John, that does surprise me, but I don't know anything about how comparable the graphic situations in Hebrew and Arabic are.
In modern Hebrew, there is use of 'full spelling', which includes more regular letters used as vowels. For the native speaker, I understand that there is little ambiguity even in unfamiliar words, at least for words of Hebrew origin. Currently, as I understand it, nikud are used for primers for children, for dictionaries, for poetry, and for religious texts. If Hebrew speakers found them really helpful, other than for resolving the occasional ambiguity—for which they are used—I would expect them to be used more widely.
Bill, I think you're applying the wrong lens to this. Around the year 800 (CE, as Jews like to say; AD to others), some Jewish communal authorities thought the sound of the Bible was in danger of being lost, as local pronunciations influenced by other languages were seeping in. In regard to a language such as Hebrew, without internal vowels and in which ambiguities abound, they were likely speaking from observation. So one system developed in Babylonia, followed a little later by another, more complex one, in Tiberias (that's the one that stuck). To people of faith, getting the word of God wrong was a category of sin and the sensibility resist it persists to this day. The same sensibility was applied to liturgy, which is, as I mentioned, replete with biblical language.
Biblical Hebrew, liturgical Hebrew, and Modern Hebrew are three branches of the same language. The Ashkenazic culture, of the Rhineland Jews who spread through much of Europe, embraced the diacritics fully for their liturgy, whereas the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, the Jews of Spain and the Middle East, felt less of a need for them, preferring instead the vowelless form of Aramaic. The local Jewish non-Hebrew languages--Yiddish (Judeo-German), Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Persian, and Judeo-whatever--were written in Hebrew script, but only with the most occasional diacritics, such as to differentiate p and f, which are the same letter.
The Sephardic and Mizrahi traditions, both of writing and pronunciation, prevailed in the State of Israel, so the rest is, as they say, history. But even in Israel, most prayerbooks use full diacritics. There is one, however, that is felt to be unnecessary there, the "meteg," the little vertical rule mark that indicates syllabic stress. This is an Ashkenazic thing, as Yiddish speaking Jews typically stressed Hebrew words in the Yiddish way.
That's it for now! I have to get back to real life.
Scott-Martin, what do you mean by wrong lens? ( I don't think your history is quite accurate, but here is not the place to discuss it.)
John, a paper I just found googling compared Hebrew-speaking dyslexics' ability to read with and without nikud. The nikud did not help. And here is a slide presentation on research indicating that Arabic is harder to read.
To get back to the topic, I think that the rules on forming Hebrew script (from the tractate Sofrim) probably dictate the kind of evenness of script for Hebrew that Frank is noting for latin.
Wiliam: ‘[…] because the demands of the eye had already resulted in regularized hands of scribes.’
That has been the generally embraced theory for a long time now. But which ‘regularized hands’ are you pointing at for proof? So far I have never seen any Renaissance handwriting predating type that looks similar to Nicolas Jenson’s famous roman. Poggio Bracciolini’s littera antiqua is often referred to, but in my opinion it doesn’t even come close (see image below), especially if we as type designers consider for instance even the Plantin 110 and Times New Roman 327 series different designs.
That being said, which roman types do you have in mind? Sweynheym and Pannartz’s or the ones by the Da Spira brothers or Jenson’s roman type? Jenson's version became the archetype because Griffo/Manutius recognized its esthetic quality and/or its technical quality, or because Aldus Manutius’ father in law, the printer Andrea de Torresani of Asola, owned and applied Jenson’s roman type.
Anyway, if Jenson's goal was to imitate handwriting he certainly did not succeed. The opposite, i.e., that written letterforms in manuscripts from the late-fifteenth century were influenced by those in early printed books, seems easier to prove. But this resulted in not much more than crude approximations of roman type. Some later roman type that mark the decline in quality of workmanship as the result of mass production, which resulted in books infinitely inferior to anything produced in 1470, could be considered attempts to transfer this approximations back to roman type again in my opinion.
‘Do you think there is any perceptual reason why absolute regularity of widths would be better?’
Better for what? Legibility? Personally I tend to believe (not more than this, because the legibility factor is outside the scope of my research) that legibility is purely relative to, and hence defined by the rules of a grapheme system. If one looks at the differences between Latin, Arabic, Indic, CJK, etc., scripts when it comes to harmony and rhythm, it is difficult for me to believe that there are absolute factors, although there seem to be shared ones. The grapheme systems define the rules for the conditioning of their producers, i.e., type designers, their appliers, i.e., typographers, and their users, i.e., readers. A child’s mind is blank before it is conditioned: ‘The Reader converts characters into systematic phonemes; the child must learn to do so. The Reader knows the rules that relate one set of abstract entities to another; the child does not. The Reader is a decoder; the child must become one. […] what is necessary for the child to learn to read is that he be provided with a set of pairs of messages known to be equivalent, one in ciphertext (writing) and one in plaintext (speech).’(1)
Legibility researchers seem to look for the holy grail for legibility. Type designers seem to focus especially on what Ovink named ‘atmospherevalue’ in Legibility, atmosphere-value and forms of printing types (Leiden, 1938). According to Ovink design (‘form-giving’) in arts and crafts ‘[…] is governed by two systems of value: beauty versus utility. The latter can be proved objectively, the former cannot […] the ulterior motives of the artist’s pleading for type as a reading-tool are of aesthetical nature.’(1). But the fact that ‘utility’ is more objectively measurable than ‘beauty’ does, according to Ovink, not imply that it is by definition the more important factor: ‘[…] for these theorists refuse to measure the utility of a type by other qualities than legibility, even if experiments prove that the reader feels clearly the atmosphere of a type […].’
‘Is the letter you reference published on line anywhere?’
Around 20 years ago Huib van Krimpen gave me JvK’s Memorandum for publication. Huib also gave me his Dutch translation. I published both in 1996; the English text in the Monotype Recorder, which I published for the ATypI The Hague conference and the Dutch one in a booklet. I will scan the Memorandum pages from the MR and post these as PDF later today.
