity of creating its own prototypes and left it able to spend its creative impulses in other ways. So well did it succeed that, within the first few decades after Gutenberg, it had brought forth almost every major development that it was to contribute and, in fact, had established itself so well that it may be fair to say that, until the 20th century, the art was a static one for all but the first 50 years of its existence. Further, the fact that the art form could take its basic ingredients from existing sources gave it a stability that it would not otherwise have had. Since it was unnecessary to wait while various producers in various countries came to agreement on which letter shapes to adopt or what reading conventions to employ, the typographer was enabled to get on with the work of overseeing the printing of books for distribution on a scale never before envisioned. The influence on the Renaissance was of incalculable importance if, indeed, it was not one of cause and effect.

History of typography

Type, from Gutenberg to the 18th century

      Whatever else the typographer works with, he works with type, the letter that is the basic element of his trade. It has already been said that there have been but three major type families in the history of Western printing: (1) black letter, commonly and not quite rightly called Gothic by the English; (2) roman, in Germany still called by its historical name of Antiqua; and (3) italic. All had their origin in the scripts of the calligraphers whose work printing came ultimately to replace.

       calligraphy is dealt with at length in other articles (see further calligraphy (writing)). It is necessary here only to provide a context for the evolution of the typefaces of the printer's font. The basic letter forms of the Latin alphabet were established by the classical imperial capital letters of 1st-century Rome. Lowercase letters emerged only slowly, with their most vigorous development coming between the 6th and 8th centuries.

      Charlemagne (Carolingian art), in order to encourage standardization and discourage further experimentation, ordered his educational program for the Holy Roman Empire to be written in a script consisting of roman capitals and a specific form of minuscules (lowercase letters) known as Caroline (Carolingian minuscule). The uniformity thus achieved was short-lived. Under the impact of the national and regional styles of the scribes who worked with the alphabet, the letters—clear, simple, and somewhat broad by today's standards—were gradually compressed laterally, until, by the 11th century, the curves had been converted to points and angles, and the body of the letter had been made thinner while the strokes of which it was composed had been made thicker. This was black letter. By the 15th century it had completed its evolution into the formal, square-text Gothic letter.

      It was this formal black letter that provided the first model for printer's type when printing was invented. It served well in Germany, but when printers in Italy, in part under the influence of the Humanist movement, turned to the printing of Latin texts, they found the pointed stateliness of the Gothic letter out of keeping with the spirit of humanism. For these works, they went back in calligraphic history to a time when the text had been less open than the first Caroline alphabet but more rounded than the narrowed, blackened, and pointed Gothic that it had become. When the printers Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz in Subiaco, Italy, brought out an edition of Cicero in 1465, they used a typeface that was explicitly intended to be, but was not, a printed copy of the text of Cicero's own time. To distinguish this type from the Gothic that was more “modern” in the 15th century, the Italians called it Antiqua. Known today as roman, it spread rapidly throughout western Europe except in Germany, where the Humanist movement was blocked by the counter-impulses of the Reformation. There, Gothic type was accepted almost as a national typeface until 1940, when its discontinuance was ordered.

      It is notable that the majority of early printers continued for many years to use the Gothic type for non-Humanist texts, ecclesiastical writings, and works on law. In Spain, for example, Jacob Cromberger printed books in which the text was set in roman type and commentary on the text was set in Gothic.

      Like the Gothic and roman, the third great family of types had its origins in the writings of the scribes. The italic and the Gothic Schwabacher, which serves as a kind of italic to Fraktur (as black letter is known in Germany), both had their genesis in the fast, informal, cursive, generally ligatured letters developed by chancellery clerks to speed their work.

Gutenberg and printing in Germany

      The 11th edition (1910–11) of Encyclopædia Britannica, not uniquely in its day, gave the honour of inventing the printing press to Laurens Coster (Coster, Laurens Janszoon) of Haarlem. Later research in the 20th century, which has more or less become common consent, gives it to Johannes Gutenberg (Gutenberg, Johannes). Actually, the amount of invention involved in the development is open to argument. Certainly, there was in the air at the time much interest in an artificial method of reproducing calligraphic scripts, and books had already been printed from blocks; the techniques necessary to the punching of type and the making of matrices from which to cast it were known to the metalsmiths; paper was replacing vellum; and wine, oil, and cheese presses were readily available as adaptable models. It remained only for someone to combine what was in existence or clearly capable of creation.

 Gutenberg began his experiments around 1440 and was ready to put his method to commercial use by 1450. In that year, facing the need (not unknown to later printers) for financing, he borrowed from Johann Fust (Fust, Johann). About 1452 he borrowed once more from Fust, who at that time became his partner. The only extant printing known for certain to be Gutenberg's (Gutenberg Bible) is the so-called Forty-two-Line (the number of lines in each column) Bible (see photograph—>), completed in 1456, the year after Fust had foreclosed on his partner and turned the business over to his own future son-in-law, Peter Schöffer. Experts are generally agreed that the Bible displays a technical efficiency that was not substantially bettered before the 19th century. The Gothic type is majestic in appearance, medieval in feeling, and slightly less compressed and less pointed than other examples to appear shortly.

      The Forty-two-Line Bible, like the other works of its day, had no title page, no page numbers, no innovations to distinguish it from the work of a manuscript copyist—this was presumably the way both Gutenberg and his customers wanted it.

      Some five years later, also in Mainz and quite possibly from the re-established printshop of a refinanced Gutenberg, there appeared the Catholicon, notable among other reasons for its early use of a colophon, a tailpiece identifying the printer and place of printing, and for the slight condensation of its type—a move toward more economic use of space on the page and greater type variety in printing.

