Matthew Carter's definition of 'revival'

Looks like a different article... http://www.typecon.com/download/interrobang_2.pdf

Jerry Kelly gave an informative and well-illustrated talk at the ATypI conference of 2008, titled “Type revivals: What are they? Where did they come from? Where are they going?”.

Sorry for sending folks Downer rabbit hole. :-)

Matthew is definitely one of my all-time heroes and I admire his work deeply (has anyone ever made better contours than he?*). So, if the following sounds blasphemously, then that was not at all my intention.

What I mean, is that Matthew’s definition (tautologically or not) of a revival is what a revival is –irrespective of the reason for reinterpreting the historic model, like aesthetic preferences. Basically all of us would come up with the same definition, I reckon. Perhaps the only one that could have disagreed, was Jan van Krimpen because he disliked revivals so much. Having been an apprentice of Rädish, perhaps Matthew has encountered that –but that is a bit off-topic.

*no

I find it unlikely that Carter could claim that a type revival’s raison d’être is mere repurposing for a new technology.

I don't think the quote — with whomever it originates — makes that claim; rather, it simply describes what a revival is, without exploring the reasons why someone might choose to re-make this or that typeface available in a new technology or, indeed, why someone might choose not to.

I like Nick's definition but isn't there also an element of taking advantage of font consumers too. Taste and technology may not have changed significantly, but just enough to trick the gullible.

Chris Lozos said:

Si, Is there a difference between a revival and a resuscitation?

In common typographic parlance, there isn’t. The term revival, if you want to explain it to a layperson in a watertight manner, is really tough. It encompasses quite a lot of things. Nick mentions the Caslon revival in 1844, which used (at least mostly) eighteenth century matrices.

The early-twentieth-century revivals (I think), are much different animals from the Caslon revival. When ATF revived Bodoni and Garamond, for instance, they – in essence –looked at books printed in Bodoni’s types and – ahem – Jean Jannon’s types, and drew their own new designs based on these, which were then cast for hand-setting. Monotype, particularly in the UK, revived a good many classic types via a similar process; their product was not exactly the same as ATF’s … they produced matrices which were intended to be used in their machines for printers to cast their own type.

Naturally, the word revival did not come into English from typographers, printers, or typefounders. It has at least two older uses: There are the religious revivals, which were quite a wide-spread phenomenon in the pre-revolutionary United States, among other places, and then there are the architectural revivals. The most wide-spread of the architectural revivals, the Gothic Revival, had already been going in in Britain for some time when the Caslon revival in printing occurred. In architecture (and the decorative arts) there were also Greek Revivals, Egyptian Revivals, Romanesque Revivals, etc. You can see their effects all over British and North American cities, and to a lesser extent, perhaps, in continental European cities, too.

The Caslon revival, in terms of authenticity, was much truer to the original types of William Caslon than the concurrent Gothic Revival in architecture was to buildings constructed in the Middle Ages. The architectural revivals are more akin to what e.g., ATF and Monotype (but also Linotype and every virtually every European typefoundry) were doing in the nineteen-teens and nineteen-twenties.

I would be all for calling the Caslon revival, and revivals that are more like that (such as Berthold’s ca. 1919 release of Walbaum, and Stempel’s first version of Janson) resuscitations – or simpler still, re-uses – instead of revivals. But I fear that the horse has already left the stable here. Revival is the dirty term that we’ve received for everything that was old which became new again, and nothing we write going forward is likely ever to change that.

Nick mentions the Caslon revival in 1844, which used (at least mostly) eighteenth century matrices.

The term revival applied to the mid-19th Century use of Caslon really means a revival of use of Caslon, which had fallen out of fashion for some decades. The foundry provided electrotyped matrices to Charles Whittingham, whose Chiswick Press had instigated the revival, but I wouldn't consider this process a revival in the type design sense.

The 1920s Caslon Old Face, on the other hand, is very much a type design revival, despite the publicity claims of the types being 'cast entirely from matrices produced from the original punches engraved in the early part of the 18th Century'. The entire type was, in fact, re-cut, with significant regularisation of the design.

Yeah, I agree. Several historical narratives of the revivals of older types begin with Caslon in the 1840s, and while (as John points out) this is a different thing that what later founders and designers meant by a revival, we are still left with the received historical problem, and I think that it has been with us for so long that we are just stuck with it.

[This 1840 Caslon revival is probably not the first time that something referring to type usage has been filed under type design, or vice versa.]

Revival is a pretty yucky term. It is too broad, and it means different things to different people. But, that’s type! We are always going to have terminology problems like this :-D

Revival is the dirty term that we’ve received for everything that was old which became new again […]