ScottMartin: ‘Frank, first let me offer my apologies for pushing this outside the realm of the Latin alphabet […]’
Actually, I appreciate this parallelization a lot and I look forward to seeing the illustrations you mentioned.
1. Philip B. Gough ‘One Second of Reading’, Visible Language, Volume VI, Number 4, (1972) pp.291–320 (p.310) 2. G.W. Ovink, Legibility, atmosphere-value and forms of printing types (Leiden, 1938) p.12
This is the diagram I mentioned earlier. It's an excerpt from a much larger project, in progress. This has never been shown before, except in some talks, though I furnished some of this information for a recently completed doctoral dissertation by Stephen Lubell (University of London). The diagram is based on measurements I took of a number of sets of matrices, including several by Le Bé, at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, in Antwerp.
Frank, on the comparison of scribal writing and Jenson, I think your diagram rather confirms my view—which as you say is a common one—that scribes regularized scripts. That regularity of rhythm which you are ascribing to the unit system was already approximately there in scribal hands.
Scribes were writing for readability, whereas if a person is writing a note to himself or even a letter, the priority is usually on ease and speed of writing—leading for example to slanted, connected scripts that are less readable. The regularity of rhythm is found in the scribal hand you show. If you did a Fourier transform on it, you would I think get a similar band pattern to those from set text type.
Jenson was following the general shapes and regularity of scribal hands, but changing them partly for still more readability. For example, his letters were more upright, and he did other departures from the pen as well. As far as aesthetics, as Harry Carter notes in his View of Early Typography, (p. 46-47) Jenson and even more so Griffo changed the lower case by making the serifs more like those of the imperial capitals. This was a way to harmonize the two different alphabets. Of course, the constraints of ease or speed of writing, or even having the strokes totally conform to pen rules didn't apply with type.
Part of the increase in readability of type does come from increased regularity. But the question in my mind is whether fairly regular rhythm needed is significantly helped by a strict unit system. That is what I am skeptical of. And here the JvK memo does also cast doubt on whether a unit system is ideal, if I am understanding him rightly.
I hope to write more about this later, when I have a free moment, but for now I want to say that van Krimpen's memorandum has to be understood within the context of the Monotype row system of mat case organization, and the way the company worked at the time it was written. Most everyone who read the Monotype Recorder were system operators, and they understood precisely what he was talking about.
Van Krimpen's complaint was not about too few widths for his designs, but the limited availability of those widths in the rows. He complained that once a row was filled, certain characters which he had intended to occupy the same width were then forced into the adjacent rows, either wider or narrower, wherever space permitted, which was unacceptable to him. The company would show a draft to the designer, and it was up to them and the manager to alter characters as necessary. This is an aspect of type history that is truly no longer relevant to anything other than to provide an understanding of why certain Monotype faces looked and performed the way they did. (Some were excellent, others less so--and there was much variation in quality from size to size.)
The early Monotype system's mat case was arranged 15 rows by 15 columns, each row being a single width, but later versions expanded to 15 x 17, and then 16 x 17. It's been thirty years since I was involved with setting Monotype, but as I recall, one could cheat the system by rearranging key bars, thereby tripping the "wedge" that dictated width. This is why the same type sometimes looked better from some shops than others. (Carl P. Rollins, a close friend of Bruce Rogers, who became head of Yale University's printing office, was a master of this sort of thing.) It seems evident to me from re-reading this memo after many years and vK's famous letter to Philip Hofer, that van Krimpen was not a man to get his hands dirty learning to operate the system; he was much better at indignation. That's quite different from us today (aside from the indignation), who both design and make type, albeit without splattering metal and machine grease.
Scott-Martin, I did get that Van Krimpen was complaining about the limited availability of widths. But he also seems to have problems with fixed widths themselves. I conclude that from his statements about each designer having a certain sense of rhythm, and his view that to get things to look best in Monotype he would have to make finished drawings to those widths, rather than trust the Type Office to adjust his designs. It seems to me that he is implying that he had to adjust what seemed to him ideal to the less-than-ideal fixed units. In other words, the Monotype units were inevitably a step down from what could be done with foundry type.
I'm sure nobody knows JvK's type better than Frank, from his wonderful revivals of JvK's type. Frank, did JvK's sense of rhythm violate the unit system, in your view? Was this a failing or a virtue?
William: ‘That regularity of rhythm which you are ascribing to the unit system was already approximately there in scribal hands.’
With ‘approximately’ you underline my point. In the illustration above enlarged images of a Humanistic m in respectively Poggio’s hand (left) Noordzij’s interpretation, and from Jenson’s roman type. Although they share the rhythmic principle, there is a big difference between the poles. Noordzij captured this rhythm in his ‘Humanistic script’ illustration from The stroke of the pen (1982), but he filtered it –inevitably influenced by the fact that he is familiar with Renaissance roman type. The image below with Poggio’s hand on top and Jenson’s type below shows besides the pattern-similarities also that Jenson rigidly standardized and systematized these patterns.
So, approximately: yes, but literally: no. There are clear differences between Humanistic handwriting and the roman type from the Da Spira brothers and especially Jenson. I think it’s quite plausible that instead of putting rectangles around written letters for the conversion into type, the written model was literally molded into prefixed rectangles, and that this system found its origin in that for the morphologically-related Textura type.
‘Jenson was following the general shapes and regularity of scribal hands, but changing them partly for still more readability.’
The legibility (I like to follow Tinker’s distinction between readability and legibility[1]) factor is a complex one IMHO, because there is no proof that the Renaissance punch cutters investigated this prior to the development of their types. And Gothic type (also cut by Jenson) remained in wide-scale use in Renaissance Italy for liturgic publications, and we consider the Rotunda model less legible nowadays. I assume (not more than that) because we are conditioned with the Jenson/Griffo/Garamont model. And to make matters more complex, Morison notes that in spite of Jenson’s almost divinely assisted craftsmanship, fine writing nevertheless was elsewhere so highly esteemed that even his printing failed to please many contemporary collectors of books. The bibliophiles of Florence insisted that printing was so inferior to the manuscripts as to be unworthy to their libraries.(2)
‘Jenson and even more so Griffo changed the lower case by making the serifs more like those of the imperial capitals.’