      While not all early results of the printer's art were accepted in all quarters (in 1479 the cardinal who later became Pope Julius II ordered scribes to copy by hand a printed edition of Appian's Civil Wars as printed in 1472), they were generally well received by a basically conservative literate public that wanted reading matter in clear, legible, compact forms and in quantities greater than, and at prices less than, would have been possible for the copyists of the day. Within 15 years of the Forty-two-Line Bible, the printing press had been established in all of western Europe except Scandinavia.

Italy

      When printing moved outward from Germany, it established itself first in Italy, where it was nurtured by German and German-trained craftsmen. Sweynheim and Pannartz (mentioned above) were the first printers in Italy. They opened their press in Subiaco in 1465 and almost immediately produced a Cicero (De oratore) printed in an early and interesting Antiqua type that would with time become roman. (This, rather than a type cut by another German, Adolf Rusch, in Strassburg in 1464, is generally credited with being the initial roman simply because to most modern eyes its connection with the later face seems more clearly demonstrable, less tenuous. Indeed, more conservative theorists are not entirely convinced that even the Subiaco type was close enough to roman to be so called, except in the light of very informed hindsight.)

      The brothers Johann and Wendelin von Speyer (sometimes called da Spira and sometimes of Spire) opened the first press in Venice in 1469 and, until Johann died in 1470, had a one-year monopoly on all printing in that city. They used a clear and legible typeface that represented another step toward the contemporary roman. Whether or not these earlier types were really roman, there would seem to be no reason for putting the production of the first clearly recognizable roman any later than the work of a Frenchman, Nicolas Jenson (Jenson, Nicolas), who had learned printing in Germany and set up business in Venice at about the time the von Speyer monopoly ran out. An excellent idealization of the roman typeform, Jenson's type was cut for an edition of Cicero's Epistolae ad Brutum, printed in 1470. It has been described by most modern critics as an elegant cutting, and one—Stanley Morison (Morison, Stanley)—called it perhaps the most perfect roman face ever cut. The expertness of the work may be attributed to Jenson's training as a medalist before becoming a printer. It is notable that Jenson never used his roman type for the printing of ecclesiastical or legal works—for which various versions of black letter were to remain standard.

      By all measurement the commanding figure in the typography of the late 15th century was Aldus Manutius (Manutius, Aldus, the Elder), who also was in Venice. Manutius established his business around 1490 and, by 1495, was issuing a series of Greek texts which were notable more for their editorial authority than for their typographical excellence. Manutius was his own editor. His type designer and cutter was Francesco Griffo of Bologna, who made two major contributions: he drew on pre-Caroline scripts as the inspiration for a more authentic roman type that soon displaced the Jenson version; and, for what was to become the most important series of books (book) in its time, he cut the first example of the cursive type now known as italic. It was, in the opinion of some critics, not a very good italic face, and it has been described as more a slanted roman than an italic. Nevertheless, it was the first of a new family of typefaces. Interestingly, it was at first a combination of new-face lowercase letters with roman uppercases. Equally interesting, the entire text of the Aldine books for which it was used were set in the new type. Not until 1550 did it become what it is today, a special-function type.

 The books for which this new type—based on a chancellery (cancellaresca) cursive—was first cut consisted of a spectacularly successful series of Latin texts initiated in 1501, with Virgil's works as the initial release. The series was planned deliberately to interest a market of new readers—Renaissance men who were hardly interested in liturgical writings or Greek classics but who had instead the Humanist's passion for the Latin writers, with whom, somehow, they associated themselves. To fill that market, Manutius projected a series of books compact enough to be carried easily, set in type that was both economical and highly readable, edited with scrupulous accuracy, and sold as inexpensively as possible. With Griffo's cursive type as the base, the problems of size and readability were both solved; and, by increasing the normal print run to 1,000 copies per edition, the economics were rendered more favourable. They were, indeed, the first pocketbook best-sellers, and they were what would today be called an instant success. The volumes were sought after throughout Europe, as much or more for their scholarly authority as for the excellence of their typography. New volumes were issued every two months for the next five years, and Manutius early had the honour, but dubious pleasure, of being pirated.

      The continuity implicit in the work of Manutius and others during this period destroys the value of that older approach to the history of typography that isolated everything printed from 1455 to 1500 as incunabula. The year 1500 did not provide a genuine dividing point, and later historians have generally marked the end of the first valid “period” in typographic history at around 1540, after which the importance of experiments with typefaces tended to be ignored, if not disapproved of.

France

      In Germany and in Italy, the many centres of printing grew up for the most part in the centres of commerce. But in France—where printing was from the first a sponsored activity—there were only two such centres: Lyon, from which significant printing largely disappeared after the Inquisition; and Paris, where it was established in about 1470 by the rector and librarian of the Sorbonne, who invited three German printers to occupy university-owned property and who later supervised all of their work. The first book printed in France—a manual of instruction in Latin composition—was printed in an Antiqua type; and though there is some history of the use of a mixed Gothic until about 1520, printers in France from the start led the way to establishing the predominance of roman and italic. Important influences in effecting the almost exclusive use of roman type were the printers Simon de Colines, Henri and Robert Estienne, Geoffroy Tory, and the man who was the world's first commercial typefounder, Claude Garamond.

      Perhaps because of the quasi-official nature of printing in France, French publishers early established and long maintained a reputation for careful and elegant work. Their volumes, sumptuous more often than not, were characterized by minute attention to almost extravagant detailing. Books of the hours, introduced by one Antoine Vérard, whose tastes ran to illustrated and heavily ornamented pages bound in deluxe editions, were important influences in these directions. It is estimated that Vérard published more than 200 of these editions in a little more than 25 years, beginning in 1485. They are precise, mannered, delicate, and elegant.

