I've never seen the terms "rule" and "law" defined quite like this. But one is entitled to one's own definitional structure.

That's fascinating. Conjectural laws, rather than authoritarian rules--very nice.

In the related interview with Noordzij that is linked, he says,

"When he gave a lecture, Tschichold - the old Tschichold, as well as the new Tschichold - always said on the invitation card: 'no discussion afterwards'."

The interesting thing about Tschichold is that his extreme dogmatism did not prevent him from doing brilliant work, nor from changing his mind. It just made him on occassion very annoying :)

I really look forward to reading the new Christopher Burke book on Tschichold.

ps. on the 'law' of maximum line length for legibility, Bill Hill of Microsoft mentioned a basis for the law in his Typecon talk: At normal reading distances, if a line is longer, the reader has to turn his or her head, instead of just the eyes, which slows down the process.

Interesting link.

I wonder, when type criticism doesn't explicitly state the laws guiding it, whether it would constitute another example of this rule-based presumptuousness from Noordzij's (or anybody else's) perspective.

Take for example this sentence: "There are wayward details in some letters: the shortened bar in f, the inadequate ear on r, the cropped head of a..." What is the basis for asserting that an r's ear is inadequate—an unspoken law? an obnoxious rule? or is this sort of criticism understood to be acceptable as a matter of taste, different from something like Tschichold's rules about line length?

I think basis for judging those details are largely a matter of aesthetic taste, but practical rules set the boundaries of the ball park we deem a tasteful, or comfortable place to be in.

Aesthetic and design rules inform taste.

Does that make sense?

j a m e s

>basis for judging those details are largely a matter of aesthetic taste, but practical rules set the boundaries

As you say there are two factors: One is aesthetics. The other is the set constraints put on by our perceptual apparatus as to what is more readable. This is a matter of physiology and psychology, and includes things like line length. Actually, I think that details can also affect readability, so text type can be critiqued from that point of view.

Gerrit Noordzij claims in this essay that if "If we ask for the intentions of the type designers, we find that their work reflected their attitude to writing with little regard for previous solutions."

I think this very wide of the mark. After Jenson, all type designers that I know of were very influenced by previous *type* designs. Griffo had and worked with Jenson's type IIRC, and his efforts take Jenson's ideas and push them in a more typographic direction, for example, *not* a direction more influenced by writing.

Caslon was directly interpreting Dutch typeface models in his own way. And that Baskerville was heavily influenced by Caslon's work, as well as by the steel pen. In turn Bodoni and Didot were influenced by what Baskerville did, not only the pen. And today an original work like Scala I don't think was influenced by changes in writing, but by other concerns relating to digital production, and the need for sans and serif designs that go together.

It's a task of writers and scientists to explain what artists and designers do, and perhaps offer them guidelines.
(And Guide is a word I prefer to Rule or Law.)
But ultimately art, design, language and maths have different ways of thought, and in as much as language and science continually attempt to define and proscribe art and design, art and design are always evolving their territory to render the map obsolete.

I find it strange that there is an expectation that typography should be subject to simple objective rules or laws about such things as line length. So while I agree with Noordzij's notion of "conjectural laws" of typography, I'd have to say that any "law" I have come across has nevertheless only ever been a generalization or best practice, and exceptions which disprove such theories are not difficult to produce in number.

Nick: So while I agree with Noordzij’s notion of “conjectural laws” of typography, I’d have to say that any “law” I have come across has nevertheless only ever been a generalization or best practice, and exceptions which disprove such theories are not difficult to produce in number.

There are no exceptions to laws, in the nicely precise sense that Noordzij uses the term, there are only exceptions to rules. Something that disproves a law -- i.e. the circumstance that renders a law false --, is not an exception, it is the basis on which you reformulate the law so that it is no longer false. This is the very heart of the distinction that Noordzij is making between rules and laws. As soon as you say

And Guide is a word I prefer to Rule or Law.

you are missing the whole point of what Noorzij is saying. He is not looking for guides or offering laws as guides, he is offering laws to prompt creative antagonism and discussion. Fundamentally, it is a scientific approach, based on putting things to the test. His objection to rules is that they cannot be put to the test, they can only be obeyed or broken.

There are no exceptions to laws

Yes, I was opining that the notion of law is not applicable to typography, and that any laws I have come across are not really laws, but as I noted, "laws".

you are missing the whole point of what Noorzij is saying.

No, I'm saying in typography I'd rather by guided (or guide) than have hard-and-fast conditions.

Bill: I think this very wide of the mark. After Jenson, all type designers that I know of were very influenced by previous *type* designs. Griffo had and worked with Jenson’s type IIRC, and his efforts take Jenson’s ideas and push them in a more typographic direction, for example, *not* a direction more influenced by writing.

I used to think this too, but then I spent a lot more time looking at contemporary manuscript books, and Griffo's innovations are pretty minor and well within the influence of the formal humanist book hand. Between Jenson and Griffo, not a lot happens in terms of that book hand, so we should not expect any significant evolution in type styles. As typographers, we have established a history in which something like making the bar of the lowercase e horizontal instead of slanted is suddenly significant, but in the overall context of renaissance text manufacture -- both chirographic and typographic -- it is not significant at all. Griffo's types, like Jensons, are thoroughly wedded to the humanist book hand.

What Noordzij has drawn our attention to is the phenomenon of very significant changes in type styles over the following centuries that correspond to and trail changes in writing. There is a tendency to think of a pre-Gutenberg scribal culture and a post-Gutenberg print culture, a kind of revolutionary media rupture of the kind that excites modern cultural theorists. But the fact is that the scribal culture persisted in various ways well into the 19th century, until the invention of mechanical typesetting, and in some areas of life until the popularisation of the typewriter. The production of manuscript books gradually dwindled to almost nothing in the 150 or so years after Gutenberg, but formal writing continued to be the means of producing many other kinds of documents, and it continued to provide the aesthetic and cultural context for the design of new typefaces. This does not imply that typographic letterforms simple copied written letterforms: obviously they did not. But they did import the characteristics of the popular written forms, most notably in stroke contrast and axis, i.e. the two characteristics by which we most often classify types.

Regarding your final points, of course designers of type are responding to other types as well as to writing, but for most of the history of type they have been doing so in a context in which a large amount of the text that readers encounter everyday is written by hand. Writing is more dynamic than type, so evolves more quickly and shows more immediately changes in tools and taste.

I really don't see any influence of Caslon in Baskerville's types. Baskerville is responding to neo-classicism and looking for a form that reflects the aesthetics of his culture. His models are not writing directly, but the increasingly important engraved image of writing, which itself is importing characteristics from writing as informed by the larger movement in architecture and art. These forms are a hybrid of written and constructed forms. In Bodoni's case, the direct influence of writing is explicitly acknowledged. Most of the 'history' of type design has been written without reference to a larger business of manufacturing texts, and so presents a purely typographical narrative in which the only possible influence on the development of new types is old types, or occasionally inscriptional lettering. This leads to fantastical notions such as the 'Transitional' classification of type, as if Baskerville were somehow anticipating Bodoni and designing his own as an interpolation between the 'Oldstyle' and the as-yet-non-existent 'Modern'.

And today an original work like Scala I don’t think was influenced by changes in writing, but by other concerns relating to digital production, and the need for sans and serif designs that go together.

Today, all bets are off on the influence of writing because there simply isn't any. Formal writing in the west is dead, and I don't consider 'calligraphers' significant. Calligraphers produce calligraphy, not texts. Type design has therefore lost its historical context. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, in terms of what may be produced as we look for new contexts to respond to and new paradigms for typography, but I think it makes it all the more important to understand that historical context and the relationship that has existed between writing and type in periods and places where formal writing and a scribal culture persisted alongside typography. Apart from anything else, it will make us sensitive to the perceptions of typography in those few places in the world where a scribal culture still exists and still influences taste and opinion of typographic forms.

When I was teaching, I tried to avoid the kind of creative antagonism where the teacher says "this is how it's done", preferring the approach of "there are many ways to do this, let's find what works for you".

Nick: Yes, I was opining that the notion of law is not applicable to typography, and that any laws I have come across are not really laws, but as I noted, “laws”.

But you still seem to be conflating 'laws' with 'rules'. Indeed, you wrote

I find it strange that there is an expectation that typography should be subject to simple objective rules or laws about such things as line length

which may indeed be an expectation that some people have, and they may share your lack of distinction between rules and laws, but that is not what Noordzij is saying and to him the distinction is very important. Why is it important? Because he is using 'law' in the scientific sense, i.e. an analytic statement of fact that, by definition, may be disproved by contradictory evidence, forcing a reformulation of the law.

You are using 'law' as a synonym for 'rule', which, as I say, is to completely miss Noordzij's point. You can't say that 'any laws I have come across are not really laws', in the scientific sense, on the grounds that you can come up with exceptions to them, because it is a given of scientific laws that they are disprovable.

By setting a Law and pointing to it, we set up the challenge to find something false in its logic. By doing this, we do more to kindle debate and get at what might be truth than if we never have a Law to ponder. Rules are meant to be broken and Laws are meant to be debated by the supreme court.
It has been a number of years since I taught but I used to throw out a "Law" or even a rule just to see what it prompted from my students. It was a worthwhile exercise.

ChrisL

Nick: When I was teaching, I tried to avoid the kind of creative antagonism where the teacher says “this is how it’s done”, preferring the approach of “there are many ways to do this, let’s find what works for you”.

Sheesh. Did you actually read the Noordzij article, Nick? He doesn't walk into a classroom and say 'This is how it's done', and his criticism of Tschichold is that the latter did indeed take that approach. Noordzij walks in and says 'Here is a law, is it true?'

If I were a student whose teacher walked in and said 'There are many ways to do this, let’s find what works for you', I would walk out. I can find out for myself what works for me.

Here is my version of a law:

When interletter spacing is not rhythmic and in synch with the whites inside the letters, the 'optical word' or word image or 'bouma shape' is disrupted or falls apart, and visual wordform resolution suffers.

Bill, you wrote “Griffo had — and worked with — Jenson’s type IIRC, and his efforts take Jenson’s ideas and push them in a more typographic direction, for example, *not* a direction more influenced by writing.” [my insertion of em dashes for clarity]

What might push them in a more typographic direction mean? (I don't know what a typographic direction is.)

You are using ’law’ as a synonym for ’rule’

John, you are completely misinterpreting me.
Since when does grouping two things together make them synonyms?!
I'm saying, like, I prefer bicycles to trucks and cars. That doesn't mean I think trucks and cars are the same.

it is a given of scientific laws that they are disprovable

Um, isn't it usually the other way round?

Noordzij walks in and says ’Here is a law, is it true?’

I would avoid that kind of creative antagonism also. Design is a practical process of problem solving, not one of dealing with abstract rules and laws. The problem is that there is not a law of line length for instance, but different ways of dealing with it. So the idea that there can be "a" law is spurious.

If I were a student whose teacher walked in and said ’There are many ways to do this, let’s find what works for you’, I would walk out. I can find out for myself what works for me

That was my approach. I didn't actually say that. Finding a personal solution to a design challenge happens differently in different environments. You, working on your own, would do it differently than someone in a class, interacting with the teacher and other students tackling the same problem. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, so it's the teacher's responsibility to address the weaknesses.

Nick, doesn't “practical problem solving” benefit from knowing the consequenses of irregular or too wide spacing or how effective sense-following — in the case of prose and in the case of poetry — is affected by variations in line length, in both directions beyond a certain normative range (that it should be our business to try and find)?

It might be an interesting challenge to a group of students to find this range without having the benefit of Tschichold's rule or presumably scientific papers on the subject. In a sense Emigré was a playground for this type of exploration (on multiple fronts!).

doesn’t “practical problem solving” benefit from knowing the consequenses of irregular or too wide spacing

Of course, and it's good for students to learn general principles. No need for laws or rules, though.

The general principle is, "don't have too few or too many characters in a line". But that begs the question, as among the factors which effect this are:
-type style
-type size
-type weight
-leading
-number of lines in a paragraph

In this example from a shipping brochure, long line length is not a problem, because of the copious leading, few lines per paragraph, and the amply-sized bold typeface (14 pt. on 32 pt. Corvinus Medium).

.

Nick, the import of my question was: doesn't practical problem solving benefit from knowing laws: laws of vision, laws of perceptual processing in reading, 'laws of the letter,' that is, how letters behave, and how effortlessly they are processed as a unit when placed beside each other in words, or when formed in certain ways.

I distinguish between "laws of" that, in our attempts to encapsulate them in words, have conjectural validity, and the dictates of expert practitioners that institutionalize personal ways of working with or around those laws.

Line length might not be a problem in your example, but I think the word spacing, relative to letter-spacing, in the justifed block of text is.

Nick: Um, isn’t it usually the other way round?

No. A scientific law is by its nature disprovable. It is taken to be true until disproved, but if it a priori could not be disproved it would not be a scientific law. Science only deals with that which can be disproven.

Design is a practical process of problem solving.

Is that a law? It looks like one. I hope it isn't a rule.

I regard it as an ideological statement, and one that is uncritically repeated by thousands of designers and design teachers. Perhaps the most refreshing statement I have heard in 13 years in type design was something Peter Biľak said during his presentation at TypeCon in Minneapolis: he explicitly rejected the view of 'design as problem solving' and suggested instead a view of 'design as a kind of reading'. And he showed a short film he had made imposing punctuation on a cityscape seen from a moving train, to make clear that what he was reading, as a designer, was the world around him. This is very much where my 'affections' -- to use Noordzij's term -- lie, with design as a process of engagement and response, understanding and interpretation. Within this process there is definitely a place for laws, i.e. for analytical formulations that enable a critical engagement.

Most design is banal and predictable precisely because it is undertaken as problem solving.

Science only deals with that which can be disproven.

You're putting the emphasis in the wrong place.
The body of science is that which can not be disproven.
That's why I said "usually".

Is that a law? It looks like one. I hope it isn’t a rule.
I regard it as an ideological statement

Make up your mind!

a process of engagement and response, understanding and interpretation.

You could say that about many things, including problem solving.

A metaphorical reading of the world is certainly a prerequisiste to design, part of problem definition (which is understood to be part of the problem solving process).

Banality results from merely going through the motions, which is just as possible with "engagement and response, etc."

This is an interesting discussion to me, if slightly esoteric. I've ranted, on and off, for a few months now—not in these environs—about, for want of a better term, Tschichold to excess.

One thing I want to point out concerns the sample brochure above. In a lot of ways, it's an attractive piece, judging from the small amount of it we see. But as enne_son rightly points out, the word-spacing is a problem. That first line had word-spacing you can drive a truck thru.

Granted, working in as many books as often as I do, that's a particularly annoying issue for me. And I don't care which software I use—Quark, InDy, formerly PageMaker, vaguely remembering FrameMaker—I need to go thru line-by-line of every page to make sure I like the looks of all lines and their word-spacing. (Letter-spacing isn't even an issue; just goes without saying.)

So what I'm saying is, this is a nice theoretical discussion, but it still comes down to how type on the page looks. Each and every time.

From Gerrit Noordzij's essay: The rule promises paradise, but in obedient submission. The law promises the wilderness, but in freedom.

To my mind he means rules are akin to formulas which offer a guaranteed result by stipulating how a thing is to be done, without deviation from the given formula (rule). Rules are orthodox in their nature. By contrast, laws are more akin to principles upon which (in this discussion typographic) design rests---by and large---but which are subject to ongoing testing by practitioners to prove or disprove their validity.

Also from Noordzij's essay: Students are frightened by freedom as soon as they understand that freedom leaves them alone with their own judgement.

That's so true, not only of design students; the majority of practising designers seem almost terrified of taking risks. Realistic practitioners accept that there can be no art or new design without risk.

"Freedom is a scary thing. Not many people really want it" ---from the song Statue of Liberty, on Laurie Anderson's recent album Life on a String.

The body of science is that which can not be disproven.

The body of science is that which is destined to be disproven. The whole history of science is a succession of theories or laws disproven by experiment and observation, and supplanted by new theories which in turn are disproven and replaced by subsequent laws or theories, on and on.

The Day the Universe Changed, by Professor Sir James Burke, narrates this history of science and scientific revolution with immense clarity and insight. Nothing is what it seems. Not even laws are what we think they are. Each view attained by each phase of culture and society is just another view---a reading of the world that attempts to make sense of it.

Some psychologists view human consciousness as a kind of dreaming, in the sense that we dream in an illusory fashion in order to percieve the world around is.

Most design is banal and predictable precisely because it is undertaken as problem solving.

I couldn't agree more John.

j a m e s

Peter, thanks for posting the link to this very interesting essay.

John Hudson wrote
"There are no exceptions to laws, in the nicely precise sense that Noordzij uses the term, there are only exceptions to rules. Something that disproves a law — i.e. the circumstance that renders a law false —, is not an exception, it is the basis on which you reformulate the law so that it is no longer false."
which hits the mark. Noordzij's notion of Law is very close to the Peirceian notion of law/thirdness. (Also: Dewey, Fleck, Popper, & al.) Very nice.

As to dogmatism:
I think in the bigger picture, it of no relevance whether an author is dogmatic (Tschichold) or self-critical and open for discussion (Noordzij). Both may, or may not, provoke discussion nevertheless. If Tschichold does not criticise himself, others will do it for him.
Science / scientific attitude is more than questioning one's own beliefs. So it is not required that an author be self-critical, or not be a dogmatist. It seems that in science, quite many participants are rather dogmatic. What makes this business "democratic" is that there are many many of them, who try to support their own points of view and falsify the other ones'. This ensures criticism or reflexion on the level of community rather than of the individual.
It would have been interesting to compare Tschichold and Renner in this respect, the former representing Rules, the latter Laws. And, what does it mean that Tschichold is popular to day while Renner's writings on typography were almost forgotten, "rediscovered" only in recent years? Which turns attention toward ...

"The role of the reader"
The "problem" possibly is not authors but readers/followers. Even if Tschichold himself was a typographic dictator, one may still read him with a smile and ask for his motivation, for the paths which led him to his conclusions or beliefs in this or that. (At least that's how I read any text.) Amusingly, Mr Noordzij who, in my reading, keeps an ironic distance to his own writings seems to have followers who read him the dogmatic way. Maybe not so much as regards the theories but more in terms of "applied interpretation" -- I think of the existence of so many "The Hague style" typefaces, from within the school and outside. Sometimes it is hard to figure out whether this or that typeface is the result of "dialog" with (or re-interpretation of) the The Hague understanding of type design, or a mere imitation of the tangible results of this understanding.  ;-)

Neville Brody faced the same situation.
He did his own thing, but everyone cloned his style, rather than doing their own thing.
The penalty of leadership.

That first line had word-spacing you can drive a truck thru.

It doesn't bother me at first read, but I do like to read old stuff. I don't think it would have concerned readers at the time.
On analysis, it becomes apparent that the typographer has opened out the word spacing in the first paragraph, and amply spaced the "ellipsis", to enable that paragraph to be squared off without leaving too big hole in front of E. Keble Chatterton. What would you have done to maintain the squared-off style, Steve? Bear in mind that in those days (the 1930s) raggedness was bad grooming, and more objectionable than big word spacing.

In general, the consensus on appropriate word spacing today is that it should be a lot tighter than it was in the past. I would say that greater flexibility and control of kerning and H&J parameters enables this effect, and there is also a greater incidence of rag right copy, which has less wordspace overall than comparable justified text.

Consider the beginning of sentences. With sentences in English often beginning with the letter T, Y, or W, when there was no kerning for a following lower case letter, a narrow preceeding wordspace positioned the Intial in the middle of a fair amount of white space, too close to the end of the previous sentence. The solution to this design problem was to have a larger space between sentences -- but in order to not have this stand out too much, the normal word space was larger. An airier look altogether.

I believe that had the same "readership efficiency" test of acceptable word spacing been conducted then and now, the results would be different. People are more comfortable with what they're used to. Any laws of perceptual processing must be culturally specific: place, time, demographics.

The body of science is that which is destined to be disproven.

Yes James, John, I'm familiar with Popper's theory of epistemology, but as I keep saying, it's a question of emphasis. Pythagoras' theorem, for instance, seems to be holding up pretty well.

But Pythagoras' theorem is, um, a theorem, not a law. It is part of the definition of a theorem, in mathematics, that it is something that can be proven within a specific, explicit and agreed set of circumstances. Laws aim to be universal. When Newton formulated the law of gravity, he wasn't stating what happens when a particular apple falls off a particular tree onto the head of a particular English physicist.

Nick, you say laws of perceptual processing are culturally specific. I would say they are species and domain specific (species: humans; domain: alphabetic writing). Nevertheless, what is done on the basis of knowing how letters in combination and words in sequence work, varies. And it varies with time and place, conditions of production, individual skill sets and attunements, as well as 'positioning' requirements. Practices are culturally specific, and when they become shared have a rule-structure.

I have no problem though with the fact that new and effective situationally-responsive 'variations' become 'attractors' for an entire generation of skilled practitioners.

What your sample ignores is that disproportionate word spacing overwhelms the proper salience of the interior whites, disrupting rapid automatic visual wordform resolution and hence disturbing smooth sense-following--the essence of reading. This is not so bad in short stretches, but probably detectable, and no doubt problematic over the long haul.

I guess you could say the "Law of Diminishing Returns" comes into play with some readability factors. Short texts (as those found in ads and covers) are minimally affected by what is certainly needed in long texts as to diminish the returns. You might even say that, if well done, reducing readability in favor of communication by other than word reading means, can improve message communication.

ChrisL

I’m familiar with Popper’s theory of epistemology, but as I keep saying, it’s a question of emphasis.

Okay, understood. Now that you have sufficiently emphasized the role of emphasis, I think we can agree on that.

Practices are culturally specific, and when they become shared have a rule-structure.

Cultural norms and conventions form the basis of emphasis? Have I got that right?

...disproportionate word spacing overwhelms the proper salience of the interior whites, disrupting rapid automatic visual wordform resolution and hence disturbing smooth sense-following—the essence of reading. This is not so bad in short stretches, but probably detectable, and no doubt problematic over the long haul.

For a magazine insert and most print ads, diruption of smooth sense-following has certain advantages, I can tell you. In some kinds of advertising it is advantageous to force the reader to focus on particular words, or on particular expressions, grammatic devices etc, to emphasize those passages and the ideas or cultural constructs embodied by them. Drawing attention to certain words with a bolder weight of type or a contrast type like an italic, or a change of ink color, often transpires as too obvious a form of modulation and manipulation of the reader's perception. Subtler methods are required, and one such method commonly used to fly in under the radar is to employ loose word spacing and/or letterspacing.

That first line had word-spacing you can drive a truck thru.

It's not book typesetting and the material isn't literary. It's an ad.

j a m e s

when Newton formulated the law of gravity

Well OK, let's say that some of Newton's laws have stood the test of time.

It’s an ad.

It's from a brochure. It's all reading. The perceptual process is the same.
We know that decks and headlines don't have to be as easy to read as body copy, but I doubt that science could quantify by how much. All it's good for is very basic controlled situations, like some kinds of book text. And highway signs.

As there has been some reference to education, it should be pointed out that there's not much typography for books going on in design school. We should be educating designers to do more interesting things--where rules are irrelevant--with type than straightforward book text.

What your sample ignores is that disproportionate word spacing overwhelms the proper salience of the interior whites, disrupting rapid automatic visual wordform resolution and hence disturbing smooth sense-following—the essence of reading.

I disagree. Your notion of "proper" word space is entirely subjective, culturally specific in fact. As I argued, readers at that time would have had no problem with the large word spaces, and readers generally make allowances for "display" typography that is set with some style.

To change the example from wordspace to leading, consider this, set by Yale University in 1936 for Stanley Morison's text. With it's bumping extenders, it pays homage to many centuries of solid leading. No doubt the rules people will say this is a no-no, and I'm sure it would be possible to prove it's inefficient in a laboratory test, but hey, don't let that language go extinct. In a similar vein, but paying homage to Raygun more like, the decks in Step magazine employ reverse leading. A trend perhaps, but nothing to do with an intellectual appraisal of rules, and the kind of thing where an art director let's the hand and eye do the thinking, while playing around with the variables in a layout program.

.

Nick: Well OK, let’s say that some of Newton’s laws have stood the test of time.

You mean that have been a reliable basis for prediction and have not been disproven by contrary evidence? Sure, but what makes them laws in the scientific sense is that they are disprovable. The fact that they have not been disproven to date and may never be disproven neither contributes to nor detracts from their classification as laws. What makes for a scientific law is falsifiability, and that is an inherent property of the formulation of the law, not something that is determined by time.

In some [contexts] it is advantageous to force the reader to focus on particular words, or on particular expressions, grammatic devices etc, to emphasize those passages and the ideas or cultural constructs embodied by them.

Yes!

Have I got that right?

I might prefer: Emphases form the basis of conventions.

Practices are culturally specific, and when they become shared have a rule-structure, can harden into conventions, and are sometimes given normative force. The last two are, or can be problematic. The rule-structure is probably a structure of emphases. The early Tschichold emphasized the dynamic force of assymmetrical placements, also when it came to positioning text-type in book-work.

It’s from a brochure.

Well, promotional literature then. My point is that kind of material uses substantially less wordage to convince the reader than the length of discourse allowed by purely literary texts like novels and non-fiction books.

...I doubt that science could quantify by how much.

It's a reckless world that lets itself be guided by its tools, nevertheless I find scientific analysis useful. Quantification of how much to adjust things is not the aim. It's more like an instrument that catylizes understanding of what's going on. A percptual means of peering inside.

j a m e s

I might prefer: Emphases form the basis of conventions.

That makes perfect sense too.

j a m e s

James: To my mind he means rules are akin to formulas which offer a guaranteed result by stipulating how a thing is to be done, without deviation from the given formula (rule). Rules are orthodox in their nature. By contrast, laws are more akin to principles upon which (in this discussion typographic) design rests—-by and large—-but which are subject to ongoing testing by practitioners to prove or disprove their validity.

Yes, but Noordzij being Noordzij, he expresses this in a provocative formulation:

The rule promises paradise, but in obedient submission. The law promises the wilderness, but in freedom.

I think it would be remiss not to acknowledge the religious references in this dual metaphor, something that Noordzij employs quite often in his writing. There's a, presumably, Dutch Calvinist frame of reference that Noordzij plays with, in this case offsetting the Judaeo-Christian wilderness against a fairly transparent reference to Islam ('submission').

One of the reasons I enjoy reading Noordzij so much is that he is seldom just talking about design. The same is true of Bringhurst, although in a very different way.

John,
thanks so much for that insight. You're much more familiar with Noordzij's writings than I. I'll have to read more of him and get back to you on this in more detail.

Examining that provocative sentence again I can see the dual metaphor relating to religion. Possibly he's tapping the notion of religiosity as a force acting upon cultural frames of reference, a kind of attractor. Sorry that's a bit abstract and esoteric.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading Noordzij so much is that he is seldom just talking about design. The same is true of Bringhurst, although in a very different way.

That's what I love about Bringhust too---the hidden riches, and the pleasure of uncovering them. There's a comedy sketch by Alan Bennet about two friends climbing a mountain, and at the end of it he says something like, "Life is like a tin of sardines. Once we've found the key, we open the tin, and find hidden inside life's riches. But there's always a tiny bit in the corner we can never quite get at." ;^)

Pardon me gents I have to leave the building right now.

Later.

j a m e s

the hand and eye do the thinking, while playing around with the variables in a layout program

Nick, this is precisely what I do in my practice. But the mind does not go blank.

