Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. A Study in Survivals, Volume II
The second of Updike's two volumes carries his history of printing types from 1500 into the early twentieth century, country by country.
What it is
The second of Updike's two volumes carries his history of printing types from 1500 into the early twentieth century, country by country. It covers the Plantin press and the Elzevirs in the Netherlands, Spanish printing up to the Imprenta Real specimens of 1799, English founders from Pynson to Caslon, Baskerville, Wilson and Fry, the types of the American colonies, and the 'classical' faces of Bodoni and the Didots. Later chapters follow the English modern and fat faces, the 1844 revival of Caslon by Pickering and Whittingham, and William Morris's Kelmscott Press. Each claim is backed by a numbered facsimile plate of a real specimen or page. The book ends by turning the history into advice: five classes of type for a composing room with Caslon first, a list of faces to refuse, and a chapter arguing that printers of the past faced trade pressures much like those of 1922.
Why read it now
Read it for its method of choosing, not for its list. Updike tells a printer to buy every size of a few good families in depth rather than many faces in small amounts, and to learn to refuse. That still holds: a brand built on one or two families with a full range of weights and sizes reads as one voice. His account of revivals, that an old face comes back once its defects are forgotten and people want change, fits how type fashions still cycle. His closing chapter answers a common excuse: printers in every age had cheap customers and trade pressure, and the good ones held a standard anyway. What has dated is his taste. He refuses all sans serifs, condensed faces and most family variants, which now carry most screen, signage and packaging work, and his world is Western book printing, with Arabic mentioned only in passing. Use: before a brand refresh or a campaign, write a short list of the brand's required faces, one text family and one display family with the sizes and weights allowed, and a second list of what is refused.
Passages worth keeping
for a few complete series in large fonts are far more valuable than thrice the amount broken up into small fonts of many different series.
عائلات قليلة مكتملة بكميات وافية أنفع من أضعافها موزعة على حروف كثيرة متفرقة. العمق في عائلة واحدة يعطي تنوعًا كافيًا دون فوضى.
studies in type-forms teach us not only how to choose, but give us courage to eliminate.
دراسة تاريخ الحروف لا تعلّم الاختيار فقط، بل تمنح الجرأة على الاستبعاد وقول لا لما لا يصلح.
all condensed or expanded types, all "sans-serif" or (as they are absurdly miscalled) "gothic" types, all fat-faced black-letter and fat-faced roman, all hair-line types
هذه قائمة الحروف التي يرفضها المؤلف، ومنها الحروف غير المذيلة والمضغوطة والسميكة. وهي اليوم من أكثر الحروف استعمالًا، فتبيّن حدود ذوق عصره.
A constant factor also is a natural love of variety and change.
من أسباب عودة الحروف القديمة حب الناس الطبيعي للتنوع والتغيير، لا تفوق الحرف القديم وحده.
Types and books reflect the state of the arts around them, because on one side typography is an art; but they are influenced by trade conditions, because it is also a trade.
الطباعة فن وتجارة في آن واحد، فتعكس ذوق عصرها وتخضع لظروف السوق. ومن يتجاهل أحد الجانبين يخدع نفسه.
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
If this library is useful, leave an email
We send new patterns, ads, and notes when we add them. Name and phone are optional.
You are on the list
We will write when we add more library material.