      Henri Estienne (Estienne, Henri II) established himself sometime around the beginning of the 16th century. A scholar, publisher, and printer, he gained his reputation as a publisher of classical literature. His edition of Galen's De sectis medicorum is an interesting early scientific work. Estienne, for a time, had as his adviser Geoffroy Tory (Tory, Geoffroy), a scholar who later became a printer himself. Strongly influenced by Italian typography, Tory experimented with the use of floral ornamentation and ornate initial letters. In 1529 he wrote the first known treatise on the design of type, and in 1530 the title king's printer was created for him.

      Tory, Colines, and a few others introduced the Aldine publishing methods into France. Colines designed italic, roman, and Greek type fonts, some of which were cut for him by his punch cutter, Garamond (Garamond, Claude). In 1531 they created, for an edition of St. Augustine's Sylvius, the roman typeface to which all later so-called Garamond typefaces are traced.

      Garamond quickly became a major force in making well-designed and superbly cut types available to printers, including those who generally could not have afforded the services of capable cutters. Though Garamond's efforts with a Greek font were not notably successful, his French versions of the roman type of Manutius and an italic type of Ludovico degli Arrighi (an official in the apostolic chancellery who soon after 1522 had produced specimen pages of a type based on the cursive letters of the chancellery clerks) were of commanding importance in European typography until the end of the 16th century. In 1540, after years of experimentation, Garamond perfected a roman type that, though it had affinities with the lettering of scribes, was designed unmistakably for mechanical reproduction. It was sharply drawn, graceful and of good contrast, and it soon displaced most other typefaces then in use. This typeface ushered in the new era in which, for the first time, the typographic book was more common than the manuscript one.

      From the middle of the 16th until well into the 18th century, if not later, the most notable type designers in Europe were important more for their refinements on Garamond's modifications of earlier faces than for innovations of their own. One of the very few who attempted new departures in type design was Robert Granjon, who, in addition to fashioning some notable versions of Garamond types, also tried—with his type called Civilité—to create a fourth major typeface to be different from and stand alongside roman, italic, and Gothic. He envisioned it as a national type for the use of French printers. Reminiscent of a cursive Gothic, it ultimately found its only acceptance as a display face and was not utilized in the printing of books.

England

      Printing was introduced into England near the beginning of the last quarter of the 15th century by an Englishman who had traveled widely throughout Europe to study the art—William Caxton (Caxton, William), who was a gentleman and dilettante. He studied printing, it is said, so that he would be able to print his own translation of a French work—Raoul Le Fèvre's Recueil des histoires de Troye—exactly as he wanted it to be printed. Setting up in business in Bruges in 1473, he issued The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in English, about 1474; in 1476 he returned to England and established a press in Westminster. The first dated book printed in England was the Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, issued from his press in 1477. Printed in black-letter type of an almost startling blackness, its pages command attention by means of a contrast too pronounced to be comfortable to the reader. Caxton printed some 90 books—70 of them in English—before turning his business over to Wynkyn de Worde, his former assistant. De Worde used the first italic type in England in 1524.

      Stanley Morison is authority for the statement that English typography in the first 100 years after the invention of printing was of a secondary order except for the work of Richard Pynson, a Norman who operated a press in London from 1490 to about 1530. Pynson, who used the first roman type in England in 1518, issued more than 400 works during his approximately 40 years of printing. Of these, a substantial number are legal handbooks and law codes, on the printing of which he enjoyed an effective monopoly.

Maturation of the printed book

      Well before the end of the first century of typography, the printer had brought to the book the basic forms of nearly every element that he was to contribute. The styles of the three major typefaces had been formalized to the point at which little other than refinement remained to be added to them; most of the business and craft functions that were to mark the production of books down to the present had been identified and differentiated; the printed book had achieved an acceptance comparable to, and an audience far greater than, that of the manuscript volume; and publishing specialties had already emerged. Fully one-third of all of the books printed during the period of the incunabula—that is from the 1450s to 1500—were illustrated. The printing of music had become practical, and the practice of numbering the pages of a volume in sequence had been adopted.

      The printer's mark, an identifying device, was used—though only briefly at first—in the typographic book from the very beginning. Almost as early, and probably more important, was the typographer's addition of the colophon, in which the printer-publisher recorded the place and date of publication, asserted his claim to credit for his role in the production of the work, advertised the merits of the enterprise, and, on occasion, attempted to protect his property from the depredations of rival printer-publishers. Indeed, Caxton turned the colophon into a short essay in which he included, in addition to the normal elements, an editor's preface and a dedication. Whether or not it is accurate to assert that the title page—the major nonmanuscript feature of the typographic book—emerged from the colophon, it is a fact that the title page took over some of the content of the colophon, which, however, continued to exist.

      The first title page was probably used by Gutenberg's successor, Peter Schöffer (Schöffer, Peter), in 1463 on a papal bull. It was Schöffer's only known use of the device, and, like the other early versions that followed, it was really—in today's terms—a half title. The full title page did not appear until 1476, when one Erhard Ratdolt in Venice used it on an astronomical and astrological calendar. The device was well established by the end of the incunabula period. Continuing the tradition of relative anonymity of authorship of the manuscript books, the earliest pages never, and later ones only seldom, revealed the author of the work. The title page, apparently, was meant to provide, first, a protective cover for the text within and, second, an opportunity for advertising for the publisher-printer.