I think Bruce Rogers would have disagreed. Below Rogers’ broad-nib tracing of the ‘Eusebius’ type for Centaur (The Newberry Library col.). On the other hand, does Rogers' tracing proves that Jenson’s type finds its origin literally in writing, or does it prove that one can trace Jenson’s roman with a broad nib if one wants to? And, as you know, despite this tracing Rogers decided to relate the serifs of Centaur to those of Roman imperial capitals.
1. Miles A. Tinker, Bases for Effective Reading (Minneapolis, 1966) p.115 2. Stanley Morison, Four centuries of fine printing (London, 1949) p.19
Frank, it wasn't Tinker who defined typographic readability, it was Matthew Luckiesh. And it was Linotype that tried to have different definitions for legibility and readability. Tinker actually muddied the waters and did lasting damage to the subject. Peter Enneson and I have written the story in the latest Typography Papers, #9, which came out in December: https://hyphenpress.co.uk/products/books/978-0-907259-48-0
I certainly think Jenson increased regularity and readability, and I think deliberately so, though I can't prove it. The increased regularity is partly just a matter of type vs writing. When every appearance of a letter has the same width, as in metal type, it is going to make the text look more uniform. I think that fact tends to push the type designer attend to the rhythm perhaps more than the scribe would have in old days. The fact that every letter has to be happy next to every other letter imposes a new kind of discipline, which I think Jenson was the first to really understand well.
But what is not obvious to me is that the unit system was really a cause. As Van Krimpen makes clear, the designer has scope to try to impose his own sense of rhythm, even with a unit system. So I suspect that the distinctive rhythm of Jenson is mainly Jenson's own eye, though the unit system you have discovered may have played some role.
A large part of this work was that of the matrix justifier, who was responsible for the sidebearings. So it's not only the best-cut type, but the best justified type that we admire so much. This isn't a matter of speculation. The Plantin-Moretus Museum has exquisitely justified matrices of types cut by Granjon and van den Keere (and punches in some cases), so you can see for yourself how they did it.
I'm not entirely sure what van Krimpen's complaints were, as he doesn't give us examples in the memorandum. One thing that irked him, for sure, was the difference of the quality and subtlety of the line from hand-cut pushes to mechanical ones. Fair enough. As I mentioned earlier, some of his own types that were cut and cast at Enschedé were, to my eye, less than perfectly justified--Haarlemmer being a prime example, but not the only one. I don't really trust van Krimpen. I admire him greatly as a letterer of consummate skill, but his types, well . . . I'd rather praise them than use them.
William: ‘I think that fact tends to push the type designer attend to the rhythm perhaps more than the scribe would have in old days.’
Despite the similarities between written letters and type, there is a major difference: the calligrapher divides the space with pen strokes and the type designer (formerly punch cutter) divides the space between these strokes with side bearings. The question where the horizontal space belonging to a letter starts or ends does not exist for the calligrapher; he makes rhythmical patterns of black and white shapes. The type designer has to equally divide the space between the letters, because this is the quintessence of movable type. He needs the assistance of the typesetter for eventually restoring the pattern.
‘So I suspect that the distinctive rhythm of Jenson is mainly Jenson's own eye, though the unit system you have discovered may have played some role.’
At the moment I'm fitting Adobe Jenson on a unit-arrangement system of 8 cadence-units for the n on a limited number of different widths. The image below shows a first result. Taking in consideration that the original size of Jenson’s type is pretty small and that this inevitably resulted in some deviations when striking/casting/printing, and the fact that Slimbach's interpretation is an… interpretation, the first result is not disappointing when compared with (enlarged) original prints from the 15th-century. It seems to show the same kind of irregularities in spacing. This is really a very simple system. The word space used here is 2 units.
My fitting of (Adobe) Jenson’s roman on 8 cadence-units for the n resulted in 9 rows. Rows with (slightly) smaller widths can be used for kerned versions of letters in the next nearest rows. I will try to reduce this number even further. The original printing by Jenson shows deviations in fitting that can’t be easily explained optically, but which can be explained by fitting on units IMHO.
Basically I tend to believe that the smaller the number of grid units, the stronger the rhythm of the type will be. A simple beat could in this case be better than a complex one. The more lines one needs to capture the rhythm, the more tolerance. For Renaissance type the stem interval was at least as important as the equilibrium of the white spaces. The length of serifs seem to have been an indication for the caster the spacing. Guy Hutsebaut and I tested this at the Museum Plantin-Moretus last year.
ScottMartin: ‘This isn’t a matter of speculation. The Plantin-Moretus Museum has exquisitely justified matrices of types cut by Granjon and van den Keere (and punches in some cases), so you can see for yourself how they did it.’
Exactly! Type is above all esthetically judged, but its quality is just as much depending on its design as on the sophistication of the supporting technology. The production of type has always been a technically challenging matter, because characters have to be adapted to limitations of the medium. In an e-mail exchange from 2012 David Lemon wrote me that in his opinion the great leaps forward in the history of type and printing have stemmed from a sort of dialog between technology and art: ‘Each figure in that history may have been more artist than technician or more technician than artist, but they all had both qualities.’
I made quite some photographs at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in the course of time, and started uploading these on flickr.
If you look at the middle image on the top row of Frank's pictures, you'll see some mats of Granjon's Ascendonica Cursive. Notice how the left sidebearing is much greater than the right, then imagine how certain caps kerned over them. Why did they do it that way? Because if they didn't, they would never have been able to set the caps together. One doesn't have to do it that way today, but I find that it helps greatly to establish the right rhythm without relying on kerning tables, which can inadvertently disrupt the rhythm.