What I put forward in my statements has nothing to do with an "intellectual appraisal of rules." I made a statement about disproportionate word-spacing and proper salience. Proper salience, means the relative salience letter parts amd counters need if the words they comprise are to be read accurately and without difficulty. My statement was about what happens; how salience works. I can see what happens. I can see what my manipulations do, optical-grammatically, perceptual-psychophysically and gestural-atmospherically.

The way salience works in vision has nothing to do with me personally, but everything to do with how the species I am part of functions or responds when confronted by letters in separated scripts at text sizes. Optical-grammatically and perceptual-psychophysically there are realities with ranges and thresholds. I can try to state what I see in words and sentences and make my observations more widely available. Is that what you mean by "intellectual appraisal of rules?" I can make predictions about the effect of my manipulations on various things that are foundational to reading, like visual wordform resolution and sense-following. I can test my predictions to see if they are right.

My statement was about what happens. I have no issue with using my attunements to the effect of manipulating or modulating spacing on rapid automatic visual word form resolution in order to put in place typographic structures that arrest the reader, slow him or her down in certain contexts, focus attention, or make an over-familiar text strange (aka ostrananie), that is to use my awarenes of the laws of vision to effect my or my clients communicative needs or ends.

[John] […] offsetting […]

I wonder if you have the contrasts right.

I've been busy repenting on Yom Kippur, so I couldn't post. Looks like you guys should have been repenting too :)

1. For a theory to have scientific status it should, according to Popper, be *potentially* refutable. That is, they should exclude some events about which we can actually check whether they happen or have happened under the specified conditions.

For example the simple claim 'birth stars influence character' is not refutable, and so not scientific. (It may be true--or not--but that's another issue.) The claim that normal human conception involves an egg and a sperm is testable. You can look with a microscope and see whether the little creatures are there, and indeed they are.

For a theory to be testable is not only a matter of logical form. Scientists also have to want to check by observation and experiment, and not try to weasel out of refutation by equivocation about meaning of terms, etc. As Karsten notes, Popper emphasized that the this process is a feature of science as a social institution, not just the attitude of a particular researcher.

Nick and John, strictly speaking Newton's law of gravitation has been refuted. That's what Eddington's 1921 observation of a solar eclipse was about, testing Einstein vs Newton. Of course Newton's laws are approximately true and good enough in most circumstances. But that's not good enough. Einstein's theory survived those tests better than Newton's.

2. Noordzij's use of the terms 'law' and 'rule' is a little idiosyncratic, but his point I thought was pretty clear, and sound: conjecturing scientific laws of perception in reading is a healthy open-minded process, whereas demanding conformity to rules based simply on one's own authority is pretty ridiculous, however accomplished the person.

3. Nick, the laws of human perception do limit print legibility. Print black on black and it's hard to read because of low contrast. Print it at 3 point, and people will have an extremely hard time reading it because of size. Now such issues as spacing the science is much more complicated and confused. But that's because the science is not that good yet, not because scientific results are in principle irrelevant.

4. On the influence of changes in writing technology and practice on type design. Noordzij's theory is very interesting, and may indeed be one influence.

But here Noordzij starts sounding like Tschichold, and makes his theory the one and only influence, which I think is absurd. To repeat, Noordzij wrote; "If we ask for the intentions of the type designers, we find that their work reflected their attitude to writing with little regard for previous solutions.”

That type designers weren't looking at previous type and influenced by it is to me a ridiculous theory.

Let me start with my idea that Baskerville had studied Caslon carefully and was heavily influenced by his *type*. You say: "I really don’t see any influence of Caslon in Baskerville’s types."

Ok, here's what Baskerville said:

"Mr. Caslon is an Artist, to whom the Republic of Learning has great obligations; his ingenuity has left a fairer copy for my emulation than any other master. In his great variety of Characters I intend not to follow him, the Roman and Italic are all that I have hitherto attempted; if in these he has left room for improvement, it is probably more owing to that variety which divided his attention, than to any other cause."

That as quoted by Alexander Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface, p. 187, my emphasis.

Now that sounds to me like a type designer. It is well aware of what the previous generation did, and takes that as his point of departure. He also puts in a dig that Caslon was sloppy because he turned out so much work (true). Baskerville changed a lot about Caslon, but for sure he was looking at *type* and not writing only.

I will discuss writing vs type further another time, and answer Peter's question, but this post is long already.

Bill: Now such issues as spacing the science is much more complicated and confused. But that’s because the science is not that good yet, not because scientific results are in principle irrelevant.

Why would science be relevant to spacing?
It could measure what is effective and come up with general principles -- rather like the marketing survey or sales results for an advertisement -- but that is a snapshot in time, after the fact. Science can't come up with the creative, and what works now will not be as effective tomorrow.

Peter: I can make predictions about the effect of my manipulations on various things that are foundational to reading, like visual wordform resolution and sense-following.

That may be true if you are making a sequel. But brains get bored, and society evolves. Typographic culture changes, and typographers should be at least partly agents of change, and respond to change.

Ottmar Mergenthaler developed a system of justification in the early 20th century, which inserted extra spacing between characters as well as words (which is what Quark etc made something of a standard from around 1990). But at the time, everyone thought it looked horrible, so Linotype stuck with justification only using word spaces. This is one more reason that leads me to conclude that our physiological apparatus can handle all kinds of different spacing models, and it is cultural and technological contingencies which determine which are more effective, not biology. So the science of reading is more of a social science, further from engineering.

Bill, I think Baskerville was being polite to his highly respected countryman and his celebrated types, presenting his own work as if it were an 'emulation'. This isn't an entirely uncommon phenomenon: an innovator courting acceptance for his work by downplaying its innovativeness. Remember, innovation has only recently been seen as an entirely positive thing, and we know that Baskerville had trouble getting his types accepted by conservative readers who knew-what-they-liked-and-they-liked-Caslon-thank-you-very-much.

If you actually look at the types you have to acknowledge that Baskerville is doing something very different. The change from an oblique to a vertical axis alone is a radical difference (one that prompts every type classification scheme I'm aware of to put Caslon's types and Baskerville's in separate categories). The change in contrast, weight and proportions are also significant. And these changes are all mirrored in contemporary developments in formal writing brought about by the increasing use of the split nib. Baskerville's genius was to take the stroke logic of written and engraved lettering, which was most often oblique, and apply it to roman forms.

Baskerville's Greek type is also worth looking at in this regard, I think: this is not a typeface designed by a man who cared what anyone else had done before him. It is weird and probably must be considered a failure, but it owes nothing to Caslon or any other type designer. Baskerville may have felt some need to publicly claim that he was a humble follower in Caslon's footsteps, but the work tells a different story. Baskerville was an unconventional man (he lived with a woman who was not his wife for many years at a time when this was seriously scandalous), and I doubt if he had any illusion that he was not, in fact, the finest printer England had every produced.

But none of this is to suggest that type designers have not been influenced by other type designers, and I don't think Noordzij is suggesting this either. What I am saying, at least, is that such influence takes place within a wider context of text creation that is only partially, if increasingly, typographic, and it is developments in this wider context that produce radical changes in the styles of type. In an important sense, I would say it doesn't matter whether a particular type designer of the past was more influenced by writing or by type, because what he was actually influenced by was a text culture within which writing and typography were not as compartmentalised as we have come to think of them.

[John, do you have an image of Baskerville's Greek?]

Nick, the typical performance curves that come out of the labs show a steep climb followed by a wide plateau and than a gradual decline. The plateau means our "psychological apparatus" can handle variation inside a certain range. The plateau also provides inventors room to set up their heavy equipment and designers room to play.

Science doesn't need to come up with the creative. All it needs to do is document this.

Designers come up with the creative, contingent on how they read what the situation requires.

The creative varies over time, depending on the path the designer choses within or at the edges of the ranges. Playing at the edges has intrinsic risks, and going over them like David Carson did, has it uses. But these efforts wouldn't have their force if the plateaus don't exist and there is simply a level playing field extending indefinitely in every direction.

>But none of this is to suggest that type designers have not been influenced by other type designers, and I don’t think Noordzij is suggesting this either.

John, it seems to me you are dismissing compelling evidence.

I'll repeat the Noordzij quote a third time, and perhaps you can explain how I am misinterpreting it:

“If we ask for the intentions of the type designers, we find that their work reflected their attitude to writing with little regard for previous solutions.”

By "previous solutions" he means, as I read him, the designs of other type designers. That is what I am reacting against. And by the way Noordzij is on occasion given to extreme, interesting, thought-provoking statements, so this is quite in character.

Let us go with the case of Baskerville further. I do not find your dismissal of Baskerville's explicit statement of debt to Caslon convincing. There are a hundred ways he could have praised his predecessor without directly saying he emulated him, but he didn't choose any of those hundred. So why would he feel compelled to lie outright, which he has to be doing for Noordzij to be right?

Also, I have been working on history of ideas in one way and another for a long time, and I have found that what an innovator says about his or her predecessors is extremely revealing, and is worth paying careful attention to. These statements are usually very brief, and as a rule more accurate and revealing than anything else that has been written since.

In Baskerville's case, I think that only one of a number of changes he made to Caslon is directly attributable to writing.

Again, more of what Baskerville actually said:

"I formed to my self ideas of greater accuracy than had yet appeared, and have endeavored to produce a Set of Types according to what I conceived to be their true proportions."

Let us take 'proportions' first. As you note, handwriting is generally oblique. And it tends to narrower n's h's etc. than roman letters. And the counters in the o, n, m, etc are more assymetrical with the outsides. And this remains true in 18th century writing, such as that of Bickham. I don't know if Bickham has wider arches than earlier scripts, but if so it would be influenced by neo-classical taste, rather than any result of the mechanics of the pen or of writing.

Baskerville's nm etc have lovely neo-classical arches, and to achieve these are wider than previous letters, and the arches are more symmetrical and circular than earlier types. The vertical stress of Baskerville takes what Caslon (and earlier the Dutch) had done with the O and o, and apply it across the board. All of these features *contradict* writing, and are more likely influenced by neo-classical architecture and other design than by 18th century writing in particular.

As to 'accuracy', if you look at Caslon's original types, you see that in some sizes eg the m's and n's have quite different curves, and there is a lot of variation in x height, ascender height, stem width etc. And the relative proportions of letters sometimes vary greatly from size to size. So Baskerville set out in reaction against Caslon to have strict consistency in these matters. But again, this is not a feature of writing. The extreme consistency and accuracy is not possible or even desirable in writing, but it is in type.

Baskerville it seems to me was influenced by Caslon as much by reaction against him as in following him. But that makes it no less an influence: he was looking at *type*, contrary to Noordzij. I haven't made a comparative study of the two types, but my impression is that there remain some similarities in structure. The x-heights and extenders are, IIRC, similar in proportion. And the way the diagonal letters are handled (formation of k, W, M) is similar. And the caps are fairly heavy in relation to the lower case. They are somewhat less than Caslon, but much more than eg. Garamond, showing the enduring influence of Caslon.

And by reaction, Baskerville gives the letters greater contrast, more vertical stress, and wider and more symmetrical letters. The high contrast is the one thing in this that is likely an influence of the steel pen, but that's about it.

Again I have gotten long, so more later...

Bill,

Noordzij writes: “If we ask for the intentions of the type designers, we find that their work reflected their attitude to writing with little regard for previous solutions.”

This seems to me a confused statement, because it starts off asking about intentions and ends up talking about what their work reflects. I'm not into guessing intentions, but I am interested in what one can deduce from looking at the product. Maybe, in intention, Baskerville really did think of himself as emulating Caslon, although it seems unlikely to me given his otherwise innovative genius. But I have a number of books printed by Baskerville in his own types, and they are clearly something distinct from what preceded them, and one of the things they reflect is a different attitude to the formation of letters that is also reflected in the contemporary fashions in writing. And I think it is interesting that Baskerville's types went from being initially criticised by conservative readers and compared unfavourably with Caslon's to being emulated by virtually all the English founders of the next generation (the Frys, Martin, Austin). And that emulation is very, very obvious and it also very obviously takes place within a large text culture that is very different from that which inspired Caslon. So this takes us back to what I said -- which differs from what Noordzij said -- and which I am going to repeat:

What I am saying is that such influence takes place within a wider context of text creation that is only partially, if increasingly, typographic, and it is developments in this wider context that produce radical changes in the styles of type. In an important sense, I would say it doesn’t matter whether a particular type designer of the past was more influenced by writing or by type, because what he was actually influenced by was a text culture within which writing and typography were not as compartmentalised as we have come to think of them.

Of course Baskerville knew Caslon's types and of course he was aware, intimately, of the ways in which his own were similar to or different from them. What matters -- why we care about Baskerville and why his types were so widely emulated -- is the ways in which they were different and the reasons why they were different. Caslon's types were the end of the line for the Dutch oldstyle; in fact, they are primarily of interest because they were made in England and so came to play an important role in Anglo-American typography: if they'd been made in the Netherlands, we probably wouldn't pay any attention to them. Baskerville's types were the beginning of something, and they came to be seen as reflecting their cultural context better than the oldstyle types could.

Here is a mental exercise that I recommend: imagine that you are a typesetter/printer in the later 18th century. Imagine that you are typesetting a new book, say James Harris' Hermes, or a philosophical inquiry concerning universal gramma (fascinating book, by the way), and you have before you the manuscript copy from which you are composing the type. Picture that manuscript copy. Now try to feel the cultural discomfort, the disconnection between that manuscript and the late renaissance or mannerist typeface that you have in your font of type. Today, we live in a typographic world full of revivals of historical models and a great diversity of styles, and because we don't very often encounter handwritten copy and because there is no culture of formal writing, we don't generally experience anything like this cultural disconnection between written and typographic forms that would have been very evident and awkward to earlier generations (the closest we come is when we see a piece of text set in what seems an inappropriate typeface). Indeed, one can argue that most of the history of innovation in type design has been in reaction to such disconnections, and should be seen in terms of correction and the bringing of typographic forms into line with the broader text culture, itself part of a larger intellectual and artistic culture. We see this even in the very beginnings of our 'roman' typographic forms, where a disconnection between the available blackletter types and the culture of Italian humanism prompted the invention of new styles of type based on the formal Italian book hand.

I am largely but not totally in agreement with your last post.

I don't know the history of handwritten scripts, but my impression is that after type and printed books become widespread, people generally didn't take pains to write the formal, more readable upright humanist script. They were writing slanted, cursive hands that had less to do with the formal, highly readable upright script. Type was more readable than any script, so if you really wanted maximum readability you could just have it printed. If I'm right about that, then it would seem to me natural that designers of text types looked less to handwriting than to previous type designs.

>I’m not into guessing intentions, but I am interested in what one can deduce from looking at the product.

You don't have to guess: Baskerville told us what his goals were, and the fact that he was influenced by Caslon. If I am trying to do accurate history, I'm not going to ignore what the originator himself said, even if I don't have to take it fully at face value. In using the word 'emulation,' he was acknowledging a debt. I agree with you that the debt is less than for most designers, as he was one of the more original designers in type history. But there are signs of that debt, as I noted.

Baskerville had been a writing master, and if he wanted to write about his debt to other writing masters he could have. He chose instead to write about his debt to Caslon, which I see as a significant choice. I agree about the influence of the contemporary pen and writing on contrast, but all the other stuff I don't see as a writing influence. That why I think it is reasonable to conclude that the bigger part of his problem-situation was type, rather than writing.

On Jenson and Griffo. You say that hand scripts had not changed much between the two, which would indicate that Griffo's inspiration was not from hand written script. However, you go on to minimize the diferences between the two.

I think the differences are more significant, and move in a more typographic direction. For example Griffo's ascenders I believe lean a bit less to the right, his serifs are more symmetrical, and the crossbar on the e is horizontal. All of these features are more unnatural in writing, and they move further from the examples of the humanist script. That is why I conclude that Griffo was looking more at Jenson's type, and less at hand writing.

Jenson made the biggest leap, in my view, in making his type more upright and more even in color than hand writing, and so strikingly more readable.

Still, I don't think that Stanley Morrison was just blowing smoke and advertising when he wrote that Griffo's types were more clearly modern and decisively set the pattern for later roman types.

I hesitate to say that Griffo's type was more readable than Jenson's, as the breakthrough was really Jenson, and the differences may well be more aesthetic than in readability. Still, I have the feeling that Griffo does have a slight edge in readability, and I suspect it may have to do with more even color as well as the other features. But I haven't studied it enough to really have any firm opinion.

ps on Caslon himself. You write:

>Caslon’s types were the end of the line for the Dutch oldstyle; in fact, they are primarily of interest because they were made in England and so came to play an important role in Anglo-American typography: if they’d been made in the Netherlands, we probably wouldn’t pay any attention to them.

I agree that Caslon's place in history--and being the first old style to be revived--has a lot to do with the attention paid to his designs. But I do think he had he own sensibility about proportion and color that was admirable and highly readable. And that I, for one, think is worth trying to emulate in modern type. I am convinced that for all his vagaries, Caslon always proofed his characters between other characters, and had a very strong sense of what worked and didn't work. He didn't care so much about uniformity, but he had a very strong sense of what was readable, and it showed in his types.

Bill: I don’t know the history of handwritten scripts, but my impression is that after type and printed books become widespread, people generally didn’t take pains to write the formal, more readable upright humanist script. They were writing slanted, cursive hands that had less to do with the formal, highly readable upright script. Type was more readable than any script, so if you really wanted maximum readability you could just have it printed.

Who says that 'type was more readable than any (handwritten) script'? This is a totally untestable supposition. Printed texts were quicker and more economical to produce, and they enabled text to be cleanly reproduced at smaller sizes than are comfortable to write, again making type more economical than manuscript. These factors alone account for the spread of printing. I've looked at a heck of a lot of manuscripts, and I don't think you can make a general case that type is more legible than writing: much depends on the quality of the individual production, whether the result of a better or worse scribe or a better or worse printer. Frankly, an awful lot of early printing was very bad, which we tend to forget because only the best stuff became famous and gets reproduced in histories of typography. The types got worn very quickly because the metal mixes were not right. The inking is uneven and the pressure is inconsistent. A lot of contemporary manuscripts were better, not least because the renaissance scribes realised that they were in competition with the new technology and needed to show just how good manuscript books could be. There was a late flowering of the European manuscript book tradition after the advent of printing; in the end it wasn't sufficient to counter the financial advantages of print publishing, but it produced some extraordinarily beautiful books that were specifically made to compete with print on the grounds of quality, including readability. I strongly recommend Jonathan Alexander's The painted page: Italian renaissance book illumination, 1450-1550 for a well-illustrated overview of this period (it also deals with illumination of printed book).

I don't think it is possible to look at a manuscript like this and make a claim like this:

Jenson made the biggest leap, in my view, in making his type more upright and more even in color than hand writing, and so strikingly more readable.

Jenson's biggest leap was to render the culturally acceptable form of humanist letters in type, so that the new technology would be accepted for the production of the kind of texts that the Italian renaissance readership (all of whom, as Bringhurst has drawn attention to in various places in the past few years, were not only readers but also writers). Sweynheym and Pannartz had begun this process at Subiaco and Rome, but never really got away from the blackletter. Jenson was more comfortable with the humanist script, so knew better how to cut letters to that model.

It shouldn't be necessary to point out that people are still making text faces based on those writing models, e.g. Adobe's new Arno Pro.

On Jenson and Griffo. You say that hand scripts had not changed much between the two, which would indicate that Griffo’s inspiration was not from hand written script.

What I actually said was that the characteristics of both Jenson and Griffo's type are found in the larger context of Italian humanist text creation that includes manuscript hands. Like Peter, I'm not sure I know what it means to say that Griffo's letters were 'more typographic', other than perhaps more regular. It shouldn't surprise us is that there is greater variety in the many individual manuscript hands than there is in the relatively small number of typefaces -- some of which are merely copies of other printers types: that sort of 'emulation' has always been with us --, and that the types represent only a subset of the ideas and forms found in the former.

I'll agree with you that Noordzij sometimes overstates the case for writing -- which is why I prefer to draw attention to the overall phenomenon of text creation in which there isn't a compartmentalisation of writing and type, but only a single activity of making texts for people to read --, but Noordzij's overstatement is nothing compared to the uniquely typocentric view presented in most histories of typography, many of which completely ignore or gloss over the role of writing in the contemporary text creation cultures.

>Who says that ’type was more readable than any (handwritten) script’? This is a totally untestable supposition.

Well, I shouldn't have used the word 'any', because someone might very carefully and slowly imitate type, with a steel pen, enough to be approximately the same. But 'almost all' would do. Even if one compares deliberately calligraphic fonts--eg Brioso--with less calligraphic ones--eg Minion--the higher readability of typographic ones is striking to me. Testing readability is difficult in any case, but when better tests come along eg to distinguish eg. sans or all caps, I don't see why they can't test a hand written page against a printed one. I have suggested such tests (testing for fatigue), but they haven't been done, to my knowledge.

>Baskerville

You didn't respond to my rebuttal of your hypothetical analysis of how Baskerville might looked at contemporary writing and was influenced. I think my analysis based on what Baskerville said about his own goals is more plausible, because it addresses the actual historical record.

Generally speaking, I suspect the further removed from Jenson we are historically, the less contemporary handwriting influences designers of text types. Writing always remains an "underlying force", as van Krimpen said, based on the origination of our letter shapes in writing. And designers may get ideas from their own experiments in writing, done with an eye to type.

The biggest change in type after Baskerville is perhaps the introduction of fat faces and sans serifs. And I don't see how these have anything to do with writing, aside from high contrast in the case of fat faces. They were, I believe, influenced by architectural lettering and sign painting. Those are important non-type influences on type, but they are not writing. And they were influenced by the needs of advertising--large sized, attention-getting type.

I will respond later on Jenson, Griffo and what is typographic.

>What you seem to miss Bill, is that the stroke of the pointed, flexible nibbed pen is more than a stylistic influence, or an influence among influences, but provides a contrast manipulation paradigm that is fundamentally different in kind to that which came before...

Oh sh*t, I'm wrong again :) Well, I'm here to learn.

To summarize the current ping pong score (according to me), John has displayed a lot of vertical stress examples, so I was wrong in assuming that that was Baskerville's invention. And Peter has a point (!) that the new pen's flexible point may have got people thinking in new directions, as Noordzij argued.

However, the similarities in structure of Baskerville and Caslon leave me convinced that Caslon was an important influence. And how much the new vertical, high contrast styles were due to writing and how much engraving and other lettering is an open question, so far as I'm concerned.

And I still don't see a dent in the idea that the innovations of Jenson and Griffo, while subtle, were profound as far as improving readability.

James, thank you very much for the Warde quote and for the extraordinary George Shelley plate. What is the significance of 'French Cannon' in the right margin? Is this a size reference (is Shelley not only writing the typeface but spec'ing the font?) or a label for the style?

Also note that 'Shelley scripsit' not 'Shelley fecit', Bill. :)

The maintenance of the gothick style in the repertoire of mid-18th century writing masters

Blackletter never went out of use in typography, one reason being that it provided a useful "bold" in the time before the roman style was emboldened with fat-faces and Egyptians in the early 19th century.

Well, fecit, John :) --If you can assume that Baskerville was lying about being influenced by Caslon, I can assume that these letters were carefully built up, not written in a flowing hand, pace Noordzij.

John, the ‘French Cannon' can only be a reference to the type size (about 48 pt), and to my mind must mean that Shelley was offering the model for a kind of written or painted letter – or a ‘type' that nobody had actually made but perhaps would one day (or maybe somebody had already got a fair way towards in France).

As for the writing master triumphing over the traditional punchcutter, I think the splendid pen strokes in Baskerville's Q (from the Virgil, 1757) say it all :

Caslon seems to be struggling away from old models toward something rounder and more calligraphic in his 2-lines Great Primer (the 36 pt), one of his types that is not based on a recognizable older type – but he would never have done anything like this.

Bill: However, the similarities in structure of Baskerville and Caslon leave me convinced that Caslon was an important influence.

An influence on what? I don't think you can claim that they were an influence on the new style of type, because the styles are so different and, in any case, Baskerville's types are in essentials identical to the George Shelley's alphabet of 1715 as shown in the plate that James provides. Some letters are different -- the Q, thanfully -- but they are also different from Caslon's and I suspect if one dug through enough exemplars from the writing masters one would find a model for every form in Baskerville's types. Why? Because the forms can all be worked out with a split nib pen -- even if a typical typographic contrast pattern sometimes requires rotation of the pen, which was not unheard of as Bodoni's swash letters make plain -- , and these guys had been doing this for decades. I doubt if there was any workable shape that had not been fully explored with a pen by the time Baskerville came to cast it in type.

The trouble with trying to make a structural link between Baskerville's types and Caslon's evidence of influence or emulation is that you should first remove from the equation the structural similarities that are common to >90% of Latin text faces, that are accounted for by adjustments proper to the scale of the letters. Baskerville may have looked at Caslon's types to gain an understanding of what makes type work, because they were the most readily available samples, but he may well have relied on John Handy's expertise to provide that understanding. It is important to bear this in mind, because when we say that Baskerville 'designed' these types we run the risk of imagining an anachronistic industrial design process. Handy would have cut punches according to the knowledge of his craft, based on some form of model provided by Baskerville. This model would not have been 'drawings', of the kind that we are familiar with from much later, mechanical punch cutting processes. What were they? I think they were almost certainly pen-written letters of the kind shown in Shelley and Bickham's writing manuals, which Baskerville, as a writing master, would have been able to produce with ease and speed. Handy would have interpreted the letters to make them work at the sizes of type specified by Baskerville (just as, two centuries later, August Rosenberger interpreted in metal the written and drawn letters provided by Hermann Zapf).

Baskerville did emulate Caslon, but primarily in the still novel notion of making original types in England, rather than importing them from the continent, as had been the norm for almost three hundred years. But Caslon based his types on the style of those imported types, while Baskerville based his on indigenous lettering styles.

When Baskerville speaks of Caslon 'leaving room for improvement', I don't think he is referring merely to certain technical deficiencies such as poor vertical alignment and inconsistent serif weight, but also to the inappropriateness of Caslon's types to the neo-classical text aesthetic. The room for improvement was the gulf between the text culture of Holland a hundred years previous and the text culture of contemporary Britain.

Bill: If you can assume that Baskerville was lying about being influenced by Caslon...

I don't think he was lying: I don't think he said it at all. I've read and re-read the statement, especially now that James has provided it in its original state, and I don't see anything in it that suggests that Baskerville is saying that the form of his types is influenced by Caslon's. He says that Caslon left a 'fairer copy for his emulation than any other master' (which seems intentionally ironic given that Baskerville was the (writing) master and his types are so clearly modeled the styles developed by his fellow writing masters), but does not say that he in fact emulated this copy. All he says he has done is to produce roman and italic types, in contrast to the great variety of types that Caslon was producing. There is something in it of the brash but nervous new competitor paying tribute to an established, monopolistic firm: 'Yes, of course Microsoft Windows is great and the world owes Bill Gates a great obligation, and we've personally learned a lot from Microsoft. But we do feel that they perhaps try to do too much in their operating system, and there is plenty of room in the market for a smaller, faster system. So here is what we've made. It doesn't do everything that Windows does, but what it does do we think it does better. We're not setting out to compete directly with Microsoft; indeed, we only seek a small share of the reputation (and market), from an area of software development that proves accidentally to have been the object of our mutual pursuit (please don't crush us).'