The middle years

      The first really notable roman type had been cut by Jenson for a text by Cicero in 1470. It had been replaced in popularity and importance by the romans that Francesco Griffo cut for Manutius in the late 15th century. The first italic had been a Griffo design introduced by Manutius in his pocket editions early in the 16th century. These two faces had, in turn, been displaced in European typography by letters designed in the mid-16th century by Garamond in France: a roman based on Griffo's cutting and an italic based on a form put forth by Ludovico degli Arrighi. The Garamond versions of these faces were to be of prime importance in European typographical work until the end of the 16th century, during which time so many adaptations of them were produced that “Garamond type” came to be used as a generic term.

      By the end of the 16th century, typography in Europe had, generally speaking, deteriorated in vigour and quality. In France, the first comeback step was taken in 1640 by Louis XIII, who, under the influence of Cardinal de Richelieu, established the Imprimerie Royale at the Louvre. In 1692 Louis XIV ordered the creation of a commission charged with developing the design of a new type to be composed of letters arrived at on “scientific” principles. The commission, whose deliberations were fully recorded, worked mathematically, drawing and redrawing each letter on squares divided into 2,304 equal parts. The approach was far removed from the style of the calligraphers, whose work had provided models for all of the important alphabets until then. It is probably fortunate that Philippe Grandjean (Grandjean, Philippe), who was called on to do the punch cutting, did not feel himself to be under constraint to carry out his own work with the mathematical precision of the commission members who had drawn the patterns. Using the basic designs merely as suggestive, he cut a type that almost immediately drove the Garamond style from its favoured position. Known as Romain du Roi, it was used first (1702) in one of the médaille books that were then popular as commemorative devices. As might be expected, the type is notable for its regularity and precision; there is a good, though not exaggerated, contrast between the thick and thin strokes, and the addition of flat serifs on the lowercase letters was effective.

      Though intended for the exclusive use of the Imprimerie Royale, the new roman was immediately copied by other designers, one of the most active of whom was the founder Pierre-Simon Fournier (Fournier, Pierre-Simon), who is also remembered for his creation of a wide range of printers' devices that could be combined into festoons, borders, and headpieces and tailpieces for the heavily ornamented éditions de luxe that were popular in France then and that were to remain so until the Revolution.

      It is reasonable to say—as did designer-theorist William Morris—that the Romain du Roi replaced the calligrapher with the engineer as a typographical influence. In general, the calligrapher was not to be reintroduced until Morris himself performed the operation as an ideological matter in the 19th century. Before that could happen, typography was to undergo further modifications under the influence of three great designers, two in England (United Kingdom) and one in Italy.

      William Caslon (Caslon, William), who issued his first type-specimen sheet in 1734, made a number of refinements of the Garamond style and created faces that have become traditional and are still much in use. Caslon's refinement of the Garamond version of the Aldine roman was essentially straightforward and unmannered except for a slightly pronounced contrast between the thin strokes and the thick ones. The letters were graceful and well balanced. Serifs were bracketed (see above). They were well cut, and they made up into type blocks that were comfortable to read.

      The type won wide acceptance and became well known in the American colonies, where it was introduced by Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin). It was the type in which a Baltimore printer issued the official copies of the United States Declaration of Independence.

      Even more significant changes in typographical fashions were achieved about a quarter of a century later by John Baskerville (Baskerville, John) in Birmingham. Baskerville, who taught calligraphy, introduced further variations in the spirit of Caslon. His letters suggest a greater concern for aesthetics. Their feeling of gracefulness is more pronounced. They were more original than Caslon's. His roman letters were open and legible; his italics tended to be spidery and quite pinched. Open and quite rounded, they are, perhaps, more self-consciously pleasing to the eye. As a book designer, Baskerville combined his new faces with exaggerated page margins and relatively wide spacings between letters to suggest new directions in style. By the use of special papers, improved press methods, and special inks, he achieved an effect of almost glaring contrast, an effect heightened by his preference for emphasizing the typographer rather than the illustrator or the engraver. Though his acknowledged masterpiece, a Cambridge Bible, was not printed until 1763, he was an important influence on English and European typography almost from the first printing of his Virgil in 1757.

      In Italy, Giambattista Bodoni (Bodoni, Giambattista) enthusiastically took up the principle of page design as worked out by Baskerville, though not his typefaces. Further modifying the Aldine roman of Garamond, he mechanically varied the difference between the thick and thin strokes of his letters to achieve the ultimate contrast possible in that direction. His letters are rather narrower than those of either Caslon or Baskerville. He exaggerated his thick lines and reduced the thin ones almost—it seems at times—to the point of disappearance. Like Baskerville, he used opulent papers and inks blended for special brilliance. His pages were not easy to read, but he became, in the words of Stanley Morison (Morison, Stanley), the typographical idol of the man of taste, and his “plain”—though deliberately and artfully contrived—designs were an important factor in the decline in importance of the édition de luxe and its replacement by works more austere in feeling, more modern even to today's eyes. He set what was, in general, to be the standard book style of the world until the appearance of William Morris.

Warren E. Preece

Type and book design since the 19th century

      Two late-19th-century developments—one technological, the other aesthetic—profoundly changed the course of book typography and design. The advent of mechanical type composition in the 1880s (the so-called Linotype machine was patented by Ottmar Mergenthaler (Mergenthaler, Ottmar), a German inventor, in 1884; the Monotype, by an American, Tolbert Lanston, in 1887) had much to do with the look of the 20th century book. The Arts and Crafts Movement, whose leader in typography as in other aspects was William Morris, had an equally great influence on the quality of modern book printing.

