Chris, I speak of classicism as a point of departure, an inherited foundation we need to know, not so much intellectually as under the skin. If you choose to leave it all behind, you need to know what you're leaving. You mention Brahms, Puccini, Stravinsky, Ellington, Muddy Waters, and John Lennon. Brahms, who was largely self-taught, fanatically collected early manuscripts and books of music from the Middle Ages on. He described them to his friend Joseph Joachim, the violinist, as his "university," and found himself so enriched by them that he worked for some years with the musicologist Friedrich Chrysander as co-editor of the complete works of François Couperin (1668-1733), all the while writing his own music. Brahms's library became the cornerstone of the Gessellschaft der Musikfruende library in Vienna. Puccini came from a family that held the position of maestro di cappella in Lucca for over 125 years. His musical education was as classical as one could imagine, similar in many ways to that of J.S. Bach. Stravinsky, who was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, became more and more involved with old music throughout his life, writing works based on Pergolesi, Gesualdo, and Bach. For thirty-five years, from 1920 to the mid-1950s, his works were largely neoclassical. Duke Ellington and Muddy Waters were hugely influenced by their forebears, in jazz and Delta blues. And did not John Lennon freely acknowledge his debt to Elvis and Chuck Berry? Did the past undermine their splendidly original voices? Fra from it.
We all have influences and predilections, some from long ago, others from our own time, and some all our own. Not one of the men you mentioned threw the past out the window in order to find their own voices. They used whatever was useful. We, in typography, especially those who didn't have the experience of working in metal as I did for a decade, inherited a broken tradition. By the time I became in involved with biblical Hebrew, there was not a single person alive who had had the experience of setting a Hebrew Bible by hand, as the last such project ended in the early 1930s. Most Hebrew Bible texts were printed from electrotypes of type set in the 19th century, reused again and again into the era of offset printing. This is not stuff that could be invented out of whole cloth, so I had no choice but to turn back to where it first reached full flower, and apply what I knew to finding out how they did it.
Your work isn't invented out of whole cloth, either. Whether your influence is Robert Granjon or Paul Renner or Herb Lubalin, you still have influences. Unless you're inventing entirely new alphabetic systems for entirely new languages, you're in the same boat I am--and we all are.
There is one huge difference between "throwing out the window" and just "always looking backwards". As I have said many times don't ONLY look backwards. You may choose to live your life only looking in the rearview mirror if you like, I have no problem with that. Just ONCE in a while, you might look forward while driving. Don't LIMIT your influences to dead people. I don't limit myself to just the living. All I am saying is open your eyes and see instead of asking someone in history to tell you the ONLY place to look is where we have already been.
I have just finished composing my first Mozartian opera, just after painting my latest Rembrandtian self-portrait ... I hope you like them as much as I (obviously) do.
Chris: ‘All I am saying is open your eyes and see instead of asking someone in history to tell you the ONLY place to look is where we have already been.’
Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about. If the danger is that too much knowledge of the historic development is dimming your creative spark, then simply ignore Scott-Martin’s and my research. The latter would be in line with a trend I noticed in present-day graphic design education, in which knowledge seems to be considered merely a fetter.
Discussions on this subject become difficult anyway if you consist in loosely bringing up people and historical facts and simply ignore well-founded counter-arguments.
Jan: ‘(Chris: “[…] to take a step into the darkness and light the way.”) That's exactly what Mr Darwin did.’
Well, Mr. Darwin’s way was lighted a bit too though: ‘Darwin, was the ultimate insider in English scientific circles. His grandfather, Erasmus, was an early student of evolution and his half-cousin, Francis Galton, was a noted statistician who was considered the father of eugenics.’ It is a well-known fact that Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) had his own intriguing ideas about evolution, which did not come out of the blue either.
The quote above comes from this article, that also shows that this discussion is following classic patterns, including the ridicule.
