Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. A Study in Survivals, Volume I
Volume I of Updike's two-volume history of printing types, published by Harvard University Press in 1922 and grown from his lectures on printing at Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration from 1911 to 1916.
What it is
Volume I of Updike's two-volume history of printing types, published by Harvard University Press in 1922 and grown from his lectures on printing at Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration from 1911 to 1916. Updike, who ran the Merrymount Press in Boston, argues that type-forms are survivals of handwriting, so a face can only be judged once you know the pen hand it copied and the problem its cutter faced. After chapters on casting, the font and its case, and the point system, he surveys fifteenth-century types country by country: the first Mainz Bibles, Jenson's roman at Venice, Caxton's seven types, Ratdolt's specimen sheet of 1486. He treats the Aldine italic of 1501 as the last original idea in type-forms, then follows German, Italian and French types to 1800 through printed books and founders' specimens, with 192 reproductions, most at actual size.
Why read it now
Read it for its method of judging type, which still holds. Updike shows faces at actual size in running sentences, because what counts is the effect of type in mass, not one handsome letter; that is still how to test a brand font. His case against the point-set and lining types of his day, which cut descenders short to save money, rests on one point: they are harder to read. Miles Tinker's legibility tests of the 1950s and 1960s broadly agree: common, well-proportioned text faces read at similar speed, while distorted or unusual ones slow readers. The Aldus chapter is also a product lesson: a condensed type was cut so a small, cheap pocket book could hold more text. What has dated: taste verdicts tied to furniture styles, weight given to the unproven Coster story of a Dutch invention, and a view of type that is almost all Latin script; Arabic appears only through the Medici press alphabet of 1592. Use: before choosing an Arabic brand face, find the hand it descends from, such as Naskh or Kufi, and judge it set in real paragraphs at reading size.
Passages worth keeping
But apart from all this, the fundamental trouble with these schemes is, that they make types hard to read.
العيب الأساسي في أنظمة توفير الكلفة هذه أنها تجعل الحروف صعبة القراءة، وهذا وحده يكفي لرفضها.
It probably occurred to Aldus that simple, compact volumes might be popular, and thus commercially successful
خطر لألدوس أن الكتب الصغيرة البسيطة ستلقى رواجًا وتربح، فصمم لها حرفًا يناسبها؛ أي أن الحرف المائل وُلد من قرار تجاري.
Of every class of type there are many forms, but one or two forms only that are the best.
لكل صنف من الحروف أشكال كثيرة، لكن الأفضل منها شكل أو شكلان فقط، والمهمة أن تعرف أيهما.
Only when we understand their problem can we justly judge how well they solved it.
لا نحكم بعدل على عمل صانع الحرف إلا إذا فهمنا المشكلة التي كان يحاول حلها.
Interesting as successive variations in the design of individual letters may be, it is the effect of these variations upon type in mass that is important for my purpose.
ما يهم ليس تفاصيل كل حرف على حدة، بل أثر هذه التفاصيل حين تجتمع الحروف في كتلة نص يقرؤها الناس.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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