© Neel Dozome

Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus “House-Workshops-Museum” complex is the only one of its kind: Europe’s oldest printing factory preserved as a museum. It dates back to the Renaissance and Baroque periods. A UNESCO world heritage site, it is a living fossil that continues to reveal to researchers what typography was in the earliest epoch of its birth. Established by Christophe Plantin (1520–1589), the printworks were one of the largest and best-equipped of its time. Upon Plantin’s death, the business was headed by his son-in-law, Jan Moretus I (1543–1610). The Moretus family continued the firm’s production activities for three centuries, from 1576 to 1867. A decade after it stopped trading, the palatial buildings were converted to the museum. It is dedicated to “presenting the relationship between the living environment of the family, the world of work, and the world of commerce during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries”.

In the 1950s, Harry Carter, who served as a consultant and archival expert on type history at the Oxford University Press, began making regular pilgrimages across the pond to explore the museum’s immense uncatalogued repositories.

The Plantin-Moretus’ collections were particularly famous for containing an enthralling collection of letters cut by a 16th century master-typographer named Robert Granjon. “Among the great names of French typography — those of Verard, Tory, de Tournes, Garamont, Fournier, Didot, come first to mind — that of Robert Granjon (1513–1590) is rarely cited, “ writes Hendrik D.L. Vervliet. Granjon, however, was deeply admired by a group of elite British type designers. Harry Carter’s contemporary, Stanley Morison’s Times New Roman is said to be a recalibrated version of another Monotype typeface called Plantin. Granjon’s italics were paired with Garamond’s to make a complete set. Designed in 1914 by Frank Pierpont and Fritz Stelzer, Plantin, very obviously took its name after the heritage museum. It was heavily derived from Garamond and Granjon’s designs. Thus, Granjon continues to live to this day, most prominently, through Times New Roman.

On weekends, Harry Carter’s son, Matthew, then an eighteen year old recent school-leaver on a “gap yah” apprentice at the fine printers Enschedé en Zonen (located a train’s ride away in Haarlem) would lend a hand to his father with the research. Those quiet Sundays at the Plantin-Moretus, Harry and Matthew Carter, father and son, worked in a small attic, cleaning, identifying and sorting type punches that had not been touched for over three hundred years. As they dusted away the accumulated dust, ink and soot of the centuries, long-lost ideas about European typography slowly started to reveal themselves once again. Matthew Carter would later describe his fascination for the styles from this “pre-conventional” period.

In the 1950s, the digital revolution was suspected by there was no way to know how much it would revolutionise how type would be consumed. The rise of digital type would make Matthew Carter the “most-read” man on the planet. When Ikea shifted from Futura to his creation Verdana, he was briefly the most hated man in typography. In philosophy, however, Carter could never be faulted. He has always followed in the grandest of Humanist footsteps. This approach be summarised in a quote by the great 14th century Florentinian Coluccio Salutati who wrote:

“I must imitate antiquity not simply to reproduce it, but in order to produce something new.”

I. RECOVERED IN TRANSLATION

Born in Rome, Robert Granjon (1513–1590) spent the early part of his life in Lyon where he was active as librarian, printer, and engraver of typefaces. A gifted linguist, Granjon developed a reputation for proficiency in Middle Eastern languages, and in 1578, he was approached by Giambattista Raimondi, a Rome-based professor of mathematics and Arabic-expert, to cut letters for a new printing venture. This press would specialise in translation and was to be called the “Stamperia Medicea Orientale” or “The Typographia Medicea”.

Almost a millennia ago, between 383 AD to 404 AD, working in Palestine, St. Jerome had created “the Vulgate”: a single, unified translation of the Bible to Latin through translation from Hebrew and Koine Greek. In a letter, Jerome recounted an incident where, during the Lent of 375 A.D., he had suffered a terrible nightmare. He was dragged before a tribunal of the Lord and accused of being a Ciceronian — a follower of the 1st-century Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero — rather than a Christian. For hundreds of years, Cicero’s poetry has been acknowledged to possess an addictive charm for those who are able to appreciate it. Jerome confessed that compared to the writing of the Latin pagans, Christian scripture lacked lustre. In particular, as a lover of reading and thinking, he was seduced by Cicero’s suggestion that all a person truly needed in life was a garden and a library.