Talking about being hampered by knowledge of historical developments, one of my assignments at the KABK LetterStudio, which I’m running together with Peter Verheul and Donald Roos, is titled Defining grapheme systems. This is the introduction text:
One could state that conventions for typography are relative to the nature, i.e. the properties, of specific type and not per se interchangeable with other forms of type. The morphologic relationship of graphemes does not by definition have to find its origin in writing. Geometrically constructed letterforms will have their own morphologic relationship, which will be related to pen-made shapes when they follow the conventions, but harmonic systems are not restricted by definition to conventions. For instance WimCrouwel’s New Alphabet (1967) can’t be compared in any way with the archetypes and therefore the conventions for textletters can’t be applied on the typeface. The New Alphabet underlines that Crouwel’s type concept was not restricted by historical conventions; Crouwel actually created new conventions. It is quite well possible that there is room for making improvements to the New Alphabet using the rules defined by Crouwel’s structures and patterns.
Basically the grapheme systems for representing the Latin script, which are in use since the Renaissance are quite arbitrary. As soon as a grapheme system is set up, the further development (evolution) and consequently the related conditioning is defined by the applied structures themselves, and what is considered to be optically correct is only purely relative to (the conventions of) the system. Conditioning is based on conventions and conditioning preserves conventions. Thus the snake bites its own tail; to be able to use one’s ‘eye’ like for instance Fournier advocated in his Manuel Typographique (1764–1766), one has to be educated to look at type in the same way.
This project comprises the definition of a complete new grapheme system for the Latin script. Would it be possible to ignore or circumvent current conventions and to define new grapheme systems, i.e. new rules, without the restrictions of the type we use nowadays?
This PDF shows the sparkling research by Sanne Groenendaal, one of my third-year students.
Sorry, Frank. My objection involved just the Darwinian claim and the title of this thread, not the research itself. I did not realise that you were joking.
This is another research, which in my opinion is interesting because Annelot Bossink (also third-year student) asked fellow students and laymen to space her grapheme system. They had to do this based on the rhythmic pattern they had to distill themselves. Unfortunately it’s all in Dutch (still).
So, and now I will not bother you anymore with this assignment.
Chris and Jan, II think we differ on an even more important point. You speak of typography as a pure art that, if hindered by too much knowledge, will only be derivative and stuck in the past. On the contrary, we're looking at it as exemplary work whose creation and manufacture has not been fully understood--unresolved mysteries that are worth exploring because they might contribute to a better-lit path for the future. In my case, they already have, and the practical results as interpreted for modern technology are plain to see. I realize I'm speaking about a language that relatively few people know, but in a bigger sense you could say lessons are lessons, especially when they concern proportion.
I don't believe typography is a pure art; it is, at its best, a high craft. Typography has cultural confines and perhaps optical rules that can't be ignored. Music does, too, but it has far greater fluidity and possibilities than does typography. The example of Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet, though extraordinary and challenging, is more an intellectual stimulant (which is precisely why it's important for students, as Frank has made clear) than a guide to the perplexities of daily typographic life. To drag Mozart and Brahms and Duke Ellington into the discussion, much as I love them, is of very limited usefulness here, except to say that each created art within boundaries that they stretched to brilliant and original limits. Our medium is more limited than that, though we need to have ideals.
Frank's work has been happening in an academic setting, though he knows full well that it has, and will have, practical implications on his work as a teacher and designer. His work is more speculative than mine, though it stems from the same impulse to find answers. My work in old Hebrew typography is entirely practical, and has yielded better solutions for advanced, feature-driven OT typography that I have expanded to include some grammatical differentiations built into the fonts. These fonts aren't "replicas," though some are modern interpretations of older work. I should say, too, that this isn't lab work; I have been using these types in some of the most widely disseminated books of their kind. My High Holidays prayerbook Mahzor Lev Shalem, a 944-page volume first published in 2010, has just reached 335,000 copies in print. The Reform equivalent I am working on now, a two-volume set that will be published next year, will likely exceed that number within one or two years. And some of the work will soon be implemented for mobile devices.
A work that I think has great bearing on this discussion is Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, which was first published in 1973 and later revised. Though his subject is poetry and its writers, Bloom's concern is the contest (the agon) between the original and the referential, and how some have either overcome it or come to peace with it. What we've been discussing is, at its heart, the same thing.
You speak of typography as a pure art that, if hindered by too much knowledge, will only be derivative and stuck in the past.
Well, I do not, and I never did. I appreciate the old masters (and new) and the scholars who study them. I agree that the work has practical implications. I just have an enormous admiration for Darwin, who (from direct observation of nature and pretty much first principles) made a breakthrough of a world-defining order which still stands pretty much unchallenged. The chutzpah here was my issue, and I apologise for my intrusion.