The private-press movement

      The Industrial Revolution changed the course of printing not only by mechanizing a handicraft but also by greatly increasing the market for its wares. Inventors in the 19th century, in order to produce enough reading matter for a constantly growing and ever more literate population, had to solve a series of problems in paper production, composition, printing, and binding. The solution that most affected the appearance of the book was mechanical composition; the new composing machines (typesetting machine) imposed new limitations not only on type design but also on the number and kinds of faces available, since the money required to buy a new typeface was enough to inhibit printers from stocking faces of slight utility. As a result, Victorian exuberance of design, which might use a dozen or more typefaces within a single book, was effectively curbed.

      It is paradoxical that what became known as the Arts and Crafts Movement, with its roots in the romantic Gothicism propounded by the critic John Ruskin and by Morris (Morris, William), should have had a considerable influence on modern industrial design, including that of the book. An Englishman, William Morris was a fervent Socialist who believed that the Industrial Revolution had killed man's joy in his work and that mechanization, by destroying handicraft, had brought ugliness with it. Morris was above all a decorator; his work in the decorative arts had added great lustre to the fame he had already achieved as a writer when, partly as a result of dissatisfaction with the editions of his own works, he decided to establish a press. In 1888 Morris attended a lecture given by the printer Emery (later Sir Emery) Walker (Walker, Sir Emery) and was entranced by Walker's lantern slides of early types, greatly enlarged. He proposed to Walker that they cut a new font of type that would recapture the strength and beauty of the early letters, based upon medieval calligraphy. The Kelmscott Press, in its brief life (1891–96), printed 52 books that exemplified Morris' standards of perfect workmanship. A firm believer that a return to the past would produce a better society, he commissioned handmade paper like that used in the 15th century, had new, blacker inks made, and used the handpress and hand binding exclusively; a few copies of each title were also printed on vellum. With Walker, he designed three types: a roman, based upon that of Nicolas Jenson, and two Gothics after German models; all were cut and cast by hand. Woodcut initials and borders were engraved to his own design, and wood-block illustrations were cut from drawings by Edward Burne-Jones (Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley, 1st Baronet) and other of his friends.

 The Kelmscott Press's major book was its Chaucer, finished in 1896, a sumptuous folio whose rich decorations and strong black pages are reminiscent of the German incunabula Morris admired. A table book, meant to be looked at rather than read, it is one of the most influential books in the history of printing—a revolutionary book, despite its anachronisms, which caused a whole generation of printers and designers to be dissatisfied with the books they saw about them and to attempt to improve upon the badly made, weakly designed books that were common in the late Victorian age.

      Private presses on the Morris model proliferated in England, on the Continent—especially in Germany and the Scandinavian countries—and in the United States. The best of these, notably the Doves and Ashendene presses in England and the Bremer and Cranach presses in Germany, published books of great style and strength. There were also poorer imitations, as the Roycroft Press in the United States.

      The most influential of the private presses was the Doves Press, established in 1900 by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson (Cobden-Sanderson, Thomas James) and Emery Walker (Walker, Sir Emery). Walker, who was one of the prime movers in fine printing for over half a century, also played an important role in creating type for the Ashendene and Cranach presses. Cobden-Sanderson was one of Morris' circle at Kelmscott House and had become a bookbinder at the suggestion of Mrs. Morris. The bindings executed at his Doves Bindery are notable for their excellent craftsmanship and their clear, simple design, which often used Art Nouveau motifs (see below). The Doves Press books, which were printed in a type based on Nicolas Jenson's 15th-century roman, were austere in their typography, eschewing all decoration and illustration and relying for their effect on the beauty of their type, spacing, and presswork. Occasionally a second colour, a splendid red, was used, and superbly drawn initials adorned many of the 50-odd books. A five-volume Doves Bible, issued between 1903 and 1905, is among the monuments of fine bookmaking, as well as one of the most influential modern books, a result of its virility, purity of design, and perfection in craftsmanship.

      The third great English private press, the Ashendene, was conducted by C.H. St. John Hornby, a partner in the English booksellers W.H. Smith and Son. Hornby in 1900 met Emery Walker and Sydney Cockerell (Morris' secretary at the Kelmscott Press), who encouraged and instructed him and helped in devising two types for his own use: Subiaco, based upon Sweynheim's and Pannartz' semiroman of the 1460s, and Ptolemy, based upon a late 15th-century German model. The Ashendene Press books, like those of Morris, were often illustrated with wood engravings, and many had coloured initials.

      In Germany Morris' closest counterpart was Rudolf Koch (Koch, Rudolf), who gathered around himself at Offenbach, where he taught at the Arts and Crafts School and designed types for the Klingspor foundry, a community of craftsmen who painted, worked in metal, wood, and stone, printed, and wrote. Above all a consummate penman, Koch made the written word the basis of his designs in any medium, whether tapestry or woodcut. A devout Christian, Koch, like the medieval craftsmen he admired, saw the Gothic style as a supreme manifestation of religious spirit; he was no mere imitator but an artist who freely reinterpreted in his types and books the traditional Fraktur type of Germany. Koch also created a number of modern types, among them sans serifs and romans.

      Cobden-Sanderson's (Cobden-Sanderson, Thomas James) influence, however, far exceeded that of Morris in Germany. The most important of the German private presses, the Bremer Presse (1911–39), conducted by Willy Wiegand, like the Doves Press, rejected ornament (except for initials) and relied upon carefully chosen types and painstaking presswork to make its effect. The most cosmopolitan of the German presses was the Cranach, conducted at Weimar by Count Harry Kessler. It produced editions of the classics and of German and English literature illustrated by artists such as Aristide Maillol, Eric Gill, and Gordon Craig and printed with types by Emery Walker and Edward Johnston on paper made by hand in France. Kessler's books did not attempt to imitate medieval or Renaissance models; they sought to create—using the same methods as the early printers—books modern or, rather, timeless, in spirit.

