I don�t know if this is of any help of not. It is long, maybe boring & surely didactic.

It is the introduction to a talk I gave, & what made my day was when Carter, who was also on the panel, said he agreed. Of course, he is a polite man . . .



Using Type? Well . . .

Put very simply, typography is the style and appearance of printed matter. Taking a book open to a text page, the typographic elements are the letterforms of the type and certain spatial relationships: the space between letters, the space between words, the space between lines, and the space of the text block on the paper.

Again keeping things simple, within fairly narrow limits the letterforms determine the space used between them. The letters and their spacing determine, within fairly narrow limits, the space between the words. Now some may argue that we have reached the end of typography, that the other spatial relationships are a matter of design. I take the other position, that the length of the measure, the space between lines, and the spacing of the text block on the paper are all typographic matters. Tschichold called his early work �the new typography,� and we are as comfortable with the phrase �asymmetric typography� as we are with �symmetric design.�

Typography and book design overlap in a broad way, but the terms are not synonymous. Consider a mathematical text filled with equations. The typography could be excellent, but if the font selected for the text was Deepdene, I would feel uncomfortable saying it was an excellent design, as it would not be particularly comfortable for the book�s intended audience. Or consider large print books, where the design may achieve its purpose of making texts available to those with poor eyesight, but the typography is knowingly sacrificed.

There are numerous books about typography. Some of these are prescriptive, emphasizing what one ought to do. Tschichold's The Form of the Book and Dowding's Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type come to mind. Others, such as Hendel's On Book Design, are more descriptive, examining what typographers and designers look at and think about as they work. I have read both types of books, the prescriptive manuals early on when I was concerned about what I ought to do, and later descriptive texts, to find out how others thought. Later still, as I began to put together a personal understanding of typography, I felt a need to look at a broader range of material. I have spent and continue to spend considerable time looking at examples of typography from the sixteenth century to current times. For this, resources like Blumenthal, Morgan & Godine's The Art of the Book and Sutton & Bartram's An Atlas of Typeforms are invaluable, and I consider them too to be typography manuals.

Perhaps typography can be an art; I am only interested in it as a craft. There is a broad overlap between craft and art, but again the terms are not synonymous. We feel comfortable with the notion that an artist may decide their work is for a very small audience or only for themselves. This would be an odd statement to make about the work of a craftsman. For the craftsman, the aim of typography is to give us books that are both affordable and a pleasure to read. From this perspective, one important difference between craft and art is that a broad, general audience is considered competent to judge good craftsmanship because the aesthetics of craft are cultural, that is, worked out over a long period of time. Arguments based on history and tradition not only count but count a great deal.

I would put fine print books in the artistic category. They are expensive to make and to buy, and the endless pains taken over detail do not, I believe, add much to the reading pleasure. Fine print books seem to be made to look at rather than to read. I would also put typographic movements like Grunge typography in the artistic category. In their pure form, they are rebellions against the status quo and what has passed before. Such movements often have a simple message, and to the extent it has value, it is usually co-opted by what it sought to replace.

I don't mean to claim that we reached the pinnacle of typography in the fifteenth century and matters have been going downhill ever since. Over the years, the kinds of typefaces have grown; Venetian, Old Face, Transitional, Modern, Slab Serif, Sans Serif, and so on. These different styles have added richness to typography, even if many of the individual fonts have not. Different kinds of material have been printed as well. To books, we have added newspapers, posters, magazines, flyers, and now the computer monitor. New typographies came about with the new printed matter, and styles originating in one milieu have been successfully adapted to others.

But there have also been many typographic wrong turns. Changes in typographic style usually come from those involved in the manufacture of printed works, not the general audience. In evaluating such changes, this general audience I've claimed to be the proper judge of typographic craftsmanship usually speaks slowly, and not with a single voice. For example, the use of wide word spacing in books began in the middle of the nineteenth century and went on for almost 100 years before final banishment.

There have also been ``wrong turns'' brought about by the efforts to make books more affordable. Typography itself began on this note; few in the fifteenth century would argue that the printed book was more attractive than the scribal manuscript. With every change in manufacturing that made printed works easier to afford -- machine set type, power presses, photocomposition, offset presses and so on -- came the cry that quality was being compromised. Well, quality was being compromised, but a dilemma arises because printed matter was also becoming more affordable.

It is just here, I think, that the craftsman works. There have always been compromises. Handset type was compromised by the number of sorts available in the case; the need to re-distribute type after printing made using extra sorts a significant issue. Early Monotype was compromised by the 18-unit em; the setwidth for all the characters had to fit within this measurement system. Linecasters were fraught with compromises. Dropping a full mould meant kerns could not be cast, so the design of certain letterforms was often changed, giving us the button-hook and truncated ``f.'' Duplexed mats meant that the roman and italic letters had to have the same setwidth, which did considerable damage to the appearance of italic fonts. As I will discuss later, photocomposition introduced still more compromises. But one interesting development with photocomp as it has matured to the current state -- PostScript with Open Type formats -- is that most of the compromises required by the hot metal machines can be removed, and their removal is one proper role of craft.

FWIW,

Charles

> Thank You very, very much