Scott-Martin: ‘Frank's work has been happening in an academic setting, though he knows full well that it has, and will have, practical implications on his work as a teacher and designer.’
Yes, that is true. Actually my research is based on two hypotheses; the second one is that present-day type design can be relatedly standardized without loss of creativity and individuality. And yes, this is probably even more controversial than the first hypothesis.
As you can read here, the purpose of the systems and models I defined during my research, is to map the aspects and elements that together determine the shapes and consistency of letters and characters, and the way they interact. I consider grapheme systems and subsequently formalized representations, i.e., type, as the sum of particles. Defining these particles not only provides means for a better understanding of the underlying harmonics and dynamics, but also creates parameters for the artificial creation and computerized analysis of type and typography. Computerized analysis could even form the basis for parametrized legibility research in my opinion.
The image above shows the systems involved in the creation of written letters (1–4). By adding the factors formalization and idiom the result is a group of formal graphemes, which could be a ‘typeface’. Of course, the tweaking of the first four systems already creates personal structures and patterns, but type design offers more options for adding sophisticated and refined details, i.e., idiom, than writing with a prefixed or partly customizable tool, such as a broad nib or a flexible-pointed pen.
Jan, no need to apologize, though its appreciated all the same. I come from a culture based on argument, so I take from it (perhaps erroneously) a call for more explanation.
Frank, I agree with you. What's the point of it? Aside from whatever it might yield (or not) in further analysis, at its most basic it gives us a stable place to begin the design and manufacturing process.
It's worth remembering that printing and type founding were industrial processes. In the early Modern World, speed and cost counted for a lot, so what we see in the evidence (the matrices and casting records) is that ideas such as standardized widths--the fewer the variables, the faster the production--was a highly attractive one. Obviously, some exceedingly good punch cutters worked quite happily within this system and their work has endured to this day, becoming the basis for much of the type we read everyday.
What we also see in the old materials is that designers broke away from those restrictions when they believed they had to. Some of Granjon's Greek ligatures may have been aesthetic workarounds. In the least, they suggest a line for further inquiry. One of the things I found with Biblical Hebrew types is that one letter, the shin, was most often first squeezed unnaturally to fit the width of the majority square letters in most of the earliest types. By the 1550s, Guillaume Le Bé added 25% to the width, bringing it back to its traditional calligraphic form, but rather than make it a singular exception, he also designed wider justifying letters at the same width, thereby establishing a class of casting width. One of his fonts that survives at the Plantin-Moretus, which he calls "façon de Vénise" (Venetian style) has a set of mats for letters whose width is reduced by 25%, also for justification. They're not very pleasant, and it's telling that he never repeated that approach.
Biblical Hebrew is peculiar case and while it may have few lessons to offer designers of Latin fonts, it does have relevance to Arabic and, especially, Urdu. I'm sure John Hudson can tell us about others, too.
I grew up in the 1960s around a number of people who thought they could bypass traditional training and thrust themselves straightaway into the avant-garde. I was always reminded of this story told by John Cage about his lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, which says a great deal about the value of classical training:
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.' "
Scott-Martin: ‘Some of Granjon's Greek ligatures may have been aesthetic workarounds. In the least, they suggest a line for further inquiry. ’
David: ‘Oh. I'd like to support the study of those matrices, if anyone is interested.’
As you can understand, I'm interested too. One of my (French) Plantin students is making a Granjon-revival (Double Pica Roman) and is measuring and photographing (with a digital microscope) the matrices and punches in question (I’m using the outcomes for my research too). He probably will be interested in measuring and photographing Greek material from Granjon, so I will ask him. If not, probably another student will be interested (depending on the level of support, I reckon). When I lecture again in the Museum Plantin-Moretus in April, I definitely will have a look at the stuff.
Briefly back to JvK. In the introduction of The Monotype Recorder from 1996, subtitled The Dutch Connection, Huib van Krimpen states: ‘Jan van Krimpen never actually employed the method of design he advocated in the Memorandum: all the designs mentioned (apart perhaps from Haarlemmer, Sheldon or both) were first hand-cut by P.H. Rädisch and therefore made “in the wrong way’, according to the Memorandum.’ The drawings for Spectrum (of which I previously posted the one for the roman) show a standardization of widths though. The Monotype-layout for Spectrum largely follows JvK’s scheme.