"Karsten: [John, do you have an image of Baskerville’s Greek?]"
So, doesn't this imply that greek could not so easily go through the transitional needle as Latin could?

"’fairer copy for his emulation than any other master’"
I think this is virtue that we take for granted in the digital age and is probably what Baskerville meant to emulate, along with certain proportions.

"...the forms can all be worked out with a split nib pen."
I think you mean all of some parts of all forms can be worked out. But there is still some decision in the hand and its upstairs. ;)

"So I find it much easier to believe that writing led the way, in 18th century England at any rate, than engraving, which was very seldom a medium of expression and almost always a medium of reproduction."
This does not follow logic all the way. Which had more effect on "the Republic of Learning", mass-produced engravings, or handwritten letters? ( and when did that watershed occur, reoccur? )

Cheers!

David: So, doesn’t this imply that greek could not so easily go through the transitional needle as Latin could?

I mentioned this discussion to Robert Bringhurst, who suggests that Baskerville's Greek is not so novel as is generally regarded, but that it has earlier precedence in the 16th century types of Stefano Niccolini da Sabbio, with which I am unfamiliar, and Simon de Coline's augustin Greeks, which I must have seen but can't recall.

Bickham includes a Greek plate at the end of The Universal Penman, in which the conventional shapes, including ligatures, of the old Byzantine cursive style are written with a split nib pen. Minus most of the ligatures, and with greater regularity of proportion, this approach is the basis for the Didot, Bodoni and Leipzig Greek types.

[Bickham also has a highly entertaining Arabic, in which the horizontal strokes must have been written from left-to-right because you can't push a pointed split-nib pen. It's almost the invention of a new style of Arabic script, but it doesn't quite work, despite some very beautiful individual shapes.]

I would think that in England the innovations came from writing, because of the monopoly on book printing exercised by the Company of Stationers, and government restrictions on newspaper and pamphlet publishing by means of repressive taxation. Surely these restrictive practices would have created and maintained an intensely conservative type culture, which certainly seems to be the case prior to changes in the copyright law in 1774 -- opening up book publishing, and the reduction of newspaper tax in 1836.

This is not to discount the influence of innovators, but such people would be few and far between, outsiders of sufficient committment and wealth to work independently, John Baskerville, for instance. And what success did he have? Outside of notoriety, precious little, except perhaps in France. Other typographic outsiders were at work in the 18th century in Scotland, where, notably, the law, in 1727(?) reduced copyright to a few years, not perpetual as in England, and book culture consequently was not so turgid as in England.

The invention of lithography and its vogue in the early 19th century contributed to a loosening up of the lettering arts in general, as can be seen from the fashion for illustrations of lettering made out of rustic briars etc.

Wait a minute, maybe I shouldn't have plead guilty, I mean pleaded wrong in response to Peter's argument.

I just read that the pointed nib pen came into use in the 17th century. But both punch cutting and engraving came into use at the end of the 15 and into the 16th century. And in both of these you can get the extreme thicks and thins. So you already have a 'contrast manipulation paradigm' in these. So why do you need the pen to start thinking of letters with more extreme thicks and thin? Maybe the pointed pen came into use to imitate printing and engraving, not the other way round. Its widespread use is evidently later. Were there high contrast engraved letters before the pointed nib pen? Did any of them have vertical stress?

There have been brushes in use for thousands of years, notably in China. Varied pressure and speed of movement causes thick and this lines. Also, the Trajan column letters and other Roman inscriptions were layed out using brush lettering long before the 17th century. The broadnib pen you speak of was the slotted version. Reed pens were in use in ancient Greece. They were not as efficient t holding ink though so you got dry spots at the end of strokes.

ChrisL

Bill, it's not that there are extremes of thick and thin, it where on the stroke the thicks and thins occur. Baskerville didn't deal in extremes, while Bodoni did, yet the ‘contrast template’ is the same.

>contrast template

The problem is that the contrast template was already there, from the broad-nibbed pen and modifications by type designers. Having vertical stress and greater contrast didn't change the basic rules--rules like thick verticals and thin horizontals, alternating thick thin on the W, or the tapering of strokes at joins of curve to straight.

I can see the influence of the pointed nib on loopy scripts like Bickham, but not on romans.

And with sans, later, you have a *reduction* in contrast, even when the pointed steel pen is most flourishing.

The 'contrast template' of the pointed Chinese brush is, in comparison, radically different. Put any two characters from Griffo and from Bodoni side by side. Then put both beside a brushed Chinese character.

Contrast existed, and the translation contrast template was there from the start, not the expansion contrast template.

Is there an 'expansion contrast template'?

People were not only writing, but also painting and drawing and carving and engraving letters, and cutting punches--in all of which they had the freedom to alter contrast, and did. For example Caslon did high contrast faces for large sizes, lower for small sizes.

To be sure, different designers handle the thick to thin curves differently, but isn't that a design decision rather than any 'template' dictated by the pen?

Bill, I really think you are arguing against yourself. As you say, punchcutting and engraving technically permit high contrast, fine hairlines, etc. And yet the normative model of typographic letterforms from the 15th to the mid-18th century remained based on the translation contrast pattern of the broad-nib pen. It was not until after the development of the split-nib pen and its associated writing styles, based on an expansion contrast pattern, that type founders began to make types that were modeled on that pattern. The fact that it would have been technically possible to cut such types at an earlier date is notable precisely because no one chose to do so: the technology precedes the writing, but the writing precedes the application of the technology to those forms.

It is also interesting to note that between the translation model of the renaissance broad nib and the flourishing of the expansion model of the split nib in the 18th century, one finds the rotation model of the mannerist and early baroque writing masters. And yet one sees almost no influence of this different technique and, hence, different contrast pattern, in the roman text types of this period, which stick pretty doggedly to the translation model. The obvious explanation for this is that the mannerist writing masters did not provide a model for such types: they did not apply the new writing techniques to those kinds of letters. You do find some evidence of rotation in italics, though, and in the civilité types which were modeled on the popular writing style of the time. In the 18th century, by contrast, we have writing masters such as Shelley explicitly providing models for typographic roman letterforms produced with the preferred tool of the day according to the preferred techniques of the day.

So not only do we have the evidence of type founders creating types that follow trends and models set by writing masters, we also don't see them creating types based on other potential models when these are not provided by the writing masters, despite the technical ability to make any shape that the cutting, punching and casting processes would permit. Overall, typography prior to the 20th century comes across as a very conservative field, following behind the much more dynamic development of new formal writing styles. There are good economic reasons for this: making type was a costly and time consuming business, while a writing master needed only a pen, some ink and some paper to develop and practice a new style.

I can see the influence of the pointed nib on loopy scripts like Bickham, but not on romans.

Then you're blind. Sorry, but there's no polite way to put it. From Baskerville to Didot to Bodoni the expansion contrast pattern is the defining basis of the new styles (much more than axis, by the way, which actually varied a lot more than the popular revivals indicate). Not only is it possible to emulate all these styles of types using a split nib pen, it is impossible to emulate them with any other kind of pen (presuming one is writing the strokes and not drawing the letter).

The lower contrast, sans serif letters were based on a different but still contemporary style of drawn lettering (see James' The Nymph and the Grot. No one is claiming that the split nib was the only tool used during this period, or that the styles of writing associated with it were the only styles of lettering either popular or invented during the period. But it was the only tool used for the principle styles of formal writing, and evidence of the broad nib is only found in the gothick.

Bill: To be sure, different designers handle the thick to thin curves differently, but isn’t that a design decision rather than any ’template’ dictated by the pen?

Who are these 'designers'? What was their process of design?

I'm not sure who the first person was to describe himself as a 'type designer' or when, but I suspect it was quite late, and reflects a process of design within an industrial type manufacturing setting. As I wrote earlier, I'm pretty sure that Baskerville's design process consisted of sitting down and writing the style of letters that he wanted, and John Handy translated the written forms into type.

We know that, earlier, renaissance printers hired writing masters to produce models for italic types and or modeled their types on the writing of specific scribes, whose names are known to us.

And I wonder what Griffo's design process was for the Aldine roman types? Obviously there is an evaluation of Jenson's types involved, but how did he -- and many future generations of 'designers' -- actually visualise the letters to be cut in the end of the bits of metal? It is very unlikely that he worked directly in the metal without a model -- the fact that Rudolf Koch did this was notably unconventional --, so what did the model look like, and how did he create it? I think we can be reasonably sure that he did not produce draughtsman's englarged drawings of a kind that only became necessary with the introduction of mechanism punchcutting. I think it is overwhelmingly likely that he used a broad nib pen and carefully wrote the forms he intended to translate into type, because of course he was not only a punchcutter, he was also a writer, just like every other literate person of his time. He may not have been a great calligrapher or a professional writing master, but he knew how to handle a pen just as he knew, as a punchcutter, how to translate those written models into metal and what adjustments to make for scale and technical limitations.

Interestingly, Arrighi's italic types seem to have required fewer ligatures than Griffo's, suggesting that the professional writing master had better insights into how to adapt letters to the technology, while Griffo tried to follow a particular written model that obliged him to use more ligatures.

I’m pretty sure that Baskerville’s design process consisted of sitting down and writing the style of letters that he wanted, and John Handy translated the written forms into type.

Surely his roman capitals are too carefully constructed for that.
He must have drawn, constructing them in the manner of the large letters in the George Shelley specimen.
After all, he started out doing gravestones, and would have drawn those outlines before he started chiselling.
He was a precocious letterer and no doubt a multiple threat, like many a talented letter designer.
As a writing master early in his career, I suspect he would have used a fine nib to draw large exemplary letters, filling in the thick strokes.
Look at the line weight of the flourishes in the Shelley specimen -- would not Shelley have used the same pen to outline the large letters?

Was Baskerville also an artist/illustrator? Did he design the images for his Japanning business? It's a very graphic medium.
I recall reading that he also had flash livery on his coach, which one would assume he also designed.
Why would he limit himself to writing the models for Handy, and not sketch?

we also don’t see them creating types based on other potential models when these are not provided by the writing masters

Would they have been familiar with the geometrically constructed forms of the Roman du Roi?

I wonder if I can offer my own view of some of these topics without disrupting the thread (as sometimes seems to happen).

A long time ago I put together an argument and some images under the title ‘English vernacular', and I returned to the theme this year in Forum, the journal of Letter Exchange, and in papers at Bologna and at ATypI in Brighton.

The title is ironic, since ‘English' refers to the round hand script of 1700 and after that was called English in France and other countries (l'écriture anglaise), but derives from French, Dutch and, above all, Italian models. My hero then, as now, is the calligrapher Giovan Francesco Cresci, who introduced flowing writing using the flexible pointed pen in about 1560, and changed the shape of Western writing and typography.

The common charge against the new calligraphy is that it was not only unnatural (since Nature had ordained the broad pen) but that it was a perverse attempt to copy the brilliant work of copper plate engravers. That is only to say that the new generation of Italian (then Dutch and French) copy books was indeed engraved on copper and that the style was increasingly used in the lettering of maps and prints. I think stylish and brilliant copperplate models are to some extent responsible for the increasing contrast between thick and thin that appears in the bigger types of the 17th century (these have been noted in this thread), and I would add to this the tendency of their serifs to become thinner, the appearance of ‘fish hook' serifs in the C, G and S of Dutch types like Van Dijck's (and their adoption in England) and the appearance of the calligraphic double-curve to the tail of capital R that can be seen in several 17th-century English types.

If the 18th-century ‘English' style became a force to be reckoned with in the history of writing and type generally it was because of the increasing strength of British industrial power at home and the creation of a new maritime empire, based on trade, and held together with a web of paper documents, bills of lading, letters of credit, and so on, that needed to be clearly, accurately and impressively written. Hence the rise of the English writing masters, and sooner or later, their power to influence print. It is symbolic that this was achieved by a writing master who became a successful self-made industrialist in the boom town of Birmingham, miles from the tightly-knit, conservative book trade of London. Caslon, a Midlander like Baskerville, chose to join this conservative world and did very well for himself by catering for it competently, whereas Baskerville was notoriously seen by many Londoners as a strange being from outer space.

Incidentally, Nick, the notion of British ‘perpetual copyright' was not so much changed by law in 1774 as be discovered to be non-existent – but you are right in pointing to the legal case of this year as a key event which decided the matter. It generated a boom in competing editions of the same text for which new types and new wove paper were used as promotional features. And this opening up of the market for books, which fed off the rise of a new rich middle class, generated a demand for the new, distinctive, ‘modern cut', types of the 1780s and after.

If I can marshal these arguments effectively, I shall do my best to use them in a new text of ‘English vernacular'. And I shall be delighted to go on reading debates like this one that will help me to get things right.

John, don't you think that Mannerist and Baroques romans — a better set of names for the romans traditionally dubbed transitional — or what Robert Bringhurst also dubs the proto-Baroque letters of the later sixteent century begining with the mature work of Robert Granjon and passing through the garamonds and on into Caslon, do show the influence or awareness of rotation? All these letters show a variable stroke axis as the illustration from Robert Bringhurst “fuelleton in honour of John Dreyfus” Shovels, Shoes and the Slow Rotation of Letters makes plain. And the axis of the 'o' becomes typically vertical as if to anticipate what becomes formalized across the board in the Didonis on the basis of expansion.

This movement of the stress axis of the ‘o’ to vertical might also further explicate Baskerville's ‘debt’ to Caslon.

[almost forgot to say this]

It's my impression that the tensive effects on form of rotation made visual wordform resolutional affordances even more robust.

Thanks for that Peter, the ascent/descent of type. To the point of how much more objective we can be about the history of our craft than the "average" historian, I think it goes on and on until we test the flexibility of the exact kinds of tines they made to be sure of 90% of what we think we know.

I also like James' introduction of the relationship between the text type they were setting and the display type they were drawing or engraving to accompany it. I am comfortable setting or recommending the setting of text (8-10.99 pt) in oldstyle even if a transitional or a modern is set above it in the display size. Starting at 11 or 12 pt. a mix such as this becomes dicey. But I am very uncomfortable setting or recommending an oldstyle above a modern at any size.

So I'm assuming these effects on form in visual wordform resolutional include our desire to see things more handwritten the smaller they are, (probably to a point) in the same way we are more comfortable with wood upon stone rather than the opposite, which gives me the creeps, worse even than oldstyle display above modern text.

Cheers!

>disrupting the thread

Are you kidding? I would much rather read your knowledgeable analysis than my guessing.

I have made no pretense of knowing the history of writing here. What I did react against was what seemed to me an exaggerated claim of Noordzij, that later type designers disregarded what earlier type designers did, and only looked to writing. Having spent recently a lot of time designing letters, I just don't find that plausible. I may have misinterpreted Noordzij, but my impression from reading both Letter Letter and The Stroke (translated by Peter) is that he has brilliant new insights on the development of letters, but that he at times claims they are the whole story rather than part of the story.

>you are arguing against yourself.

Well, yes, after Peter's argument I said I thought I was wrong, but then had second--or third--thoughts about that as I looked a little more into the history. Now that James confirms my guess that there was an influence of engraving on the adoption of the pointed, flexible pen, I am thinking now that the story is one of interaction between the crafting of letters in different media.

>Then you’re blind. Sorry, but there’s no polite way to put it.

You are, um, jumping to conclusions. My guess, which may well be wrong, is that the letters such as the Shelly letters James showed us are constructed, not written. By that I mean that they look carefully built up of many strokes, not truly 'written', with a continuously moving front. I see that Nick also has the same feeling. And if I read him rightly, David also sees them this way. Can you tell us more about how these letters were made, James?

Reading the Wikipedia article about the pointed nib, I see that you can't do a thick upstroke with the pointed nib, but have great control on the down strokes. I think I can see affects of that in the cursive styles, which are more written, but the Roman look to me constructed, and keeping largely to the earlier rules of where contrast should fall--but just made more vertical.

Peter wrote that there was an 'expansion contrast template'. Thinking about it further, I do see that the vertical stress would be more natural with the pointed nib, as you could bear down on the vertical down strokes, and in that sense he is right. However, you also have the tradition of 'constructed' letters, from the 15th century on. I see an example of a vertical stress letter from the Romain du Roi, and I am wondering how early vertical stress 'constructed' letters exist--do they exist before the pointed pen?

So I would concede to Peter and you at this point that the vertical stress seems more natural with the pointed pen. But I am wondering whether the point pen is following design ideas from earlier, with constructed letters, and letters created in other media: punch-cut, painted, stone carved, engraved.

>I’m not sure who the first person was to describe himself as a ’type designer’ or when, but I suspect it was quite late

I know that applying the term 'type designer' to Jenson is anachronistic, but I don't think it is misleading. As Harry Carter pointed out in the passage I quoted above, the earlier creators of printers type such as Jenson and Griffo were not simply copying writing, but were cutting their punches to conform to models that were in their heads. In that sense they were designers, whatever medium they used to create letters.

I suspect that the 'rotation of the pen' in Dutch typefaces is an example of such interaction. You can get the vertical stress of the 'o' by changing the pen angle from the 'e'. But the question is, why would you bother to do this, which takes extra trouble in writing? It seems to me you would do this if you wanted to conform to a different design idea that you were trying to produce on paper.

And just for the record, when I write for publication, I thoroughly study the history of what I am writing about, unlike my guessing and rambling here on Typophile.

[Bill] “[…] cutting their punches to conform to models that were in their heads […].

When you adjust the contrast or the weight of storkes in the letters you design, do you do it because of a model in your head or because something is wrong in optical-grammatical terms and / or “gestural-atmospheric force” terms? I believe Jenson and Griffo’s innovations were the result of the characteristic featural play or exploration afforded by cutting punches. The ‘end’ of this is not evident at the start. The formalized result of exploration articulates a model only after play has resulted in something worth keeping.

To answer my own first question on this thread, perhaps when the changes are the result of the characteristic featural play or exploration afforded by cutting punches, writing becomes more typographic. But what keeps writing writing is writing.

[Bill] “[…] vertical stress seems more natural with the pointed pen.”

The only tool that an expansion consistently perpendicular to the direction of the stroke and symmetrical relative to the “heartline” (Gerrit Noordzij) is native to is the pointed flexible pen.

Or to say it in a less contorted way: The only tool that western expansion is native to is the pointed flexible pen. By ‘western‘ expansion I mean: an expansion consistently perpendicular to the direction of the stroke and symmetrical relative to the “heartline” (Gerrit Noordzij)

>The ‘end’ of this is not evident at the start.

Yes, that seems more plausible. They had a goal of more readable, attractive text, but had to discover what how to get closer to that goal by trial and error. Some of that trial and error may have been with drawn letters on paper, though, before or during the punch cutting.

I would guess that because they were adjusting weights in a way that didn't conform to letters written with a broad nib, they would also have tried such variations out on paper.

[Bill] “constructed”

Of course it's all constructed. It's just what contrast template is the — ummmm — model, and what tool that template is native too. The rest is feature manipulation upon or away from the implied template.

Bill: My guess, which may well be wrong, is that the letters such as the Shelly letters James showed us are constructed, not written. By that I mean that they look carefully built up of many strokes, not truly ’written’, with a continuously moving front.

But what you said was that you didn't see the influence of the split nib in the neo-classical roman types. The point that both Peter and I have made is that the influence is in the distinctive stroke contrast pattern. The fact that Shelley likely drew his c. 48pt letters (split nibs are notoriously difficult to use to write letters this large), or that Baskerville might have drawn rather than written his models for John Handy or used some mix of writing and drawing, doesn't alter the fact that what is employed in the shapes is a contrast pattern that is distinctive and based on that of the split nib pen. And for obvious reasons: the goal was to make harmonious letters at a range of sizes, all in keeping with the dominant text aesthetic (the social and economic background of which James has nicely encapsulated). So Shelley and other writing masters write at the sizes at which they can write, and draw at the sizes at which they can't write, but maintaining a harmony of style that is based on the characteristic contrast template -- to use Peter's term -- of the writing that is, after all, the more common.

Peter, there are two kinds of rotation:

Rotation between strokes, in which the angle of the hand is changed while the pen is lifted from the page.

Rotation within strokes, in which the angle of the hand is changed while the pen is moving in contact with the page.

One finds the first kind of rotation in all kinds of scripts, styles and periods, and this is what produces letters with variable axes. It is, for example, an essential component of the Byzantine cursive Greek miniscule, which always displays some variation in ductus.

Rotation within stroke is much less common, but this is the characteristic of mannerist writing with a broad nib that Noordzij has analysed so well in the work of Jan van den Velde. It is a virtuoso method: very difficult to learn but stunning when done well. So far as I can tell, it was not applied to 'roman' letterforms, though, and it's influence in type, beyond civilité, seems minimal and limited to some features in italics.

The kind of rotation you point to in Bringhurst's illustration is the first kind: rotation between strokes creating letters with varying ductus. But the ductus within the individual letters does not vary significantly. I suppose the implied slight rotation in the exit stroke of the e in some styles might be significant, but it could just as easily be a paratypographic feature of 'type design'.

David: I also like James’ introduction of the relationship between the text type they were setting and the display type they were drawing or engraving to accompany it. I am comfortable setting or recommending the setting of text (8-10.99 pt) in oldstyle even if a transitional or a modern is set above it in the display size. Starting at 11 or 12 pt. a mix such as this becomes dicey.

Excellent point.

It's worth noting that Baskerville's types are all pretty large by modern text standards. The neo-classical English book tends towards the monumental in its layout, which is why stylistic harmony between the different sizes of type was important.

John, clearly you're right.

But in the typographical instatiations of the carolinian minuscule isn't the emulation of between-stroke rotation by the mannerists an innovation beyond their typographical predecessors?

Peter: But in the typographical instatiations of the carolinian minuscule isn’t the emulation of between-stroke rotation by the mannerists an innovation beyond their typographical predecessors?

I'm going to say yes, so long as one is only considering the instantiations of the caroline miniscule by those typographical predecessors. Obviously, if one also consider their instantiations of the Byzantine cursive miniscule, there is typographical precedence for the idea of between-stroke rotation. But the fact that this rotation only gets applied to roman letters at the time when rotation, both between-stroke and in-stroke, has become a feature of Latin script writing seems significant.

John: Rotation within stroke is much less common,

But very common for finishing strokes. If you wish to create a terminal at a different angle to the angle of stress, you must rotate as you finish the stroke.
With a broad pen, if you incorporate removing one side of the pen before the other into the motion, you can create a perpendicular serif. But that is easier than rotating while holding the nib flat to the paper, because the rotation serves to lift one side of the nib off the paper. Dragging the dry corner of the nib, the build up of ink behind the nib is eased and tails off as it clings after the diminishing area of contact.

So that is how the top serif in this letter is formed, as the pen moves from right to left, rotates counter-clockwise, and the right side of the nib lifts off the paper, while the left corner eventually drags down vertically.

Yes. Lifting one side of the broad nib and writing with the corner is another virtuoso technique. As you note, Nick, in Latin script it is primarily used for certain kinds of terminals. In the nasta'liq style of Arabic it is the cornerstone of the whole style.

John, "The scribes weren’t imitating type, the type was imitating the scribes."

In fact, scribes did imitate type. (Trittenheim)

Giampa

Noordzij vs Harry Carter, the sequel.

So as I was saying, scripts like Bickham show the influence of the flexible pointed pen in a way that Baskerville does not. What do I mean by that?

Here are a few characters from Bickham pro, but I suspect they are pretty true to the 'ductus' of the flexible pen:

I see here several things different form the broad pen type of writing, beyond greater contast. First, in the O we see that the pointed, flexible pen is able to get strokes in the same direction and same angle of different thicknesses. These are cleverly used a 'echo' shapes of different weights. Second, instead of the 'twisted ribbon' look of a broad pen changing direction, we have a gradual, sweeping swelling and diminishing of the stroke, and an ability to change angle without changing width (the left stroke of the N). .

By contrast, if we look at the typographic letters of Shelly, above, or at Baskerville, see more vertical stress, and greater contrast, but not the kinds violation of the broad pen as in the pointed pen script. Here is Baskerville:

What is going on here? Is there another influence, not from the flexible pointed pen?

Stay tuned for our next exciting adventure...

Was there any influence on Baskerville other than the pointed flexible pen, and the new things that were possible with it, and that it was conducive to?

Peter writes above that the pointed flexible nib created a "contrast manipulation paradigm that is fundamentally different in kind to that which came before."

And John argues "What you said was that you didn’t see the influence of the split nib in the neo-classical roman types. The point that both Peter and I have made is that the influence is in the distinctive stroke contrast pattern."

But does the 'distinctive stroke contrast pattern' in Baskerville actually come from the flexible pointed nib, or are other sources equally or more important?

As Harry Carter argues in the earlier passage I quoted, the effort to find a geometrical 'true' paradigm for the letters freed punch cutters to change their types from what the scribes had done.

Is that kind of following a certain aesthetic ideal an important driving influence? Well the evidence? As James alludes to above the Romain du Roi type fifty years earlier already had some of the characteristics of Baskerville. And it was allegedly worked out using geometric models, as we can see here (image from Types of Typefaces):

However, the pointed flexible nib had been introduced in the 17 century, so perhaps this typeface was also just following the pointed nib pen, and the geometrical exercises were mere window dressing.

The problem with this theory can be seen in some of Albrecht Dürer's drawings of letters:

Here Dürer does both vertically stressed characters and 'old style'. And he is quite conscious that the first, vertical stress letters violate the models of the broad pen. He writes in the description of the second 'C', "and, as though made with a pen, let the descending stroke be heavier than the ascending."

Note that the serifs are also more pointed than in any pen script, and they are also, in the H, I, etc, symmetrical.

Now Dürer did these engravings in 1525, so that is long before the flexible pointed nib was generally used. My own conclusion is that Harry Carter is right about there being a freedom to pursue new ideals not derived from writing. And those explorations eventually to the Romain du Roi and to Baskerville's work.

As a coda to this, let me return to the typographic engravings of Bickham. The fact that these drawings do not display very prominently some of the characteristic uses of the flexible pointed nib shown in the cursive writing indicates to me that these drawings are heavily influenced by type. Nevertheless, the p in the top picture, for example, shows the presence of the flexible pointed pen in the fairly uniform, fine line arching into the stem above and below. However, in Baskerville, (at least in modern interpretations, and I think I see the same in the small sample above) there is more tapering, characteristic of earlier type, including Caslon, rather than writing.

These engravings of pen made roman letters are not so much writing as careful drawings that show the marked influence of type, and which try to work out ideas that go back to Dürer, and probably earlier. This is not to deny that pointed nib makes a contribution by facilitating the exploration, but there is a lot besides writing going on.

Tomorrow: conclusions.

Bill, the fact that Baskerville's types display only some of the contrast patterns that may be produced with the split nib is not an indication that the split nib, via the lettering of the contemporary writing masters -- including Baskerville himself! -- is not the primary influence. One also doesn't see the kind of parallel strokes of different contrast in the formal roman letters written by those writing masters, as seen in the illustrations I provided above, only in their cursive 'script' styles. The reason you don't see it in the roman letters is that such parallel strokes are not a part of the letterform.

The fact remains that you can't produce Baserville's letters using any other writing implement but a split nib. The fact remains that Baskerville was a master of writing with the split nib. The fact remains that English writing masters were producing roman letters in his style several decades before his first types were cut. The fact remains, that other than blackletter, all the styles produced by these writing masters were based on the dynamics of the split nib.

