When looking through books published from early movable type, I am often struck by how different the italics appear to modern works published with, purportedly, the same faces, digitalised.
The modern Italics often seem far less flamboyant than their historic predecessors but I cannot work out whether this is due to the digitalisations being toned down in their reproduction of the forms; changes in typesetting practices or just my imagination.
For example, looking at some examples of Jannon Italic or the example in Carter’s “A View of Early Typography” at fig. 83, the Italics seem more striking than they do in modern revivals.
Of course, much of the flamboyance seems to be caused by greater use of swash letters (obvious in the Qs but also in the initial u); ligatures (in addition to the traditional “old-style” ligatures, ligatures such as the us and is which are rarely found in modern fonts); and less kerning than is possible today. However, I often feel that historic Italics sit less comfortably on the base-line than their modern revivals (for example look at the start of the word accoustumé in the second Italic line of the linked file); and that they tend to have less even stroke variation, in that the amount of contrast between the strokes is often different in different letters. I think, combined with the greater number of glyphs (e.g. a stand-alone s is rarely the same as the s in the st ligature, as it would be now), this makes the faces seem more extravagant, but I am worried that this may just be my imagination.
Although, I’ve been wondering about this for a while but do not have sufficient numbers of examples to be able to make proper conclusions. I was therefore wondering what typophile members thought about this.
Thanks!
Jacob