You are all familiar with the photo’s shown here from The work of Jan van Krimpen (Haarlem/Utrecht, 1952), I reckon. As a student I was told that Rädisch translated JvK’s drawings on the eye. Later I found out that this was not true. Rädisch revealed a production ‘trick’ in his autobiography A tot Z. He transfered the drawings by JvK to his punches photographically using zinc and copper plates. He describes that a photo at the right type size was made of Van Krimpen’s drawings, and that he used etching on red copper (first he used zinc, but was not precise enough) to get an image sufficient enough to make a smoke proof from. The smoke proof was used to transfer the image to a punch via a transparent film. This is generally unknown –probably because only 135 copies of A tot Z were produced (in Dutch).
Rädisch suggests that this technique was his idea, but I have proof that this method already was applied for the production of type in Germany in the first half of the 20th-century.
Years ago I saw a small photograph from Rädisch’s archive of one of the drawings of Haarlemmer I possess. It was archived as smoke proof, but it probably has been used by Rädisch to transfer JvK’s drawings to the punches.
Frank, I'm not sure if you already know this, but there's a very nice 14-minute video of Rädisch cutting a punch (I think of a JvK type). It was filmed by Carl Dair on 16mm in 1954. Two copies of it survive. One is here in Toronto at the Massey College library, and one is at the Enschede Museum. Rod McDonald and I have been trying to get the film digitized for a while now, before oxidation gets the best of it (which is already starting to happen). We'll hopefully manage to save it soon.
This is terrific news, Patrick. It would be wonderful to have it accessible online. I understand it's a silent film. Perhaps someone could write a narrative for it. Matthew Carter worked for Rädisch around that time and I think he could trace the steps easily. Wikipedia shows that Carl Dair is still alive at 102. Is that true?
Carl Dair died in 1967, on his way from NYC to Toronto.
Matthew Carter already did a narration for the film. It will be part of the digital version eventually released. Also somehow attached to this will be a 30-minute interview with Carter about his time at Enschede. Carter started his Enschede apprenticeship just after Dair finished his.
Frank, for what it's worth, I think that you are more on target with your theories about rhythm, harmony and proportion. I suspect that these match with human processing capacities in the eye and brain, and this is why they developed under scribes making manuscripts meant to be read relatively widely. But, as I said there are competing ideals, so there may be no one best, but rather a range.
It could also be argued that writing rhythmically is easier than not (as with walking and music), a similar argument to that of ease-of-manufacture for metal type through modularity. And this has nothing to do with human processing capabilities, given the herky-jerky nature of saccadic movement.
This is contradicted by the fact that normal handwriting is less regular and rhythmic than scribal writing. And I think that applies to every script. Scribes are writing not just for themselves or the recipient of their letter. They are writing to be read by many viewers. Hence readability is prized, and being consistent and rhythmic promotes readability. How else are you to explain the high regular rhythm of scribal writing vs personal hand writing?
Isn't that Bill's point? Regular rhythm in writing requires training and practice, i.e. writing rhythmically is not, as Nick suggests, easier than not.
I've spent some time the last few weeks looking at examples of movement exercises for penmanship from the 18th and 19th centuries. Much of them are concerned with exactly this: training rhythm as a muscle memory.
Bill, my casual research indicates that all mature scribal cultures develop both formal and informal hands. With exceptions for some scripts, the formal hands are characterised by being upright, broader, more regular, more definitely rhythmic, and featuring a greater number of pen lifts in letter construction: all indications of being more slowly written with greater care. The informal hands are characterised by all the signs of being more quickly written: sloped, compressed, less regular, more variable rhythm, and with returning pen strokes. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, though, there is a formalisation of the informal cursive hands in western Europe, influenced I think by the popularity of engraved copybooks, and greater regularity of rhythm becomes the ideal of the roundhand styles. The French go so far as to invent upright cursive styles that require considerable slowness and care to make look good.
Of course writing rhythmically is easier—with the understanding that this is something one does a lot of, as did the scribes of yore.
Rhythm and standardization may also have been a product of the extent to which scriptoria were factories. And the formalization inherent in a “house style”.
If rhythmic writing was considered easier to read, was that determined by the market, as aristocratic clients, given a choice between formal and informal, opted for rhythm?
