BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Update: Hours after the publication of this article Indra Kupferschmid published an article in which she corrected some of the facts presented in the original article and provided an opposite view on the issue. We republished Indra’s article to correct the factual errors, with her permission of course. Make sure to check the corrections before reading this article.—Ed.

The other day someone sent me a link to a website with the preposterous title of “The 100 Best Typefaces of All Time�. Topping the chart was Helvetica, and that stirred my ire. I dismissed the list because it was based on marketing figures from one source, FontShop, coupled with the opinions of half a dozen mostly Berlin-based typographers, but I was still incensed.

When it comes to, say, boxers, you can handicap the various athletes in the ring and predict that Muhammad Ali would beat Jack Johnson or Jim Corbett and that, therefore, he is number one, but a lot of other factors come to bear on your decision: sentimentality, the fact that Ali is acknowledged (by people like me, with no real knowledge of the sport) to be “The Greatest�; he has name recognition, and so on. But how do you evaluate a typeface? Is it just based on its widespread use? Or its suitability to the subject at hand? Ease of reading? Familiarity?

Bust portrait of Muhammad Ali by Ira Rosenberg, from the World Journal Tribune. (Image: Library of Congress)

For Helvetica, an explanation of its history helps to explain its longevity. Most typeface designs are the result of fashion or changes in taste; some are technologically driven. When iron printing presses were introduced around 1800, sharper, crisper types such as Bodoni and Didot were created. When laser printers came along in the mid-1980s, with their bitmapped fonts, students in Holland began producing typefaces that reflected the quality of the poor printing. Letters in Studie (Eindhoven, Lecturis, 1983) shows examples by Jelle Bosma and Petr van Blokland designed on a 40-pixel grid. Emigré, an early digital type foundry, produced Oakland (1985) and other lo-res types for the market.

So, fashion and technology, which are ever evolving as they become obsolete, are as influential on type design and typography as on any other medium, from dressmaking to car design. When printing technology became so good that uniformly smooth, crisp faces were the norm, designers longed for the grit and noise found in old letterpress posters and started a fad for trashed and distressed faces. But like everything else that is fashionable, typefaces retire to await a future recall.

The art of reviving typefaces began in the Victorian era, and among the choices of contemporaries, the original Caslon is a model that has endured. In the 20th century, typeface revivals seemed to outstrip new designs. Production accelerated as two big companies, Linotype and Monotype, tussled in the field. The head of typeface development at the British Monotype Company, Stanley Morison, said, “Type today does not require inspiration so much as investigation.� He led the charge into the past with modern versions of the types Aldus (Bembo), Fournier, Bell, Walbaum and others. Linotype (under George W. Jones) countered with superior versions of Granjon (ironically named as it is the best Garamond copy of the metal era), Baskerville and Janson.

At that time, two sans-serif types introduced in the late 1920s dominated the market for advertising. These were Monotype Gill Sans and Futura, of the German Bauer foundry. Suddenly there was a rush to create, imitate or revive sans-serif types. The Berthold foundry of Berlin dusted off the matrices for its Akzidenz Grotesk (1898), while their rivals, the Haas Type Foundry of Basel, decided to rework Schelter Grotesk, which had been issued by the Leipziger Schelter & Giesecke foundry in 1880. This became Neue Haas Grotesk in 1957, which was then picked up by the Stempel foundry in Frankfurt. It wanted to identify the type with the emerging popularity of Swiss graphic design and chose the ancient Roman name of Switzerland, Helvetia, and so Helvetica was reborn in 1961.

Max Meidinger’s original 1957 design of Helvetica (from the Haas Typefoundry brochure “From Helvetica to Haas Unica,� Münchenstein, ca 1979).

The reason for the popularity of Gill Sans and Futura was that they turned their back on these Grotesks of the 19th century, which were worn out. Eric Gill took a new approach: pen-made humanist calligraphy was the basis for his type (he had also worked on the drawings for the London Underground alphabet with his mentor, Edward Johnston). These letters made more coherent word shapes and were easier to read than Grotesks. But Gill’s type standardized the distinct curled-tail “l� and shed-roofed figure “1� of Johnston’s design, which led to confusion with the capital “I� (a problem in many sans serifs).

The third (digital) version of Edward Johnston’s proprietary London Underground typeface, photographed on the Piccadilly Line in 1983.

Paul Renner’s Futura was designed to reflect the new machine age, with simple geometric shapes, straight lines and circles that gave it a cool Art Deco elegance. Both types are now imbued with a lot of cultural baggage, so Gill suggests the British Broadcasting Corporation and Futura has become nostalgic shorthand for the era of streamlining.

Paul Renner’s Futura Light, 1928, from a Bauer type foundry brochure (New York, ca 1930)

But in the 1930s, these two types were immensely popular in Europe and North America, and the other founders had to respond quickly. Returning to the 19th century should have been out of the question for the competition, except that the German foundries had been flattened in the Second World War and were slow to retool.