By the way, the example of large letters produced by George Shelley, presented by Beatrice Warde in her Monotype Recorder article on Baskerville and reproduced by James above, is dated 1715. Today I found an example of much smaller roman letters written by Shelley (about the size of the main body type of Baskerville's Milton) in 1709. If you didn't realise it was written and not type, and someone asked you to name the typeface, you would say Baskerville. I'll post a photo shortly.

* * *

If you are going to introduce the Roman du Roi, then I would say that we have to start paying attention to French writing masters as well as English ones. Just as you can't ignore what English writing masters were producing in the decades before Baskerville's types, you can't triumphantly point to the precedence of the Roman du Roi without taking into account what French writing masters were producing in the decades before it was devised. Thankfully, we happen to have one of the the foremost authorities on the Roman du Roi reading this discussion. Thankfully, also, I happen to have his book. Page 32 shows 'Devises pour les tapisseries du Roi, 1668.... la calligraphie est vraisemblablement de Jarry'. Do I need to say that it shows essentially the style of the Roman du Roi type, written with a split nib pen, thirty years before the cutting of the typeface?

* * *

Pace Harry Carter, Dürer's constructed letters, like the numerous other renaissance exercises in attempting to devise or prove a geometric basis for roman capitals, exist entirely outside the mainstream of text production. They have nothing to do with the making of text, either in manuscript or in type.

As Harry Carter argues in the earlier passage I quoted, the effort to find a geometrical ’true’ paradigm for the letters freed punch cutters to change their types from what the scribes had done.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think there is visual evidence to back it up. Punchcutters are providing types to produce text, within text cultures. The theoretical and conceptual exercises of artists, accountants, and varied other people who dabbled in the geometric construction of letters seems to me to have had remarkably little influence on the development of typographic letters. This isn't surprising, because such exercises had remarkably little impact on the contemporary text culture.

What Dürer and other letter-constructors were trying to do was to establish a geometric basis for the classical roman capitals. That is, they were taking something that already existed, and trying to map it to various kinds of geometries to see how well it fit and to iron out suspected non-rational inconsistencies. I think the committee and draughtmen responsible for the famous engraved Roman du Roi plates were engaged in the same kind of exercise: taking the kind of letters being written by master scribes like Nicolas Jarry -- employed in the service of the same king as the makers of the Roman du Roi --, fitting them within a grid, and imposing geometries on the construction of details. In the process, they rationalised many aspects of the construction. What is interesting, of course, and oft remarked on, is that Grandjean's actual type does not follow these engraved plates. It is, in fact, very close to Jarry's 'calligraphie'. Why? Because that's the contemporary text culture.

Gerald: In fact, scribes did imitate type. (Trittenheim)

Trittenheim?

There are certainly individual examples of scribes directly copying type, as there are of scribes attempting, painstakingly, to emulate the regularity of type. But these examples are notable precisely because they were not the norm, and because in text cultures in which manuscript and typography exist side-by-side the writing has the advantages of immediacy and economy in the innovation of new styles. [Which is not to say that writing-centric text cultures are necessarily innovative: The naskh style of Arabic script has remained the basic book hand for more than five hundred years.]

The conclusion of my version of the story is that printers type is both derivative of writing, and a deliberate departure from writing in an effort to increase readability.

The movement away from what is natural in writing starts even with scribes. When people write naturally, they write in more cursive, flowing styles, with slant. Scribes were producing text for reading, and made hands that are more unnatural to write--being more upright for example--but easier to read.

The creators of the printer's type that became dominant in latin script--Jenson and Griffo--took this process a step further. They not only made the letters more upright and more symmetrical, but were willing to violate the rules of the broad pen, and change relative weights and the nature of joins to get more even color and higher readability.

In the case of Baskerville, we see a strong tendency to more simple geometrical shapes. He is not just increasing contrast, but having more circular arches in the mn, for example. That these are more circular reflects the neo-Classical arch--as Bringhurst notes--and not only writing influences. It may well reflect also a search from before the time of Dürer for 'ideal' shapes and proportions. Since Baskerville says specifically that his goal is "true proportions"--a phrase reminiscent of Dürer's "just shaping of letters"--I also think it likely that his shapes are influenced by this concept of a certain ideal, not derived from writing, but to which writing can aspire, and type more successfully achieve.

If we look at the C from Bickham (taken from above), Baskerville (from the Prayer book image) and Caslon (scanned from Caslon's Great Primer), we have some of the story:

What I see here is Baskerville being influenced by both: following the greater contrast from the writing (actually engraving), but also following the geometrically more simple, rigid and symmetrical form taken from type, and specifically Caslon. (Had I scanned a larger size of Caslon, you would see more higher contrast and closer resemblance to Baskerville.) We also see a formal balance that seems to owe a lot to pushing toward an imagined ideal architype of letters, and not one that simply follows and regularizes writing--even the most typographic of writing.

>The fact remains that you can’t produce Baskerville’s letters using any other writing implement but a split nib.

You can't produce them by the pointed nib either, and can only come close laboriously. You can produce them by drawing, or by cutting them in punches, which is how they were in fact produced. The question is whether the inspiration was simply writing, or also type and ideal shapes.

John: "There are certainly individual examples of scribes directly copying type, as there are of scribes attempting, painstakingly, to emulate the regularity of type. But these examples are notable precisely because they were not the norm, and because in text cultures in which manuscript and typography exist side-by-side the writing has the advantages of immediacy and economy in the innovation of new styles."

In spite of what you say "of the advantages of immediacy and economy in the innovation of new styles." the influence of typography on the work of scribes is greater than you may think.

Scribes became very competitive before the demise of their industry. Competing technologies often inspire better work, and often imitative work, as you could observe when letterpress competed with litho.

Printers influence generated a "general improvement" on the craftsmanship of scribes.

Also Printers abandoned lavish imitation of scribes work including many aspects of page design, there are examples of scribes imitating printers typographical design sensibilities.

On the other hand printers departured from tradition by adding features such as the mathematical combinations of fleurons.

That said it would be foolish to pretend printers did not owe great debt to the work of scribes.

Bill: The movement away from what is natural in writing starts even with scribes. When people write naturally, they write in more cursive, flowing styles, with slant. Scribes were producing text for reading, and made hands that are more unnatural to write—being more upright for example—but easier to read.

Natural? You seem to assume that writing that is cursive, attached, with slant is somehow more 'natural' than writing that is formal, unconnected and upright. This has nothing to do with one form being more 'natural' than the other: it is simply a question of speed. Almost all mature manuscript text cultures produce two main styles of lettering: a formal book hand that is written slowly, often employing a greater number of strokes to form each letter, and a faster cursive hand in which the pen is lifted less often; slant and horizontal compression are results of increased speed. To my knowledge, the more slowly written formal book hand always precedes the cursive hand chronologically. If you study palaeography, this is one of the first things you notice, and you see it repeated again and again in different cultures and scripts. Speed, far from being more natural, only comes with experience.

In the case of Baskerville, we see a strong tendency to more simple geometrical shapes. He is not just increasing contrast, but having more circular arches in the mn, for example. That these are more circular reflects the neo-Classical arch—as Bringhurst notes—and not only writing influences.

But the round arch and the more circular forms of e.g. Shelley's capitals are part of the same neo-classical moment. There is a whole intellectual and artistic culture converging in ideas about classical proportion and beauty, and this is shaping the particular text culture and creating the need for neo-classical types. What is interesting is that this need is first met by the writing masters, who are essentially 'writing typefaces' up to four decades before Baskerville is having them cut in metal. Why are they doing this? Because the typeface for the emerging text culture does not exist yet, so they have to write it.

I don't think there can, in fact, be any question that Baskerville's inspiration was the kind of formal letter being written by his fellow writing masters. Indeed, these letters are basically the spec for his types. The interesting question is not whether Baskerville looked to Caslon, but what typefaces someone like George Shelley was looking at, since Caslon had not made his types when Shelley was writing the shapes that Baskerville would translate into metal. One can assume that Shelley and other writing masters were familiar with the imported types that inspired Caslon, but it seems to me that they're not so much responding to specific typefaces as they are to an idea of typographical letterforms -- formal, regular, adaptable to a range of sizes -- and then creating what they think the neo-classical form of those letters should look like. I don't think it would have made much difference to the result if they had looked at Griffo's types, Garamond's or de Walpergen's, because the same basic qualities of 'typeness' can be derived from any of them: what matters is how to embody those qualities in letters that reflect the neo-classical text culture. This is what George Shelley does as early as 1709, and by the time John Handy cuts Baskerville's types at mid-century, the style has become part of the standard repertoire of the English scribe.

It may well reflect also a search from before the time of Dürer for ’ideal’ shapes and proportions. Since Baskerville says specifically that his goal is “true proportions”—a phrase reminiscent of Dürer’s “just shaping of letters”—I also think it likely that his shapes are influenced by this concept of a certain ideal, not derived from writing, but to which writing can aspire, and type more successfully achieve.

Again, this is part-and-parcel of the neo-classical moment.

Gerald: Printers influence generated a “general improvement” on the craftsmanship of scribes.

As I wrote near the beginning of this discussion: there was a flowering of renaissance manuscript production after the introduction of printing. But this is characterised by a conscious effort to improve quality and beauty: the form of the letters used is the same humanist formal book hand on which the Jenson and Griffo types were based. Competition from print inspired the scribes to do better work, to write more carefully and to show off just how legible and regular their letters could be, but the form of those letters was still the same lettera antica that they had been writing for half a century before the invention of type casting and which had shaped the contemporary Italian text culture. The early printers stepped into that text culture, and their presence changed it in numerous ways, but their influence on letter shapes seems the most minimal.

>There is a whole intellectual and artistic culture converging in ideas about classical proportion and beauty, and this is shaping the particular text culture and creating the need for neo-classical types. What is interesting is that this need is first met by the writing masters, who are essentially ’writing typefaces’ up to four decades before Baskerville is having them cut in metal.

It seems to me here you are agreeing that ideas about proportion and the previous model of roman typefaces and their readability principles, are among the prime drivers of the process leading to Baskerville. It wasn't not simply writing or even other hand lettering. That has been my main point all along.

Given the evidence from Dürer, I think it is clear that these ideals existed well before the pointed pen, and were driving these efforts. Is it possible that even the adoption of pointed flexible nib was to emulate the more dramatic thick-thin contrast that already existed in engraving?

I didn't know how much the neo-Classical forms had been developed before Baskerville; so thanks for explaining that and posting the examples. And thanks to James for his explanations and examples as well.

Bill: It seems to me here you are agreeing that ideas about proportion and the previous model of roman typefaces and their readability principles, are among the prime drivers of the process leading to Baskerville. It wasn’t not simply writing or even other hand lettering. That has been my main point all along.

But it was the translation of those ideas into written forms that provides the very obvious model for Baskerville's types. That is 'the process leading to Baskerville'. And that translation involves devising ways to create formal roman letters with the primary writing tool of the day such as will harmonise with the other script styles in contemporary use. That it took the better part of half a century for those letters to find their way in to type is testimony to the relative conservatism of the printing and typography trades. You can make a case that Caslon was also exploring these ideas of neo-classical proportion, but it seems to me very difficult to separate out such a notion from the basic inheritance of his Dutch models and from the many inconsistencies of his types. Writing masters like Shelley did a much more convincing job of giving form to these ideas, and that surely consistutes the 'room for improvement' that Baskerville saw.

And I'm not agreeing about 'readability principles' because I'm not convinced that there is a significant difference in readability between type and a carefully written formal book hand -- including those many models of formal book hand in various scripts that were not adapted to typography -- that is ascribable to anything other than regularity. The adaptations and modifications found in typographic letterforms are explainable relative to scale and the physics of impression. It is easier to make small text with type than with a pen, and hence more economical in material terms (it uses less paper), and these letters benefit from modications to proportions and details that make them legible at these small sizes. So you can say that small type is easier to read than an equivalent size of written text, but can you say the same thing about type that is the same size as typical manuscript text? There doesn't seem to be evidence that small text is easier to read than larger text. Baskerville's text, of course, tends to be quite large and I'd much rather read his Milton than any number of typical modern editions.

Between Dürer and neo-classicism is the wide expanse of the mannerist, baroque and rococo periods. The obsession with proportion in the neo-classical movement was not a direct continuation of the renaissance investigations of people like Dürer, but a starting again.

There is no “process leading to Baskerville”. Baskerville, like anyone else, is an intersection or meeting place of many things. When I did my work on Henk Krijger’s Raffia Initials, I needed seven ‘referential frames' to say what needed saying about them. Some of them related to construction, some to curve structure, some to contrast, some to organic form.

Some of the things that Baskerville is a meeting place for are:
1) awareness of the contrast type native to writing with the flexible-nibbed pointed pen;
2) awareness of how the contrast type native to the broad-nibbed pen was formalized in the first roman types
3) awareness of what was done with traditional contrast by the mannersists and proto-baroque;
4) a preference for 'classical' or ‘just’ proportions.

But the point is, or so it seems to me, that the foundational ‘norm-violation” of the baskerville, fournier, didot and bodoni types is the reliance of their contrast styling on a new and fundamentally different contrast scheme. That contrast scheme is characterized by expansion, and it is native to writing with the flexible-nibbed pointed pen, whatever the actual historical details of it's transition or fine tuning in roman letters. And the contrast is in a way, written over the older contrast type. (Foundational, in this context means: what makes these types genotypically distinct. These types were ‘strong departures’ from what came before.)

Also, how Baskerville came to his application of the contrast scheme (that he came to know from the inside out, through writing) to the latin roman, might have been mediated by engravings in the model books (which might also have a complicated relation to actual writing).

I don't think Noordzij’s bald statement is intended to obliterate these complexities.

And, finally, I wonder if you mean to suggest that Baskerville worked from ‘readability principles,‘ that is, from a set of tacit rules (in the Noordzijian sense)?

>There is no “process leading to Baskerville”

I don't understand what you are objecting to here. I only meant to refer to a sequence of events and a variety of influences on Baskerville, such as you list.

>written over the older contrast type.

I like this description, because I think it captures something I was trying to say above--that Caslon was a starting point, and even though there was a lot of change, you can still see the 'memory' of it in some ways.

>native to writing with the flexible-nibbed pointed pen

Well this is true, but I can't totally buy the flexible pen as having a dominant influence on the the shapes, as they do in the cursive. Here, for example, is a comparison of Caslon and Baskerville. The top are scans from Caslon's larger sizes--from James Mosley's facsimile edition and commentary on the 1766 specimen booklet. Below is ITC New Caslon.

As to the difference between the two C's I really don't see that Baskerville is that different, particularly as far as how the curves are handled. The arches on the m are to me the decisive difference, but here it seems that the desire for high contrast and the circular arches (inside and out) may be as much an influence as the ductus of the pointed pen. If you tried to draw this letter with a broad pen held vertically, you could pretty much get it, I am guessing, except for the left part of the arch. But these tapers in joins are in any case generally handled in type differently than the broad pen, including in Caslon. And even Baskerville's m has a gradual taper, which is more traditional than the long fairly uniform curvy thin strokes, as in the Bickham N above.

So did having the pointed pen to work out the shape help it? Yes. But the neo-classic aesthetic taste and keeping close to 'typographic' rules for the roman seem to be just as important influences.

>And, finally, I wonder if you mean to suggest that Baskerville worked from ‘readability principles,‘ that is, from a set of tacit rules (in the Noordzijian sense)?

I suspect Baskerville was was mainly driven by aesthetics. I think he wanted it to look like type, and part of roman type is that it is highly readable, so there might have been a tacit influence there. But mainly he was striving for a much cleaner, more elegant look than Caslon. As you know, he was an innovator in inks, paper and printing in an effort to get the cleaner look. The type face was only part of the story.

Bill, does it help for me to say that what is at issue is not of the order of phenotypical similarity, but of genotypical change?

Mimicry of the pen, or making letters that look like pen-formed letters is not at issue, but the contrast type the flexible-nibbed pointed pen teaches is. With this lesson in hand, and looking back to Caslon one see a kind of proto-expension in some of the forms, which Baskerville perhaps realized. What is incidental, piecemeal and approximate in Caslon in phenotypical terms — and due to a kind of rotation — becomes, through knowledge of expansion, genotypical, fully realized across the letter set, and a ‘logic’ in Neoclassical and Romantic type.

As well, the counter in the ‘n’ of the top example is more regular in geometric terms than that of the lower specimen.

Bill: I like this description, because I think it captures something I was trying to say above—that Caslon was a starting point, and even though there was a lot of change, you can still see the ’memory’ of it in some ways.

It's with the notion of Caslon as 'a starting point' that I have most trouble with your position. I see Caslon's types as a kind of mid-way and perpendicular development to the thread that connects Baskerville's types so clearly to the letters derived by people like George Shelley earlier in the century. Earlier, that is, than both Baskerville and Caslon. What I now see in Caslon is an attempt to merge two sets of influences: the imported Dutch models that provided the specific context of typography in England, and the general context provided by neo-classicism, particularly as explored and expressed in the work of the writing masters. To visualise this, you need to put alongside your big C and m images from Caslon and Baskerville the same letters from Shelley's 'French Cannon' of 1715. Baskerville's types are, of course, much closer overall to Shelley's forms than Caslon's, but I think the comparison suggests that Caslon was trying to introduce elements of the new neo-classical letterforms into his types while still staying true to his Dutch models. Indeed, I suspect that this observation might explain many of the apparent inconsistencies in Caslon's types. Again referring back to Baskerville's comments re. Caslon, one might define the 'room for improvement' as all the remaining traces of the Dutch oldstyle in Caslon's types. That he didn't dismiss Caslon's types completely indicates that he recognised the interposed neo-classical features among the oldstyle; but he surely also recognised where those neo-classical features came from: George Shelley and the other early century writing masters.

[By the way, I don't think ITC New Baskerville is a good basis for making observations about Baskerville's types.]

Bill: So did having the pointed pen to work out the shape help it? Yes. But the neo-classic aesthetic taste and keeping close to ’typographic’ rules for the roman seem to be just as important influences.

You still seem to be looking at the type and ignoring the fact that those neo-classical aesthetics and conformance to 'typographic' rules for the roman were worked out first with the pointed pen, which was the primary lettershaping tool of the neo-classical text culture. We don't know what neo-classical letters might have looked like if the pointed pen had not existed: you don't get very far trying to write letters with a vertical axis with a broad nib pen. What we do know is that the text culture would have looked very different, and so would the typefaces that came, belatedly, to form part of that culture. What I'm pretty sure would not have happened is the development of Baskerville's types, or even the neo-classical elements lurking in Caslon's types, without the specific models that the contemporary writing masters produced with those pointed pens. There are concepts of proportion that one might derive from neo-classical treatises on art and architecture, but those don't lead you to the specific forms of Baskerville's types.

>does it help for me to say that what is at issue is not of the order of phenotypical similarity, but of genotypical change?

Well, yes. Since the same type of modulation of the stroke is in not only the mnhr but also the bdpq, and it is modulation more independent of change of direction in stroke, the pointed pen is more critical than I have conceded so far. The modulation of stroke in earlier type also violated the rules of the broad pen in its joins, but I admit not in the same way.

John I think a lot of inconsistency in Caslon was, as Baskerville implies, because he was in a rush to get masses of work out the door. Here by 'inconsistency' am referring to things like variation in ascender height and x-height within the same face, and of variation in the relation of characters to one another--some wider or narrower in relation to others in different sizes. However, if Caslon could come on Typophile, I suspect he would defend himself by saying "If it looks right it is right." I think he had a self confidence that even if it was not consistent, if it looked harmonious in his eyes, it was excellent. Now I don't think that is a full justification, as he has characters which are just bad. Still, I find it remarkable that he was able to make quite different characters in different sizes, and somehow they all look Caslon, and are impressive in spite of their inconsistencies. And in may be that inconsistency with harmony that helps give them their warmth and charm--and part of the difficulty in capturing their spirit in revivals.

By the way, another source of inconsistency, including in design, not only execution, may be that he had different models of type as a starting point for his types in different sizes. This James Mosley seems to indicate in his commentary on the specimen book of 1766.

I remain unrepentant that Caslon was an important influence on Baskerville, but it would take a lot of work to try to prove it, scanning and comparing letter forms, and I won't be doing that.

“[…] different models of type as a starting point for his types in different sizes.”

Bill, I assume you mean “different types as models for his types in different sizes.” Forget your idea of starting points. Different specimens, printed matter or actual punches might be reference points, but contrast types, construction schemes or role-architectural templates, weight ranges, ideas about relationships of sizes, height to width ratios are starting points.

John: "The early printers stepped into that text culture, and their presence changed it in numerous ways, but their influence on letter shapes seems the most minimal."

It would surprise me otherwise with the following exceptions.

Printing spread letterforms to "countries unfamiliar". National hands became oppressed.

Also printing exploded the use of letterforms which were economical in space. Paper was very expensive. Mass reproduction by printers put great pressure on papermakers. One copy of a book produced by a scribe was negligible compared the hundreds produced by a printer of the same text. Economical letterforms became very important. In that sense printers influence was not so minimal. Consider that Aldus Manutius was the inventor of the pocket book.

"The Aldine Press revolutionized the production, accessibility, and use of the book. Founded by Aldus Manutius (ca 1452-1515), the press introduced a number of innovations that helped shape the development of the modern book, including italic type and the smaller, pocket-sized volume. By putting the Greek and Latin classics in a form that everyone could afford, it revolutionized scholarship: the uniform Aldine texts made comparison and collation universally available, and they were used in schools."

But yes, as I said, printers owed great debt to the previous work of scribes.

>Forget your idea of starting points

Yes, I mean that he was looking at different types, possibly from different hands, at different sizes. How exactly Caslon went about his work is not that important to me, but if I did want to look into this I don't see why I would want to forget the actual types--in metal or on paper--that Caslon was looking at. It isn't only the general theory or design principle, but actual individual letters that matter. Caslon was a very ad hoc kind of guy, and his different sizes not only have different contrasts, different serifs, and different widths, but are sometimes different in their structure--eg small sizes of the C having no barb on the lower arm, but large sizes having the two barbs. That might have been a concept, but it also might have been just copying other types.

[Bill] “I don’t see why I would want to forget the actual types”

My suggestion was to see them as reference points, not starting points. Caslon's types were reference points for Baskerville, as I suppose were the types of several others.

Expansion was his starting point when it comes to the dimension we call contrast.

Probably Baskerville looked at Caslon’s actual types through expansion-tinted glasses.

Question: if Caslon was an “ad hoc kind of guy,” is the pattern of Caslon that there is no pattern? Or that the copying was indiscriminate?

>Question: if Caslon was an “ad hoc kind of guy,” is the pattern of Caslon that there is no pattern? Or that the copying was indiscriminate?

Caslon is mysterious. To describe his style is a kind of Rorschach test, because there is so much variation. But in spite of copying and varying, it all mysteriously comes out Caslon.

It reminds of a concert I saw with the great rock guitarist Chuck Berry. That time he played a lot of guitar, and played different kinds of music, like calypso, show tunes, etc. I don't remember what the different songs were. But what was striking is that they all sounded like Chuck Berry. He has such a strong and individual style, it just stamps everything he touches.

I don't have time to respond to Gerald's interesting comments right now, nor to Peter and Bill's latest posts. But here are some more images that I 'had in the oven'.

First, here is an example of 'written type' from George Shelleys Natural Writing in all the Hands, with Variety of Ornament of 1709. The titles of these writing manuals, which were really forms of advertising for the services or tuition of the writing master, often give a good indication of how the writers thought of what they produced. Given Bill's comment above about 'natural' writing, Shelley's title is particularly apposite. He is demonstrating his facility with 'all the hands', and clearly he counts the formal, pseudo-typographic letters to be among the contemporary hands that are expected to be written 'naturally' by a man of his profession.

And here is a detail. It is worth relating his back to Shelley's 'French Cannon' (approx. 48pt) as illustrated by James earlier in this thread, about which it was suggested, reasonably, that these were 'built up' or drawn letters, rather than written. In this image you see the same forms as written, at about 15pt I think (I've lost my point rule).

James: If the 18th-century ‘English’ style became a force to be reckoned with in the history of writing and type generally it was because of the increasing strength of British industrial power at home and the creation of a new maritime empire, based on trade, and held together with a web of paper documents, bills of lading, letters of credit, and so on, that needed to be clearly, accurately and impressively written. Hence the rise of the English writing masters, and sooner or later, their power to influence print.

I think this statement should be read and re-read, because it neatly summarises the particular British context of the influence of the writing masters on typography. And here is an image that very nicely illustrates all of the points that James makes. I think one could base an entire lecture around this one image and what it tells us about the place of writing in British imperialism. [Click here for a larger version.]

This is from William Brooks' wonderfully titled A Delightful Recreation for the Industrious -- was there ever a better description of type design? -- of 1717. This, and the images from George Shelley's earlier publication, are reproduced in J.I. Whalley's English Handwriting 1540-1853 (V&A, 1969). Whalley comments on this piece: 'A form of self-promotion: Brooks displays his virtuosity by the variety of hands shown in his advertisement. It also gives an indication of the number of style still current at this period, before the overriding demands of commerce swamped the less practical ones.'

"Fractions" in Fraktur - could that be a pun?!

Any way you cut it, fractions could be a pun :-)

ChrisL

"like calypso"

'My Ding-a-Ling' :-)

ChrisL

William: "It reminds of a concert I saw with the great rock guitarist Chuck Berry. That time he played a lot of guitar, and played different kinds of music, like calypso, show tunes, etc. I don’t remember what the different songs were. But what was striking is that they all sounded like Chuck Berry. He has such a strong and individual style, it just stamps everything he touches."

A valuable comparison to the "sound" of Caslon's work.

Caslon did not cut punches from patterns. Patterns were used in the much later mechanical punch cutting innovations, not by hand punch cutters. Drawings were, "but not always" used by punch cutters. Let me compare my own approach to typographical design to that of Jim Rimmer's. Jim would draw his page with the very spirit and feeling of his finished product. I never used drawings (layouts) I designed in the type stick, or with fleurons on a galley. If I do say myself, and I do, typographical compositions found in my stick were "not too shabby"

It is unknown, some even have doubts, including myself, that Caslon began with drawings. In fact the Caslon Foundry, or Foundery, if you prefer, which I do, survived into the twentieth century with punches and matrices intact. But no sign of drawings to my knowledge, and I asked the Caslon Foundery. They offered this very theory.

That is important hear-say evidence drawing me towards significant doubt that Caslon worked from master drawings.

Also, Caslon was not so much cutting a "type face" as he was a "type size". Caslon had a very natural gift for intuitive optical scaling. Some characters, Italic "&" show great departures. One may also note the upper-case "A" changing in design in the original Caslon. Then start looking closely at the other characters.

However all sizes, represent the work of Caslon. All have the same sound, but no two sizes are identical.

By the way, I believe Baskervilled was greatly influenced by Caslon. However the reasons for "non slavish imitation" has yet to be discussed.

In 1723 Baskervill taught writing and became a skilled engraver of tombstones. Caslon was a gun lock engraver, and importantly a bookbinding tool stamping engraver. In other words Caslon was a skilled punchcutter before beginning his business endeavor. Although Baskerville and Caslon were engaged in remotely similar industries they possessed very different disciplines. So one should anticipate notable differences in spite of Baskerville's stated emulation.

Which brings me to the word "emulate" mentioned previously, the one that both John and William have sparred with.

One of the early definitions of emulation is to: (Oxford) "Try to equal or excel; rival;".

