Typographia: An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing
Thomas Curson Hansard's Typographia, published in London by Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, joins a history of printing to a working manual for running a printing office.
What it is
Thomas Curson Hansard's Typographia, published in London by Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, joins a history of printing to a working manual for running a printing office. The preface says it builds on Stower's Printer's Grammar and marks text kept from Stower with 'we' and new text with 'I'. Part I runs from stamped Babylonian bricks and Chinese block printing through Gutenberg, Caxton and the spread of presses in Britain, then paper-making, the Stationers' Company, lives of eminent printers, and a long section on English type-founding drawn from Rowe Mores, from the Caslons to Fry, Figgins and Thorne. Part II covers the fount and cases, composing, the press from the wooden press to the Stanhope and Columbian, fine printing, inking rollers, steam machines from Koenig's press for The Times, ink, the overseer and the reader, accounts, prices, office design, stereotype, lithography and colour printing.
Why read it now
Most of the book is craft history, but three ideas travel. First, Hansard judges type by fitness, not fashion: he attacks the new fat faces of Thorne and Fry as preposterous disproportions fit only for wood. He lost that argument. Heavy display faces took over posters and job printing because they carried at a distance, still the test for billboard and thumbnail type. The lesson is to test a style against the job it must do, not against taste. Second, the reader and overseer chapters treat accuracy as a system with named duties, the same logic as a modern QA checklist. Third, the machines chapter shows a trade in a technology shift, where each new press claimed superiority over the last before anyone could judge it. Marketers adopting AI tools will recognise the scene. What has dated: nearly all the technical instruction, and the book's certainty about what good taste requires. Use: read the type-founding and machines chapters as a case study in how a trade judges something new, and write down your own criteria before the next one arrives.
Passages worth keeping
it has certainly been a principal part of my endeavour, to inform the young practitioner, as well as the amateur of typography, as to the most approved modes of conducting the several branches
المؤلف يحدد جمهوره بوضوح: المبتدئ في المهنة والهاوي، ويعد بأن يشرح لهما أفضل الطرق المجربة في كل فرع من فروع العمل.
the fat-face fashion, which ought to be eradicated from every type-foundry, and left for hewers in wood alone
هانسارد يرى أن موضة الحروف السميكة يجب أن تخرج من مسابك الحروف المعدنية وتبقى لصانعي الحروف الخشبية للملصقات.
the folly of fat-faced, preposterous disproportions
حكم ذوقي صريح: الحروف السميكة عنده حماقة وتشوه في النسب، مع أن السوق فضّلها لاحقًا في الإعلان.
who may detect the inaccuracies in thought or language of the author, and by judicious suggestions contribute to the perfection of his work
المصحح الجيد لا يصلح الأخطاء المطبعية فقط، بل يلتقط ضعف الفكرة واللغة ويقترح ما يحسّن العمل.
the improvement of the art which is ultimately the improver of all others
الطباعة عنده الصنعة التي تحسّن كل الصنائع الأخرى، ولذلك تتسابق الاختراعات على تطويرها.
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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