But what of hellfire and damnation after such a life of indulgence? Wracked by guilt for succumbing to this pagan charm, and delirious from illness, Jerome dreamed feverishly that he was severely lashed by God’s agents for neglecting his religious duty. Upon waking, he vowed never again to read or possess pagan literature. Burning his books, Jerome took a vow to devote himself exclusively to scripture. The Vulgate was the fruit of this dedication. His version, in an accessible European vernacular (rather than an ancient or foreign language), would serve as the basis for a uniform Bible across Europe — a book that would go on to be reproduced billions of times.

By 1470, there was enough of a demand for the Bible for Gutenberg to sniff financial patronage for his ideas about printing using moveable type. Caxton took Gutenberg’s technology to London and there it was developed further. The instincts of these print pioneers was not wrong: Church officials were indeed the first to identify the utility of this technology for their requirements. Additionally, they would also cater to a huge interest in the writings of ancient wise men, like Socrates, Aristotle, or Plato that people wanted to read for self-help and improvement.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the wide-spread culture of literacy amongst its noblemen and citizens was extinguished. Cicero was forgotten and what was once a grand tradition of literary appreciation for poetry, history, rhetoric, grand public signage and private scroll-collecting was lost. However, in one corner of Europe, the flame was sought to be preserved: the monasteries of Ireland.

Even there, though, reading was no longer treated as a luxurious indulgence. One of the important duties of monks, almost as a type of punishment, penance and self-flagellation, became to copy out and disseminate Christian and other Church-approved scripture. The calligraphic hand that was used in these scriptoria dates to Roman times but is still seen on Irish-style pubs. This script is called the “Roman Uncial” but it is also referred to, because it is synonymous with Ireland and its monks, as the “Irish Insular”.

An Irish pub in London

The mythology of St. Colmcille (also referred to as “Columba” or “Columcille”), one of Ireland’s patron-saints, describes him as as a giant, mighty warrior with another unique magical attibute: the ability to scribe at a supernatural speed (he could even make light pour out of the fingers of the free had as a kind of night lamp). Colmcille was the first “pirater” of the Vulgate and successfully waged war for the right for the Bible to be common property. By the 6th century, the Irish brothers had established scriptoria across Europe to make further copies of the Vulgate and other important scriptural literature. Over the 8th and the 9th century, another system of writing, designed for use by chancery officials, emerged through the improvement of the insular script. This was codified at the court of Charlemagne: the “Carolingian miniscule”. Over the centuries, many chancelleries and court offices across Europe developed quick calligraphic scripts that only their own officials could decode.

Robert Inerarity Herdman (1829–1888)’s Saint Columba Rescuing a Captive

As literacy rates started to improve across Europe, parchment became more expensive and scribes needed to economise. The bowls and roundness of the Roman uncial and Carolingian miniscule evolved into letter-forms that were much straighter, narrower and tightly packed. By the 12th century, a distinctive new style of hand, discernible as proto-Gothic started to emerge. This would eventually fully develop into the “Gothic” hands (the term “Blackletter” is one of its synonyms). It would birth important variants, like Fraktur and Textura (arising from the text appearing to be like it was woven).

Jerome’s Epistle to Paulinus: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_bible_Old_Testament_Epistle_of_St_Jerome.jpg

Textura was the type of calligraphy that served as the inspiration for Gutenberg and Caxton when they were designing letter-forms for their presses. Their design goal was for the page to look like it was hand-written. So, they followed the look and feel of the well-regarded Textura but with some modifications for legibility and the mechanical exigencies of the printing process. For this reason, their text is sometimes is also called “bastarda” because it combined the features of the upright Gothic hand with some curved features of the Roman uncial.

If St.Jerome’s translations created the Vulgate, it was now time for the Vulgate to be further translated to other languages. Church officials were particularly eager for the Bible to be translated to Arabic to support missionary activity in the lands of Christianity’s own origins. Under the patronage of Pope Gregory XIII, Ferdinando I de’ Medici (1549–1609), Cardinal and Grand Duke of Tuscany set up the Typographia Medicea with the ambition that it would be a great foreign-language printing office. Instituted at Rome, it would supply materials for Catholic missionary work in the Middle and Near East, including both aids to learning the Arabic language and disseminating Catholic religious texts in Arabic.