A further consideration is the two distinctly different personalities,

Baskerville: "He invented his own lustrous, uniquely black, opaque ink; he was the first to exploit commercially James Whatman’s invention of wove paper, which was much smoother than the traditional laid paper; and he modified the printing process by using heated copper cylinders to dry the ink before it had time to soak too far into the paper. All of these innovations enabled Baskerville to produce printed work of an elegance, crispness and clarity never seen before."

Baskerville was a very inventive book printer not so much a type founder. Baskerville did not emulated Caslon's business model. While Baskerville's workmanship was excellent "the trade not so excellent", or should I say "fussy". The trade had "work to do" and whiskey to drink.

Caslon was a type founder selling to the trade, and sell he did. His foundery produced Caslon Old Face for well over two hundred years. I sold and set tons of Caslon Oldstyle over the years, not a pound or a setting of Baskerville although I offered both.

Baskerville I find more of a curio typeface and compare it with my interest with souvenir spoons. I hate souvenir spoons.

Now that you mention it Gerald, I haven't worked from or with drawings since I got the hang of working directly in Fontographer in 1995.
The only time I have recently put pen to paper for a type design was to write the "script" version of Panoptica.
Nonetheless, I have produced 5" high pen and ink finished art for types, in the 1980s.
I surmise that Caslon et al would have had an idea of what they wanted to do, made that idea a reality in metal, and checked it out in a "smoke" proof. Does that seem reasonable?
If one has drawn or written letterforms at some point, I suspect that is an action which is remembered, and informs subsequent work.

Firstly hello Nick.

Nick: “The only time I have recently put pen to paper for a type design was to write the “script” version of Panoptica.

Nonetheless, I have produced 5” high pen and ink finished art for types, in the 1980s."

That comment is interesting. I would bet Jim Rimmer still draws his type face first. You don’t want to bet do you? So there seems to be an agreement that there are "several approaches to the same problem". The results one would expect to be influenced by the methods used. My rule is to work in methods that give comfort. I think we all try to do that. I wonder how many digital type designers draw first?

Nick: "I surmise that Caslon et al would have had an idea of what they wanted to do, made that idea a reality in metal, and checked it out in a “smoke” proof. Does that seem reasonable?”

That is what the Caslon Foundery expressed.

Also “Smoke proofs were instant and clean”. Smoke proofs were an established function of the punch cutting industry by the time Caslon began his work. Even the Lanston Monotype Machine Company of Philadelphia used smoke proofs in the initial punch cutting process.

Hello Gerald!

I wonder how many digital type designers draw first?

In 2006 I saw Luc de Groot (Graphika) and Cyrus Highsmith (TypeCon) give presentations in which they showed pages from their sketchbooks -- with both an almost diary-like habit -- which included cartoons, writing, and sketches for typeface ideas.

I suspect that a lot of typed designers today do rough sketches, but I wouldn't like to bet.
I also don't believe that the absence of extant rough sketches by Caslon, Baskerville et al is any proof that they didn't do them.
I'm afraid I missed Jim Rimmer's talk at the Type Club of Toronto -- I was out of the country at the time -- perhaps he revealed his working methods then. Maybe Richard Kegler knows.

Nick: I also don’t believe that the absence of extant rough sketches by Caslon, Baskerville et al is any proof that they didn’t do them.

More to the point, in the case of Baskerville would we be able to distinguish such 'rough sketches' from any number of other sheets of neo-classical formal lettering? We should also bear in mind that, unlike Caslon, and despite his experience as an engraver, Baskerville did not cut his own punches. So he must have provided John Handy with some kind of model to follow.

Hey Giampa! Good to see you about once more! Hope all is well with you.

ChrisL

Gerald: Baskerville I find more of a curio typeface...

I don't think Baskerville's types are at all curios in the context of English neo-classical book design; indeed, it is hard to imagine such design without them, and all the other types of the style -- Bell and Bulmer, for instance -- are heavily indebted to Baskerville even if they are, in many respects, more useful typefaces.

I think 'Baskerville', as a revival, becomes a curio, or worse, when taken out of that design context. I'm almost always disappointed when I pick up a book to read and discover that it is set in ITC New Baskerville, because it is usually about 11pt, on a fairly wide measure, with tight linespacing. In other words, generic modern book production, into which Baskerville has been inserted without any regards for the particular character of the typeface: typography as random font selection.

I wonder, Gerald, if a customer had come to you asking for something to be set in Baskerville, how would you have approached the design? It seems to me that you had a real mastery with Caslon, and given your interests in pattern and ornament I suspect your tastes and methods tend naturally toward the baroque. How do you think using Baskerville might have affected your approach to the design? There is, I think, enough of the oldstyle in Caslon to be married convincingly with Granjon's fleurons, for example, but I doubt if that style of ornamentation would work at all well alongside Baskerville, because they belong to entirely different aesthetics.

John:

"I don’t think Baskerville’s types are at all curios in the context of English neo-classical book design; indeed, it is hard to imagine such design without them, and all the other types of the style — Bell and Bulmer, for instance — are heavily indebted to Baskerville even if they are, in many respects, more useful typefaces."

–

"English neo-classical book design;"––pseudoclassical/neo-classical, I consider that movement "faux", don't you?

–

"it is hard to imagine such design without them,"––That would have been a good thing.

–

Look–I have used Bodoni which is even more extreme, but in my opinion, a far superior work to the others. Fleurons were not employed, rules were, printed on Carlyle Japan a bright white paper. The second colour after black was out–of–the–ink–pot warm red.

I was out of my elements other than craftsmanship and a vague idea about design. I was not embarrassed by the design but was not encouraged by the type face enough to chew cud. Although I am responsible for Bodoni 26.

What faces do I lean toward? Well I don't mind Pastonchi, Cochin, Garamond and many Goudy faces. I was known as the typographer that made Goudy look good. I thought Goudy made me look good. In my hot metal days I would have happily employed some of Jim Rimmer's faces. But the most beautiful face, in my opinion, is Centaur.

Bruce Rogers, come to think of it, was pretty handy with fleurons in his own book designs. Did I mention–Caslon cut ornaments for book binders before he became a typefounder.

Your observations on my work has made me ponder. There was harmony in my work, however somewhat accidental if taste is not counted. I was using Caslon long before I discovered fleurons. I easily recognized my gift with ornaments, possibly a genetic one from my great–grandfather who was the King's weaver. I don't care about Kings, but appreciate excellent weaving.

I think Baskerville would have kept me awake at night wondering what to use in the way of fleurons, but call me crazy, I think Bodoni would work with art-deco ornaments. Perhaps I should give it a try.

Sorry that I don't like what I don't like.

Chris, hello to you. I think of you every time I cook saganaki.

One of the most noteworthy uses of Baskerville that I've come across is in Fortune magazine from the 1930s. It's the only typeface used-- display, text, sidebars and captions; most of the editorial content is printed on thick rag paper with lots of gain, but some is on coated gloss, the same spec but a greatly different effect.

Popper's 'Conjectures and Refutations' (his best book) is in Monotype Baskerville, I think. It is a somewhat larger format book, and the width of the Baskerville helps with the wider measure. I always thought it looked quite nice.

I try to separate personal taste from what is better and worse design. Personally, I don't particularly like modernist taste, but I recognize that there are good modernist designs and bad. Same with Victorian.

With neoclassical, Baskerville is one of the good ones if you ask me. It is really beautifully thought through and executed. I do think it's a tiny bit wider than ideal as far as readability, but that may be just prejudice on my part.

I suppose Baskerville is not all bad.

Gerrit Noordzij was kind enough to e-mail me scans of a piece of hand written calligraphy from 1605 and an engraving of the same piece. [I have reduced their size to fit in the Typophile window.]

Here is the original handwriting of Jan van den Velde,

and the here is an engraving of it by Frysius.

As is obvious, these are extremely close.

He also refers me to his last chapters in Letterletter, where he discusses Mannerist writers and the engraving of their writing. Both he and scholar Amy N. Worthen, whom he quotes at length, argue, convincingly, that engraving did not influence writing, but the other way around.

The question of whether changes in aesthetic ideals were driving changes in writing and writing instruments is still an open one, at least for me.

As to the specific issue of the influence of the flexible, pointed pen on Baskerville, as I have said, I am now convinced my initial idea about Baskerville in this thread was wrong. Furthermore, Gerald Giampa makes a good point that Baskerville may have meant by 'emulate' that he was trying to equal or excel Caslon, not that he was imitating him.

As to the influence of the typographic ideal on Baskerville, I do think that this is still sound. I don't think that the typographic writing of Shelley and Bickham posted by John could have ever been done had not Jenson and Griffo earlier established a specifically typographic look for roman type. This includes the uprightness, regularity of design, and violation of broad pen rules for the sake of greater evenness of color.

Baskerville does use the pointed pen line in his arches and round to stem joins, but he introduces these changes in line with restraint, and in the service of a very rigid, upright design that breathes the spirit of past roman type. John and James may not like the term 'transitional', and it is in a way unfair to Baskerville as he was not fumbling toward a different solution, but realizing his own coherent ideas. Nevertheless, compared to Didot and Bodoni, the use of the pointed pen line--changes in expansion largely independent from direction--Baskerville is a lot more restrained and limited. In that sense it seem to me fair to say that Baskerville is a transition to those who used the expansion-contraction line more fully in their types.

"Here is the original handwriting of Jan van den Velde,"
I have trouble calling this "handwriting". Is it really?

>Is it really?

Noordzij calls it handwriting. In the context of his book, I think this means that the letters are not built up, but written with a moving pen making the whole line. The mannerists, he says, twisted the pen, which I guess is responsible for the different angles of the ends of the flourishes. Whether he had to lift the pen off the paper and join a new line with old ones to make those extended loops, I don't know.

I wonder if he (the calligrapher) used a light box for tracing roughs.
Certainly, he would have had to plan the whole thing out in advance, building up the design.
I've done this kind of thing, and it's very difficult to leave exactly the right amount of space between flourishes to accomodate future passes of the pen.
Probably used an erasable medium, like graphite. What kind of eraser?

And how would the engraver have transferred the image to plate, before engraving?
One way would be to draw on the back with graphite, and then rub that onto the plate.
So a light box (or window) would come in handy.
You couldn't just lay a "carbon black" sheet between the drawing and the plate, and go over the writing with a hard implement, because the image needs to be reversed onto the plate.

This "which came first?" argument is so chicken/egg.

Different forms of letter are easier to execute in different media.
Sure, writing masters and engravers could do stiff, discrete, regular lettering that looked like type, and dress it up with fine details that typographers had difficulty matching. But it was a laborious and awkward process to make it look slick.

And sure, type founders could incorporate the graceful finesse of lettering and engraving into their work, and add a cool mechanical gloss (Baskerville's innovations with paper and ink technology certainly helped) that calligraphers had difficulty matching, but it was a laborious and awkward process to make it look slick.

Each medium provided a challenge and a stimulus to the virtuosos of the other, and it was only natural that those accomplished at both should, at the conceptual level of design, elide distinctions—if they wanted to; it seems a bit derogatory to assume that those excellent artisans and creative geniuses weren't aware of and actively engaged with the issues involving the various media of their day, and only worked intuitively in a state of subject technological determinism.

>a bit derogatory to assume that those excellent artisans and creative geniuses weren’t aware of and actively engaged with the issues involving the various media of their day, and only worked intuitively in a state of subject technological determinism.

Thanks, Nick, well put! That's what I've been uneasy with in Gerrit Noordzij's account of the development of writing and type. His analysis of the influence of writing sheds wonderful light on the history. But there were a lot of other influences and creative response to them was going on as well, and these drive the development as well.

Nick, it's not which came first, it's what sets the pattern.

But yes, each medium does provide a challenge and a stimulus to the virtuosos of the other, and it's only natural that those accomplished at both should, at the conceptual level of design, elide contrast schemes, and play with intensification and reduction of contrast amount. The type-involved are creatively engaged with issues involving the various media of the day, and work intuitively in a state of subject-technological co-determination or exchange.

Bill, lots of things influenced the development of writing and type, but not all of them effected fundamental differences in the basic shape-logic of the strokes.

>not all of them effected fundamental differences in the basic shape-logic of the strokes.

Yes, but what drove that change? In the discussion of Mannerist writing Gerrit Noordzij says in Letterletter that the mannerist pen was broad, but flexible. I'm guessing that this was a step to the pointed, flexible pen. From what I read, it seems one could make all of these--broad, mannerist and pointed--from a goose feather and a pen knife. So there wasn't any technical limitation as to why people didn't create and use this kind of pen earlier. Did they modify the pens because they wanted a more florid, dramatic style? Was this related to changes in the decorative arts generally? I would guess 'yes'.

And if the pen is driving everything, why was there was a reaction against the high-contrast vertical stress types toward the end of the nineteenth century? It is said that the publication of Lady Willoughby's Diary, the first revival of Caslon, and of any type, was a sensation in 1844. Many people found it more readable than the high contrast types that had come to dominate printing. and by the end of the century in English speaking countries there was a tide of 'old styles' that continued into the 1930s.

And you had Edward Johnston taking up the broad pen in England, IIRC, and doing old, pre-flexible pen writing. And you had Morris reviving Jenson, or trying to. Was everyone suddenly forced to write with a broad pen and then designers helplessly followed? No. But society was changing--first the industrial revolution, and then reaction to its bad side.

The pen was an important part of the story, but was type design a prisoner of the history of the pen? I really don't think that's tenable, because writing is part of a broader culture--visual, technological, social, and the change in writing instruments are themselves part of that.

For example, one of the technical changes was Baskerville's improvements of inks and printing methods. Again, I don't know, but I would guess that this did help inspire Bodoni and Didot to do what they did *in type*. For the pen's ductus didn't change between Baskerville and Bodoni, so far as I have heard--and I'm sure John will correct me if I'm wrong!

Bill, I don't see why my or Gerrit Noordzij’s saying thst the contrast native to the flexible-nibbed pointed pen set the pattern and was responsible for fundamental change, should be taken as suggesting the pen is driving everything, or that the type designer is a prisoner of the history of the pen or that nothing else matters.

Ultimately we don't know what drove the change besides an understanding of the logic and a proliferation of things that expressed this logic, either artificially or by the choice of tool. All we know for sure is that fundamental — epochal — change happened and in what direction. And that it became a basis for more dramatic modulation in the direction of the change, some if it pushing toward a stall- or breaking-point. And that there is a kind of fit with other elements inside the culture whose character it co-defined amd whose strictures ultimately became oppressive. And that there is a fit between how far intensification of contrast was pushed, and what it became possible to hold in print.

[postscript]

Getting a handle on the nature of the change — epecially when it is fundamental — doesn't knock out relevant factors, it just falls them into place.

Bill, as Peter says, no one is claiming that the pen, per se, drives everything. But in the area of text creation, within cultures in which large amounts of documents were being written rather than typeset, writing tended to set the aesthetic agenda for text because it has the advantages of speed and economy, i.e. writing could respond to and express changes in fashion and cultural tastes more quickly than typography. I think James' point about the importance of manuscript document production to the imperial project of 18th Century England creating a situation in which the writing masters could directly influence the direction of the typographic culture is well made. [How's that for an unpunctuated sentence!]

It is quite typical for aesthetic movements to become increasingly virtuoso and extreme in their expressions, eventually prompting reaction and either revolutionary developments or revivals of previous aesthetic. Both revolution and revival happened in response to the decline of neo-classicism into the hackneyed art of the academy and the decreasing quality of industrial production. In painting, for example, the reaction was largely revolutionary -- impressionism, pos-impressionism, cubism --, excepting the Preraphaelites (who were, of course, associated with William Morris); in the text culture the reaction was revivalist and, as you note yourself, it involved equivalent revivals in both writing and typography, as both returned to renaissance models.

The Caslon revival of the mid-19th Century is a kind of odd blip: a sign of dissatisfaction with what was happening in the increasingly high-contrast types, but not a wholesale programme of reform of the text culture as undertaken at the end of the century by Johnston, Morris, Cobden Sanderson, et al (which also, of course, had equivalents in other countries around the same time, indicating a much broader cultural shift than printing some books in Caslon). Much Victorian typography continued to be bad after 1844, and the so-called Caslon revival doesn't seem to me to have been particularly broad. I recently read a novel published in the 1870s with two narrow columns of justified 9pt scotch roman on each page.

Speaking of the Caslon revival, which was begun by Charles Whittingham's Chiswick Press, you should try to find something printed in Caslon by the Chiswick Press from the first few years of the 20th century. The type is a large Caslon heavily overinked and sunk deeply into thick rag paper in emulation of the new styles made popular by the Kelmscott and Ashendene presses.

By the way, yes you can cut the shape of a pointed split nib in a feather quill, but it won't last very long. The fibres of the feather are nicely flexible, but they don't rebound well and the finer they are cut the weaker they become: the two sides of the split will splay and the pen will be useless. Steel provides the ideal combination of flexibility, strength and durability.

John, you write "no one is claiming that the pen, per se, drives everything."

That may be an exaggeration of Gerrit Noordzij's view, but is only a slight exaggeration. His view is clearest in a summary article, "The Shape of the Stroke", which Peter was kind enough to send me some time ago. It contains information also in Noordzij's book "The Stroke", which as you know Peter translated--thanks Peter! It is particularly concise in expressing Noordzij's views. Here is the abstract:

**
1. Design Shapes Human Life.
2. A civilization is a mode of design.
3. The primitive artifact (the 'DNA' of a civilization) is the single stroke of writing.
4. The stroke is a shape.
5. It is defined by a description of its two dimensions.
**

The first sentence of the first section:

"Western civilization is the cultural society which is communicating in Western writing." (Italics are Noordzij's.) And then at the end of that paragraph he repeats: "Writing is the cultural paradigm." And note that writing and print are not the same thing for Noordzij.

My reading of this, which I think is a reasonable interpretation, is that western civilization hangs on the stroke of the pen. This is reinforced by Noordzij's dark forebodings that Western civilization is threatened by not teaching children handwriting.

This is what I am objecting to as exaggerated. I think that since the introduction of printing, and the achievements of Jenson and Griffo in readability of type, changes in handwriting have been stylistic changes that have reflected, rather than fundamentally changed the culture. Printing has been central to Western culture since then, and writing important, but increasingly less so since the introduction of the typewriter. Notice "type" writer.

To take the analogy of the dog wagging the tail, not the other way around: Changes in writing have been the tail of the dog of larger cultural changes. The tail of writing styles have not been wagging the dog of culture. This is not true of printing: printing was and is the dog, changing civilization. And now printing (not writing!) on the screen is a new cultural force.

So John, do you think I am misreading Noordzij? Do you agree with everything he writes above as not exaggerating the importance of hand writing?

Bill, I will acknowledge that Gerrit Noordzij likes to make stark, compact, unqualified, arresting, and superficially outlandish, often playful but serious-at-the-same-time statements.

In the section that you quote, Noordzij also says “there is much more to say about Western Civilization,” adding “but nothing could be more precise and concise than the simple statement of the first sentence; writing is the cultural paradigm.”

To get part of what this means, let’s emphasize is and the. Writing is the cultural paradigm. Isn't the core of what this says that what happens in writing — that is, to the stroke — is pre-eminantly representative of what happens in a culture?

For example, isn't romanticism an intensification of the polarities existing in Neoclassicism, exactly like Bodoni represents an intensification of the contrast of Baskerville, while retaining the model it is based on?

This reading is supported by Noordzij saying in the second to last sentence, “Here again the paradigm of writing offers a suitable model for social processes, the development of science included…” He says this after suggesting ‘increased articulation’ “represents the trend to formalized establishment,” and this process “provokes the informal reactions which want to be formalized again in a new establishment."

Do you think Noordzij’s making the stroke of writing paradigmatic represents an intention to ask us to see it as causatively originary across each and every board?

I‘ll ask if I'm allowed to post my pdf of the paper.

Bill: Nevertheless, compared to Didot and Bodoni, the use of the pointed pen line—changes in expansion largely independent from direction—Baskerville is a lot more restrained and limited. In that sense it seem to me fair to say that Baskerville is a transition to those who used the expansion-contraction line more fully in their types.

But what you are describing here is the relationship of neo-classicism to romanticism, which was paralleled in pretty much every area of western culture as the 18th Century gave way to the 19th. Yes, one can in retrospect consider Mozart's music as a transition to Beethoven, but is that fair to Mozart? It certainly doesn't tell you anything about what motivated Mozart or about the musical context in which he created his compositions. The typographic category 'transitional' marginalises neo-classicism.

Bill, as I wrote earlier, I'd rather have an argument or discussion between you and me than have you arguing with Noordzij through me. When I wrote 'no one is making the claim...' I meant no one actively participating in this discussion.

I'm going to step aside from the recent topics of discussion here and talk about something that I think might put Noordzij's typically provocative comments into a proper perspective. Ironically, this takes us right back to the original topic of this thread, because, in his critique of Tschichold, Noordzij comes straight out and describes his pedagogical method: which is to present seemingly absolute statements (laws) as a starting point for exploration and discussion. The aside I want to make is to drag in Plato, Popper and Gadamer. Popper considers Plato one of the primary enemies of the open society, because he reads The Republic, as many others have done, as a sociopolitical programme. That is, he reads it as a philosophical treatise on government, akin to many subsequent treatises in the history of western political thought. Gadamer, though, teaching classical philology during the Nazi period because it was safer than philosophy, comes to the realisation that the Platonic dialogues have to be seen in the context of the Platonic academy, i.e. not as treatises but as teaching aids, as works that were composed as a basis for discussion. Plato isn't laying out a programme of ideal government, he's teaching, by example of dialogue, how to talk about government. Similarly, I don't think Noordzij's writings should be separated from Noordzij's teaching, and should also be seen in the context of his pedagogical method. I have little doubt that Noordzij considers teaching more important that writing (in the authorial sense), and the books and essays only exist as teaching aids.

Peter, I take Gerrit Noordzij here as using the word 'paradigm' in the sense introduced by Thomas Kuhn, a sense which is now very widespread. A 'paradigm' in this Kuhn's sense is a model that is applied to many other situations, and hence help to generate new results. It is a causative factor, not simply a representative.

I think the fact that Noordzij starts this abstract by saying that "design *shapes* life" indicates that he sees writing and writing styles as driving forces in civilization.

Bill how I interpret Noordzij reflects what I take from what he says. I do not know how to take some of what he says. My interpretive strategy is to suspend my disbelief, and ask: in what sense can what is said be true? You ask: in what sense is it false? Noordzij, meanwhile is interested in finding out how far his a priori can take him.

>I’d rather have an argument or discussion between you and me than have you arguing with Noordzij through me. When I wrote ’no one is making the claim...’ I meant no one actively participating in this discussion.

John, when you wrote 'no one is claiming', for you to exclude Noordzij is very odd, since you are referring to my words, in which I was clearly and explicitly discussing his views, which are the topic of this thread.

As to the question of how to take Noordzij's strong claims, I think he is pretty clear in this essay on his intentions, both as a scholar and teacher. He puts these theories forward seriously--as claims to the truth--but not dogmatically. That is a wonderful spirit, and it is not simply as an 'exercise' to stimulate student's brains, but an effort to advance closer to the truth. I think he, like Popper, wants us to take seriously his views as attempts at true description, and to criticize and improve them if possible. Fortunately, unlike Popper, he seems to be also personally happy with that critical discussion of the views he has advanced.

Plato was serious--contra Gadamer--and dogmatic. But that is a topic really too far afield to get into it.

Bill, because I don't know how to take the sentence in the abstract that you quote from, I've re-read the essay you refer to.

To find out what Noordzij means when he says “design shapes human life,” or “a civiliztion is a mode of design” you have to look at what he does.

What Noordzij does is define civiliztions, the cultures that exist within them, their beginings and endings, by attending to what happens in it's writing, that is, what happens to the stroke. So for instance ‘his’ “Middle Ages” “begin in the 7th century when an Irish scribe invented the word,” and he defines the Middle Ages as the period of increasing contrast.

According to Noordzij, “the new unit of writing could be strengthened by reducing the white shapes between the letters which demanded a corresponding reduction of the white shapes within the letters. During the Middle Ages the size of the letters in respect to the width of the pen was gradually reduced.” He continues: “I have never found something like a mediaeval mood which fosters this process. It is more sensible to understand Middle Ages as the name of this process.

Noordzij does the same kind of thing for other epochs as well, up until the 20th century. And he begins to show that what happened with contrast through the space of the period is representative of what happened, or paradigmatic.

Middle Ages as the name of this process. That is all that is claimed. And that is all design ‘shaping’ human life should be taken to mean, or so, at least I think.

The statements are all about identity, definition and paradigmaticity; his Middle Ages, Mannerism, Classicism. Baroque. There is nothing about causation, or a driving force. And his may not correspond exactly to yours or that of the others.

Here with Gerrit Noordzij’s permission is a downloadable version my pdf of the paper Bill refers to and he and I have been arguing about. It comes from Robert A. Morris and Jacques André (ed.), Raster imaging and digital typography 2: papers from the second RIDT meeting, held in Boston, October 14-16, 1991 New York, 1991.

Noordzij informs me that the essential part is the part about the picture of his father, and that Maxim Zukov showed him that he made mistakes in the lay-out of the squares.

The analogy to the picture does help. The idea he explains there is that the picture of his father is more representative than his interests and books.

That clarifies in what sense Noordzij thing that "writing is the cultural paradigm." It is a representative, and reveals essential characteristics of a culture--rather than creating them.

That may be true, but I still have a problem with writing being "the" cultural paradigm. Confucius said something like: "Show me the dance and music of a culture, and I will tell you its character." And he was right.

The larger point is that the current cultural products of a society at any given time to a remarkable extent share the same 'DNA'. In the visual arts, for example, you see a resonance between architecture and letters.

It is true that some cultural products are most characteristic of a culture at a given time. In this respect, if you wanted to have a graphic representative of Europe in 1500, I think it would not be scribal hand writing, but a printed page of Aldus. And the departures of type from hand writing would be a small but not insignificant part of that paradigm.

Confucius said something like: “Show me the dance and music of a culture, and I will tell you its character.” And he was right.

"There is no doubt that this urge towards generalization gave the art history confined within this scheme grandiose perspectives. Wölfflin brought this out graphically when he declared that one can as easily gain an impression of the specific form of the Gothic style from a pointed shoe as from a cathedral. However, the more critics learnt in this way to see in a pointed shoe what they were accustomed to seeing in a cathedral, or to see in a cathedral what a shoe could perhaps have told them, the more they lost sight of the elementary fact that a shoe is something slips on to go outside, whereas a cathedral is a place one goes into to pray. And who would deny that this, so to speak, pre-artistic functional differentiation constituting the essential different between two objects, arising from man's use of different tools for distinct purposes, is a factor which plays a decisive part in their artistic formation, giving rise to aesthetic differences in formal content in relation to the observer?"

- Edgar Wind, 1930

>man’s use of different tools for distinct purposes is a factor which plays a decisive part in their artistic formation

Yes of course. It isn't a question of either-or, but both-and. Both the functionality of what is being designed and the aesthetic biases of the day play a role in the final product.

My point was a different one: that written letter forms are only one indication of a culture. Noordzij has given us valuable insights into pen strokes as cultural indicators. These are, however, not the only ones, nor necessarily the most indicative or influential ones.

Bill, regarding Aldus’s part of Europe in 1500, I think the point is, what happens to the stroke of the scribal hand in the printed printed page of Aldus is paradigmatic. And thus puts you in touch with fundamental aspects of the culture.