      The most notable figures of the private-press movement in The Netherlands (Netherlands, The) were S.H. de Roos (Roos, S.H. de) and Jan van Krimpen (Krimpen, Jan van). De Roos, like Morris a utopian Socialist, was an industrial designer who hoped to create a better society by improving the appearance of ordinary utilitarian objects. His first book, Kunst en Maatschappij (1903), was, significantly, a collection of Morris' essays in translation. De Roos's decorative style became simple and less florid under the influence of Cobden-Sanderson, whose work he greatly admired, although his ideals remained those of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Unlike Morris and Cobden-Sanderson, de Roos was a book designer, designing books for others, rather than a printer—one of the earliest of the new school of typographers, who provided layouts for the publisher or printer, specifying type, format, and overall design. Increasingly, as technology became more complex and shops more highly specialized and automated, design became more a profession; the typographer, trained in industrial design or graphic arts, succeeded the printer or the publisher in deciding how a book should look. De Roos, who drew a number of typefaces for the Typefoundry Amsterdam, designed books for the Zilverdistel, the Meidoorn, and other private presses, as well as for trade publishers.

      Jan van Krimpen used little decoration in his work, which achieved its effect through a classic clarity of style and impeccable printing. His books, for the Enschedé firm for which he worked, for private presses, or for trade publishers, attempted always to interpret the author's meaning as clearly as possible, to reflect it rather than to enhance it. Krimpen also designed a number of typefaces, all of which show his earlier study of calligraphy. Among them are Lutetia, a modern roman and italic of great distinction; Romulus, a family of text types that includes a sloped roman letter instead of the conventional italic; and Cancellaresca Bastarda, an italic notable for its great number of attractive decorative capitals, ligatures, and other swash (i.e., with strokes ending in flourishes) letters, elegant in appearance.

      Another typographer working in the classic mode, Giovanni Mardersteig (Mardersteig, Giovanni), spent most of his creative life in Italy, though he was born and trained in Germany. His Officina Bodoni utilized Bodoni's types to print the collected works of D'Annunzio. Mardersteig not only used the handpress for limited editions (usually on handmade Italian papers) that rival 15th-century printing in their beauty of spacing and presswork, but also supervised at the Stamperia Valdònega in Verona long-run editions on high-speed presses, which are likewise remarkable for their craftsmanship. In addition, he designed several typefaces, among them Pacioli, Griffo, Zeno, and Dante.

      The Art Nouveau movement was an international style, expressed in the consciously archaic types of Grasset in France; in posters and magazine covers by artist Will Bradley in the United States; and in initials and decorations by Henry van de Velde (Velde, Henry van de) in Belgium and Germany. Van de Velde, the leading spokesman for the movement as well as one of its most skilled practitioners, in his essay “Déblaiement d'art” (1892) advocated the development of a new art, one that would be both vital and moral, like the great decorative arts of the past, but that would use contemporary modes. For a reprint of the essay, he designed a series of initials and typographic ornaments that express the characteristics of the style: decoration based upon natural forms; pages whose typography and decoration blend to make overall patterns; and a richness of texture reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. Van de Velde's most important book was an edition of Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra, which he designed for the Insel Verlag and had printed by the Drugulin-Presse of Leipzig and for which he created a series of ornaments printed in gold, as well as endpapers, title page, and binding; a small folio, conceived as an architectonic whole rather than a series of unrelated openings, it is a striking, if dated, volume.

Mechanical composition

      The private-press movement did much to raise the standards of the ordinary trade book. Small, independent publishers who wished to make a mark not only through the distinction of their titles but also through the distinctiveness of their house styles acted as a bridge between the deluxe bibliophilic editions and ordinary books. Companies such as those of John Lane and Elkin Mathews, who published Oscar Wilde and the periodical The Yellow Book; J.M. Dent, who commissioned Aubrey Beardsley to illustrate Malory and who used Kelmscott-inspired endpapers for his Everyman's Library; Stone and Kimball of Chicago and Thomas Mosher of Maine, who issued small, readable editions of avant-garde writers with Art Nouveau bindings and decorated title pages; the Insel Verlag in Germany, with millions of inexpensive yet well-printed and designed pocket books—these and their many colleagues brought within the reach of the ordinary book buyer mass-produced books whose appearance, if not their method of manufacture, had been profoundly altered and improved by the Arts and Crafts Movement.

      During the early years of the 20th century, more and more printers installed composing machines (see printing: Modern printing techniques (printing)). The early Linotype and Monotype faces, like the foundry faces they imitated, were weak and poor. The first significant face cut especially for mechanical composition appeared in 1912, when a new face based upon the old-style types of Caslon was produced for The Imprint, a short-lived periodical for the printing trade published by Gerard Meynell of the Westminster Press in London. Its contributors included Edward Johnston, who not only wrote for the magazine but designed its calligraphic masthead; and Stanley Morison, who began his career as printing historian and typographer on its staff. Other Monotype faces cut at this time included Plantin, based upon the types of the great Antwerp printer, and Caslon; the latter was made at the instigation of George Bernard Shaw's (Shaw, George Bernard) publishers, since Shaw, who had strong views on typography, would not allow any other face for his books. World War I, however, stopped any further development of types for the composing machines.