Helvetica became a national brand, an identity for the popular “Swiss style� of typography of Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann, which quickly spread as their well-indoctrinated students took the new look back to Yale and other American schools. From BMW, Bayer and Lufthansa in Germany, the Helvetica look spread to Bank of America, Knoll, Panasonic, Target, Crate&Barrel, JC Penney, Mattel, American Airlines, Sears, Microsoft and other corporations.

In the late ’90s Microsoft was selling a million copies of Word each month and gave away 14 fonts with its program. Its knock-off of Helvetica is called Arial. Linotype had taken over Stempel, and then Haas, and so consolidated its ownership of Helvetica and many of the clones. The stark sans-serif look that had first symbolized revolution in the hands of Russian typographers in 1917 became institutionalized as the bland face of corporate smugness.

Swiss-style poster for the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, 1972. (Courtesy of Frances Butler)

As it spread over the graphic landscape like melted runny processed cheese, I suggested renaming it Velveetica. Its blandness and general horridness oozed out on all sides. It was neutral, but also tasteless and was taking over typography. Nothing could stop it as designers unquestioningly copied one another in adopting it. The idea that it was more modern than Gill Sans or Futura has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

A card advertising Helvetica filmsetting (Bauer Alphabets, New York, no date)

After the adoption of the Swiss style internationally, another event caused the persistence of Helvetica: the arrival of the personal computer. Apple could fit only a few types into the memory of its LaserWriter printer driver. Times and Helvetica were decided by executive fiat (based on their popularity at the time); Symbol and Courier were required by the operating system. Then, a team of experts was called in to choose more types: Palatino, Zapf Chancery, Avant Garde, Bookman and Century Schoolbook were picked by committee. One of the committee, Sumner Stone, told me, “In retrospect they seem pretty strange and random. … Times and Helvetica were redrawn, and with Helvetica the narrow and oblique came free because it was just an algorithm.� With only garbage to pick from, there was a visual blight of Times, Helvetica and Palatino in the early days of “desktop publishing,� which lasted well beyond their sell-by date.

Helvetica brochure Frankfurt (D Stempel AG, no date)

Speaking of which, the US government (which uses Helvetica for tax forms and other official printed matter) specified it for “generic packaging� in (wouldn’t you guess?) 1984 (see top of page). Everyone blindly accepts Helvetica, most of them we assume because they follow leaders like lemmings, but why do they extoll its worth? Is it a great international hoodwinking conspiracy, like the Emperor’s New Clothes?

In 1993, Robert Norton, who was a Microsoft bagman, invited prominent people in the field of typography to contribute to a book entitled Types Best Remembered / Types Best Forgotten (London & Kirkland, Washington, Parsimony Press) and write about their favorite and least favorite typefaces.

Peter Karow (who created the Ikarus program for type digitization) wrote about Helvetica: how he had digitized it in various clones throughout the 1970s and 1980s as competing companies put out their own similar versions. It was his favorite, it seems, but with reservations. In 1993, he relates, Stefan Rögener told him that “90% of creative directors use Helvetica, Futura, Garamond and Baskerville. Give me a pistol!�

The Ikarus program allowed designers to alter their Bembo clone into a Helvetica clone, although why would they? (From “Ikarus for Typefaces in Digital Form� by Peter Karow, URW Unternehmensberatung Karow Rubow Weber GHBH, Hamburg, 1983)

I took the opportunity to name Helvetica my least favorite type and wrote a reasoned (I thought) explanation of why it is not a good typeface: “The letters are square and squat and don’t communicate with their neighbors. … There is more internal space in the counters than around the words, creating ugly and standoffish silhouettes.� The point I was making is that, to operate legibly, words have to have a visual balance between internal and external white space, a kind of aerodynamic flow. It’s a physical fact, and types like Syntax or Frutiger work far better than Helvetica, which remains self-enclosed and constipated-looking.

Legibility operates not at the level of characters but of ideational units. Adults read clusters of letters, such as “the,� as a single unit, or their brains group clusters of characters to speed comprehension. The better these units cohere, the more legible they will be (assuming that speed and comprehension are goals). Typefaces that have many characters that resemble one another (such as “a� “s� and “e� in Helvetica) impede the reader, as does the fact that the enclosed letter shapes prevent them from fusing to make more cohesive units. These are scientifically established aspects of letterform design and should take Helvetica out of the equation for anyone looking to create a legible message. Communication is a science and doesn’t really have much to do with aesthetics, other than the reader’s comfort via familiarity.

Static versus dynamic letterforms

In this illustration from “Syntax-Antiqua, eine serifenlose Linearschrift auf neuer Basis (Syntax, a Sans Serif on a New Basis)� (Gebrauchsgraphik, 1970), Erich Schulz-Anker (Manager of Typographic Development at D Stempel AG) contrasts the mechanical Didone-Helvetica development with a humanist line running from Garaldes (i.e. Sabon) to Syntax, designed by Hans Eduard Meier and released by Stempel in 1969. He contrasts them as “static� versus “dynamic� forms. I would further characterize them as illegible versus legible forms. See how the letters on the left stand apart and isolated from one another, while those in the dynamic group relate to their neighbors.