>the point is

But *my* point is that Aldus's page shifted the paradigm, as Harry Carter, Morrison and others have said. And it was shifted away from the stroke of the scribal hand, as it violated the rules of that hand--if as I suspect the type resembles latter type in the tricks to get more even rhythm and color.

Gerrit Noordzij in Letterletter does acknowledge some change in Jenson from the scribal hand. However, he ascribes this to what is cut "more easily" in a punch (p. 96). Here is the nub of my disagreement. I suspect that was was going on, at least by the time of Griffo, is deliberate changes to achieve a purpose of higher readability than what the scribes achieved. Furthermore, this movement away from writing continued, I suspect, up to at least Garamond.

In order to make this case I will have to get high resolution scans, which I don't have time to do now. However, that movement away from the scribal hand is where I suspect Noordzij's story--and John Hudson's has an important missing theme.

By the way, I broke down and picked up a pointed, flexible steel pen and dipped it in ink and tried to draw an approximation of a Baskerville 'n'. I was taken aback that the pen did drew pretty much exactly Baskerville's line.

The source of my blunder on this is that I was thinking of the pointed pen as the 'generalized pen' that Noordzij describes, with translation, rotation and expansion in any direction. But the pointed pen is more restricted in how it draws on up strokes and side strokes. So it has a characteristic stroke that I wasn't aware of. Or as John Hudson put it--rather ungenerously--that I was 'blind' to. Thus Baskerville didn't just violate the broad pen, he violated it in a way that is characteristic of the pointed, flexible pen.

Bill, did Griffo have a problem with the readability of what the scribes achieved?

I prefer to think of what was going on as formalization — or re-formaliztation, if he didn't like how his contemporaries were going about it — and the introduction of critical norm violations to make the new technology with it's new constraints as workable a technology of text transmition (in text presentational terms) as what preceded it, and it was starting to replace.

What prevents your claim about Griffo’s motives from being anachronistic? How do we know for instance, that our assessments of greater readability in Griffo aren't reflective of our preferences and conditioning, rather than of real affordances?

“Thus Baskerville didn’t just violate the broad pen, he violated it in a way that is characteristic of the pointed, flexible pen.”

Exactly!

Peter, at the moment I only have Harry Carter's book, which doesn't have large pictures of Jenson and Griffo's type. However, he does have a big picture of Garamond's type, which I think will suffice to make my point. Here it is, a fresh printing type made from Garamond's original matrices of the Gros Canon size:

What we can see here is the kind of optical correction that is documented here by Briem. The O overshoots compared to the H. That might have been done by scribes, but not the increase in the weight of the vertical curve of the D compared to the stem of the D. If it were drawn by a pen of fixed width, the horizontal width of the D curve would be the same as the stem.

Also the diagonals don't follow 'pen' rules. If the pen were held at a fixed angle, corresponding to the slope of the head serifs, then the diagonals would be thicker. But the fat diagonal on the x is about the same as the vertical of the h, not thicker. (That's not documented by Briem, but is common in type.) And the Z and z have the stress reversed from what a written Z would have with the pen held at a constant angle--a thick, not a thin. The bottom curve on the c and c look thicker than the horizontal at mid-height, but it they are actually the same, not thicker. They rely on optical illusion to get the appearance of thickness.

Furthermore, the small, delicate the serifs also may not follow what can be done with the pen, but are rescaled because of the designer's ideas, not the pen.

Also Noordzij himself notes that Garamond may have occasionally curved his outside corners in larger sizes, and that may have been "intended to look like enlargings of the printed small sizes." (Noordzij's emphasis)

Garamond may have been influenced by the rising mannerist tide, though Bringhurst, at least, categorizes him as "high Renaissance," not mannerist.

Peter, you may call this "regularization" and may debate whether it was done for aesthetic or readability reasons. My point is that whatever the reason it violates pen rules, and is a critical departure from the pen, in favor of the eye.

Another important factor here is spacing and width of characters. If you look at the example of formal humanist writing that John posted on Sept. 23, above, you will see that the spacing and the width of characters varies continually. If you look at Jenson or Griffo, as well as Garamond, there is a strikingly different rhythm. Part of this was no doubt that they had to decide on one width for all the 'n's, for example. And in general there had to be sufficient space to put one piece of type next to the other, with a wide enough 'beard' to keep the type physically strong. But these physical constraints I think pushed them to creatively think: what are the best proportions and spacing for the lower case? And here they came up with a pattern that was not an imitation of writing but decisively different and more readable.

My overall point here is not that Noordzij is wrong about the huge influence of the pen. I acknowledged his innovative insights at the beginning, and now I see he is even more right than I realized earlier. However, he does neglect another important part of the story, which is specifically typographic, and is different from or actually contradicts the patterns of the pen writing. These I have sketched a little bit of here.

“Furthermore, this movement away from writing continued, I suspect, up to at least Garamond.” [Bill]

Is the movement in Griffo away from “translation,” the contrast type charactersistic of the broad-nibbed pen? Are the norm-violations ‘essential,’ and ‘genotypical’? Or do they represent feature-manipulational adjustments upon a translational frame.

So if the translation model for apportioning contrast is retained — and that, I think is the definition of the old characterization Old Style or Ancienne — is it right to speak of a movement away from writing in any essential sense?

I wonder if, in other words, the characterization “away from writing” and “toward readability” is, to use Nick’s term derogatory and probably insensitive to our own conditioning.

>Are the norm-violations ‘essential,’ and ‘genotypical’?

I think 'yes'.

I would have to get a broad pen and try to write over Garamond to test it out properly. But I don't see how you can get a wider vertical arch on the D than the stem of the D by translation, and no rotation or expansion. You will have to do rotation, at the very least, and then the question would be, why are you doing it, when they didn't before? Optically a fatter arch balances better with a vertical stem. Why ignore that as a driving factor? It also ends up with more even color as a result, which, carried through systematically, is better for readability.

But the spacing issues don't have to do with the 'ductus' anyway. The point is, Noordzij's categories of 'ductus' aren't sufficient to capture important features of the development of type design. Visual features concerning optical balance, even color, spacing and rhythm are different variables, and are critical.

Noordzij does have interesting insights into optical effects, but he doesn't integrate these into his history, so far as I remember.

Bill, in the Garamond lower case you show above, the pattern of contrast is massively set by the translation paradigm. This does not depend on each and every characteristic of the Garamond type being executable to the finest detail by the tool it's contrast type derives from.

The norm violations are incidental and — I think — progressive, i.e., in the direction of optimizing affordances, not relative — oppositionally — to writing, but inside the domain of the specific letter set they were creating.

Writing set the spacing paradigm of rhythmic coherence between the interior and exterior forms of letters within words, and a break from this in the spaces between the words. Type designers devised their own ways of consolidating this as well.

If the type designers asked themselves anything, it was probably: how can I keep spacing rhythmic in the new environment of rectangular sorts. What do I need to do to proportions and widths, and, with widths also — and in consequence — weights?

“Visual features concerning optical balance, even color, spacing and rhythm are different variables, and are critical.” [Bill]

I did say: “critical” norm violations, several posts above.

I could also add “strategic.” Saying that they are non-essential, in that they don't change the paradigm, doesn’t make them not important!

Bill: Thus Baskerville didn’t just violate the broad pen, he violated it in a way that is characteristic of the pointed, flexible pen.

It seems to me that saying that Baskerville 'violated the broad pen' implies a relationship to that implement that is absent not only from Baskerville's own work, as both a writing master and as a typographer/printer, but also absent -- with the exception of blackletter -- from the contemporary text creation culture. It makes almost as little sense as saying that he violated the Chinese brush or the Burmese stylus: the broad nib as a tool for the creation of text was alien to his culture and hadn't been widely used since before Baskerville's birth. And even if you want to say that he violated the latent, inherited translation stroke pattern in typographic letters, that still implies a relationship that I think is contradicted by the evidence.

Now I think we need to look at what happens when a script is reduced to typography. Gerald already commented on some implications of this, including the typical loss of regional scripts (although this had already begun in the manuscript culture as early as Charlemagne's time, and some regional scripts either survived or were later revived, e.g. the Irish insular hand). But there is a more general case to be observed, which is that the norm for typographic letters derives from the canons of the contemporary formal book hand, but in the new medium undergoes a secondary canonisation. That is, the normative manuscript hand of a particular text culture becomes the normative typographic letter of subsequent text cultures. So in renaissance Italy, the humanist formal book hand and later the cursive hand become the normative forms of humanist typography, which eventually becomes the normative typographic form of Latin letters, supplanting previous styles such as the various blackletter and regional hands and admitting new styles derived from contemporary writing, such as Civilité, only as supplementary fashions. So the process of type design becomes the process of creating these normative letterforms in new ways, with different proportions, contrast and detailing, rather than the process of creating new styles of writing. But in the meantime, new styles of writing are being invented by writing masters and professional scribes, who are producing significant quantities of text in various kinds of documents, who are teaching new styles of fashionable handwriting to both children and adults, and who are publishing copy books and exemplars, all in response to broader developments in intellectual and cultural life. Meanwhile, in comparison, the norms of typographic letterforms develop hardly at all: they are locked in their original Italian humanist form. To the type designer and typographic historian, there is a rich development in the treatment of proportions, weights, serif treatment, etc. and the important development of the canon of typographic articulation through supplementary styles, italics, smallcaps, etc. But compared to the range of different writing styles developed during the same period, Latin typography remains largely static and the basic underlying forms of the letters remains frozen and continues to be frozen today. Indeed, we now associate the normative forms not only of our typography but of our alphabet with these particular historical shapes. We admit some variation in the forms of e.g. a and g, but most of the rest of the historical and regional variety of the Latin script is unknown to most people.

What happens in the 18th century is that these typographic norms are re-intepreted in light of the principle tool of contemporary writing and its distinctive stroke pattern. This is done by writing masters first, and only some decades later by a 'type designer'. In stylistic terms, everything Baskerville needed to create his types is already there in Shelley's exemplars of 1709 and 1715. By the 1750s, this kind of 'typographic writing', i.e. the normative typographic letterforms as written with a pen, has become part of the standard repertoire of the writing masters, and taking the next step of making it into a typeface is largely a financial and manufacturing issue. There are particular design considerations relating to the size of individual fonts, but that has been the case in typography since at least Griffo's time: the style of the new types was developed by writing them, as the documentary evidence shows. This may be a unique phenomenon in the history of typography: the development of a significant new style within the overall canon of typographic letterforms, i.e. not a new style of writing but a new way of making typographic shapes in a contemporary way, developed independently of the manufacture of type (something similar is happening in France at around the same time, but can probably be considered part of the same phenomenon, especially if one takes into account Fournier's enthusiasm for Baskerville's types).

The point is, Peter, the violations are systematic, and being pushed by different goals, or a different 'paradigm', if you will. In that sense, yes, they are changing the paradigm in a fundamental and systematic way.

The broad pen remains an "underlying force" (van Krimpen) in Garamond, but is contradicted by another force: the greater freedom of the punch cutter to please the reading eye more than the moving broad pen was able to. I never said the pen wasn't a force, just that there were other forces pushing away from its lines. You say that the changes are "critical", "strategic", but "non-essential". I think you are getting into a distinction without a difference here. If they modify and contradict the rules of the pen in a systematic way, I don't see how they can be anything but an essential change.

Another way you can look at this is that there are two forces or paradigms at work: one the pattern set by the pen, and the other what pleases the reading eye. Noordzij rightly highlights the importance of one, but not the other, in the historical evolution of type design. You need both to get the full picture, I think.

And later on in history you get a desire to meet some aesthetic standards that even make text type less readable. Even there it is those aesthetic ideals, and not the pen alone that is driving the process. Eg making the lower case wider, and the caps more even width, doesn't come from the pen.

Bill: If they modify and contradict the rules of the pen in a systematic way, I don’t see how they can be anything but an essential change.

Because they dont contradict the rules of the stroke? I think Peter, and almost certainly Noordzij, consider the stroke pattern as the essential characteristic, and the various parachirographic tactics that modify weight and otherwise adjust the arrangement and relationship of strokes do not change the paradigm established by the stroke pattern. So, for instance, Garamond's D includes certain adjustments to stroke weight that contradict the rules (characteristics) of the broad nib pen, but the strokes remain describable in terms of translation and rotation (the latter showing the mannerist influence).

>saying that Baskerville ’violated the broad pen’ implies a relationship to that implement that is absent not only from Baskerville’s own work, as both a writing master and as a typographer/printer, bit also absent — with the exception of blackletter — from the contemporary text creation culture.

That is a question-begging argument, as it assumes what is under question. You are assuming that 'text creation culture' excludes printing and printer's types, whose influence is under question. But printing is text creation also. People of the day, including Baskerville, read a lot of text in newspapers and magazines and books--probably a lot more than hand writing--and these printers types followed the old model, influenced by the broad pen. That old model had been fundamentally modified for the eye, as I have been arguing with Peter, but none the less the broad pen was there as an underlying force.

Bill: You are assuming that ’text creation culture’ excludes printing and printer’s types...

No, I'm not assuming that at all. I began my part in this discussion about Baskerville by insisting that printer's types be seen in the larger context of text creation that, in cultures with significant manuscript document production, has certain observable characteristics and influences that argue against the accuracy of any typocentric history. This isn't a statement only about 18th century England, but what happened there is particularly interesting because the model for the new types is so clearly established in a different medium, writing, prior to being implemented in type, and we have such good documentary evidence of this because of the social and economic importance of writing and the production so many copy books and exemplars.

Yes, the broad pen, i.e. the translation stroke pattern, is there in the imported printing types and in Caslon's types (although I think you did an admirable job, earlier in this discussion, of demonstrating influences of neo-classicism in some of Caslon's forms, whether that was your intention or not), but my point made earlier was that this left typography increasingly at odds with and out of step with the aesthetics of the text creation culture dominated by written, engraved and inscribed forms that were based on very different stroke patterns. And the strongest evidence of this domination is that there is, during half a century or more, no counter influence of these old fashioned types on any other area of text creation. That seems to me very significant.

So when you say that Baskerville 'violated the broad pen', i.e. broke with the translation stroke pattern, I think you are still imposing a typocentric view that doesn't fit with the evidence. The evidence suggests that Baskerville spent his whole life writing with a flexible split nib steel pen, that he became a writing master and practitioner of the various styles of writing and lettering associated with that pen, and that he later had two of these styles cut in type by John Handy. In order to 'violate the broad pen' he would have had to have had some engagement with the broad pen, and I just don't see it and I don't count reading books set in Caslon's types to constitute such an engagement.

You could argue reasonably, I think, that the first person or persons to write the normative typographic forms of Latin letters with a split nib 'violated the broad pen'. But that wasn't Baskerville, and you are unjustifiably privileging the act of cutting those letters in metal if you imply that Baskerville or Handy's achievement constitutes such violation but not George Shelley's, four decades earlier.

Bill, it doesn't matter to my claim that the ‘norm violations’ are systematic or dramatic, as with the oblique stroke in the garamond ‘z‘. To again use the biological terminological apparatus, the normviolations you described exist at the level of phenotypical elaboration and not at the level of genotypical kind. That's why I called them incidental rather than essential, and added that incidental and non-essential doesn't mean non-important. I meant that in both an historical and a 'robustness of performance’ sense. The genotypical kind exists, moreover, at a set level, not individual sorts.

And: what are those different goals? A goal, moreover, is not a paradigm, and neither is the pressure to please the eye or meet it’s needs. Changing goals or adding a new one is not the same as changing paradigms.

Peter, Popper has a whole chapter hammering 'essentialism'--the method of searching for definitions to capture essences of something. This approach is based on the Aristotelian concepts of essence and accident, and has been abandoned by modern science. Poppers argues, rightly I think, that it predictably decays into verbal disputes. So I don't want to argue about essences, which I think is fruitless.

My basic point here is that type designers systematically altered hand writing in ways to please the eye. And those alterations are missing in Noordzij's account of the history, and so the account in my eyes omits one important dimension of the history of type design, a dimension not ruled by the stroke of the pen.

Don't worry Bill, I'm neither an essentialist nor an Aristotelian.

My basic point has been that the norm violations you described exist at the level of phenotypical elaboration and not at the level of genotypical kind. And I am wary about how you want to account for them / what value or ‘meaning’ you want to ascribe to them.

I could add as a concession that the pattern of norm violations in for example Garamond, while not changing essentially or fundamentally the foundational paradigm for apportioning contrast in the stroke, can become paradigmatic for the culture they happen in.

In general I want to hold out an openess to this: Noordzij's account accommodates more than he details, and he details more than you give him credit for, even in the article you introduced.

“systematically altered hand writing in ways to please the eye” [Bill]

I would put it differently.

Type designers systematically introduced alterations to what the first transpositions of writing into type produced. And they did so along several axis.

The first axis, I'll call the optical-grammatical problem-solving axis.
It's not problems reading scribal writing that provoked the alterations, it's things that appear when the small variations introduced by the human hand and physical tool are resolved into a workable amount of standardized and co-ordinated widths, standardized heights (x-height, cap height, ascender height, descender depth) and standardized stroke proportions. This sets up a type-internal dynamic. And I think that's what you miss in Noordzij. The ‘o’ overshoot problem is of this sort, as is the incremental widening across the board of certain strokes.

Small variation in pressure, rotation, proportion is a thing of the hand, and over the space of a text produces a consistent texture. Constraining variations to absolute values — which the new technology presupposes — allows optical issues of uneven colour and optical irregularities — which aren't spontaneously evoked in an environment of random, small-incremental variation — to assert themselves or obtrude.

(The second axis I've tried to call the gestural-atmospheric-force inflection axis.)

Norm-violations along the optical-grammatical problem-solving axis aren’t generally stroke-paradigm changing, but they can (help) push the paradigm to a breaking point.

An afterthought: I think Noordzij's concern is to not have a focus on what I refer to above as ‘type-internal dynamics’ overwhelm or eclipse a larger, deeper-level and generally untold story, such as he seeks to narrate with his matrixes of letters in the RIDT essay I posted.

Peter, I like your analysis of how the inherent consistency of type--the same 'n' etc. everywhere--causes irregularities to protrude, which might otherwise be submerged in the general variability of hand writing. And thus the producers of type, as opposed to writing, needed to deal with details even more exactly than the scribes did. The care with spacing (in justification of matrices) is probably also a consequence.

The regularity of type may also may make the dimension of evenness or unevenness of color stand out. To deal with it, by the time of Garamond, anyway, we have a *contradiction* of the broad pen in systematic ways, including, as I mentioned, the thinning of 'thick' diagonals and the expansion of vertical rounds compared to stems. But it goes way beyond this, and includes the weight of terminals, the shapes of letters, their relative widths etc.

You won't see these kinds of modification of vertical arches or thinner diagonals on the Trajan Column, or in hand writing with the broad pen, so far as I know. How you want to label this designing for the eye--'essential' to type 'genotypical' or whatever--doesn't matter. I do know that it is type-specific, systematic, and not derived from the broad pen. For type design, it is an equally or perhaps even more important part of the story as the that story of original basis of the letters in pen-drawn shapes, a story that Noordzij has shined new light on.

Bill, we're a good deal closer, but still not exactly on the same page. I can let it rest.

Bill: To deal with it, by the time of Garamond, anyway, we have a *contradiction* of the broad pen in systematic ways...

My basic point here is that type designers systematically altered hand writing in ways to please the eye. And those alterations are missing in Noordzij’s account of the history...

But not, I think, from his account of the stroke. The alterations take place within the logic of the stroke model, even as they sometimes transcend what the actual pen is capable of in a single stroke or in a consistent ductus (and bear in mind that consistent ductus is a feature only of some writing systems and styles). Consider what Peter identifies as a 'dramatic' example of such alteration, the contrast pattern of the Garamond z, which becomes the normative pattern for the typographic letter: clearly the implied ductus of the strokes is inconsistent with the other letters, but the stroke model is still analysable in terms of translation. Likewise the other alterations in renaissance types that you have identified: they transcend the pen by extending the logic of the pen, not, as you suggest, by contradicting it. They are, to use a term Peter introduced on the ATypI discussion list, 'parachirographic'.

>the logic of the pen

The logic of which pen? If we are talking about one broad pen, with a fixed width held at a constant angle--which I gather is the story through Garamond--then what I have described are contradictions to that pen.

Sure, if you change to a different pen of different width when you do a diagonal, or somehow rotate the pen at weird angles while writing the letter--you might get those uniform or thinner diagonals, though probably if you kept the pen on the paper it would mess up the stroke at vertexes while you rotate. And you'd have to switch or rotate the pen to get the wider arches too. Switching pens for heavier caps makes some sense, but not in the middle of a lower case letter, I think.

A theoretical pen is irrelevant to causation in history, because it didn't exist and it didn't drive the historical development.

I find Peter's analysis persuasive--that the inherent uniformity of repeating the same letter forms pushed type creators to make the changes I have written about. That way they were able to achieve better rhythm in letter widths and spacing, and more uniform color, enhancing easy and comfortable reading. And by the way not all were able to do it. As Harry Carter illustrates, W. de Spira's roman type failed to achieve that good typographic rhythm, and Jenson succeeded. And he thereby became a model for Griffo. There are typographic solutions to typographic problems, and these are not trivial, and not simply derivative from writing.

Earlier in this thread, having before my mind's eye Noordzij's theoretical pen--that can do translation, rotation, and expansion--caused me not to see Baskerville's arches as guided by the ductus of the pointed pen. The pointed pen is, however, a real pen and doesn't act the same way in down stroke, upstroke, and moving sideways, and so is decisively different from that theoretical pen. I only really fully understood that then when I picked up a pointed pen and wrote with it. Now I think you are making a different mistake, but due to the same cause--assuming a theoretical pen that didn't exist and didn't influence history.

The changes in pens did influence letter forms, as Noordzij explains. But other forces also influenced the evolution of type.

Bill, I'm talking about the translation stroke pattern, in which the angle of the moving front -- the broad nib -- is constant throughout the stroke. Note: not necessarily constant across every stroke in every letter, but within each individual stroke. And my point is that where e.g. Garamond's letterforms differ from the scribal model on which the roman types were based they do so in ways that are consistent with the translation stroke pattern. This is why I say they are transcending the pen, not contradicting it: the logic of the stroke pattern is extended and applied independently of the model, but the strokes remain informed by the translation pattern, not by some other pattern.

A theoretical pen is irrelevant to causation in history, because it didn’t exist and it didn’t drive the historical development.

Well a theoretical pen exists as soon as one thinks of it, so you can't say it did or didn't exist without knowing how the punchcutters thought about letterforms. But I don't think a theoretical pen, i.e. a theoretical understanding of the moving front such as Noordzij has developed, is necessary to applying the stroke pattern of particular writing implements systematically and independently of that pen. Type designers do this all the time, and stonecutters and woodblock cutters have been doing it much longer: you get a feel for a stroke model and how to apply it and, yes, also how to manipulate and transcend it.

There are typographic solutions to typographic problems, and these are not trivial, and not simply derivative from writing.

Absolutely. In this I completely agree with you, and much earlier in this discussion I referred to some of those specifically typographic problems that are associated with scale. But when we are talking about the development of styles of type and typography -- as we are when we start talking about what distinguishes Baskerville's types from Caslon's --, then we need to incorporate in our view a much broader text creation culture, and not limit ourselves to 'type history'.

John: "The Caslon revival of the mid-19th Century is a kind of odd blip: a sign of dissatisfaction with what was happening in the increasingly high-contrast types, but not a wholesale programme of reform of the text culture as undertaken at the end of the century by Johnston, Morris, Cobden Sanderson, et al (which also, of course, had equivalents in other countries around the same time, indicating a much broader cultural shift than printing some books in Caslon)."

My comments are not a direct response. It just reminded me of something that may be of interest to some. Perhaps William.

The original "American love affair with Caslon" died, as love often does. The death, however, was not from fickleness, the death was murder for reasons of jealousy and greed.

Does anyone know the "true story"?

> Gerrit Noordzij claims in this essay that if “If we ask for the intentions of the type designers, we find that their work reflected their attitude to writing with little regard for previous solutions.”

What I do like about the whole discussion and also the article that it somehow states that there could be despite of all theories and intellectual approaches to type design something deeply individual, almost unremovable in a person that influences his design. I like this aspect. For I am personally looking to express something personal in my designs. Far away from the frightening (for me) Spiekermann and Slimbach production machinery that rules our world of percepting type today.

Stefan

" Far away from the frightening (for me) Spiekermann and Slimbach production machinery that rules our world of percepting type today."
Hu?

the death was murder for reasons of jealousy and greed.

But surely the Americans can't be faulted for developing their own type culture and types, especially the Scotch romans of such as the Bruce foundry in the mid 19th century. The same is even more so of the generation of old-stylers:, Goudy, Rogers, Cooper and Dwiggins in the early 20th century, who approached the task of reviving the classic Antiqua genre with just as much personality and originality as, say, Gill or Koch.

John, it's not just adjustments for small size. The Gros Canon of Garamond, above is pretty big. Canon is 48 pt, so I supposed 'Gros' Canon is bigger, a display size. And in addition to not following rules of any real broad pen of fixed width, many strokes also violate the rule of sticking to translation. The bottom of the stems in Garamond often widen out symmetrically before reaching the bracketing of the serif; that broadening is an expansion, violating the fixed width of a pen.

I haven't been writing here only about changes in style, but also in readability. But in any case Garamond, it seems to me, is a significantly different style from humanist hand writing. If you put the Gros Canon and your post of humanist hand writing side by side, I think most typophiles would say that there is a marked stylistic difference. And that difference in style was doesn't seem to have been driven by changes in hand writing.

Bill, you are still mixing up what the pen can do with the contrast styling paradigm that is native to it and it offers. The contrast type native to the broad-nibbed pen becomes the basis of a paraphrase of it in the typographical medium. The paraphrase is not exact. But the contrast styling paradigm visibly and emphatically persists there — right through a whole series of beyond-paraphrastic (para-paraphrastic) adjustments — before it gets replaced. The beyond-paraphrastic adjustments don't really care about what the pen can or cannot do, though they are mindful of what it’s done. The systematicity of the ajustments can only be seen from the perspective of the scheme.

You want to know what drives them. You want to say: concerns about readability. I tried to say the readability of writing in any normal everyday experiential sense was not a / the problem. I've tried to circumscribe ‘what drive’ in terms of optical-grammatic pressures and gestural-atmospheric likes. And, my thinking is that, as a kind of epiphenomenal gift, affordances were consolidated or enhanced. Where I say affordances, you might want to substitute your 'readability.' And that is your prerogative. By my sense is that the term is inadequate as an historical explanatory concept.

Peter, I have always acknowledged that humanist formal writing is the starting point of type, and has remained an "unlying force" in type--even in Bodoni etc.

What drives changes? I have said I like your ideas that irregularities that pass in handwriting will become problematic in type.

Whether the creators of type thought 'that doesn't look right' or 'that is distracting' or 'that isn't so smooth for reading' or whatever, I don't know. I think there is an intuitive reaction of 'rightness' that reflects how our visual apparatus works, and that was at work in their minds, as it is in ours.

It think also that aesthetic fashions were huge influences. I would guess that these drove both the adoption of the pointed, flexible pen nib, and the development of high contrast type--the same forces behind both, though the particular line of the pointed pen also influenced Baskerville.

Thanks, Bill. I think I misunderstood where you were going with your response to John.