When I'm asked why I never attend type conferences, I usually reply, "Those guys are interested mainly in the letters, and while I'm interested in the letters, too, I'm interested mainly in the white spaces." I'm holding out for a Conference of Justifiers.
>For Renaissance type the stem interval was at least as important as the equilibrium of the white spaces.
Ok, so this is the problem: there are competing considerations. Evenness of stem intervals is one ideal, but even there I think that absolute evenness is not good because then you are in danger of 'dazzle' from the picket fence effect. Having interior and between letter-spaces the same visual area is, as you indicate, a different ideal. That's why I'm skeptical that the unit system is what is really getting Jenson to his breakthrough of making less calligraphic but more readable type.
Writing, lettering, carving, type. Though they all descend from the same impulse, each of them has its own aesthetic dictated by by the particularity and physical nature of its medium. And each has its own sense of function and of beauty. Stone carving is as much about light as it is about form, whereas light is not a big consideration in type design. Calligraphers, who infected the type world in a big way since the 1940s, are sometimes too concerned with beauty of form to have a feeling for the simple handsomeness of the utilitarian that stems from the physical limitations of the medium. (One of my favorite cases in point is Zapf's Palatino drawings compared to what was cut in the end by Stempel's punch cutter, August Rosenberger.)
It's hard to reconcile these differences, and the type literature that bases itself in writing systems alone, without regard to the mechanics of the medium is, in my opinion, perilously close to a waste of time. It's deep background, not forefront information.
Maybe a more telling document than those of the forever-complaining Jan van Krimpen is this published letter from W.A. Dwiggins to Rudolph Ruzicka. Despite his love of fantasy and his great gifts as a letterer, Dwiggins shows himself to be quite canny at acclimating himself to the mechanical reality in front of him. https://archive.org/details/WADtoRR1940
Maybe, as Chris Lozos seems to think, this stuff is irrelevant to our current era. But until someone reinvents the wheel, and while we're still making interpretations of earlier forms, it's good to know something about their original intent and methods, which derived in large part from living happily within the medium, which, like all classical restrictions, has a plenty of elasticity for the creative soul. Think Mozart.
N.B. My opinions here are strictly in regard to types intended for long-haul reading. Display is an entirely different matter.
"Maybe, as Chris Lozos seems to think, this stuff is irrelevant to our current era."
Irrelevant is much too harsh. I just feel that it is focused on too much so that very little else is looked into. Think of it like a tiny group of researchers who see an elephants foot as the entire universe. They continue to see the largest toe on the foot that they can see as the largest protrusion in their universe. And they will continue to think so if they retain their imagined borders. However, if they pursue other places unlooked at, they may discover that the elephant has a trunk as well.
William: ‘That's why I'm skeptical that the unit system is what is really getting Jenson to his breakthrough of making less calligraphic but more readable type.’
Chris: ‘I just feel that it is focused on too much so that very little else is looked into.’
Basically these remarks are addressed in the following research questions (excerpt) IMHO:
– How did the subsequently required standardizations of handwritten models influence the structures and proportions of roman and italic type?
– To what extent was the Renaissance font production systematized? Did the punch cutters for instance use relatively sophisticated forms of unitization?
– Did such standardization and systematizations preserve optical preferences for form, rhythm, and harmony (distilled from the handwritten origins), or did they create new ones due to the forced canalization, i.e., grid fitting, of the written letters, which formed a new basis for the conditioning of ‘the eye’?
– How does this theory relate to the generally embraced one, in which ‘the eye’ of the punch cutter seems to have been the deciding factor, and calligraphic models the guides, and in which Jenson, Griffo, and Garamont, of whom the first was an engraver and the other two were goldsmiths, i.e., craftsmen, are subsequently more or less considered ‘type designers’?
I’m investigating and questioning matter that so far did not get much attention. It’s just research, and the outcome could well be that my hypothesis is proven false. So far, based on my measurements of and casting from Renaissance foundry stuff, there seems to be proof that (sophisticated) standardizations were applied in the 15th- and 16th-century. Also it seems to be plausible that these standardizations had an influence on harmonic and rhythmic aspects of type.
To be honest, the main reason that I refer to Darwin is because there seems to be a certain creationist-like tendency amongst type designers who believe that Jenson had special gifts and that he created his roman type using only his mythical eye. Perhaps Morison is partly to blame for this by stating ‘Having learned and memorised the true proportions of roman letter as taught in the manuals of Moille, Pacioli and others, the goldsmiths, punchcutters and printers relied on their eyes and not upon their measuring tools.’(1) I have no idea what formed the basis for this statement.
About Jenson’s capitals Morison states: ‘[…] it is in his capitals that Jenson is perhaps most open to criticism; they are too large for the lower case […]’.(2) What? Jenson capitals not optically appealing? If Morison would have taken a closer look at their proportions, then he would have noticed that they seem to follow a simple standardization scheme (see image below).
If at the end Chris and others are not convinced by the outcomes of my research, they can just simply ignore them, of course. I consider it interesting to use the discovered patterns and structures for my lessons type design at the KABK and the Plantin Institute of Typography, and for the development of font tools. But as former student of Gerrit Noordzij and experienced calligrapher I’m quite familiar with other approaches too (which not necessarily completely contradict), and it’s definitely not my intention to reform students in any way.
1. Stanley Morison, Pacioli’s classic Roman alphabet (New York, 1994) p.79 2. Stanley Morison, Type designs of the past and present (London, 1926) p.19
A long time ago, I spent many years in the world of "early music," which is a field identified with the use of period instruments and an examination of early sources regarding performance practice. In the 1960s, when I was a teenager, the approach often met with resistance and ridicule from performers of the standard repertoire on modern instruments. But the best early music people had a bigger vision that had little to do with antiquarianism; they were looking for a direct way into the emotional world of the music, whereas the others seemed satisfied by simply playing the notes as written. The early music performers got better and became more convincing, eventually winning converts amongst the best and brightest of modern instrument performers, many of whom began to embrace the style and the substance of the movement. Not just a few outliers, but even the most mainstream conductors, the likes of the late, great Claudio Abbado and Carlos Kleiber, and younger ones such as Simon Rattle.