Of course, most lay people can’t tell one sans serif from another. When people say they prefer Helvetica to Arial because the latter is a bad copy, I ask if there’s a difference between a Big Mac and a Whopper, and, more to the point, would you honestly feed either to your kids?

Adrian Frutiger, “Mister Univers� himself, tried to improve on Helvetica with the Univer series, begun in 1954 (and he succeeded, causing the Helvetians to expand their family of weights in response), but then, in his maturer years, he turned his back on Univers to design the family that bears his own name (Frutiger, 1976). With the Internet, Helvetica has retrenched and, despite the Arial clone that mimics it (see “The Scourge of Arial� by Mark Simonson), gotten new legs as a font that stays the same cross-platform. If you use any Adobe product, you cannot avoid Helvetica.

Comparison of four sans serifs from “My Fonts�

Everything about Helvetica is repellant: from its uptight aura to its smug, splendid isolation. How it persists in the face of such brilliant alternatives as Frutiger and Syntax defies logic.

Mike Parker, who oversaw production of Helvetica at Linotype, wrote, “In the sixties by cutting it for the Linotype we made Helvetica the Swiss sans serif of choice across most of the world.� But, he adds ruefully (in Types Best Forgotten), “Never again should we have to endure quite such dulling repetition of any single design.�

First showing of American Helvetica (Mergenthaler Linotype, New York, no date)

I sincerely believe that people (even designers) who say Helvetica is legible are simply confused. It’s pervasive, certainly. We see it everywhere — that’s why we think we can read Helvetica — but it is not nearly as legible as, say, Frutiger or Syntax, for the reasons I have stated above. Syntax is not merely a legible typeface: Syntax is beautiful, it’s sublime, it sings. Well, you argue, Helvetica is neutral. Yes, Helvetica is neutral, but it also symbolizes blandness and conformity and… well, sorry Swiss people, boredom.

Helvetica-Kursiv flyer from D Stempel advertising Linotype-Matrizen in 6 to 10 point (Frankfurt, no date)

In 2007, Gary Hustwit made a documentary film about the typeface in which various talking heads exuded enthusiasm for the wretched mess that is Helvetica. The corporations have agreed, and the bland new world feared by Huxley, Orwell and other writers of the last century is one step nearer.

(al)

© Alastair Johnston for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

The Industrial Revolution gave us a new iron age, one of cast iron, which a devotee of Vulcan told me he thought was the highest achievement of man — or, as he put it, “the hairless ape.â€� In the 18th century, cast-iron bridges sprang across British rivers such as the Tay and Severn. These lovely sculptural archways are resistant to rust, so many are still standing.

But tragedies like the Dee Bridge collapse and the terrible Tay Bridge disaster of 1879 dampened the public’s enthusiasm and led to William McGonagall’s famous ballad:

“Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay,
Alas! I am very sorry to say,
That ninety lives have been taken away,
On the last sabbath day of 1879,
Which shall be remembered for a very long time.”

What are “Industrial-strength types”? In this article I propose to explore them.

Birth Of Trainspotting

Railway locomotives, which moved through the countryside, were the first big machines to broach people’s consciousness. As individual self-propelled machines, they altered the landscape, which had been static until that point. A coach or horse-drawn cart moved along well-worn paths, but a railway required straighter lines and a level surface, so cuttings, ramparts and bridges were built, and the coal-fired locomotive would spew fire and ash like a dragon as it clattered along.

A replica of “Puffing Billy,� a giant boiler on wheels with a beam engine, runs at the Beamish Open Air Museum in County Durham, UK. Its nameplate reads “Locomotion� in sans serif.

The Agenoria, built in 1829, is on display at the Railway Museum in York, UK. Its name is cast onto the driving wheel in a thick roman typeface.

The Great Western Railway was one of the first to have a livery, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel also distinguished his railway by having a broad gauge, of seven feet. Though he was well known as an engineer and a builder of bridges and iron ships, he was pleased to buy two steam locomotives from George Stephenson, who is considered by many to be the father of the modern railway for his 1829 “Rocket.�

The original “Rocket,� in the Science Museum in London.

The brass nameplate shows a strong hand-wrought letter with backward-only serifs on the upright of the K and reinforced bracketing on the serifs of E and T. Otherwise, it is an early form of the type later known as Clarendon.

The Purpose Of Clarendon Types

Clarendon was first introduced for emphasis, a precursor of bold as a related face in a family. The idea of a boldface directly related to a roman arose with the Linotype machine in 1895, where bold was offered as an alternative to italic in two-matrix machines, but in the 20th century, extended typeface families that included bolds and semi-bolds became commonplace.

Before the introduction of Clarendon as a text face, it could be seen as a display type, for example in Figgins’ two-line Pica in shade, from about 1817. It was copyrighted by Robert Besley of London’s Fann Street Foundry in 1845, and as soon as the copyright lapsed three years later, it was widely copied. Railway timetables, newspaper headings, dictionaries, guidebooks, textbooks and other places that required spot emphasis were its preferred venues at first.