Giambattista Raimondi, however, had a slightly different agenda from the men of the Church. He wasn’t so much interested in God’s words as he was in God’s proofs. He had learned Arabic and Armenian by travelling to the Middle and Near East with the objective of educating himself in mathematics. Raimondi, as a new generation of Humanist, was heading in a different direction than his predecessors. They had gone north to find old or overwritten manuscripts in forgotten monastery vaults. Raimondi ‘s generation, however, realised that Greek science and Roman philosophy had been preserved and built upon magisterially in Arabic. So, they headed south and eastward to recover Europe’s lost heritage.

Under Raimondi’s guidance, the press produced unique works of huge importance to academics, such as the geography of al-Idrisi and the great medical treatise of Ibn Sina (Avicenna). The Medici press, though profits were thin on the ground, achieved a new bench-mark in the variety and quality of the work it disseminated. It gave many Europeans their first introduction to Arabic texts that preserved Greek classical knowledge (this was also the period when the Arabic number system slowly established itself at the center of Western science and technology).

In the employment of the Typographia Medicea, Granjon’s task in Rome was to design these foreign language editions. He developed typefaces for Armenian (1579), Syriac (1580), Cyrillic (1582), and Arabic (1580–1586). He also created a Greek typeface, Parangonne Grecque. Not only did he have to create letter-forms, Granjon had to solve the grid issues of adapting non-Latin typefaces to a European codex format. The manuscripts of the Typographia Medicea became the conventional model for Arabic printing in Europe. Later translators, working out of university towns like Leiden and Oxford, took deep inspiration from this work.

A Typographia Medicea page: https://www.forumrarebooks.com/item/_bible_new_testament_gospels_arabic_latin__arba_at_anajil_yasu_al_masih_sayyidina_al_muqaddasah_sacrosancta.html?

Yet, the takeaway from this history for our purposes isn’t how Granjon influenced the look of Arabic in print. Echoing the cultural process I wrote about concerning the English language and Hobson-Jobson, it is how the knowledge of Arabic calligraphy clearly gave Granjon’s leaning Latin letter-forms their dancing sparkle.

Granjon’s ‘Gryphius’ Long Primer Italic. From: Vervliet, Hendrik D.L.’s Catalogue on Granjon (Oak Knoll Press)

II. MEN OF CICERO

There was another reason why Robert Granjon was well-suited to the needs of an Italian publisher like Typographia Medicea. Italians (one may have a hard time believing this) had extremely refined notions about style and aesthetics. They disagreed with the Germans and the English on their textura-inspired Gutenberg and Caxton trajectory (that eventually birthed Bastarda and Fraktur). The French, however, with in sync with the Italian sensibility. Granjon was trained in a style of typography that was as much in vogue in Paris as it was in Florence and Venice.

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), often referred to as “Petrarch”, complained that Gothic-style writing may look very impressive from afar but was so difficult to decipher that it was as “though it had been designed for something other than reading.” For Petrarch, the Gothic hand was not simple (castigata), nor clear (clara) and inefficient orthographically (possibly meaning it hurt the hand like hell to make the slow, strange shapes of this style).

In direct contrast to St.Jerome, Petrarch had devoted his life to Cicero and pleasure, rather than Christ and self-flagellation. An intellectual titan and spiritualist, Petrarch would re-organise the idea of education and put knowledge of classical poetry and calligraphy at the centre of what it meant to be cultured (which is very similar to its Asian counterpart). With a deep, life-long and abiding love for Cicero, Petrarch inspired a revival of interest in pre-Christian, Roman-era writing that had been frowned upon by the Church for its atheistic and pagan tendencies. Sarah Bakewell recounts in Humanly Possible that Petrarch’s father, an affluent notary, found out that his son was neglecting is studies as a law student, and spending all his money and time collecting ancient poetry. Furious, he burned poor Petrach’s small collection of very valuable manuscripts. However, even he allowed two books to be kept: Virgil and Cicero.