What early music asked was simple: Where else should we begin other than with the methods and materials of the time? No one really had "another path." At the end of the day, it's always artistry that matters most, but even the purest art knows where it came from.
The approach that Frank and I take is something similar to early music, at least to my way of thinking. In my case, with biblical Hebrew, adapting the 16th-century methods to today's technology have made my types work better and more easily than anyone else's. That's not an egotistical or antagonistic statement, just a mechanical fact. The basic geometry of 16th-century Hebrew typography is as much with us today as it was then. The same is true for the Latin alphabet, though the exigencies and restrictions are fewer than in biblical Hebrew (not so in Modern Hebrew). Today, we can deal more gracefully with certain difficult circumstances than did our 16th-century forebears. But the amazing things is to see how well they did and how they did it. Is the alternative to ignore them? What would be gained from that?
If you feel we're too focused, please tell us what you focus on. It would be great to know what we're missing.
I am reminded of the very old joke where a man on a dark night has parked his car in front of an Insane Asylum and afterwards realizes that he has lost his keys. After spending quite some time looking for the keys, he notices someone looking through the bars of the asylum at him. The mental patient looks up at the man and asks him what he is looking for. The driver replies, "My keys". The inmate then asks, "where did you lose them?" The man replies, "Over there," pointing towards the darkness. The mental patient then asks, "Why then are you looking over here?" The driver replies, "Because the light is much better here, you crazy fool!"
I can’t resist quoting Rameau here: ‘Even if experience can enlighten us concerning the different properties of music, it alone cannot lead us to discover the principle behind these properties with the precision appropriate to reason. Conclusions drawn from experience are often false, or at least leave us with doubts that only reason can dispel.’
Jean-Philippe Rameau (Philip Gossett, ed.), Treatise on harmony (New York, 1971) p.xxxiii
"It would be great to know what we're missing." You are missing what you might find if you looked elsewhere. Having said that jokingly, I don't expect you to look anywhere but the places that history has shined a light on for centuries. It is worthy work and proper work for those with a passion to look where the light shines. I am not saying you are wrong or right. I am only saying that you will never know what you might find elsewhere until you (or someone else) looks there. I am not asking that you abandon the great invention of the wheel or to seek a way to remake the wheel. I am just saying that wings were discovered as well, later on, but only when others made the search.
You're right, Chris, we're looking where the light is, but it so happens that it's also where the masterpieces are. We're looking at original matrices, original casting records, and original designs. That's not so crazy, considering that the bulk of what we read today is set in types that have have their origins there. You know a better place?
It is fine to only look to early music, or even to the classical period and Mozart. Thank goodness that people like Brahms, Puccini, Stravinsky, Ellington, Muddy Waters, and John Lenon did not stop there. They welcomed the unlit places and found a light of their own to shine.
Where did the first human to create any kind of original masterpiece look? That person had no choice but to take a step into the darkness and light the way.
Comments
In modern Hebrew, there is use of 'full spelling', which includes more regular letters used as vowels. For the native speaker, I understand that there is little ambiguity even in unfamiliar words, at least for words of Hebrew origin. Currently, as I understand it, nikud are used for primers for children, for dictionaries, for poetry, and for religious texts. If Hebrew speakers found them really helpful, other than for resolving the occasional ambiguity—for which they are used—I would expect them to be used more widely.
Biblical Hebrew, liturgical Hebrew, and Modern Hebrew are three branches of the same language. The Ashkenazic culture, of the Rhineland Jews who spread through much of Europe, embraced the diacritics fully for their liturgy, whereas the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, the Jews of Spain and the Middle East, felt less of a need for them, preferring instead the vowelless form of Aramaic. The local Jewish non-Hebrew languages--Yiddish (Judeo-German), Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Persian, and Judeo-whatever--were written in Hebrew script, but only with the most occasional diacritics, such as to differentiate p and f, which are the same letter.
The Sephardic and Mizrahi traditions, both of writing and pronunciation, prevailed in the State of Israel, so the rest is, as they say, history. But even in Israel, most prayerbooks use full diacritics. There is one, however, that is felt to be unnecessary there, the "meteg," the little vertical rule mark that indicates syllabic stress. This is an Ashkenazic thing, as Yiddish speaking Jews typically stressed Hebrew words in the Yiddish way.
That's it for now! I have to get back to real life.
John, a paper I just found googling compared Hebrew-speaking dyslexics' ability to read with and without nikud. The nikud did not help. And here is a slide presentation on research indicating that Arabic is harder to read.
To get back to the topic, I think that the rules on forming Hebrew script (from the tractate Sofrim) probably dictate the kind of evenness of script for Hebrew that Frank is noting for latin.
That has been the generally embraced theory for a long time now. But which ‘regularized hands’ are you pointing at for proof? So far I have never seen any Renaissance handwriting predating type that looks similar to Nicolas Jenson’s famous roman. Poggio Bracciolini’s littera antiqua is often referred to, but in my opinion it doesn’t even come close (see image below), especially if we as type designers consider for instance even the Plantin 110 and Times New Roman 327 series different designs.
That being said, which roman types do you have in mind? Sweynheym and Pannartz’s or the ones by the Da Spira brothers or Jenson’s roman type? Jenson's version became the archetype because Griffo/Manutius recognized its esthetic quality and/or its technical quality, or because Aldus Manutius’ father in law, the printer Andrea de Torresani of Asola, owned and applied Jenson’s roman type.
Anyway, if Jenson's goal was to imitate handwriting he certainly did not succeed. The opposite, i.e., that written letterforms in manuscripts from the late-fifteenth century were influenced by those in early printed books, seems easier to prove. But this resulted in not much more than crude approximations of roman type. Some later roman type that mark the decline in quality of workmanship as the result of mass production, which resulted in books infinitely inferior to anything produced in 1470, could be considered attempts to transfer this approximations back to roman type again in my opinion.
