A Brief History of Typography

B eginnings : When you look at the average newsstand or

magazine rack, it's hard to imagine that the ability to print color
photos is a relatively recent innova-
tion--the early 1940s. The ability to Notice how this sample of
reproduce photos in newspapers manuscript lettering from the
and magazines at all has only been year 1240 a.d. resembles the
around since the 1880s. contemporary example of a
black letter typeface below it.
Vari-
ous print-
ing pro-
cesses,
however,
have been
around for almost 2,000 years. The
earliest known books and manu- ABCDEFG
scripts were printed in China. The
Chinese used a method called block HIJKLMN
printing which involved carving the
letters and pictures on blocks of
O P Q R S T
wood page by page. The work was
meticulous and time consuming. If a
U V W X Y Z
As lovely as the flowing
flourishes of Black Letter fonts wood block split, it meant carving a abcdefghi
whole new page.
may be, they are a nightmare
to read and are best used as j k l m n o p q
The event that most influenced
initials at the beginning of
paragraphs or for just a few contemporary printing oc-cured in rstuvwxyz
words of text. But, don't take Germany in the early Renaissance.
my word for it. Try reading Prior to that time, the only books in Europe were handwritten
the text below.
with quill pens, mostly by Roman Catholic monks. In 1440, a man
named Johannes Gutenberg invented a new kind of printing press
that used moveable type. It duplicated pages com-
posed from individual letters carved onto smooth
blocks of durable hardwood. The blocks were ar-
ranged into lines and paragraphs in wooden trays
with thin strips of lead between the lines for spacing.
When the desired number of copies had been
printed, the letters could be rearranged into new
pages and used over and over again. With a substan-
tial number of letters, multiple pages could be com-
posed quickly. If a wood block split, it meant recarving
just one new letter instead of the whole page.
Gutenberg's early type alphabets were patterned after the
lettering with which he was most familiar, the handwritten manu-
scripts of the Middle Ages. The style was called Black Letter.
As movable-type printing spread throughout western Europe,
the Germanic Black Letter typeface designs were increasingly
unsatisfactory because they were hard to read. Although black
 A Brief History of Typography

letter type faces survive to this day, they are used seldom and
A B C D E F G sparingly, because they are still hard to read, especially the
H I J K L M N capital letters.

O P Q R S T
U V W X Y Z A New Look: Almost as early,
craftsmen elsewhere in Europe began to
a b c d e f g h i design a new style of al-phabet. The earli-
est was designed in 1470 by Nicolas Jenson, a
j k l m n o p q French printer who lived in Italy. His type face
was pat-terned after letters carved by Roman
r s t u v w x y z sculptors on monuments from the days of the
Above is a classic Roman empire such as the Arch of Constantine and a
alphabet. Shown below is 125 foot tall marble column erected 114 A. D.
a section of the 656 foot long Trajan. Both monuments survive to this day.
relief sculpture that spirals its
way to the top of the Column The Romans, ever conscious of balance and harmony, de-
of Trajan. The sculpture details cided that letters needed small extensions at the tops and bot-
the emperors victorious battles toms of strokes to give the letters stability. These extensions
against the ancient inhabitants
were called serifs.
of Romania.
From that time until the mid-1700s, Roman typefaces
became the standard in most of Europe. Prominent type
designers of the period included Claud Garramond (French),
William Caslon and John Baskerville (English), and
Giambattista Bodoni (Italian). The designs bearing their
names continue to be the foundation of serif typeface
design and remain popular today.

S tandardization in Europe: As printers con-

verted from hand-carved wooden letters to more durable
and more easily duplicated cast metal blocks, type manu-
facture switched from individual printers to type foundries.
And, as type face designs proliferated and the population
became more literate, selling type to printers was a profit-
able business. Unfortunately, no two foundries designed
type using the same measurements. Printers were bound
to whichever foundry made the sizes that fit their com-
posing trays.
In response to ongoing complaints from the trades-
men, King Louis XV of France decreed that a uniform type
measurement system would be created and adopted in
that country.
The first system was devised by Pierre Simon Fournier
in 1735. He defined a point as the smallest unit of mea-
sure in the system and determined that there would be 72
 A Brief History of Typography

points per inch. The inch at that time, however, was based on the
length of the first knuckle on the King's thumb. If a new king had a
longer or shorter thumb Louis XV, it was back to square one.
About 50 years later, another French type designer, Didot, re-
fined the system by basing it on the legal foot measure which was
permanently standardized by that time. The Fournier/Didot System
remains the standard for type measurement in most of Europe.