Baedeker’s “Greece,� Leipzig, 1909. Clarendon used for emphasis.

In essence, Clarendon is a condensed slab-serif letterform (known as Egyptian in its earliest lead incarnations), with brackets on the serifs.

Specimen Texts

Images of railway trains frequent the Fann Street Foundry’s 1844 specimen (which still bears the name of Thorowgood & Co). They feature on sans-serif, bold and even Tuscan display types. One of my favorite pages advertises the speed of the new mode of transport:

Thorowgood’s two-lines Grotesque Outline of 1841.

The typeface is a condensed sans serif with a slight shadow on the right, suggesting movement. (Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the first Bridgwater station in 1841 on his Great Western Line.)

Thorowgood’s 48-point Railway Ornaments of 1841.

Detail of Thorowgood’s locomotive, the Centaur.

Cuts of trains that could be pieced together by printers were also made by Thorowgood for use on posters. An enlargement of the largest size (four lines pica, or two thirds of an inch high) shows a locomotive of the “Firefly� class, the Centaur (labeled in grotesque, or sans serif), which was also built in 1841 and ran on the Great Western Railway.

Fellow Travellers

The Rocket ran on the Liverpool and Manchester railway. For its 150th anniversary, a replica coach was created (now in the Railway Museum, York) along the lines of a stagecoach body, with the word “Traveller� in silver slab serif, to which an elegant two-tone shadow in blue and black (like daintily made-up eyes) has been added.

An early passenger carriage built along the lines of a stagecoach.

Such illusionistic shadows became a staple of the 19th-century sign-painter’s art, and many superb examples are found on surviving coaches from the time.

Nameplate of a Great Western Railway locomotive, 1838.

The North Star was built by Stephenson around 1838, and a rubbing of its brass nameplate shows a bold slab serif with brackets. The style, which became the basis of the Great Western Railway style for the next century is “exciting and has a solid magnificence,� according to Patricia Davey in her article “Locomotive Lettering� (Typographica 13, p. 12).

Kidding Around

Alphabets of things were a popular subject for children’s books in the 19th century. The Great Western Railway is depicted in Cousin Chatterbox’s Railway Alphabet (London, Dean & Son, 1854), drawn by Freeman DeLaMotte.

Cousin Chatterbox’s Railway Alphabet, 1854. (Courtesy of the Fox Collection of Children’s Books, San Francisco Public Library)

While the vehicles are labelled in plain grotesque (or square sans-serif) lettering, the alphabet book uses an elementary Clarendon form, suited to the subject. At the outset — “A is the ARCH — we see the Doric entrance to Euston station from 1837 (no longer extant), which was one of the first recreations of monumental Graeco-Roman architecture in Britain after its designer Philip Hardwick visited Italy. The engine shown is the “Mazeppaâ€� (a name popularized by Byron’s 1819 epic poem). Euston was opened as the base for the London and Birmingham Railway in 1838.

Gladstone, 1882.

The Gladstone was built for the Brighton and South Coast railway in 1882. The sans-serif lettering floats off the surface with its multicolored 3-D effect as well as a double shadow. The red of the body detail is cleverly echoed in the highlights of the letterform. These illusionistic effects were employed throughout the British railways in the late-Victorian period.

Detail of London and North-Eastern Railway tender.

Elaborately detailed lettering in a third-class compartment.

Here are some more examples from London and North-Eastern Railways and from London Midland and Scottish railways of floating sans-serif capitals:

Bold shadowed grotesque letters from Victorian-era trains.

A century later, locomotive lettering had evolved with the times. The A4 locomotive, known to trainspotting youth as a Streak, in service on the East Coast route, was a magnificent Art Deco streamlined model, built in 1915. The first four Streaks were silver in color and went 500 miles a day. When I was a lad, the names Mallard, Falcon, Guillemot and Sir Nigel Gresley were magical to us, and we would interrupt our cricket game by the side of the track to gawk as the Flying Scotsman sped past at 100 mph. (These locomotives were mostly named after birds; Sir Nigel was the designer of this model.)

An Art Deco locomotive known to trainspotters as a Streak. (Image: Gavin Cameron)

The LNER express trains, in service until 1963, were British racing green, although Mallard and Sir Nigel were blue. The lettering was akin to Gill Sans; indeed, Eric Gill was also inspired by locomotive lettering as a boy and was a pupil and flatmate of Edward Johnston, celebrated as designer of the London Underground railway’s proprietary typeface used in its signage. Gill Sans is now institutionalized as a British national letterform (seen for example in the typography of the BBC). A rival to Monotype’s Gill Sans face was made by Stephenson-Blake and called Granby. It actually leans more toward Johnston’s interpretation of humanist sans serif, a style he had invented.

A spread from “Specimen of Printing Types� by Stephenson-Blake (Sheffield, 1932), showing Clarendon and Granby.