‘Do you think there is any perceptual reason why absolute regularity of widths would be better?’
Better for what? Legibility? Personally I tend to believe (not more than this, because the legibility factor is outside the scope of my research) that legibility is purely relative to, and hence defined by the rules of a grapheme system. If one looks at the differences between Latin, Arabic, Indic, CJK, etc., scripts when it comes to harmony and rhythm, it is difficult for me to believe that there are absolute factors, although there seem to be shared ones. The grapheme systems define the rules for the conditioning of their producers, i.e., type designers, their appliers, i.e., typographers, and their users, i.e., readers. A child’s mind is blank before it is conditioned: ‘The Reader converts characters into systematic phonemes; the child must learn to do so. The Reader knows the rules that relate one set of abstract entities to another; the child does not. The Reader is a decoder; the child must become one. […] what is necessary for the child to learn to read is that he be provided with a set of pairs of messages known to be equivalent, one in ciphertext (writing) and one in plaintext (speech).’(1)
Legibility researchers seem to look for the holy grail for legibility. Type designers seem to focus especially on what Ovink named ‘atmospherevalue’ in Legibility, atmosphere-value and forms of printing types (Leiden, 1938). According to Ovink design (‘form-giving’) in arts and crafts ‘[…] is governed by two systems of value: beauty versus utility. The latter can be proved objectively, the former cannot […] the ulterior motives of the artist’s pleading for type as a reading-tool are of aesthetical nature.’(1). But the fact that ‘utility’ is more objectively measurable than ‘beauty’ does, according to Ovink, not imply that it is by definition the more important factor: ‘[…] for these theorists refuse to measure the utility of a type by other qualities than legibility, even if experiments prove that the reader feels clearly the atmosphere of a type […].’
‘Is the letter you reference published on line anywhere?’
Around 20 years ago Huib van Krimpen gave me JvK’s Memorandum for publication. Huib also gave me his Dutch translation. I published both in 1996; the English text in the Monotype Recorder, which I published for the ATypI The Hague conference and the Dutch one in a booklet. I will scan the Memorandum pages from the MR and post these as PDF later today.
ScottMartin: ‘Frank, first let me offer my apologies for pushing this outside the realm of the Latin alphabet […]’
Actually, I appreciate this parallelization a lot and I look forward to seeing the illustrations you mentioned.
1. Philip B. Gough ‘One Second of Reading’, Visible Language, Volume VI, Number 4, (1972) pp.291–320 (p.310)
2. G.W. Ovink, Legibility, atmosphere-value and forms of printing types (Leiden, 1938) p.12
Scribes were writing for readability, whereas if a person is writing a note to himself or even a letter, the priority is usually on ease and speed of writing—leading for example to slanted, connected scripts that are less readable. The regularity of rhythm is found in the scribal hand you show. If you did a Fourier transform on it, you would I think get a similar band pattern to those from set text type.
Jenson was following the general shapes and regularity of scribal hands, but changing them partly for still more readability. For example, his letters were more upright, and he did other departures from the pen as well. As far as aesthetics, as Harry Carter notes in his View of Early Typography, (p. 46-47) Jenson and even more so Griffo changed the lower case by making the serifs more like those of the imperial capitals. This was a way to harmonize the two different alphabets. Of course, the constraints of ease or speed of writing, or even having the strokes totally conform to pen rules didn't apply with type.
Part of the increase in readability of type does come from increased regularity. But the question in my mind is whether fairly regular rhythm needed is significantly helped by a strict unit system. That is what I am skeptical of. And here the JvK memo does also cast doubt on whether a unit system is ideal, if I am understanding him rightly.
Van Krimpen's complaint was not about too few widths for his designs, but the limited availability of those widths in the rows. He complained that once a row was filled, certain characters which he had intended to occupy the same width were then forced into the adjacent rows, either wider or narrower, wherever space permitted, which was unacceptable to him. The company would show a draft to the designer, and it was up to them and the manager to alter characters as necessary. This is an aspect of type history that is truly no longer relevant to anything other than to provide an understanding of why certain Monotype faces looked and performed the way they did. (Some were excellent, others less so--and there was much variation in quality from size to size.)
The early Monotype system's mat case was arranged 15 rows by 15 columns, each row being a single width, but later versions expanded to 15 x 17, and then 16 x 17. It's been thirty years since I was involved with setting Monotype, but as I recall, one could cheat the system by rearranging key bars, thereby tripping the "wedge" that dictated width. This is why the same type sometimes looked better from some shops than others. (Carl P. Rollins, a close friend of Bruce Rogers, who became head of Yale University's printing office, was a master of this sort of thing.) It seems evident to me from re-reading this memo after many years and vK's famous letter to Philip Hofer, that van Krimpen was not a man to get his hands dirty learning to operate the system; he was much better at indignation. That's quite different from us today (aside from the indignation), who both design and make type, albeit without splattering metal and machine grease.
I'm sure nobody knows JvK's type better than Frank, from his wonderful revivals of JvK's type. Frank, did JvK's sense of rhythm violate the unit system, in your view? Was this a failing or a virtue?
With ‘approximately’ you underline my point. In the illustration above enlarged images of a Humanistic m in respectively Poggio’s hand (left) Noordzij’s interpretation, and from Jenson’s roman type. Although they share the rhythmic principle, there is a big difference between the poles. Noordzij captured this rhythm in his ‘Humanistic script’ illustration from The stroke of the pen (1982), but he filtered it –inevitably influenced by the fact that he is familiar with Renaissance roman type. The image below with Poggio’s hand on top and Jenson’s type below shows besides the pattern-similarities also that Jenson rigidly standardized and systematized these patterns.