I doubt it. I would imagine that the “creative director” at a scriptorium, himself an accomplished scribe with a trained hand, would find rhythm most pleasing to his eye, and therefore more readable, and this accounted for its presence.
The client, too, would have favored a nice-looking document that looked like it had some deliberation put into it, rather than an informal mess.
None of this has anything to do with physiological efficiences of the eye-brain in extended reading.
Nick, you always push me to make my case, which I appreciate. This time I think it is very strong. You acknowledge that overshoots and other optical illusions taken into account in type design reflect features of the way the eye and brain work. So why is it a stretch to think that regular rhythm found everywhere is also a reflection of that? Your fanciful 'creative director' strains credulity to the breaking. If this were a matter of individual taste, one would expect considerable variety—as here!—whereas you find the regularity of rhythm in every scribal hand, in every script, I believe.
Thanks, John, for your very well informed analysis. 17th and 18th century writing would have been influenced by examples of the extreme regularity of printed matter, of course. Even informal hands, as done by a scribe are much more regular than unpracticed hand writing, which again contradicts Nick's claim that regularity is easier.
Nick: "Of course writing rhythmically is easier—with the understanding that this is something one does a lot of, as did the scribes of yore." Not even true for the rushed, personal hand of a practiced calligrapher in our times: I have a silkscreen poster with calligraphy by Hermann Zapf, also signed in pencil by Zapf. The signature, which I'm thinking is closer to his personal handwriting, is much less regular than the calligraphy. I would expect the same from scribes of yore.
Comments
We all have influences and predilections, some from long ago, others from our own time, and some all our own. Not one of the men you mentioned threw the past out the window in order to find their own voices. They used whatever was useful. We, in typography, especially those who didn't have the experience of working in metal as I did for a decade, inherited a broken tradition. By the time I became in involved with biblical Hebrew, there was not a single person alive who had had the experience of setting a Hebrew Bible by hand, as the last such project ended in the early 1930s. Most Hebrew Bible texts were printed from electrotypes of type set in the 19th century, reused again and again into the era of offset printing. This is not stuff that could be invented out of whole cloth, so I had no choice but to turn back to where it first reached full flower, and apply what I knew to finding out how they did it.
Your work isn't invented out of whole cloth, either. Whether your influence is Robert Granjon or Paul Renner or Herb Lubalin, you still have influences. Unless you're inventing entirely new alphabetic systems for entirely new languages, you're in the same boat I am--and we all are.
Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about. If the danger is that too much knowledge of the historic development is dimming your creative spark, then simply ignore Scott-Martin’s and my research. The latter would be in line with a trend I noticed in present-day graphic design education, in which knowledge seems to be considered merely a fetter.
Discussions on this subject become difficult anyway if you consist in loosely bringing up people and historical facts and simply ignore well-founded counter-arguments.
Jan: ‘(Chris: “[…] to take a step into the darkness and light the way.”) That's exactly what Mr Darwin did.’
Well, Mr. Darwin’s way was lighted a bit too though: ‘Darwin, was the ultimate insider in English scientific circles. His grandfather, Erasmus, was an early student of evolution and his half-cousin, Francis Galton, was a noted statistician who was considered the father of eugenics.’ It is a well-known fact that Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) had his own intriguing ideas about evolution, which did not come out of the blue either.
The quote above comes from this article, that also shows that this discussion is following classic patterns, including the ridicule.
One could state that conventions for typography are relative to the nature, i.e. the properties, of specific type and not per se interchangeable with other forms of type. The morphologic relationship of graphemes does not by definition have to find its origin in writing. Geometrically constructed letterforms will have their own morphologic relationship, which will be related to pen-made shapes when they follow the conventions, but harmonic systems are not restricted by definition to conventions. For instance WimCrouwel’s New Alphabet (1967) can’t be compared in any way with the archetypes and therefore the conventions for textletters can’t be applied on the typeface. The New Alphabet underlines that Crouwel’s type concept was not restricted by historical conventions; Crouwel actually created new conventions. It is quite well possible that there is room for making improvements to the New Alphabet using the rules defined by Crouwel’s structures and patterns.