Pressing On

One of the great inventions of the 19th century was the all-iron printing press. Ever since Johannes Gutenberg adapted a wooden screw-lever wine press to printing in the 1440s, printers had tried to improve the power of the machine. The first successful iron press was the one made in 1800 by Walker for the third Earl Stanhope, who generously did not patent it, so anyone could build a cast-iron press. It was a huge step forward in print production and quality. The Stanhopes had the maker’s name and “Stanhope Inv.� engraved in a modern roman letter on either side of the staple.

More improvements followed, the most famous being the Albion and Columbian, but many companies made machines incorporating their own patents to improve the screw action or the pressure. The “Son of Vulcan,â€� whom I alluded to earlier, collects cast-iron machinery — in particular, iron printing presses. A visit to his collection inspired me to think about the letterforms chosen by their makers to identify them ; quite a few of his machines are unique. Unlike other cast-iron machinery, such as engines, stoves and military equipment, for which sans-serif forms seem to be preferred (because dealing with the mould when casting is easy), two letterforms dominate printing press identities: modern face and Clarendon.

F.J. Austin of New York engraved his name in a bold modern face on the metal plate bolted to his iron press, with its bas relief of acorns, patented in October 1836.

The 1848 Imperial Press, a tabletop model, uses a bold modern for its cast name; some of the alignment is a bit erratic, perhaps because the makers attempted to follow the curve with letters that work better upright. A strut supporting the feet of this same press is in a regular, more contrasted modern typeface.

The Albion Press was another popular cast-iron printing press. The lettering is a stout modern face with bracketed serifs; in essence, a Clarendon. This one was made by Henry Watts of London in 1853.

Cincinnati Type Foundry’s acorn-shaped Press was made after the design of Stansbury, sometime between 1825 and 1856. The stars are a nice touch. The lettering is also Clarendon and quite regular, suggesting that punches were used to make the mould.

For a change from the Clarendon, the British-made Lion press uses a bold Tuscan letterform. This press was an advance on the Albion made by Frederick Ullmer from 1866 onward. It was designed for embossing or bank-note printing, for which great pressure was required. The location, “LONDON,� is in a heavy monoline sans serif.

Stolid And Solid

Speaking of banks, there is something suggestive of strength in the best bank typography. A bronze plaque on the old Wells Fargo building on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, undated, has a condensed bold modern letterform. It is hybrid of Ultra Bodoni and Engraver’s Bold, with a dash of Imre Reiner’s 1932 typeface Corvinus Fett in the K.

Wells Fargo Bank (date unknown) bronze plaque.

Bank Chambers in Haringey, north London, suggests solidity with its bold square sans serif. It may have been made by pressing wood pattern letters into wet cement.

A cast-iron plaque from 1869 on an iron bridge in Morpeth, Northumberland, tells the story of the bridge in bold modern. Note the initial S in “Subscription,� “Josh� and “ESQ� have been turned upside down. There’s a folk quality to this (reminiscent of the Superman logo) that puts the weight at the top of the letter.

1869 brass plaque on a footbridge over the River Wansbeck, Northumberland.

I’ve found many examples of Victorian cast-iron lettering buried in ornate structures, from bridges to manhole covers to drinking fountains to public toilets — the one for drinking fountains, seen in Edinburgh, asks you to “Keep the pavement dryâ€� in a condensed, spaced gothic or sans serif.

Ornate shelter for a Victorian drinking fountain (a dry spot in Scotland).

Iron Ladies On The High Seas

Ships are magnificent examples of machine-age artistry, and all of them have names. One of the last sailing ships with an iron hull, the four-masted windjammer Peking, was built in Germany around 1890.

The Peking in South Street Seaport, New York.

The Turbinia in permanent dry dock.

The Turbinia was built in 1894 as the first steam-turbine-powered ship and was by far the fastest ship in the world. Charles Parsons was its engineer. The sleek and elegant design was matched by a fanciful late-Victorian letterform for the name that has the strength of a sans serif with additional midriff bulges (popularized from the 1860s to ’70s). The Ionic serifs resemble a Stephenson-Blake type of the time called Flemish Expanded, but the visual effect, with simple drop shadow, is more akin to wood type of the period.

The Mauretania is no longer extant.

The RMS Mauretania was the sister ship of the more famous Lusitania. At the time of her launch, she was the heaviest and largest moving object on earth. The Mauretania held the record as the world’s fastest ship from her inaugural Atlantic crossing in 1907 and on for the next 22 years. She was built for Cunard at the Swan Hunter shipyard on the river Tyne, and, interestingly, the name of the ship contains a huge typo. The North African roman province is often spelled Mauritania, but having gone ahead with it, the directors decided that the alternative spelling was acceptable.

This massive brass letter for the Mauretania was an enormous typo.

The brass letters used for the name of the ship were two feet square in rudimentary sans serif, but set at an angle to create a racy, more nautical italic. My photo above is of the model ship made by Swan Hunter for its board room, and the “E� is the original letter, saved when the ship was scrapped in 1935.

The U.S.S. Pampanito in San Francisco Bay.

The U.S.S. Pampanito is a submarine built in New Hampshire in 1943 that saw active duty in the Pacific during World War II. The name is Spanish for “butterfish.â€� Typical of military machines, it has chamfered gothic letterforms — like on a rugby or American football jersey — suggestive of ruggedness.