Nick"––"But surely the Americans can’t be faulted for developing their own type culture and types, especially the Scotch romans of such as the Bruce foundry in the mid 19th century.

Surely you jest, "Scotch American"? I'll have what you are having, pour me a glass!

I am in agreement with Norbert Florendo––"Linotype refers to Scotch Roman designs first cut by Englishman Richard Austin and cast by the Scottish typefounder Alexander Wilson and Son in Glasgow."

Maybe I have sadly lived under delusions but am comfortable that you, as usual, will enjoy setting me straight. I thank now before I forget.

Kidding aside––

I am under the impression that you think "American superior type culture" displaced Caslon. Perhaps you may entertain the following suggestions.

American founders were "non to pleased with the longevity of Caslon's popularity". They wanted to impose an "import protection act". The problem was that lead, and lead products were tariff free. The weasel factor came into play, the founders claimed that "Caslon types were not lead", that is why their type was so hard, not to mention, superior to American type products, therefore, "subject to tariff". In order for the Caslon Foundery to dispute this they had to demonstrate that their alloy was mainly composed of lead and "disclose the alloy"

Naturally the Caslon Foundery's alloy was a closely guarded secret.

So you see, it was a win win for the American founderies. One way they would discover the alloy, the other they would have a greater financial advantage in price for inferior products.

Eventually Caslon tried to get around this by licensing the typeface supplying punches for strikes. In my day, ATF was able to readily supply an exact duplicate from these strikes, not to mention that eventually the punches in one size were lent to the Lanston Monotype Machine Company of Philadelphia.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Giampa

Bill: And in addition to not following rules of any real broad pen of fixed width, many strokes also violate the rule of sticking to translation. The bottom of the stems in Garamond often widen out symmetrically before reaching the bracketing of the serif; that broadening is an expansion, violating the fixed width of a pen.

No, that's not expansion, that's the typical pattern of writing formal roman letters with a broad nib (or a brush for that matter: you see the same thing in the Trajan letter). What it indicates is a double stroke: the pen comes down and then out towards one serif, then is lifted and placed back on the stem and brought down and out towards the other serif. In the process, it is typical for the stem to flare, since the transition to the serif is not sharp. Pretty much any calligraphy text book will illustrate this.

Not only is this flaring not indicative of expansion, with an expansion tool you typically get a much more abrupt transition to the serif, because you are releasing pressure at the bottom of the stem. Hence the flat serifs in most Didot and Bodoni revivals.

I have said I like [Peter's] ideas that irregularities that pass in handwriting will become problematic in type.

Yes, I like this too, and it makes a lot of sense: writing is a more forgiving medium precisely because it is inconsistent so 'mistakes' are not repeated every time a letter is made. When you 'write with prefabricated letters' to use Noordzij's phrase, you want them to be at their best.

Your point about adjustments in larger sizes of type is well made, but I think we find a similar approach to 'optical correction' in larger sizes of drawn letters too, e.g. in mediaeval versal letters. Writing is very size specific in that most styles are based on a relationship of letter proportion to the size of the writing implement. [This is explicit in the teaching of the traditional Arabic styles: everything is related to the width of the reed nib.] So we can expect that there will be more adjustment of letterforms based on writing styles such as the Italian humanist book hand at sizes below and above those normally written in that style by the scribe. And I think this is observable: at smaller sizes, adjustments are made to improve legibility of text, and at larger sizes adjustments are made to improve the balance or beauty of individual letters, such as those seen in Garamond's gros canon. The closer you are to the typical size of the written style, the less important either kind of adjustment is going to be, because the writing was tailored to that size to begin with.

>Hu?

Hi dberlow!

Good point! :-)
Thanks. It helped me. ;-)

Hail Fontbureau!
(Your Garamond is beautiful!)

Salute
Stefan

PS
are you working at fontbureau? Responsabile person?

John, if you allow built-up letters, then any shape can be done by the broad pen.

Theoretically, the humanist script could have been written the way you say, lifting the pen for the bottom right serif, and starting a new stroke from above in the stem. But it doesn't seem to have been done this way in reality. Instead, the pen is moved to the left for a shorter left serif, and then moved directly across to the right in a straight line, for a longer right serif.

This is way of making serifs is reflected in the humanist script you posted on 23 September, and every one I've seen, though I've only seen samples here and there. I did see an actual page of Alcuin's magnificent Carolingian Miniscule recently at an exhibition at the Smithsonian here, and it was done this way.

This asymmetrical shape of humanist writing is shown schematically on p. 97 of Gerrit Noordzij's Letterletter. He notes the difference between the way the humanist script was written and the more symmetric serifs of early type. Noordzij refers to Jenson's Roman as having the symmetrical serifs, which I think is a mistake--it's Griffo who introduced the symmetry. If you want to see a clear digital example of following the broad pen way of doing serifs, see Trinite, at TEFF.nl

Griffo's symmetrical serifs in my view are typographic rather than chirographic--following what the eye wants, not the convenience of the hand. The tapering that Garamond does is also, I would think, not the way the hand would do it with a broad pen, even if the letter were stroked this way. His tapers start relatively far up the stem, not near the bottom. To my eyes they are carefully designed for even color, and for aesthetic reasons. The branch joining the n, h, etc adds weight, and the stems are thinner there. The slight additional weight on the lower stem evens out the look.

If Garamond were already influenced by a more flexible pen, you would have an argument for his shapes being influenced by writing. But with the broad pen and humanist scripts, I don't think the argument is cogent.

Noordzij notes that symmetrical serifs are not chirographic, and attempts to account for this. He says that "Jenson could have copied this [assymetrical lozenge] shape faithfully in his punches, but the extra work would not have paid. ...rectangular footings are much more easily cut than lozenges." This argument doesn't hold water, because in fact Jenson did serifs that more resemble humanist writing, and then Griffo moved further away.

He goes on to note other differences of type from writing but argues to minimize or dismiss them. John, you, being more holy than Pope Gerrit, even deny the differences. But that denial doesn't stand up to the reality of the record, I think. The influences were not simply the hand, but also the eye and ideals of aesthetics and ease of reading.

Noordzij is keen to controvert "the time when everybody was eager to hear stories about a typography which could be independent of handwriting." He is right of course about the strong influence of the pen, and his important contributions have established that. But to say that other considerations are not key parts of the story is to go to the other extreme. That is understandable in a pioneering and corrective effort, but also wrong. In my view there is a dialectic between the hand and the eye in the development of type, and the eye often leads, and sometimes contradicts what the hand would write.

“there is a dialectic between the hand and the eye in the development of type” [Bill]

This converation exists also in the developement of scribal writing, and with equal force: if the pen is the hammer, the eye is the anvil in paleographic change.

How does the eye lead? How does this dialectic proceed? Only by the eye reacting. And it doesn't react in type design to what the hand might write, but what a specific paraphrase of such writing in a new medium puts in place or presents us with. That's why I like to think of the modifications as para-paraphrastic, rather than anti- or non- or contra-chirographic: the fundamental thing is that the relation of type to writing is foundationally or originally that of paraphrase. And that paraphrastic relationship is never not in some way always ever there.

I think what John might be highlighting, Bill, is that not only does the pen provide the foundational contrast template, but it also can provide a partial grammer of the kinds of modifications or adjustments that might be introduced. What John is describing is shown by Noordzij in Letterletter on page 144 in relation to the Burgundian Bastarda.

I said: “I like to think of the modifications as para-paraphrastic, rather than anti- or non- or contra-chirographic.”

Let me illustrate this with the oblique stroke in the z.

A direct paraphrase of writing puts in place a thin oblique stroke in the z. At a certain point in type this oblique is brought into harmony with other obliques inclined in the opposite direction in the alphabet. This is done because it's lightness is obtrusive. The adjustment is in the direction of what a direct paraphrase of writing introduces in other key obliques. So it is only anti-chirographic in a very limited sense.

The source is other obliques. I don't know if there is a historical precedent in writing. The direction of the change is not anti-chirographic, though structurally the norm violation is dramatic when seen against the translational contrast paradigm.

Bill, the two-stroke serif formation I described is typical of writing formal capitals with a broad tool. It is the method Catich describes for the classical roman capitals painted with a brush. It is what every calligraphy text book teaches for creating this kind of serif. As you observe, the serif in the typical humanist miniscule hand is different, and that type makers adopted the symetrical serif of the roman capitals as their model. Which, as you imply, is significant. But my basic point remains: the swelling of the stem in this construction is not indicative of an expansion stroke, as you suggested, but is the normal characteristic of this kind of serif as produced with a translation tool.

The distinction between written and 'built-up' letters tends to get blurred in the most formal styles of any script. The nature of formal, as distinct from cursive, writing involves the pen leaving the paper more often, and sometimes addition of non-fundamental strokes to complete a particular shape associated with the style. In some classical Arabic styles, for instance, certain shapes are augmented with the corner of the pen and then filled; this despite the fact that the overall appearance looks very fluid and Arabic writing is frequently referred to as 'cursive' on account of its connectivity. Writing is a very varied and complex phenomenon, and it is a mistake to associate it only with the characteristics of e.g. modern handwriting.

Peter: I think what John might be highlighting, Bill, is that not only does the pen provide the foundational contrast template, but it also can provide a partial grammer of the kinds of modifications or adjustments that might be introduced.

Yes, thank you, that expresses it very well.

Peter: The direction of the change is not anti-chirographic, though structurally the norm violation is dramatic when seen against the translational contrast paradigm.

Only if you are presuming that the translation stroke paradigm does not permit rotation between strokes. But this is clearly not a requirement of the stroke paradigm, as the Byzantine Greek cursive style demonstrates: it is a matter of application of the paradigm to particular ways of writing. So what is violated in the z is the norm of the humanist bookhand way of writing (although I wonder if a sufficiently broad and deep search might reveal a precursor to this apparently typographic innovation?), not the translation stroke paradigm. What the possibility of rotation between strokes implies, of course, is that there is no such thing as a translational contrast paradigm, only translational contrast conventions of particular styles. Now, any style of writing based around the use of a broad tool is likely to make full use of contrast, i.e. it is unlikely to involve rotation such that contrast is eliminated. But nowhere does the translation stroke model imply a consistent angle or, hence, a consistent contrast pattern. The stroke model is a description of what happens within the stroke. What happens between the strokes, or on top of the strokes, is all application.

So it is only anti-chirographic in a very limited sense.

You're saying that flouting the established principles of chirography is still chirographically-driven.
It's anti-chirographic, rather than non-chirographic.
The alternative would be driven by some other, non-chirographic principle.
But I suspect you would argue that non-chirography is also a reaction to chirography.
Is there no escape? Is it all about chirography?!

“So what is violated in the z is the norm of the humanist bookhand way of writing.”

You're right. So I would alter my sentence to say: The direction of the change is not anti-chirographic, though structurally the norm violation is dramatic when seen against the humanist translation-based conventions.

I could add: in type — at least for a time — the humanist convention as regards contrast-syling became paradigmatic.

When rotation between strokes is allowed, the norm violation is still dramatic, because the rotation is quite extreme, but probably less traumatic. The source or inspiration is still perhaps, what happens in other obliques.

In the humanist west — if I remember from my Raffia Initials background research — rotation between strokes first became allowed in the formal humanist majuscule, partly as a device to harmonize the Roman majuscule and the Carolinian miniscule.

Nick, from the point of view of the writing hand that spawned it, every font is at one and the same time a paraphrase and an escape. That a secondary chirographic reference or a geometrical principle — like inversion or the perfect circle, the square and the equilateral triangle — can illuminate the escape doesn't matter. It just helps you get a handle on the nature of the change. What's important is the extent, pattern and force of the mutations.

I guess I'm more inclined to ask where it's headed than to speculate about if it's fighting against — except perhaps with the moderns where a fight against becomes explicit, and in some way self-defeating. I guess it's a question of what's a more fruitful way to think about what's going on.

In the old-style the flouting is always subtended by a more foundational embrace. But the escapes are cumulative. In the Roman de la Roi the escapes are modulated by the dictates of an superimposed grid. It's not always a chirographic principle that structures the mutations. Still the child is always father to the man.

Bill's right about other pressures.

I should add to what I wrote above, that each paraphrase / escape can provoke or generate its own paraphrase / escape, so we get paraphrase upon paraphrase and escape upon escape.

Nick: Is there no escape? Is it all about chirography?!

I think Wim Crouwel's new alphabet definitely escapes the chirographic. But that's the kind of radical approach necessary to sever the connection.

I think as long as one is considering letter construction at all in terms of strokes, then the chirographic isn't far away. And bear in mind what I wrote today in response to Bill: our concept of writing shouldn't be limited by experience of Anglo-American handwriting, i.e. chirography implies all textual marks directly made with the hand and a tool, and that includes styles in which strokes are built up, or outlined and filled, as found in various writing traditions around the world.

In order to get away from chirographic models or influences, you need to come up with a different conception of what the glyph is, i.e. something other than a collection of strokes. There are designers who have done this. I don't take Crouwel's approach very seriously, since the result doesn't actually work for text, but the idea of a glyph as a geometrically circumscribed space is, for better or for worse, a genuine break with chirography. It is different also from the attempts at geometric letter construction as proposed by Dürer, Feliciano et al, because they were trying to discover a geometric basis for letters that were already being written, while Crouwel was using geometry to discover new letters.

More interesting, though, is the approach to the glyph as a figure-ground relationship, as seen in much of Frutiger's work and in Evert Bloemsma's types.

You know, reading this thread has been wonderfully entertaining and educational. Please don't stop!

John, thinking through letterforms in figure / ground (Frutiger / Modernistic[?]) or form / counterform (Bloemsma in Legato / Postmodern[?]) terms can also illuminate ‘escapes’ from “specific-contrast-type” keyed paraphrase in the sense I suggested above.

Furthermore, I think Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet still has the structure of paraphrase in important ways, as do Douglas Hofstadter and his gang's Letter Spirit alphabets. The paraphrase / escape dynamic here is not in terms of contrast styling but in terms of construction, or what I've called role architecture.

Each paraphrase is an escape, but the only way to escape paraphrase is to switch to an unwritten script.

John, I don't know what to comment on your recent posts, as I can't find any coherent position in what you say.

If you allow built up shapes as 'strokes', then everything is allowed, and there is no difference between what is easy or natural to the pen, and what is build up with geometrical guidance, guidance by some notion of notan or whatever--because any shape can be drawn by building up.

Also, if I understand Noordzij's views rightly--and they are the topic of this thread--he would not count shapes carefully built up from multiple strokes as 'writing'.

Bill: Also, if I understand Noordzij’s views rightly—and they are the topic of this thread—he would not count shapes carefully built up from multiple strokes as ’writing’.

As Peter notes, Noordzij shows exactly this phenomenon in the context of Burgundian miniscule, in which overalapping strokes are essential creating the letters. Of course this is writing, just as it is writing when an Arabic scribe deftly outlines and fills the top of the isolated or initial ayn in the context of creating naskh text: that is how that script is written. Are you saying that no one, ever in history, has 'written' Classical roman capitals because the way to write them involves going back over the stem to create the second serif? It seems to me that you have a very limited notion of what constitutes writing.

Below is Fr Catich's illustration of how to write the Trajan letters with a broad brush (sorry it is out of focus: it's too late for natural light here and I don't like the flash). The same technique is shown in any calligraphy manual treating the writing of the Roman capitals with a broad nib. These letters are one way of writing the Latin alphabet. The technique they use is non-cursive, i.e. the pen leaves the page during the construction of the letters, which is the crucial distinction between formal (formata) and cursive (corsiva) styles of writing. Whether the pen comes back down and goes over an existing stroke or comes down and makes an entirely separate stroke depends on the form of the individual letter and the conventions of the individual style.

If you allow built up shapes as ’strokes’, then everything is allowed...

I didn't say I allowed built up shapes as strokes, I allow them as writing. I also consider cuneiform text made by pressing a stylus into soft clay writing: the direct result of hand and tool, with a distinctive pattern of shapes resulting from the movement of the hand and the nature of the tool. There is plenty of writing in the world that is not stroke based in its creation. In the case of the Roman capitals written with a broad brush or nib, though, we are definitely talking about stroke based writing, and the fact that bits of strokes are written on top of other strokes doesn't alter the fact, any more than it does for the Burgundian miniscule.

Now, insofar as some methods of writing might be said to contravene a stroke method -- the treatment of the top of the ayn in naskh certainly does, and the outlined and filled mediaeval versals are a good example of a style that many people might have trouble classifying as 'writing' --, exactly the same questions may be asked about them as we have been asking about typographic letters, i.e. to what degree are they 'paraphrase' of the stroke and to what degree are they 'escape'. Note: note paraphrase or escape writing, but paraphrase or escape the stroke. What this means, of course, is that in this aspect too of text creation typography doesn't really introduce anything wholly new under the sun.

By the way, my old mate Satwinder Sehmi's book Calligraphy, the rhythm of writing contains the best illustrations I have seen of stroke patterns for various styles of Latin letters, using overlays and different colours for different strokes. Unfortunately, it seems to be out of print, and I gave my copy to someone, so I can't provide photos.

John, I am aware of the method of drawing capitals that you have illustrated. And indeed I referred to it above in answering you.

But also I wrote that that is not what is going on in the Garamond lower case letters I posted. The difference is subtle, but crucial, and indeed illustrates the main point that I have been arguing.

Catich’s illustration shows how to draw capitals with an extra stroke for one side of a fairly symmetrical serif. Catich I believe says that these were painted with a brush, and I think it is a stretch it to say that the style of monumental capitals on the Trajan column and other stone carving is a copy of handwriting. But that is not essential to my argument.

What is essential is that your illustration shows exactly what I said is the difference between Garamond and this way of writing or painting a capital. The Catich illustration has a *straight* stem, with an added flair at the bottom.

The Garamond letters above do not have straight stems. As the attached ‘n’ from Garamond’s Gros Cannon shows, the stems swell gradually beginning just below the join of the branch. This swelling is an expansion of the shape as it descends below the join. You could get such expansion by deliberate building but you will not get it simply by a stroke of the broad pen to add a serif at the bottom of the letter. Just to blend the serif into the stroke smoothly you do not need to go that high on the stem, and then sharply change the curvature of the stroke as you go down. And as you conceded, the humanist script lower case in any case was not written with such two stroke serifs at the bottom.

The difference between handwriting and built up letters is crucial here. I am pointing out that that Garamond is doing built-up lettering or, more precisely, sculpted letters--and these consciously and systematically depart from the stroke of the pen when writing letters by hand.

Just to be clear about the difference, Noordzij writes very emphatically that built-up letter shapes not do not count as handwriting (p. 9 of The Stroke):

“The first, initial, fundamental shape is the single track of a tool. Only handwriting preserves the characteristics of the single stroke. Handwriting is single-stroke writing. Lettering is writing with built-up shapes. In lettering the shapes are more patient than in handwriting, as they accept retouching strokes that may gradually improve (or impair) the quality of the shapes. Lettering is independent of the tool, but this freedom is only available at the expense of character: in writing composed of overlapping strokes the shapes of single strokes get lost...”

I have been arguing all along that type deliberately and systematically departs from handwriting, even though it is strongly influenced by it. It departs to serve both aesthetics and readability. And there are traditions in which the departures of earlier type designers influence later type designers.

Here in Garamond’s lower case we have one such departure and tradition. I do not see this ‘waisted’ stroke in the humanist writing you posted, or other humanist writing. I do see it in Garamond, and then in later type designs, such as those of Caslon, two centuries later. And that is because there are type traditions, traditions that contradict the natural stroke of the pen. Fred Smeijers, author of Counter Punch, Smeijers sees punch-cutting as an essential influence on typeface design. And not co-incidentally, he uses the punch-cutter’s sculptured stem waist in some of his types.

Punch-cutting is the sculpting of letters, not writing. And that difference, as Noordzij notes, gives a freedom that the pen lacks, for good or ill. The putting of ‘waists’ into lower case characters, I believe for reasons of even color as well as aesthetics, is one example of how punch-cutters took advantage of that freedom to create shapes that contradicted the written line of the broad pen of fixed width.

Punch-cutting, and not only writing, is an important influence on design. Here I think Harry Carter and Fred Smeijers have good points to make.

Now I recognize that there is some ambiguity here. At what point do overlapped strokes, which occur naturally in writing, become built-up shapes? I would submit that when you systematically alter a shape that was never drawn that way for lower case letters, and differently even what would be done for Caps, and in a way not called for by smooth shapes, then you are building letters, not writing. It is just Noordzij’s deep analysis of handwriting that has helped me to see what is not handwriting, but sculpture.

Type wasn’t written, it was punch cut, and that is a key fact that changed type design. It didn’t remove the powerful influence of the pen, but it did enable other influences to be expressed and other goals to be served, in ways that were not only different, but sometimes even contradicted the stroke of the broad pen.

“It is just my respect for Noordzij’s deep analysis of hand writing that has helped me to see what is not hand writing, but sculpture.” [Bill]

I think this and the other things you write are right Bill. A Noordzijian analytic of type design helps you see what is paraphrase and what escape, and helps you gauge the direction of the escape, and through that how it is paradigmatic of the culture it reflects.

Yet, other analytics of type design exist and have value. And where Noordzij’s stops they might take over. Or it can work the other way. I’ve always liked the one implicit in Douglas Hofstadter's response to Donald Knuth's concept of a Metafont (Visible Language, Volume XVI #4 (Autumn 1982). Others might like others.

Noordzij's illimuniates in ways that others perhaps can't. But in my discussions with Noordzij about Hofstadter’s he seems to see it as antithetical to his.

Here is what I think about the Garamond Gros Canon n:

Swelling has a precedent in writing as the Burgundian Bastarda might document, and this might have helped to make swelling part of the grammer of norm-violational options, but here it seems to have a purely optical-grammatical reason, having to do with the size of the foot serifs.

Gee, William.

this Garamond n scan IS beautiful!
That’s what it’s all about and so much missing in todays fonts.
Charme and sensitiveness.

I am still somehow convinced that it is hard to achieve that by computer.

Thanks for the beautiful look!

Stefan

See also the warm “oval“ look of the inside form under the top form!

Well argued, Bill. I don't see much to disagree with in your last post.

Type wasn’t written, it was punch cut, and that is a key fact that changed type design. It didn’t remove the powerful influence of the pen, but it did enable other influences to be expressed and other goals to be served, in ways that were not only different, but sometimes even contradicted the stroke of the broad pen.

I think we might still disagree with how significant such contradictions are. But I think Peter's duality of paraphrase and escape captures the phenomena well. It is interesting, though, that this feature of Garamond's types, carried over into numerous later oldstyle designs down to Caslon, has largely disappeared from the typographic vocabulary along with e.g. Plantin's rotated e.

I still don't see much sign of anything except 'the powerful influence of the pen' in Baskerville's types.

William,

do you have other scans of this character like that?
The a for example?

Best wishes
Stefan

Stefan, that's a higher resolution scan of the same page as above, from Harry Carter's A View of Early Typography. If you are interested in history of type, it's one of the best books, and it's in paperback, not too expensive.

Thanks, John. I am not sure how best to characterize the departures of type from handwriting. To investigate it properly would involve taking good scans of Jenson, Griffo, and Garamond, blowing them up and writing over them with a broad pen. That would be very interesting, but not something I'm likely to do any time soon.

>I’ve always liked the [analysis of letter shapes] implicit in Douglas Hofstadter’s response to Donald Knuth’s concept of a Metafont (Visible Language, Volume XVI #4 (Autumn 1982). Others might like others. ...But in my discussions with Noordzij about Hofstadter’s he seems to see it as antithetical to his.

Peter, I think the failure of Knuth's Metafont as a way of creating letters is very interesting and perhaps revealing of the differences between handwriting and type. I believe Knuth's ideas appeared in print at about the same time as Noordzij's, and have some striking similarities, along with differences. Noordzij writes of a moving shape--tip of the pen--and its rotation and expansion. Knuth I believe has a single line, and rules of expansion of that line.

Can you briefly summarize Hofstedter's view? Does Noordzij object to Knuth, or Hofstedter, or both?

John has, as I remember, explained that in developing non-latin fonts he sometimes uses the pen to understand the ductus of a non-latin script. But then for creating a font he "sculpts" digital outlines, like almost everybody else these days.

This process of understanding the underlying writing, but actually sculpting outlines, I think reflects the reality of type--that it is modified handwriting. Both the fact that it has a base of handwriting and the modifications are essential. But the much of the work of type design is in sculpting the outlines.

The fact is that we could use digital pens to produce fonts, but in general we don't. And the more pen-influenced approach of Metafont resulted in poor-looking fonts, according to Richard Southall in his book 'Printers Types in the 20th Century'.

So I'm thinking that the departures from writing, both for readability and aesthetics, may be a quite large percentage of what is involved in type design.

“the departures from writing, both for readability and aesthetics” [Bill]

How can I explain to you why I object to this way of putting things?

Writing is neither unreadable, nor is it ugly. The departures are not ‘for’ readability and aesthetics in the sense that there are or were readability and aesthetic problems with writing in its benchmark instantiations or as a category, that type as a category tries in a progressively ascending way to solve or address.

The problems that departures from the specifics of specific writing conventions try to solve or address are, as I tried to say, problems generated by what happens optical-grammatically when a specific convention of writing is paraphrased in sculpted forms on the ends of recangular blocks of metal, which force them a certain distance apart and to rigorously conform to a carefully structure height / width grid. Paraphrase is what sculpting has to be or do, if it is to continue using the communcation convention that was sparked and shaped by direct mark-making.

Departures from writing are not essential, but feature manipulation in the context of paraphrastic stratagies is unavoidable, characteristic of type design, and can be productive.

About the Douglas Hofstadter response to Donald Knuth and how what Donald Knuth proposed relates to Noordzij I’ll transcribe a section from Hofstader’s Abstract, and point you to the Epilogue of Noordzij's RIDT paper as a start. The first sentence of Hofstadter's extract reads: “It is argued that readers are likely to carry away from Donald Knuth's article “The concept of a Meta-Font” a falsely optimisitc view of the extent to which the design of typefaces and letterforms can be mechanized through an approach depending on describing letterforms by specifying the settings of a large number of parameters.”

In this context Hofstadter outlines a way to letterform descritption using ‘quirk-notes’ to define how in a specific font, ‘roles’ across the alphabet are filled. For example the ‘stem’ role or the ‘bowl’ role, or the ‘ascender’ role, and how the roles relate, that is, the styles of their joining.

Bill, to reply to another thread in your comment: The poor quality of Metafont font’s isn't really a product of the fact that it was pen-influenced, but that a mechanically tractable parametrization of a mechanical pen’s enabled behaviours and dimensions can't respond effectively to the optical-grammatical issues that adjusting values over those parameters evokes.

>Writing is neither unreadable, nor is it ugly.

Writing can be beautiful or ugly, just like type. Perhaps I should have said for 'stylistic reasons'. The point is that you might want to modify a glyph in a way that is further from writing to get the look you want. To take a clear-cut example, the Futura lower case 'a' was an attempt to be geometrical and have no trace of the movement of the pen in it.

As to readability, I accept the old notion that extended text is most readable when set in a lower case serifed roman, and every departure from that decreases ease of reading, and possibly speed. Certainly I think hand writing can be quite readable, but as a rule in extended text it is much less easy to read than printing. The formal hands were partly an attempt at regularity that helps reading, but I don't think even the best of the formal hands is as easy to read as good type, well set.