Basically the grapheme systems for representing the Latin script, which are in use since the Renaissance are quite arbitrary. As soon as a grapheme system is set up, the further development (evolution) and consequently the related conditioning is defined by the applied structures themselves, and what is considered to be optically correct is only purely relative to (the conventions of) the system. Conditioning is based on conventions and conditioning preserves conventions. Thus the snake bites its own tail; to be able to use one’s ‘eye’ like for instance Fournier advocated in his Manuel Typographique (1764–1766), one has to be educated to look at type in the same way.
This project comprises the definition of a complete new grapheme system for the Latin script. Would it be possible to ignore or circumvent current conventions and to define new grapheme systems, i.e. new rules, without the restrictions of the type we use nowadays?
This PDF shows the sparkling research by Sanne Groenendaal, one of my third-year students.
So, and now I will not bother you anymore with this assignment.
I don't believe typography is a pure art; it is, at its best, a high craft. Typography has cultural confines and perhaps optical rules that can't be ignored. Music does, too, but it has far greater fluidity and possibilities than does typography. The example of Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet, though extraordinary and challenging, is more an intellectual stimulant (which is precisely why it's important for students, as Frank has made clear) than a guide to the perplexities of daily typographic life. To drag Mozart and Brahms and Duke Ellington into the discussion, much as I love them, is of very limited usefulness here, except to say that each created art within boundaries that they stretched to brilliant and original limits. Our medium is more limited than that, though we need to have ideals.
Frank's work has been happening in an academic setting, though he knows full well that it has, and will have, practical implications on his work as a teacher and designer. His work is more speculative than mine, though it stems from the same impulse to find answers. My work in old Hebrew typography is entirely practical, and has yielded better solutions for advanced, feature-driven OT typography that I have expanded to include some grammatical differentiations built into the fonts. These fonts aren't "replicas," though some are modern interpretations of older work. I should say, too, that this isn't lab work; I have been using these types in some of the most widely disseminated books of their kind. My High Holidays prayerbook Mahzor Lev Shalem, a 944-page volume first published in 2010, has just reached 335,000 copies in print. The Reform equivalent I am working on now, a two-volume set that will be published next year, will likely exceed that number within one or two years. And some of the work will soon be implemented for mobile devices.
The chutzpah here was my issue, and I apologise for my intrusion.
Yes, that is true. Actually my research is based on two hypotheses; the second one is that present-day type design can be relatedly standardized without loss of creativity and individuality. And yes, this is probably even more controversial than the first hypothesis.
As you can read here, the purpose of the systems and models I defined during my research, is to map the aspects and elements that together determine the shapes and consistency of letters and characters, and the way they interact. I consider grapheme systems and subsequently formalized representations, i.e., type, as the sum of particles. Defining these particles not only provides means for a better understanding of the underlying harmonics and dynamics, but also creates parameters for the artificial creation and computerized analysis of type and typography. Computerized analysis could even form the basis for parametrized legibility research in my opinion.
The image above shows the systems involved in the creation of written letters (1–4). By adding the factors formalization and idiom the result is a group of formal graphemes, which could be a ‘typeface’. Of course, the tweaking of the first four systems already creates personal structures and patterns, but type design offers more options for adding sophisticated and refined details, i.e., idiom, than writing with a prefixed or partly customizable tool, such as a broad nib or a flexible-pointed pen.
Frank, I agree with you. What's the point of it? Aside from whatever it might yield (or not) in further analysis, at its most basic it gives us a stable place to begin the design and manufacturing process.
It's worth remembering that printing and type founding were industrial processes. In the early Modern World, speed and cost counted for a lot, so what we see in the evidence (the matrices and casting records) is that ideas such as standardized widths--the fewer the variables, the faster the production--was a highly attractive one. Obviously, some exceedingly good punch cutters worked quite happily within this system and their work has endured to this day, becoming the basis for much of the type we read everyday.
What we also see in the old materials is that designers broke away from those restrictions when they believed they had to. Some of Granjon's Greek ligatures may have been aesthetic workarounds. In the least, they suggest a line for further inquiry. One of the things I found with Biblical Hebrew types is that one letter, the shin, was most often first squeezed unnaturally to fit the width of the majority square letters in most of the earliest types. By the 1550s, Guillaume Le Bé added 25% to the width, bringing it back to its traditional calligraphic form, but rather than make it a singular exception, he also designed wider justifying letters at the same width, thereby establishing a class of casting width. One of his fonts that survives at the Plantin-Moretus, which he calls "façon de Vénise" (Venetian style) has a set of mats for letters whose width is reduced by 25%, also for justification. They're not very pleasant, and it's telling that he never repeated that approach.