Chamfered Gothic lettering on a bulldozer.

We would expect a bulldozer to have the same letterform. Indeed, here is a typical example from Laytonville, in Northern California:

Original Caterpillar tractor logo.

However, there’s always an exception to the rule: the original logo of Caterpillar reflected the sinuous delicate creature it is named after.

Consciously or unconsciously, typographers use types for graphic effect. Bold types are used for impact, but we increasingly see subtle differences between weights of type to articulate levels of meaning. The industrial-strength types I have been discussing seem like natural choices for cast-iron machinery that emerged during this period of technological change. Today, they are found in contexts where strength or solidity is needed. But there is always a parallel history to the one we write. Forays into Tuscan or the decorative shadow effects of the sign-painter’s palette show that, no matter how straightforward a letterform, there is always an urge to adorn and decorate.

Credits

All photos copyright 2012 by Alastair Johnston, except “Sir Nigel Gresley� by Gavin Cameron. Thanks to Ted Salkin for providing access to his collection of cast-iron printing presses. Trains photographed at Beamish Open-Air Industrial Museum, Durham, UK; The Science Museum, London; The Museum of Transport, Glasgow; and the National Railway Museum, York. Turbinia and Mauretania photographed at the Discovery Museum, Newcastle-on-Tyne. Fann Street Foundry 1844 specimen, Baedecker’s Greece, and Stephenson-Blake catalogue from the Poltroon Press collection. Cousin Chatterbox’s Railway Alphabet courtesy of the Fox Collection of Children’s Books, San Francisco Public Library.

(al) (jc)

© Alastair Johnston for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

First a question (or perhaps a Freudian jab at your subconscious): What does this shape represent?

Could it be a trowel, a duck, an ornamental motif, or a seed-pod? I know, Aladdin’s Lamp! What if I told you it was an alphabetic character? What alphabet would you assign to it? Cham? Telugu? Perhaps it has the cursive quality of South Asian letterforms, created on bamboo strips (or palm leaves) and written with the pen held in one’s fist… doesn’t it?

It has been said that “we read best what we read most”. This quote was used as a type specimen in Emigre magazine in the late 1980′s by Zuzana Licko. It was written in defense of her typefaces, whose elemental shapes—designed with the strictures of the early HP laser printer in mind—challenged the commonly held notions of what made typefaces legible.

The paradigm shift—wrought by the personal computer, Postscript and desktop publishing—should have had a massive impact on the shapes of our typographic characters, just as the advances of the World Wide Web further changed the way we viewed words (even though letterforms change at the pace of the most conservative reader). Thus, radical innovations like Kurt Schwitters’ Systemschrift, (a phoenetic alphabet from 1927), are doomed to fail.

Our writing, which is derived from either Roman or Gothic forms (and sometimes both), is historic and non-systematic, said Schwitters. His “optophoenetic” approach was to make the shapes of the letters more accurately reflect how they sounded. But in order for it to work, massive re-education would be required.

Kurt Schwitters’ “Systemschrift”, an attempt at developing a phoenetic alphabet.

Licko was paraphrasing Sir Cyril Burt who wrote, “almost everyone reads most easily matter set up in the style and size to which he has become habituated.” (A Psychological Study of Typography, Cambridge, 1959, p. 18). So we do not necessarily respond to “beautiful” type. You may find Centaur elegant, but others will find the spiky serifs distracting. For this reason, rather dull typefaces (like Times Roman), come to dominate our graphic landscape. My purpose here is to examine some failed attempts at creating economy, or furthering the cause of legibility.

Is Blackletter Unreadable?

For hundreds of years English was written and read in blackletter. Today we struggle with such works, such as in the piece below printed by Richard Faques at the “Sign of the Maiden’s Head” (St Paul’s Churchyard, London, 1530). The Roman character gradually supplanted blackletter in the 17th century. It was referred to by the English printers as White Letter, due to the lighter massed effect on the page. In the 19th century, during the period known as the Gothic Revival, blackletter was reintroduced as a novelty in English printing.

Our modern Roman alphabet is a hybrid reflecting the handwriting from two periods in the development of Roman letters. It combines the Capitalis Quadratus of 1st century Roman inscriptional lettering—which are our “capital” letters—with their devolved state as manifested in the 11th century in the monasteries (that had flourished in France under Emperor Charlemagne). These became our minuscules, or lower-case letters.

Charlemagne himself desired to learn to read and write, but said that “a hand accustomed to the sword could only form the simplest shapes.” By this time, war with the Arabs had cut off the supply of reeds, but relief was on the way with the introduction of papermaking (cheaper and more amenable to writing than parchment was), and goose or crow quills were substituted for reeds. These, in turn, gave way to steel pens, introduced in the 18th century (and popularized in the 1830′s), which also had a strong impact on the way we read and wrote.

Copperplate scripts, learned from writing manuals, featured steeper angles and added virtuoso flourishing. Handwriting, just like music, was considered a useful art suitable for instructing young ladies.