>The poor quality of Metafont font’s isn’t really that a product of the fact that it was pen-influenced, but that a mechanically tractable parametrization of a mechanical pen’s enabled behaviours and dimensions can’t respond effectively to the optical-grammatical issues adjusting values over those parameters evokes.

I think you mean "mathematically" rather than "mechanically", as what is involved here are equations, not a physical device.

In any case the problem is not, I think, finding the mathematics to express each desirable modification. It is that you'd have to have modifications for each letter of each font, so it is quicker just to design the damn outline.

To put it another way the modifications are just do specific, and the what pleases the eye too complex and unknown as yet to produce a general mathematical model what would cover all cases, give a relatively small set of 'quirk-notes', as Hofstedter calls them.

For example, the stem on the B is often reduced by a few units relative to the H, which helps even color, as the bowls of the B will otherwise make the stem look a little fat. And so sometimes is the last, thick stem of the M reduced. Again, you have some visual crowding with all those diagonals in a small space, and lightening the thing helps. Question: What is the rule for how much you should reduce the M, given the B? Answer: there isn't any rule. For the eye, it will probably depend on the contrast, boldness, serif if any, width of the glyph, optical size, etc. etc.

And different people will make different decisions. Matthew Carter will make good decisions. Some others won't. Carter's font will read well, and look good, and another's might not. Still others will make good decisions different from Carter's. Type design, as has been often noted by such experienced designers as G. Briem, is a series of thousands of decisions--at least one or two for each glyph, in each style, and sometimes in each weight.

Now the thing about those decisions, such as on the stems of the B and the M, is that they are type design decisions, not writing decisions. They concern details that are at a level of precision that is generally not possible in writing, but is possible, and indeed demanded by a professional quality text font.

It is because I am right now wrestling every day with these demands of a quality text font that I am so insistent that very many of these decisions are not writing decisions, and that they do make an important difference. Perhaps Noordzij was unimpressed by the 'quirk notes' idea for similar reasons. They aren't quirks, they are type design.

Of course you could say with some justice that all type designers are quirky, but that's what it takes :)

Bill: This process of understanding the underlying writing, but actually sculpting outlines, I think reflects the reality of type—that it is modified handwriting. Both the fact that it has a base of handwriting and the modifications are essential. But the much of the work of type design is in sculpting the outlines.

Yes, I agree with that. I also have been thinking, today, about how this discussion relates to practice and, particularly, to my own practice. I'm trying to account for the fact that the typefaces I make are full of the kind of modifications to which you refer -- that is, they are evident in what I create -- and at the same time they don't seem to me very significant in terms of this discussion. And I think what it comes down to is that, for the most part, these modifications are something that I apply in the manufacturing stage to make individual glyphs 'work', rather than something central to my thinking about letterforms.

“that's why I'm so insistent that very many of these decisions are not writing decisions, and that they do make an important difference”

Bill, do you take me to say that they are writing decisions, and that they don't amount to a hill of beans?

I tried to specify in non-generic ways in what sense I think they are essential by bringing up issues of optical-grammatical imperatives and gestural atmospheric wants. And I tried to point to in what sense they are important by bringing up matters of the consolidation and extendion of affordances, as a kind of epiphenomenal benefit or gift. Is there more that must be said that this doesn't say?

I don't want to give a chance to readers taking from that fact (or statements like the one I targetted), that the changes arose — or came about — because of perceived or intrinsic difficulties reading benchmark writing, or dissatisfactions with how writing looked. That just seems to me to be a damaging, derogatory and unhistorical way of conceptualizing the changes that took place.

I've also asked before how much of ’ease’ is conditioning, and how much affordance. So that to has to be factored in.

And I've tried to say that while the results of genuinely optical-grammatically motivated adjustments sometimes have precedants in writing, this isn't ever or always the whole story. These optical-grammatically motivated adjustments might in other instances reflect other disciplines, like deliberate figure / ground gauging or form counterform experimentation as in the cases of Frutiger and Bloemsma's Legato.

The computer is a mechanical device, but it's parametrization is algorized, which is where the math comes in. Parameterized design can't make optical-grammatical adjustments, because it can't predict where they might be needed; but these are the essence of what it takes to make glyphs ‘work’ together and well in the conditions of use they're destined for. So that's where the blood sweat and tears in type will always lie.

And finally, microtypographical adjustments are not inconsequential quirks, but if they are functional, deliberate, historical and systematic, they can be described in ‘quirk-notes’ because they are particulare to the individual glyph-set or style.

Thanks William!

The ‘a’ is exceptionally beautiful!
I will look where I can by this book.

Stefan

Bill, let me state my discomfort in a different way.

When you say you don't think even the best or the formal hands is as easy to read as good type, I want to ask: Is this fair? In what sense is this true? Is part of this your conditioning? What part is real affordances? Is the plateau of good affordance really that narrow? What does it mean to say this? What is the importance of, relevance of, or motivation for saying this?

And to relate this to your more general statement: What does the acceptence of your ‘old notion’ represent? What part of comfort is familiarity with a particular role-architectural conceit? What part of affordance has to do with optical-grammatical noise? How do I distinguish between optical-grammatical noise and gestural atmospheric tuning? Is the one the method for — but anti-thetical to — the other? What part does gestural-atmospheric vitality play in broad experiential judgements of readability? Are seriffed types intrinsically more readable or just less susceptable to visual wordform resolutional decay when tracking for justification is introduced? How sould all that impact what we do in specific contexts of use?

Are we not back with rule versus law?

Or is it that I like to complicate things?

>optical-grammatical imperatives and gestural atmospheric wants ...are important by bringing up matters of the consolidation and extension of affordances, as a kind of epiphenomenal benefit or gift. Is there more that must be said that this doesn’t say?

Well I may misunderstand you, as without concrete examples to illustrate your statements I find it hard to be sure what you mean.

I take it by 'consolidation and extension of affordances' you mean that the type becomes more readable. I don't think this is a by-product or "gift" of the sense that type designers have of something being 'not right' and feeling a need to adjust proportions of a glyph or weights of parts to make it 'work', as John put it.

My feeling is that a big part of the sense of something not being right relates to good rhythm and even color in the type. These are the same thing as what promotes readability, and indeed makes good text types more readable than handwriting. So a large part of 'working' and 'being right' is readability--not a different variable of which has the consequence of helping readability.

So if you mean by 'epiphenomenon' a by-product, then I don't agree. But if you mean that the sense of rightness includes good color and rhythm, which are part of readability, then I agree.

>[Changes came about] because of perceived or intrinsic difficulties reading benchmark writing, or dissatisfactions with how writing looked. That just seems to me to be a damaging, derogatory and unhistorical way of conceptualizing the changes that took place.

I did not mean to imply that type designers were dissatisfied with the way writing looked. As I said above, I liked your analysis that the regularity of type gave rise to a new standard. Variations that would have been submerged in the general variability of handwriting became obtrusive because of repetition of the same characters over and over again in type. But the net effect of being hit with what looks 'wrong' and the new ability in punch cutting to control outlines to a finer degree of tolerance had the result--through the eyes and hands and imagination of great designers--of type that surpassed the readability of handwriting.

“not a different variable”

Bill, ‘readability’ is not ‘a’ variable in any well-specified and scientifically tractable or historiographically and pedagogically productive sense, and judgements of readability, though important, are anecdotal experiential reports that involve a cluster of partially isolatible, but interrelated factors, which we might make ourselves aware of. Some have to do with realities of structuration on the object side, and some have to do with realities of conditioning and bias on the subject side. I’d love if you could affirm this, but than I’d want to ask why you won’t let this temper your broad generalizations in ways that I and maybe others might find them easier to embrace.

In my book rhythm and even colour, as well as form / counterform logic and figure / ground control are optical-grammatical issues that have a lot to do with structuration on the object side. And the affordances that I am interested in are perceptual discrimination offordances and visual wordform resolutional affordances. Solving optical grammatical issues in one way might be productive or counterproductive when it comes to consolidating affordances. A type might become too regular. But these things aren't so easily decidable just by direct optical-grammatical gauging. I think all type-involved people should push beyond simple, conditioned statements to that level of awareness.

Perceptual discrimination has to do with how well the eye can make out the criterial parts of letters in the context of the word, sentence and text-block wholes these parts are part of; wordform resolution has to do with how easily and resiliently these parts in their relation form letters that gel well into stable, unitary, robust word-objects, because of the way they are open to and relate to other letters.

I mean by consolidation and extension of affordances, that the types became more resistant to visual wordform resolutional collapse in tougher and a wider range of contexts of use. This comes out as readable in smaller sizes, or readable under greater print degredation. But I don't want to draw from these specifics that type is intrinsically more readable than writing, or one type than the other, on some absolute readability measure. All I think it is warranted to say is that affordance structures differ from type to type: some are deep and broad, others are pointed, rich but narrow. I would be happier to talk about readability or affordance profiles, using my kind of distinctions, than I am about readability as such in a kind of winner take all scheme.

Given that the experience of comfort in reading is distinctly and complexly multifactorial in the ways I try to describe, to make broad ‘ranking’ statements using ‘readability’ as a measure is a strategy whose productive, pedagogic, and ‘fairness’ value I don't fully see.

But maybe I've banged this gong enough for now, and should move on to other things.

Peter, I think I cross-posted with your previous post. Your most recent post I have great difficulty in understanding, so let me respond primarily to the previous one.

I gather that you reject my claim that good type, well set, is more readable for lengthy text than is the best handwriting.

Yes, this is a generalization, and I may well be wrong. I thought you approved of Noordzij's tentative 'laws', rather than authoritarian rules. My proposal is a tentative or conjectural 'law' if you will, not an authoritarian demand that I am imposing on anybody.

Also I'm not accusing anybody of incompetence, bad intentions, or bad actions, so I don't understand what 'fair' or 'unfair' have do with it. I am right or mistaken, that's all.

Also, just to be clear, I am not saying that all decisions that historical creators of type made were based on readability. What I am saying is that some of them have been, and those concerning even color and good rhythm resulted in type being more readable than handwriting.

And that is not because type creators they were any better workmen or artists than the scribes. It is because the medium offered greater control over outlines, and in a more limited way, spacing. And some superb type creators, such as Garamond, were able to take advantage of this greater control.

Readability, or ease of reading with good comprehension is not a scientifically well defined and proven concept. But I'm not writing a scientific paper, just expressing my opinion in language that has been used in typography for a long time. I cannot prove that my impression of greater readability is not simply due to habituation and familiarity, and rather than an inherent advantage of type. However I think there is reason to believe that regularity in rhythm and even color do ease reading. And the fact is that handwriting is almost never used for extended text, even though technically it could be written, photographed and printed in just as many copies as any typeset text.

Bill, other pressures are making it important that I back off.

You say you gather that I reject your claim that good type, well set, is more readable for lengthy text than is the best handwriting.

I said I have number of issues with the making of this kind of statement, and would rather make a statement of a somewhat different kind, than be forced to choose for or against such a claim. To say that good type well set is more readable than the best handwriting is in fact derogatory, because it diminishes just how well the best writing does afford sustained reading of lengthy texts for those for whom it was the norm. And derogation is not fair.

I would rather try and describe affordance ranges and thresholds and plateaus for different types in different conditions of use, than make simple binary across the board judgements of more or less.

I'm expressing a measure of discomfort with the adequacy of the language that has been used in typography for a long time. So I'm asking myself, in a kind of Kantian way, what kind of a statement is a judgement of readability and legibility? And I try and punder perceptual psychology and other design traditions to find some tighter terms. The risk is distinctions that are somehow more demanding, but also maybe more servicable.

The more important thing is to communicate my discomfort. Maybe that's just me making a mountain of a mole-hill. Maybe it's not widely shared. I don't know. And I'm not sure how I can take this further. I'll have to let it sit.

I'm having a little trouble letting this thing sit just yet, so I'll give it another go.

After some more reflection, here is what I see now through my ‘perceptual processing in reading’ lens. (It probably brings me closer to what you, Bill, feel to be the case, but this way of framing it eases my reluctance.)

I'll start with this: Gerrit Noordzij sees the middle ages as the period of the consolidation of the word.

In writing with the broad-nibbed pen the consolidation of affordances approached a kind of stall-point or highpoint or limit around the time type made its entrance. In type the consolidation dynamic could continue apace concurrently or be productively resumed because of the less constrained feature manipulation it allowed. Feature manipulation overtly addresses optical-grammatical (‘look’) issues (like regularity, or evenness of colour) and gestural-atmospheric (‘feel’) wants (like, greater angularity or cursivity or varied stress), all the while — just under the surface of conscious awareness — re-mapping visual-wordform resolutional affordances, quietly adjusting its thresholds and ranges, and basis.

Because it re-tunes the basis, it requires a small-incremental reconditioning of it’s victims (a pick-up phrase originating in some other context from some of my conversations with Noordzij). But the re-tuning of the thresholds and ranges are real readability gains.

So to me this says the greater feature-manipulational flexibility in punchcutting, could initiate a consolidation of the readability affordances of writing beyond writing, though not without a cost. The cost is growing distance from the readability and character of first-rate scribal writing, especially when you factor in the unfamiliarity of the foreign or earlier mother tongue.

William: "Also, just to be clear, I am not saying that all decisions that historical creators of type made were based on readability. What I am saying is that some of them have been, and those concerning even color and good rhythm resulted in type being more readable than handwriting.

And that is not because type creators they were any better workmen or artists than the scribes. It is because the medium offered greater control over outlines, and in a more limited way, spacing. And some superb type creators, such as Garamond, were able to take advantage of this greater control."

As we all know, control over outlines does not always result in superior outlines. Look at the state of type design today.

Many think that type well set is of minor importance compared to type design in the determination of readability. I care to differ. I could take Garamond and make it very difficult to read even at 12 point printed crisply. No, I do not mean by removing anyone's reading glasses.

Also, some pain from "unreadable type faces", such as Bodoni, can be eased by careful setting.

Quickly handwriting became more of a "hangover and not so much a model for type design".

Tools do affect outlines, not to mention right handed people have dominated left handed. Counter punches compared to gravures, the two schools of thought? Now the cold mechanical feeling of digital type. This could be a lengthy discussion but I am going to spare us all.

The church found Gutenberg's Bible of minor importance compared to the lavish financial profits from the indulgences he printed. The business of printing dictated many different objectives. As I mentioned much earlier, Aldus Manutius invented the pocket book. There was great interest in making types readable in smaller sizes. This saved not only paper but allowed for more pages in the chase thus reducing press time.

Is handwriting more readable/legible, or even possible at six point than type? I think not! I predict, if it is possible to handwrite that small, (avoiding an embarrassing surprise) it must be hard to read at all. Besides I don't think they made a goose feather small enough. For the record, I believe the smallest hand set type ever made was 2 1/2 point, probably commissioned by an unscrupulous lawyer.

You may have noticed in an eye examination letters are used. Well, they aren't in Finland. Still, keep in mind the conspiracy between French eye glass manufactures and printers. They both had much to gain by smaller type sizes. Not to mention, the consumer was advantaged financially. Well, they all were.

Peter: So to me this says the greater feature-manipulational flexibility in punchcutting, could initiate a consolidation of the readability affordances of writing beyond writing...

This is better stated and doubtless more accurate than my attempt to get at this idea by looking at feature manipulation as an extension of the stroke logic inherited from writing. I like this idea of consolidation of a process that is already taking place in writing. It fits well with examples from a number of different scripts, in which one sees formal styles of writing develop that begin, sometimes in individual features or letters, to break with 'the single track of a tool'. [It is because of such instances that I don't fully agree with a definition of writing that completely rules out occasional stroke repetition, build up or outline.]

...though not without a cost. The cost is growing distance from the readability and character of first-rate scribal writing, especially when you factor in the unfamiliarity of the foreign or earlier mother tongue.

This is an observable cost, and it also has parallels within typography as in e.g. the loss of ability of many people to read fraktur with any ease or comfort. I wrote earlier in this discussion that we could not say whether e.g. Griffo's types were significantly more readable than the scribal book hand for people who were used to reading that hand, i.e. the contemporary audience for both kinds of books. Type could make consistently readable text at smaller sizes, and hence had an economical advantage, but at equivalent sizes I'm not convinced that there was any significant gain in readability. The 'consolidation of the readability affordances' were expressed in a reduction in the size of text. I wonder if any records survive indicating a rise in the number of lense grinders working in Venice at the same time?

First of all, just to be clear, I am not disparaging the accomplishments of scribes. There were over 3000 years of scribes writing alphabetic scripts and now something over 500 years of type. The scribes already did a great deal to make writing readable, including not only letter proportions, but also key matters of layout, such as amount of letter and word spacing, line measure, space between lines, and margins. And these, as Giampa points out, are also keys to readability. The scribes had already worked out much of the rules of readable text that we still follow.

However, there is a remaining area of difference of opinion I have with John and Peter, unless I have won Peter over in a discussion off-line. I think that evenness of spacing and color provides a relatively neutral framework or grid, within which the differences between letters are easily detected by the eye. When color or spacing is uneven, or there are other extraneous variations, this constitutes 'noise' that interferes with the detection of the 'signal' of letter differences.

That is why I still think that good type, well set, is more readable than good writing. Good writing still has more inherent 'noise' in it than good type, because of greater variability. The dimension of readability I have in mind here is how cognitively taxing it is to read text. This aspect of readability has not yet been tested, to my knowledge, but I have several times advocated such testing here on Typophile. I think that when good writing in familiar styles easily decoded by us--eg not Fraktur for most of us--is read it will prove more taxing than good printed text. And the more florid writing, with extraneous swashes etc, the more taxing it will be.

If this is a general psychological principle, we can reasonable apply it to readers in the 16th century, who didn't have greatly different DNA than we do.

This is also not to say that writing is less beautiful. In the hands of a superb calligrapher, it can be more beautiful--though less serviceable for long passages of text.

Bill, this probably needs a longer reply. But for now, think of noise first in terms of 'computation costs' at the visual cortex level. Also think of ‘noise’ as productive in gestural-atmospheric terms. Noise is the basis of inflection, and inflection provides 'character' and character has appeal — another factor operating in our everyday experiential anecdotal judgements of readability. I still think your ranking judgement is too easily made. Type may be made to be more noise free, but is that equivalent to more readable?

>Type may be made to be more noise free, but is that equivalent to more readable?

I think there are a number of other factors involved, but that being able to get rid of noise is where type has the edge over handwriting. In other areas probably the best scribes were probably just as good for readability.

Oh on the 'quirk notes' idea of Hofstedter. Where we do have enough information to automate things is when you have two weights of a design that resemble each other in the designer's eyes, then computer interpolation create other weights that are very 'family' looking. So as of now it seems to take two fonts with similar characters with a different values of a parameter to actually have the needed information to carry through the 'quirk notes' idea..

Bill, if reading affordance is a plateau with thresholds and ranges and heights, I might even become compelled to concede that not only ranges and thresholds but also heights are susceptible to adjustment beyond writing.

But I'll only accept ranking comparisons if they acknowledge: 1) that over time, type has probably re-tuned our internal maps so that we've become separated from the readability of writing to a degree; 2) (if they acknowledge) that through the broad-nibbed pen applied to a carolinian separated script, western writing had, by the time type arrived, carved out for its script a criterion-level or benchmark-level affordances plateau; 3) (if they acknowledge) that readability, or affordance in reading, is not a simple equation but a densely multifacted, delicately balanced thing.

The delicate balance thing is shown by the fact that removing noise in the optical-grammatical part of the equation might depress character in the gestural-atmospheric part of the equation. It might even be the case that some noise is necessary for the eyes to become and stay locked-on in visual terms to text, or for visual wordform resolution to stay robust, even though noise has a computational cost. Beyond a certain point, transparency might be a counter-productive chimera.

Bill: I think there are a number of other factors involved, but that being able to get rid of noise is where type has the edge over handwriting. In other areas probably the best scribes were probably just as good for readability.

Again, I think we have to take text size into account here. Where type has the most obvious edge over handwriting is in being able to produce smaller text with the same regularity and evenness of colour and spacing as a good scribe could produce at typically larger sizes.* This is a much more obvious advantage of type than the notion of type getting rid of noise, which I find very problematic, especially if we're comparing the textual culture of the first 100 years of printing from moveable metal type in Europe. The fact is that the vast majority of early printing was not very good: a lot of type was either over-inked or under-inked, the impressions were uneven (even on the same page), the metal alloys were not well developed and the type wore quickly, there is often a lot of extra-textual noise from ink spots. Even some of the most well-respected names in typographic history produced a lot of poorly printed books -- I know, I own some of them --, not just the justly admired masterpieces that get reproduced in books on type history. By comparison, the scribes -- seeking to compete in quality where they could not compete in quantity or economy -- were doing their best work during the same period, using highly prepared parchments and papers, well-maintained reeds and quills, carefully prepared inks. And if by 'noise' we include not only variation in letterforms or spacing but all those other factors that diminished the quality of so much printing then the manuscripts are by far the cleaner product.

[The preparation of the writing surface in the Islamic scribal tradition is particularly important, because the reed pen is pushed so often when writing Arabic, and the sized papers they use are generally smoother than anything produced for either manuscript or print in Europe. The cleanest, sharpest letters I have ever seen were handwritten Arabic script.]

* There are traditions of very small writing -- micrography -- in some scripts, notably Arabic and Hebrew. These are most often employed in decorative ways: you see a picture or a pattern, look at it more closely and you see that it contains a text in tiny letters. The Arabic term for such writing is ghubar -- literally 'dust' --, and a special style of writing was developed for it. The typical alif height of ghubar is less than 2mm; sometimes as small as 1.3mm. Because ghubar was sometimes used to write Qur'anic passages, legibility was, of course, extremely important.

John, you have a good point about the messiness of early printing. In looking at some 18th century printing in Caslon I was struck by how much of a mess it is, and painful to read by comparison to printing post-Baskerville, when inks and press techniques were improved. Unfortunately, the 'modern' high contrast types that became popular had their own problems with readability, in my view.

The benefits of the finer control that the designers introduced was only fully realized later. Still, the breakthroughs were made then.

Peter, I don't think even spacing and color forces a designer to iron out variation in shapes. Indeed variation in shape is often needed to achieve even color, because of the very different shapes of different letters. For example, the tapering of diagonals prevents clotted joins, contributing to even color, but it also creates more lively, varied shapes in the alphabet. Accomplishing both liveliness and relatively little 'noise' is what makes great text faces great.

if by ’noise’ we include not only variation in letterforms or spacing but all those other factors that diminished the quality of so much printing then the manuscripts are by far the cleaner product.

True, a good manuscript page is then cleaner than a bad printed page. But that kind of cleanliness isn't really relevant to the superiority of the typographic effect as described by Bill. If the benefit of type is to present more text on a page, within the grasp of an eye's scan, and less "noise", i.e. irregularity, then type has the edge, for two reasons.

Firstly, type forms have shorter extenders and are more compactly line-spaced.
Secondly, scribes introduce much irregularity with contextual forms and flourishes (even modest ones).

Of course, scribes CAN produce stilted work which is as mechanically uniform and succint as type, but that is not their professional raison d'être vis-a-vis the printing trade. Their added value is in handmade grace, which goes against typographic readability-value as defined by Bill in mechanical terms of maximizing quantity and uniformity of text.

However, while accepting Bill's explanation for the superior readability of type in one respect, I don't believe that readability is quite so one-dimensional. It's not something that can be reduced to scientific or mechanistic proportions. That's fast food.

>I don’t believe that readability is quite so one-dimensional.

I don't either, as I tried to make clear above. I was just referring to where type has excelled. There are a lot of things that contribute to easy readability of a typeface. Also the merits of a highly readable face can be totally subverted by bad setting.

An example of another factor in readability is darkness of the face. In the testing of Clearview as I remember they found that a medium weight sans was better than a bold for legibility in signs. I think there is also a sweet spot (or range) for text as far as darkness. But darkness is complicated, as perceived darkness is not simply a matter of sheer density. Reabability is quite complicated, I think, and not that well understood. I am not talking here about the obvious, like bad handwriting that you can't decipher to save your life, but rather readability at the high end--readable vs highly readable.

Nick: Firstly, type forms have shorter extenders and are more compactly line-spaced.
Secondly, scribes introduce much irregularity with contextual forms and flourishes (even modest ones).

Yes and yes presuming we're limiting the discussion to the Latin script. There are, of course, counter examples in the writing and typography of other scripts.

>writing and typography of other scripts.

Ever eager to test my hunches, I was looking over the Rabbi's shoulder this morning as he was chanting the Torah portion today. I've got to admit that the script--a now rare instance of handwriting of extended text by a professional scribe--was admirably lucid and readable, as well as quite beautiful.

My feeling is that the problems of getting even color in Hebrew script are a lot less, because of it being a square script. The problem in latin script is the presence of diagonal and round strokes, and their connections to stems. And the problem is bigger in lower case humanist script than caps. When it is done well it is marvelously clear, as you have greater differentiation between letter shapes than in Hebrew or even roman caps.

I really wonder how long the humanist script--with the lower case mimicking Roman capitals--would have lasted had not printing come along. Did the Carolingian miniscule last very long the first time around? I have the feeling that it is quite difficult to write well and quickly. And my impression is that even in formal documents, such as contracts, writing quickly became more cursive after the introduction of printing. Is this right?

Bill: I really wonder how long the humanist script—with the lower case mimicking Roman capitals—would have lasted had not printing come along.

A good question. On the one hand, one can guess that a major change in script style might not have occured until it did in fact occur with the influence of a new writing tool, but prior to the invention of type the scripts of Europe were constantly evolving and subject to alterations in compression, proportion, etc., and of course there were important regional scripts that gradually disappeared with the standardisation of roman types. Noordzij turns Bill's question on its head, wondering what might have happened if type had not frozen formal writing into those particular forms: "A stop of 500 years in the development of text scripts is long enough to make one look upon formal writing as static. Against a continuous tradition of 5000 years, however, the interruption has been merely incidental.'

And my impression is that even in formal documents, such as contracts, writing quickly became more cursive after the introduction of printing. Is this right?

In Italy, chancery writing tended to be cursive anyway, but also highly elaborated with swashes and ornamental devices: so cursive in form, but without the characteristic speed of writing we associate with that term. The humanist roman was specifically a book hand, intended for literary, theological and scientific texts. The quickly written cursive, without elaboration, which is the mother of italic type, was a kind of note hand, often found in manuscripts copied for their content by individual scholars rather than by professional scribes (such manuscripts seem to me the very model for Aldus' small format books in italic type).

In England and some other parts of northern Europe, blackletter remained the norm for chancery documents for a long period, only to be replaced by the split nib scripts.

And if by ’noise’ we include not only variation in letterforms or spacing but all those other factors that diminished the quality of so much printing then the manuscripts are by far the cleaner product.

If you get the objects themselves in front of you you will quickly see just how very true this is. And compared even to the vast majority of modern day printing this is still true. The level of detail possible is absolutely huge.

I don’t think even spacing and color forces a designer to iron out variation in shapes. Indeed variation in shape is often needed to achieve even color, because of the very different shapes of different letters.
Very true. When I talk to people about contextual alternatives in text they often bring up the fear that it might produce a textuta-like over regularity of form. But I don't think that is remotely likely for the reasons similar to those that Bill gives above. A well tailored custom fit for 'Notan' will produce increased clarity re: the differentiation between letter shapes. Like an adjustment, an overshoot for example you have to have some judgement about it to achieve that effect, but like Bill I think equating an search for even color with literal regularity is a false or at best a misleading idea.