So, approximately: yes, but literally: no. There are clear differences between Humanistic handwriting and the roman type from the Da Spira brothers and especially Jenson. I think it’s quite plausible that instead of putting rectangles around written letters for the conversion into type, the written model was literally molded into prefixed rectangles, and that this system found its origin in that for the morphologically-related Textura type.
‘Jenson was following the general shapes and regularity of scribal hands, but changing them partly for still more readability.’
The legibility (I like to follow Tinker’s distinction between readability and legibility[1]) factor is a complex one IMHO, because there is no proof that the Renaissance punch cutters investigated this prior to the development of their types. And Gothic type (also cut by Jenson) remained in wide-scale use in Renaissance Italy for liturgic publications, and we consider the Rotunda model less legible nowadays. I assume (not more than that) because we are conditioned with the Jenson/Griffo/Garamont model. And to make matters more complex, Morison notes that in spite of Jenson’s almost divinely assisted craftsmanship, fine writing nevertheless was elsewhere so highly esteemed that even his printing failed to please many contemporary collectors of books. The bibliophiles of Florence insisted that printing was so inferior to the manuscripts as to be unworthy to their libraries.(2)
‘Jenson and even more so Griffo changed the lower case by making the serifs more like those of the imperial capitals.’
I think Bruce Rogers would have disagreed. Below Rogers’ broad-nib tracing of the ‘Eusebius’ type for Centaur (The Newberry Library col.). On the other hand, does Rogers' tracing proves that Jenson’s type finds its origin literally in writing, or does it prove that one can trace Jenson’s roman with a broad nib if one wants to? And, as you know, despite this tracing Rogers decided to relate the serifs of Centaur to those of Roman imperial capitals.
1. Miles A. Tinker, Bases for Effective Reading (Minneapolis, 1966) p.115
2. Stanley Morison, Four centuries of fine printing (London, 1949) p.19
I certainly think Jenson increased regularity and readability, and I think deliberately so, though I can't prove it. The increased regularity is partly just a matter of type vs writing. When every appearance of a letter has the same width, as in metal type, it is going to make the text look more uniform. I think that fact tends to push the type designer attend to the rhythm perhaps more than the scribe would have in old days. The fact that every letter has to be happy next to every other letter imposes a new kind of discipline, which I think Jenson was the first to really understand well.
But what is not obvious to me is that the unit system was really a cause. As Van Krimpen makes clear, the designer has scope to try to impose his own sense of rhythm, even with a unit system. So I suspect that the distinctive rhythm of Jenson is mainly Jenson's own eye, though the unit system you have discovered may have played some role.
I'm not entirely sure what van Krimpen's complaints were, as he doesn't give us examples in the memorandum. One thing that irked him, for sure, was the difference of the quality and subtlety of the line from hand-cut pushes to mechanical ones. Fair enough. As I mentioned earlier, some of his own types that were cut and cast at Enschedé were, to my eye, less than perfectly justified--Haarlemmer being a prime example, but not the only one. I don't really trust van Krimpen. I admire him greatly as a letterer of consummate skill, but his types, well . . . I'd rather praise them than use them.
Despite the similarities between written letters and type, there is a major difference: the calligrapher divides the space with pen strokes and the type designer (formerly punch cutter) divides the space between these strokes with side bearings. The question where the horizontal space belonging to a letter starts or ends does not exist for the calligrapher; he makes rhythmical patterns of black and white shapes. The type designer has to equally divide the space between the letters, because this is the quintessence of movable type. He needs the assistance of the typesetter for eventually restoring the pattern.
‘So I suspect that the distinctive rhythm of Jenson is mainly Jenson's own eye, though the unit system you have discovered may have played some role.’
At the moment I'm fitting Adobe Jenson on a unit-arrangement system of 8 cadence-units for the n on a limited number of different widths. The image below shows a first result. Taking in consideration that the original size of Jenson’s type is pretty small and that this inevitably resulted in some deviations when striking/casting/printing, and the fact that Slimbach's interpretation is an… interpretation, the first result is not disappointing when compared with (enlarged) original prints from the 15th-century. It seems to show the same kind of irregularities in spacing. This is really a very simple system. The word space used here is 2 units.
My fitting of (Adobe) Jenson’s roman on 8 cadence-units for the n resulted in 9 rows. Rows with (slightly) smaller widths can be used for kerned versions of letters in the next nearest rows. I will try to reduce this number even further. The original printing by Jenson shows deviations in fitting that can’t be easily explained optically, but which can be explained by fitting on units IMHO.
Basically I tend to believe that the smaller the number of grid units, the stronger the rhythm of the type will be. A simple beat could in this case be better than a complex one. The more lines one needs to capture the rhythm, the more tolerance. For Renaissance type the stem interval was at least as important as the equilibrium of the white spaces. The length of serifs seem to have been an indication for the caster the spacing. Guy Hutsebaut and I tested this at the Museum Plantin-Moretus last year.
ScottMartin: ‘This isn’t a matter of speculation. The Plantin-Moretus Museum has exquisitely justified matrices of types cut by Granjon and van den Keere (and punches in some cases), so you can see for yourself how they did it.’
Exactly! Type is above all esthetically judged, but its quality is just as much depending on its design as on the sophistication of the supporting technology. The production of type has always been a technically challenging matter, because characters have to be adapted to limitations of the medium. In an e-mail exchange from 2012 David Lemon wrote me that in his opinion the great leaps forward in the history of type and printing have stemmed from a sort of dialog between technology and art: ‘Each figure in that history may have been more artist than technician or more technician than artist, but they all had both qualities.’
I made quite some photographs at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in the course of time, and started uploading these on flickr.
When I'm asked why I never attend type conferences, I usually reply, "Those guys are interested mainly in the letters, and while I'm interested in the letters, too, I'm interested mainly in the white spaces." I'm holding out for a Conference of Justifiers.
Ok, so this is the problem: there are competing considerations. Evenness of stem intervals is one ideal, but even there I think that absolute evenness is not good because then you are in danger of 'dazzle' from the picket fence effect. Having interior and between letter-spaces the same visual area is, as you indicate, a different ideal. That's why I'm skeptical that the unit system is what is really getting Jenson to his breakthrough of making less calligraphic but more readable type.