Script type based on the hand of its cutter, Robert Granjon—a wonderful example of the everyday handwriting of 16th century Protestant Europe.

As letterforms were introduced by scribes, they were soon emulated by the founders of type. In 1557, French punch-cutter Robert Granjon cut a typeface based on his own handwriting, hoping to supplant the popularity of italics (first introduced by Aldus in a 1501 Virgil), which he himself had made widespread. His Gothic script (today called Civilité, after the children’s conduct book in which it was used) unfortunately did not catch on, although it accurately reflected the everyday handwriting in Protestant Europe at the time.

The problem for Granjon was printers were equipped with blackletter (batârde) for vernacular works, Roman type for works in Latin, and if they wanted variety, (say for poetry), they used italic. Beautiful as Granjon’s vernacular script is, it was not essential. On top of this, the extra sorts (30 ligatures, 24 alternates for terminal letters, etc.) made it difficult for typesetters. But the introduction to Gautier de Châtillon’s Ten Books of Alexandreidos (Lyon, 1558) lauds the type:

“The novelty and strangeness of these letters will certainly surprise the reader, but I dare say he will be as much delighted by their cleanness and elegance. In point of beauty and legibility these letters are not outdone by others, and they are familiar to us because they imitate the written hand. What is printed looks like writing, and it may be hard to tell the pages printed with type.”

— Translated by Harry Carter, in Carter & H. D. L. Vervliet, Civilité Type, Oxford, 1966, p. 16.

As If Written By Hand

Roman letterforms evolve slowly, gradually reflecting the medium in which they are written. The Rustic letterforms of the ancient Romans, often written with a stylus on a wax tablet, were fluid and more condensed than the capitalis quadratus, but less cursive than letters written in ink with a reed (on parchment or papyrus). In 1741, Joseph Manni, a Florentine printer (and the first of our misguided visionaries) produced a unique edition of Virgil based on a manuscript of the poems (Codex antiquissimus) found in the Medici Laurentian library.

With an eye on retro-style, he cut new versions of “A”, “U” and “Y”, and sorted them with his Roman capitals to create a likeness of the original—sacrificing detail, but giving an overall approximation of the look of this ancient manuscript. He refers to them on the title-page as “Typis descriptus”, or descriptive types. Daniel Berkeley Updike had said of it: “The work displays that amazing audacity at arriving at a striking effect, notwithstanding inaccurate details and economy of method, which was typical of Italian printing of the time.” (Printing Types, Harvard, 1937, vol 1, p. 171)

Florentine printer Manni cut new versions of A, U & Y to evoke a 1st century manuscript.

A later typographic copy of a manuscript form was made by the celebrated Caslon foundry in 1785 (run by William Caslon III). Talbot Baines Reed’s assessment is that it “is of no particular merit though faithfully enough rendering the contemporary clerkish hand.” (A History of the Old English Letter Foundries, 1952 Edition, Faber & Faber, p. 245). The type had to be heavily kerned (which caused frequent breakage, as it was cast on angular bodies) might work in some contexts, such as a circular letter, or brief documents intended to look hand-written.

But it certainly did not work for continuous text. Nevertheless, that was how it was put to use by J. P. Cooke, a London printer, in his edition of Mary Potter’s Poetry of Nature (1789). The poems are in fact prose reworkings from the legendary Highland Bard Ossian, hailed as “The Scottish Homer”, but who was actually a fabrication of the poet James MacPherson. Cooke added titles in blackletter capitals to really confound his readers.

The decorative qualities of the blackletter caps work well individually with the plainer lowercase letters, but when grouped together, all-cap titles in blackletter become a tangle of confusion. The copperplate script, however, was popular with founders (less so with printers, because of the breakage) and was still being manufactured up until the mid-19th century.

Script typeface cut by the Caslon foundry in 1785 that caused many problems as it had to be heavily kerned and led to frequent breakage.

So The Blind Can Read

Before Louis Braille (1829) there were several attempts to devise a raised letterform to teach the blind to read. Valentin Haüy met Baroness Von Paradis in 1780 and “was surprised to find in her apartments several contrivances for the instruction of the blind; for instance, embroidered maps, and a pocket printing apparatus.” (Charles Timperley’s Encyclopedia of Literary & Typographical Anecdote, London, Henry G. Bohn, 1842, p. 751).

Haüy’s Essai sur l’Education des Aveugles (Paris, 1786) was a strange effort. Printed by Clousier, printer to Louis XVI (the last King of France), the book was typeset by blind children as part of Haüy’s plan to allow them to be a useful part of society, by having them set and print work for themselves to read. His fundamental blunder was he approached the problem from the angle of a sighted person, assuming that conventional alphabets offered the best hope.

The highly decorative, non-kerning, upright script form he chose (popular in France at the time) would impede even the nimblest reading fingers. In the printed version the letter-spacing and swash cap headers also would slow you down. One minor benefit to the compositors was that since the work was produced by embossing, the young typesetters worked with right-reading types.