Biblical Hebrew is peculiar case and while it may have few lessons to offer designers of Latin fonts, it does have relevance to Arabic and, especially, Urdu. I'm sure John Hudson can tell us about others, too.
I grew up in the 1960s around a number of people who thought they could bypass traditional training and thrust themselves straightaway into the avant-garde. I was always reminded of this story told by John Cage about his lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, which says a great deal about the value of classical training:
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.' "
I meant to add to the above quote: that one statement is the bottom line for me.
David: ‘Oh. I'd like to support the study of those matrices, if anyone is interested.’
As you can understand, I'm interested too. One of my (French) Plantin students is making a Granjon-revival (Double Pica Roman) and is measuring and photographing (with a digital microscope) the matrices and punches in question (I’m using the outcomes for my research too). He probably will be interested in measuring and photographing Greek material from Granjon, so I will ask him. If not, probably another student will be interested (depending on the level of support, I reckon). When I lecture again in the Museum Plantin-Moretus in April, I definitely will have a look at the stuff.
You are all familiar with the photo’s shown here from The work of Jan van Krimpen (Haarlem/Utrecht, 1952), I reckon. As a student I was told that Rädisch translated JvK’s drawings on the eye. Later I found out that this was not true. Rädisch revealed a production ‘trick’ in his autobiography A tot Z. He transfered the drawings by JvK to his punches photographically using zinc and copper plates. He describes that a photo at the right type size was made of Van Krimpen’s drawings, and that he used etching on red copper (first he used zinc, but was not precise enough) to get an image sufficient enough to make a smoke proof from. The smoke proof was used to transfer the image to a punch via a transparent film. This is generally unknown –probably because only 135 copies of A tot Z were produced (in Dutch).
Rädisch suggests that this technique was his idea, but I have proof that this method already was applied for the production of type in Germany in the first half of the 20th-century.
Years ago I saw a small photograph from Rädisch’s archive of one of the drawings of Haarlemmer I possess. It was archived as smoke proof, but it probably has been used by Rädisch to transfer JvK’s drawings to the punches.
Great! Herewith I would like to order a copy in advance!
Matthew Carter already did a narration for the film. It will be part of the digital version eventually released. Also somehow attached to this will be a 30-minute interview with Carter about his time at Enschede. Carter started his Enschede apprenticeship just after Dair finished his.
This is contradicted by the fact that normal handwriting is less regular and rhythmic than scribal writing. And I think that applies to every script. Scribes are writing not just for themselves or the recipient of their letter. They are writing to be read by many viewers. Hence readability is prized, and being consistent and rhythmic promotes readability. How else are you to explain the high regular rhythm of scribal writing vs personal hand writing?
Training and practice vs. the lack thereof?
I've spent some time the last few weeks looking at examples of movement exercises for penmanship from the 18th and 19th centuries. Much of them are concerned with exactly this: training rhythm as a muscle memory.
Rhythm and standardization may also have been a product of the extent to which scriptoria were factories. And the formalization inherent in a “house style”.
If rhythmic writing was considered easier to read, was that determined by the market, as aristocratic clients, given a choice between formal and informal, opted for rhythm?
I doubt it. I would imagine that the “creative director” at a scriptorium, himself an accomplished scribe with a trained hand, would find rhythm most pleasing to his eye, and therefore more readable, and this accounted for its presence.
The client, too, would have favored a nice-looking document that looked like it had some deliberation put into it, rather than an informal mess.
None of this has anything to do with physiological efficiences of the eye-brain in extended reading.
Thanks, John, for your very well informed analysis. 17th and 18th century writing would have been influenced by examples of the extreme regularity of printed matter, of course. Even informal hands, as done by a scribe are much more regular than unpracticed hand writing, which again contradicts Nick's claim that regularity is easier.
Nick: "Of course writing rhythmically is easier—with the understanding that this is something one does a lot of, as did the scribes of yore." Not even true for the rushed, personal hand of a practiced calligrapher in our times: I have a silkscreen poster with calligraphy by Hermann Zapf, also signed in pencil by Zapf. The signature, which I'm thinking is closer to his personal handwriting, is much less regular than the calligraphy. I would expect the same from scribes of yore.