Alphabets and Other Material Useful to Letterers
A slim reference book by Charles Rollinson, a New York engrosser, published by D. Van Nostrand in 1912.
What it is
A slim reference book by Charles Rollinson, a New York engrosser, published by D. Van Nostrand in 1912. Four pages of text open it. The first covers materials: Bristol board, Whatman's paper, parchment and vellum, India ink rubbed from the stick, Gillott's No. 170 and No. 290 pens for script, the Sonnecken pen for broad letters, and Payne's gray, lamp-black and sepia for washes. The second gives design advice: space letters so equal light falls between them, build each design around one feature that draws attention, size words by their importance, and borrow ideas but never copy a design outright. The rest is plates: business and Spencerian script, English script, Roman, block, Old English, German text, Gothic, Mediaeval, Sickel's, German round-hand, broad point and Italian alphabets, then borders, north points and monograms, closing on an engrossing firm's advertisement.
Why read it now
The two pages of design advice hold up better than the plates. Spacing letters by the light between them, not by equal distance, is still how type designers and logo makers judge spacing, and the optical kerning in modern software does the same job by measurement. The rule of one dominant feature, with everything else subordinated and leading to the main idea, is what we now call visual hierarchy, and eye-tracking studies of print ads support it: the larger an element, the more attention it takes, so the largest element should carry the main point. Sizing words by importance, so the recipient's name outweighs the institution's, applies directly to certificates, awards and invitations. What has dated: the pen and ink recipes, the heavy reliance on blackletter and ornate script, which cost legibility, and the warning against one-colour work, which plenty of effective modern print ignores. Use: before approving a certificate, invitation or pack face, list its words in order of importance, check that their sizes on the page follow the same order, then judge the spacing by eye.
Passages worth keeping
A common rule is to see that equal amounts of light come to the eye from the space between successive letters of a word
المسافة الصحيحة بين الحروف تُقاس بما تراه العين من فراغ بينها، فيجب أن يبدو الفراغ متساويًا حتى لو اختلفت المسافات الفعلية.
The preparation of a design should always embody some one feature with which to attract attention ; the other features should be subordinated
كل تصميم يحتاج إلى عنصر واحد يلفت النظر، وكل ما عداه يجب أن يكون أصغر منه ويخدمه.
in a testimonial, the name of the recipient should have a larger size letter than the name of the institution which bestows it.
حجم الكلمة يدل على أهميتها، ففي شهادة التكريم يكون اسم المكرَّم أكبر من اسم الجهة التي تمنحها.
It is unethical to appropriate another's design outright.
نسخ تصميم غيرك كما هو عمل غير أخلاقي، أما أن تأخذ فكرة وتضيف إليها من عندك فمقبول.
More time should be spent on this letter than any other
الحرف الروماني هو الأساس الذي تُبنى عليه بقية الحروف، لذلك يستحق أطول وقت في التدريب.
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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