It's hard to reconcile these differences, and the type literature that bases itself in writing systems alone, without regard to the mechanics of the medium is, in my opinion, perilously close to a waste of time. It's deep background, not forefront information.
Maybe a more telling document than those of the forever-complaining Jan van Krimpen is this published letter from W.A. Dwiggins to Rudolph Ruzicka. Despite his love of fantasy and his great gifts as a letterer, Dwiggins shows himself to be quite canny at acclimating himself to the mechanical reality in front of him.
https://archive.org/details/WADtoRR1940
Maybe, as Chris Lozos seems to think, this stuff is irrelevant to our current era. But until someone reinvents the wheel, and while we're still making interpretations of earlier forms, it's good to know something about their original intent and methods, which derived in large part from living happily within the medium, which, like all classical restrictions, has a plenty of elasticity for the creative soul. Think Mozart.
N.B. My opinions here are strictly in regard to types intended for long-haul reading. Display is an entirely different matter.
Irrelevant is much too harsh. I just feel that it is focused on too much so that very little else is looked into. Think of it like a tiny group of researchers who see an elephants foot as the entire universe. They continue to see the largest toe on the foot that they can see as the largest protrusion in their universe. And they will continue to think so if they retain their imagined borders. However, if they pursue other places unlooked at, they may discover that the elephant has a trunk as well.
Chris: ‘I just feel that it is focused on too much so that very little else is looked into.’
Basically these remarks are addressed in the following research questions (excerpt) IMHO:
– How did the subsequently required standardizations of handwritten models influence the structures and proportions of roman and italic type?
– To what extent was the Renaissance font production systematized? Did the punch cutters for instance use relatively sophisticated forms of unitization?
– Did such standardization and systematizations preserve optical preferences for form, rhythm, and harmony (distilled from the handwritten origins), or did they create new ones due to the forced canalization, i.e., grid fitting, of the written letters, which formed a new basis for the conditioning of ‘the eye’?
– How does this theory relate to the generally embraced one, in which ‘the eye’ of the punch cutter seems to have been the deciding factor, and calligraphic models the guides, and in which Jenson, Griffo, and Garamont, of whom the first was an engraver and the other two were goldsmiths, i.e., craftsmen, are subsequently more or less considered ‘type designers’?
I’m investigating and questioning matter that so far did not get much attention. It’s just research, and the outcome could well be that my hypothesis is proven false. So far, based on my measurements of and casting from Renaissance foundry stuff, there seems to be proof that (sophisticated) standardizations were applied in the 15th- and 16th-century. Also it seems to be plausible that these standardizations had an influence on harmonic and rhythmic aspects of type.
To be honest, the main reason that I refer to Darwin is because there seems to be a certain creationist-like tendency amongst type designers who believe that Jenson had special gifts and that he created his roman type using only his mythical eye. Perhaps Morison is partly to blame for this by stating ‘Having learned and memorised the true proportions of roman letter as taught in the manuals of Moille, Pacioli and others, the goldsmiths, punchcutters and printers relied on their eyes and not upon their measuring tools.’(1) I have no idea what formed the basis for this statement.
About Jenson’s capitals Morison states: ‘[…] it is in his capitals that Jenson is perhaps most open to criticism; they are too large for the lower case […]’.(2) What? Jenson capitals not optically appealing? If Morison would have taken a closer look at their proportions, then he would have noticed that they seem to follow a simple standardization scheme (see image below).
If at the end Chris and others are not convinced by the outcomes of my research, they can just simply ignore them, of course. I consider it interesting to use the discovered patterns and structures for my lessons type design at the KABK and the Plantin Institute of Typography, and for the development of font tools. But as former student of Gerrit Noordzij and experienced calligrapher I’m quite familiar with other approaches too (which not necessarily completely contradict), and it’s definitely not my intention to reform students in any way.
1. Stanley Morison, Pacioli’s classic Roman alphabet (New York, 1994) p.79
2. Stanley Morison, Type designs of the past and present (London, 1926) p.19
What early music asked was simple: Where else should we begin other than with the methods and materials of the time? No one really had "another path." At the end of the day, it's always artistry that matters most, but even the purest art knows where it came from.
The approach that Frank and I take is something similar to early music, at least to my way of thinking. In my case, with biblical Hebrew, adapting the 16th-century methods to today's technology have made my types work better and more easily than anyone else's. That's not an egotistical or antagonistic statement, just a mechanical fact. The basic geometry of 16th-century Hebrew typography is as much with us today as it was then. The same is true for the Latin alphabet, though the exigencies and restrictions are fewer than in biblical Hebrew (not so in Modern Hebrew). Today, we can deal more gracefully with certain difficult circumstances than did our 16th-century forebears. But the amazing things is to see how well they did and how they did it. Is the alternative to ignore them? What would be gained from that?
If you feel we're too focused, please tell us what you focus on. It would be great to know what we're missing.
I can’t resist quoting Rameau here: ‘Even if experience can enlighten us concerning the different properties of music, it alone cannot lead us to discover the principle behind these properties with the precision appropriate to reason. Conclusions drawn from experience are often false, or at least leave us with doubts that only reason can dispel.’
Jean-Philippe Rameau (Philip Gossett, ed.), Treatise on harmony (New York, 1971) p.xxxiii
You are missing what you might find if you looked elsewhere.
Having said that jokingly, I don't expect you to look anywhere but the places that history has shined a light on for centuries. It is worthy work and proper work for those with a passion to look where the light shines. I am not saying you are wrong or right. I am only saying that you will never know what you might find elsewhere until you (or someone else) looks there.
I am not asking that you abandon the great invention of the wheel or to seek a way to remake the wheel. I am just saying that wings were discovered as well, later on, but only when others made the search.
If I already knew a better place, that area would be lit as well. Perhaps we should all"light just one candle"?