      In America (United States) the generation of designers who had begun as disciples of Morris soon began to develop their own styles. Among the most important were D.B. Updike, Bruce Rogers, F.W. Goudy, and W.A. Dwiggins.

      Daniel Berkeley Updike (Updike, Daniel Berkeley) opened the Merrymount Press in Boston in 1893. His books, most of which he designed himself, are noteworthy for the clarity of their organization, their easy readability, and their excellent workmanship, based upon the use of a few carefully selected typefaces and immaculate presswork. Updike stocked only types that met the twin criteria of economy in use and beauty of design. His books, whether a complex folio such as the Book of Common Prayer (1930), which is considered by many to be his masterpiece, or the small and amiable Compleat Angler (1928), are both functional and pleasing to the eye.

      Bruce Rogers (Rogers, Bruce) was a typographer, trained as an artist, who had the faculty of drawing the best from the printers with whom he worked. His greatest book, a monumental Oxford Lectern Bible of 1935, is the noblest edition of the Bible ever issued in English; his smaller and less ambitious efforts, often decorated with the typographic ornament at which he was a master, possess enormous wit and charm. His one type design, Centaur, which was based upon Jenson (Jenson, Nicolas), is among the most successful modern adaptations of an early roman, although it is too elegant for frequent use.

      Frederic William Goudy (Goudy, Frederic W), who was the most prolific American type designer, created more than 100 faces during a long career as a printer, editor, and typographer. In 1908 he began a long association with the Lanston Monotype Corporation, for which he did much of his best work. Among his types were Forum and Trajan, which were based upon the roman capital letters inscribed on Trajan's Column; Goudy Modern, his most successful text face; and a number of black-letter and display faces. Goudy edited two journals, Typographica and Ars Typographica, in which he expounded his theories of design; he also wrote a number of books, among them Elements of Lettering and The Alphabet.

      William Addison Dwiggins (Dwiggins, William Addison), a student of Goudy, was long associated with the publishing firm of Alfred A. Knopf (Knopf, Alfred A.), whose house style he helped to establish. In hundreds of volumes of trade books he designed, typography was taken seriously (each book carried a brief colophon on the history of the type employed); there was an attempt to use contemporary typographic decoration; and the bindings, using designs made up of repeated decorative units like early printers' fleurons, were extremely successful. Dwiggins designed a number of typefaces for the Linotype, two of which, Electra and Caledonia, have had wide use in American bookmaking. In the U.S., unlike England and the Continent, printers have relied far more upon Linotype than Monotype for book composition.

      English (United Kingdom) typography, like that everywhere, marked time during World War I but made remarkable progress soon after. A new generation of typographers, inspired by Morris' ideals of quality but at the same time aware of the need to adapt them to the new mass-production techniques, had begun to make their names. Foremost among these was Stanley Morison (Morison, Stanley), who, after a year's apprenticeship with The Imprint, became a typographer on the staff of Burns and Oates, where he worked on a wide variety of books, among them the liturgical texts in which the firm specialized; here he began to develop the rationalistic approach to typographic design that characterizes the English school. Morison demanded that typography be functional: the task of the book and the newspaper designer was to transmit the author's text clearly, and the task of the advertising and display designer was to command attention. In 1922 Morison became typographic adviser to the Monotype Corporation and instituted a program of cutting for the composing machine a repertory of types culled from the best faces of the past, to which were added a number of contemporary faces designed for modern needs. He had prepared himself for the task by a strenuous course of self-education in paleography and calligraphy, in order to understand the written hands that the early types imitated, and in the history of printing design itself. In 1923 he joined Oliver Simon in publishing The Fleuron, a journal of printing history and design in which he published a number of important articles on calligraphy and typography.

      In 1925 Morison was made typographic adviser to the Cambridge University Press, whose printer, Walter Lewis, had begun a complete reform of its typographic resources. Cambridge stocked most of the types Morison commissioned for Monotype and demonstrated by their intelligent use that mechanical composition could be used to produce books at once handsome and functional. Among these types were Garamond, based upon a 17th-century French letter (see above); Bembo, after an Aldine roman; Centaur, an adaption of Rogers' foundry face; and Baskerville and Bell, based upon English models. Italics included Arrighi, a version of the letter used by the 16th-century papal writing master and printer (see above). Among the modern faces whose design Morison supervised were Eric Gill's Sans Serif, which enjoyed a wide vogue in advertising and avant-garde book typography; Gill's Perpetua, based upon his stonecut letters; and Times New Roman, designed by Morison himself for The Times (London), whose staff he joined in 1930. The last has been called the most successful type design of the 20th century, a result of its economy and legibility when used on high-speed presses.

      Francis Meynell (Meynell, Sir Francis) was another who demonstrated that mechanical composition and printing, if properly used, could produce aesthetically satisfying books. The books of Meynell's Nonesuch Press, which were usually limited editions of the classics reflecting his own catholic and excellent literary taste, are marked by restrained design, fine papers, and careful presswork. More varied and original than those of the earlier private presses, they were printed not by the proprietor but by large, mechanized shops. Meynell's trade books, published under the same imprint, demonstrated that well-designed and manufactured books need not be costly; the Nonesuch one-volume editions of English classical authors were inexpensive, handsome, and readable.

      The most influential modern publisher of English low-priced books, however, was Allen Lane (Lane, Sir Allen), whose Penguin books, established in 1935 and inspired by such continental publishers as Insel Verlag and Albatross, proved that a well-designed series of inexpensive paperbacks, both worthwhile reprints and new titles, could succeed both commercially and intellectually. They did much to bring about the paperback revolution that swept both the Continent and the United States in the period that followed World War II.