Two More Clues

OK, remember our quiz? Here are two more clues… what are these: Ladies’ shoes, or just squiggles?

Attempts At Cleverness

Like Manni’s attempt, economy of method was the tool employed by Philip Rusher, who also falls into our “misguided visionary” category. He proposed to save space, and thereby paper, by eliminating descenders, since only five letters in our alphabet—g j p q y—have them. But he made a serious tactical error; to demonstrate his new type he chose to reprint a popular novel, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (Banbury, 1804). Apart from the fact that it is an unremittingly dull story with little incident and a dim grasp of locale, most of the story is set in Egypt—and that word, with its three descending letters in an awkward huddle, pops up frequently.

Notice something missing…?

The type was later used by Rusher’s nephew in 1852. Rusher even obtained a patent for “various improvements and alterations in the form of printing types … so as to diminish the trouble and expense of printing, and to render it more uniform and beautiful.” But clearly they were anything but uniform and beautiful.

The letters g, y and p are found in an awkward huddle.

An early, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, study of legibility is James Millington’s Are We to Read Backwards? This book was published by the remarkable Leadenhall Press of London (1884). The press was run by Andrew W. Tuer, an antiquarian who also enjoyed the look of old books, so his typography is quite anachronistic for that time period.

However, there is a great printer’s jest in his frontispiece which shows how books look in a railway carriage as the reader is bounced & rattled along (The frontispiece is from Millington’s introduction to English as She is Spoke, published by Field & Tuer the year before—a French-Portuguese phrase book, translated into English with a French dictionary!).

A printer’s joke—the page on the left simulating the reading-on-the-train experience.

Several “improved” alphabets are shown. Plate 5 (as shown below) is boustrophedon type, which would save eye movement in reading, but caused brain strain as well as posed problems for typesetters when they had to fix an error. Plate 7 (with no ascenders or descenders, to save space), has an almost folkloric quality to it, suggesting lettering done by amateurs.

An attempt to reduce eye-movement resulted in more problems than it solved.

A typeface lacking ascenders & descenders creates a visual jumble.

Non-professional lettering is a common source for experimental alphabets. In the 1930′s the American artist Ben Shahn was documenting The Great Depression in the rural South for the Farm Security Administration. He adapted the primitive signs he’d photographed to create his own distinctive letter-forms, seen in posters and dust-jacket designs. These in turn have been digitized into the FF Folk typeface family by Maurizio Osti in 1995 (below right).

There is a problem with the typographic adaptations of quirky lettering, and that is each character is always going to look the same. When two or three “O”s appear in close proximity, they tend to become monotonous. An artist will vary letter-forms, not just to avoid predictability, but to make pairings work better together. Even without numerals, Granjon cut 138 sorts for his first Civilité type seen earlier in this article. FF Folk has two versions for each letter, and three weights to obviate the problem.

Ben Shahn dustjacket, inspired by Southern US folk signs, and a modern typeface based on Shahn’s lettering.

Unreadable Letters In Readable Sentences

But let’s go back to our riddle. The answer is, if you haven’t guessed already, the letters “e,” “n” and “r” in Hoyt Script.

Handwriting flourished—no pun intended—in the 19th century, before the perfection of a new gadget called the typewriter (1873). And people experimented with different nibs, including one called the stub-pen, whose effect was as blunt as it sounds. Simultaneously, a major change was underway in the production of typefaces. Having learned how to grow matrices from a cast character or piece of type (to pirate typefaces), the ingenious Americans soon discovered that instead of cutting steel punches, they could simply carve a character out of a piece of soft type-metal.

This created an electrotype matrix, taking hours out of the laborious process. Typeface production accelerated, and there would be a boom in the 1880′s for the introduction of new types. James West adapted these optimized methods of production. He worked for many founders in his career, including Miller & Richard (in his native Edinburgh), Caslon and Figgins (in London), and George Bruce (in New York). In the 1880′s he worked for the Cleveland typefoundry and cut many scripts with intricate connecting strokes for them, beginning with Carpenter Script, based on the handwriting of a “Mr. Carpenter” (who worked for Robert Hoe & Company, the press manufacturer).

Released in 1883, the letters of Hoyt Script are individually unreadable, but when brought together are lively and overflowing with personality.

This script was so popular that Cleveland induced West to cut more scripts, and Hoyt Script was patented in February, 1883. It’s seen here above in Cleveland’s 1883 specimen book, where as you perhaps can see, it’s recommended as “an excellent representation of stub-pen writing.” Individually the characters are completely unreadable, but en masse, they create a unique and lively typeface, overflowing with personality.

Ideal for selling ladies’ shoes, Aladdin’s lamps, or whatever you fancy.

Note: Granjon, Manni, Potter, Haüy & Rusher books are reproduced courtesy of the Robert Grabhorn Collection on the History of Printing & Development of the Book at San Francisco Public Library. All other images from the author himself.

Editor’s Note: A big thank you to our fabulous Typography editor, Alexander Charchar, for preparing this article.

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© Alastair Johnston for Smashing Magazine, 2012.