for my colleagues & friends in the worlds of letters: writers & editors, type designers, typographers, printers & publishers, shepherding words and books on their lethal and innocent ways
CONTENTS:
There are many books about typography, and some of them are models of the art they teach. But when I set myself to compile a simple list of working principles, one of the benchmarks I first thought of was William Strunk and E.B. White's small masterpiece, The Elements of Style. Brevity, however, is the essence of Strunk & White's manual of literary technique. This book is longer than theirs, and for that there is a cause.
Typography makes at least two kinds of sense, if it makes any sense at all. It makes visual & historical sense.
The visual side of typography is always on display, and materials for the study of its visual form are many and widespread. The history of letterforms and their usage is visible too, to those with access to manuscripts, inscriptions and old books, from others it's largely hidden.
This book has therefore grown into something more than a short manual of typographic etiquette. It is the fruit of a lot of long walks in the wilderness of letters: in part a pocket field guide to the living wonders that are found there, and in part a meditation on the ecological principles, survival techniques and ethics that apply.
One question, nevertheless, has been often in my mind. When all right-thinking human beings are struggling to remember that other men and women are free to be different, and free to become more different, how can one honestly write a rulebook? What reason and authority exist for these commandments, suggestions and instructions? Certainly typographers, like others, ought to be at liberty to follow or to blaze the trails they choose.
REALIST — 19th-20th centuries:
unmodulated stroke; implied vertical axis; small aperture; serifs absent or abrupt and of equal weight with main strokes; italic absent or replaced by sloped roman.
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ROMANTIC — 18th-19th centuries:
hypermodulated stroke; intensified rationalist axis; abrupt, thin serifs; round terminals; small aperture; fully subjugated italic. In Neoclassical and Romantic letters alike, the primary axis is usually vertical & the secondary axis oblique.
Like oratory, music, dance, calligraphy — like anything that lends its grace to language — typography is an art that can be deliberately misused. It is a craft by which the meanings of a text (or its absence of meaning) can be clarified, honored and shared, or knowingly disguised.
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. Its other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
One of the principles of durable typography is always legibility; another is something more than legibility: some earned or unearned interest that gives its living energy to the page. It takes various forms and goes by various names, including serenity, liveliness, laughter, grace and joy.
Letterforms that honor and elucidate what humans see and say deserve to be honored in their turn. Well-chosen words deserve well-chosen letters; these in their turn deserve to be set with affection, intelligence, knowledge and skill. Typography is a link, and it ought, as a matter of honor, courtesy and pure delight, to be as strong as the others in the chain.
Writing begins with the making of footprints, the leaving of signs. Like speaking, it is a perfectly natural act which humans have carried to complex extremes. The typographer's task has always been to add a somewhat unnatural edge, a protective shell of artificial order, to the power of the writing hand.
The typographer's one essential task is to interpret and communicate the text. Its tone, its tempo, its logical structure, its physical size, all determine the possibilities of its typographic form. The typographer is to the text as the theatrical director is to the script, or the musician is to the score.
The proportions that are useful for the shapes of pages are equally useful in shaping the textblock. This is not to say that the proportions of the textblock & the page should be the same. They quite often were the same in medieval books. In the Renaissance, many typographers preferred a more polyphonic page, in which the proportions of page and textblock differ. But it is pointless for them to differ unless, like intervals in music, they differ to a clear & purposeful degree.
For all the beauty of pure geometry, a perfectly square block of type on a perfectly square page with even margins all around is a form unlikely to encourage reading. Reading, like walking, involves navigation - and the square block of type on a square block of paper is short of basic landmarks and clues. To give the reader a sense of direction, and the page a sense of liveliness & poise, it's crucial to break this inexorable sameness and find a new balance of another kind. Some space must be narrow so that other space may be wide, and some space must be emptied so that other space may be filled.
A novel often purports to be a seamless river of words from beginning to end, or a series of unnamed scenes. Research papers, textbooks, cookbooks and other works of nonfiction rarely look so smooth. They are often layered with chapter heads, section heads, subheads, block quotations, footnotes, endnotes, lists & illustrative examples. Such features may be obscure in the manuscript, even if they are clear in the author's mind. For the sake of the reader, each one requires its own typographic identity and form. Every layer and level of the text must be consistent, distinct, yet (usually) harmonious in form.
This interlocking relationship of symmetry & asymmetry, and of balanced and contrasted shape and size, wasn't new when this example was designed (in Venice in 1501). The first European typographers inherited some two thousand years' worth of research into these principles from their predecessors, the scribes. Yet the principles are flexible enough that countless new typographic pages and page-spreads wait to be designed.
An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After practice, their work took on an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means "cloth".
The typesetting device, whether it happens to be a computer or a composing stick, functions like a loom. And the typographer, like the scribe, normally aims to weave the text as evenly as possible. Good letterforms are designed to give a lively, even texture, but careless spacing of letters, lines and words can tear this fabric apart.
In typography, margins must do three things. They must lock the textblock to the page and lock the facing pages to each other through the force of their proportions. Second, they must frame the textblock in a manner that suits its design. Third, they must protect the textblock, leaving it easy for the reader to see and convenient to handle. (That is, they must leave room for the reader's thumbs.) The third of these is easy, and the second is not difficult. The first is like choosing type: it is an endless opportunity for typographic play and a serious test of skill.
Perhaps fifty per cent of the character and integrity of a printed page lies in its letterforms. Much of the other fifty per cent resides in its margins.