      German (Germany) typography from World War I until the advent of Adolf Hitler was greatly influenced by the Bauhaus, which stressed the graphic arts; its books, which were heavily illustrated, broke away from traditionally symmetrical layouts, in which pictures were inserted into a rigid framework of text, and strove instead for freer arrangements, usually asymmetrical, in which the type supported the illustrations. The attempt was to create graphic patterns on the page and to enhance the reader's consciousness of the illustrations. Many of the Bauhaus faculty were architects and industrial designers, whose principles demanded that the types they used, like the buildings and machines they designed, be sharp and unornamented, symbolic of a machine-dominated society. Their favourite types were sans serifs, such as Gill's Sans Serif and Paul Renner's Futura. When the Nazis dispersed the Bauhaus group, its style became truly international. It has since lost favour among book designers, except for art and architectural books, partly because sans serif types and asymmetrical layout proved less legible than traditional modes and partly because of its rigid limitations.

      Other between-war styles, closely linked to literary or artistic movements that affected book design, were Dadaism (Dada) and Surrealism. The Dadaists' pamphlets, posters, and books employed free, abstract layout, a great mixture of type sizes and faces, and an attempt to create mood through typography. Surrealist writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire (Apollinaire, Guillaume) and André Breton (Breton, André) often collaborated in the design of their own books, attempting to make the typography of their works reflect its mood.

      In France, especially, the production of books intended to be works of art in their own right was dominated by painters and sculptors. Publishers such as Ambroise Vollard (Vollard, Ambroise) commissioned members of the School of Paris, among them Braque, Matisse, Bonnard, and Picasso, to illustrate books (book) in which the illustrator worked closely with highly skilled craftsmen to create colourful, original, limited editions, which, while they sometimes may fail as readable books, achieve admirable success as visual decoration.

      During the 20th century, styles in book design, as in all the arts, fine or applied, have become increasingly international. Styles born in one country spread throughout the world and die through overuse at a dizzying rate. As a consequence it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish truly individual or national styles—books, magazines, clothes, paintings, music, regardless of country of origin, all resemble one another far more than they differ. (See also writing.)

James M. Wells

Additional Reading

There is a vast literature on typography and printing history. A Bibliography of Printing, comp. by Edward C. Bigmore and C.W.H. Wyman, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1880–86), was still useful enough to merit reprinting in 1945. Several learned and technical journals print annual bibliographies. See especially Studies in Bibliography and Publications of the Modern Language Association, which emphasize articles dealing with analytic bibliography and printing history. The best brief history in English is Sigfrid H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, rev. ed. (1962). Curt Buhler, The Fifteenth-Century Book (1960), is an excellent survey of early printing and publishing practice. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–84), is the earliest comprehensive manual on printing, typography, and type making. The 1962 edition of Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, with an excellent introduction and full annotation, gives considerable insight into the typography and printing of the day; there were no significant changes from the invention, c. 1450, until the early 19th century. Daniel B. Updike, Printing Types, 3rd ed., 2 vol. (1962), is a thorough and interesting history of the development of type design from the beginnings to about 1930—highly personal, highly dogmatic, but the classic work on the subject. Of the many books and articles by Stanley Morison, three are especially noteworthy to the nonprofessional reader: First Principles of Typography, 2nd ed., with postscript (1967), is an expanded version of his Britannica article on “Typography,” which became the definitive statement of his views on the subject, and has been translated into several languages. The Typographic Arts (1950), contains two essays on, inter alia, the interrelationship between calligraphy, engraving, and type design. The Typographic Book, ed. by Kenneth Day (1962), is an expanded version of Morison's Four Centuries of Fine Printing (1924). It contains good reproductions of specimen titles and text pages spanning 1450–1935. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt (ed.), The Book in America, 2nd ed. (1951), is a historical survey of American printing and publishing from the beginning to the present. Kenneth Day (ed.), Book Typography, 1815–1965, in Europe and the United States of America (1966), contains uneven but generally good articles on its subject. John Carter and Percy Muir (eds.), Printing and the Mind of Man (1967), the catalog of two major exhibitions held in London for an International Printing Exhibition, contains much technical information on the technological development of printing and type founding from their invention to modern times, as well as notes on books important for their intellectual or aesthetic impact. Henri J. Martin and Lucien Febvre, L'Apparition du livre (1958), while heavily French in its emphasis, is a stimulating and original history of the social, economic, cultural, and technical evolution of the book trades from the manuscript period to the 19th century. Of the many modern manuals on typography, mainly reflecting the Bauhaus school, two that are representative and better than average are Jan Tschichold, Typographische Gestaltung (1935; Eng. trans., Asymmetric Typography, 1967); and Emil Ruder, Typographie (1967). The latter has text in German, French, and English, and also shows Dadaist and other modern schools. Tschichold became converted to traditional typography, and in Designing Books (1951), gives an excellent exposition of his later views. Hugh Williamson, Methods of Book Design, 2nd ed. (1966), is a full and good survey of modern book design and production methods. The Penrose Annual, published in London, has technical articles on new developments in design and processes as well as good essays on the history and aesthetics of printing. The Gutenberg Jahrbuch, emanating from Mainz, the cradle of printing, emphasizes incunabula but includes articles on later printing, publishing, and binding. Valuable information is found in Herbert Lechner, Geschichte der modernen Typographie: von der Steglitzer Werkstatt zum Kathodenstrahl (1981); Erik Lindegren, ABC of Lettering and Printing (1982); Bill Gray, Tips on Type (1983); and Words of the World: A Typographic Demonstration of World Alphabets and Languages (1983).

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