A merican Standard: On the other side of the Atlantic

Ocean in the 1800s, American type measurement was still in dis-
To help you visualize the magni-
array. Foundries used not only European point units, but also a
tude of the problem caused by lack
variety of other measuring units with names like nonpareil, min-
of standardization, let's say that you
ion, bourgeois and cannon. While the everyone in the industry
publish a newspaper set with 10
used the same terminology for the measuring units, no two found-
point Goudy type (what you see in
ries agreed as to exactly what size each unit was. Type from differ-
this paragraph). Ordinarily you buy
ent foundries couldn't be used interchangeably.
type from Alpha Foundry...
The first in a chain of events that led to standardization of type
...but B e ta Foundry is having a
measurement in America was the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. In it,
great sale. So, you buy some 10 the Marder, Luse and Co. type foundry burned to the ground. When
point Goudy type from them
it was rebuilt, the owners decided to make their pica size type molds
and mix it in with your other exactly the same size as that of a Philadelphia foundry, the largest
type. Afterward y our newsp aper
in operation at the time.
looks like this.
In 1874, Marder, Luse and Co. hired Nelson Hawks, a Milwau-
kee printer, as a junior partner. He discovered that the unit size
called a pica was exactly equal to 1/6 inch which also was exactly
equal to 12 points. Hawks proposed that all the company's type sizes
should be based on a standard pica unit. The proposal was ac-
cepted and the system was successful.
Hawks left
Marder, Luse
and Co. in 1882
after a dispute
with the senior
partners. They
wanted to profit
from Hawks' sys-
tem by licensing
it to other found-
ries. He wanted
to give it away
to promote uni-
formity within
the industry.
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871
 A Brief History of Typography

Following his departure, he spent many years meeting with type

foundry owners in major cities across the country to promote use
of the pica/point system. By the time he died at the age of 86, his
system was the standard for type measurement in both the United
States and Great Britain. Today it is used globally by designers,
type founders and printers.

M odern Typesetting: While cast metal type continued

to be used for many purposes, it had its limitations. To expand his
range of font offerings, a printer had to purchase and store a sub-
stantial supply of letter
blocks. The same was
true for each different
size in which it was
offered and for bold or
italic versions. As a result, each printer tended to stock a relatively
small group of fonts and customers chose their printer as much for
his type selection as for the quality of his work.
A major innovation in the mid-twentieth century gave designers
creative flexibility they had never known before. The new phototype-
setting process used typefaces on strips of photographic negative. As
each letter was selected on the key- board, the film
strip spooled to the proper position and
light showed
through the film to
expose light-sensitive paper.
One strip of film replaced all the metal type
for the font. The films were compact and inexpensive enough to
allow printers to greatly expand their typeface collections.
Moreover, phototypesetting could perform certain manipula-
tion with type that just weren't possible with metal blocks. For
instance, when larger sizes of type were handset, there was no
way to adjust the line spacing to accommodate ascenders and
Type Intro descenders. This created the optical illusion that some lines were
farther apart than others. Phototypesetting permitted the typeset-
ter to expand or reduce the line spacing for optimal aesthetic
appearance.
M/W Schedule
When we entered the Computer Age about a decade ago, it
literally blew the creative lid off...and all but destroyed the estab-
lished typesetting industry. Designers now can per-form a multi-
T/T Schedule tude of typographic manipulations in seconds. Some of them
formerly required costly and time consuming mechanical pro-
cesses to execute. Typefaces licensed by foundries are affordable
enough for individual designers to collect or, with available soft-
HOME ware, they can design their own.