The quilt-patch chessboard of 14th century Italian politics meant that a well-written letter (good in both visual style and content) could be as lethal in diplomacy as an army. This ability was so appreciated that a valuable paralegal scribe, even those born to a humble background, could aspire to attain the same social access as a high-born bishop with a law degree. Extorted onwards by Petrarch, a new generation of scholars and scribes emerged, such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Coluccio Salutati, who identified means of advancement, whether spiritual, social or political, through studying and writing Latin.

At that time, Florence was a republic ruled by a council secular, elected representatives. Its administrators were contemptuous of the religious authority of the Vatican, and, privately, they dismissed the Bible as superstitious hokum. They even thought the Gothic style of the German-origin papal staff was coarse and barbaric. In their search and enjoyment of Latin poetry, they repeatedly encountered references to books, poems, histories, authors, poets, historians and other literary works that they understood to indicative of a classical status amongst the Romans. Through a system of cross-referencing, they developed a canonical list of classics and set about populating it. It became almost a sport for them to travel to remote monasteries across Europe to discover one or the other on their lists to “liberate” ancient books that were held in the forgotten collections of monasteries. Sometimes they found books intact. At other times, they found that to save on the costs of parchment, monks had attempted to erase and had written over the older writing in codexes. However, it was still possible to faintly see the earlier book underneath newer writing. This was good enough and they made extremely fast and effective copies with just that to go on as a first draft (to be corrected and corroborated later). This search and study of the Latin canon came to be called “humanitas” (Latin for human nature, civilization, and kindness) and the men who dedicated themselves to this life came to be called “humanists”. They also developed a unique style of calligraphy: humanistica.

Humanistica was a rejection of Blackletter and an updated revival of the Carolingian minisicule. This script also revived block capital letters from fragments of ancient Roman manuscripts. Luxury copies (“de luxe”), especially of the poet Virgil, had been found decorated with letters inspired from monuments like the Trajan column. A thousand years later, these grand Roman monuments once again served as ideal representations of the Latin alphabet.

Following Petrarch’s advice to open up the text and write efficiently, a type of script emerged that was not just very elegant to behold but also quick to transcribe. Till this point in history, scribes trained in the Gothic hand were taught to write in exactly the same way. The individualism that the study of Latin engendered in the humanists meant that forms of hand-writing started to emerge that were the stamp of an individual’s identity. According to Berthold Ullman, the watershed moment in the development of the new humanistic hand was Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459)’s transcription of Cicero’s Epistles to Atticus. Poggio Bracciolini was a prolific recoverer of the Latin canon and regarded as a champion of champion scribes (he recovered and re-transcribed Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things). Niccolò Niccoli, (1364–1437), a contemporary and collaborator of Poggio, then came up with the next innovation. A formidable grammarian, editor, and creator of the concept of a public library (Niccolò was Poggio’s preferred proof-corrector), Niccolò realised that tilting the wrist created an even more beautiful and fast going style. This came to be described as the “chancery script in the Antique manner”or the “humanist minuscule”. It is what we now call “italics”.

Poggio and Niccoli’s innovations in calligraphy were very quickly adopted by the many others who were also working on improving calligraphy. Very soon, as mechanical printing began to become more common-place, this style became a standard option in a typesetter’s toolkit.

The first books to be printed mechanically in Italy, as their date-stamps declare, were completed in 1465. They were books was made by the printers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, clerics from the archdioceses of Mainz and Cologne respectively. Pannartz and Sweynheim had learned their trade from Gutenberg himself and escaping the looting of Mainz, they set up shop at a benedictine abbey called St. Scholastica in Subiaco, Italy. Helped by the monks at the monastery, they demonstrated Gutenberg’s technology. Some of the first books printed included Cicero’s De Oratore, apart from scripture by Lactantius and Augustine. These books are notable because they diverged stylistically from Gutenberg and Caxton’s blackletter. The type produced was a “proto-roman”: an attempt to cater to their host’s conventional preference for roman-style type but retaining some blackletter-like characteristics of their own training. In 1467, Sweynheym and Pannartz moved to Rome. There, and in that year, they printed one of the most important books in Europe from the perspective of typographic history: an edition of Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares (Letters to Friends). This edition became so well known across Europe, that it established a kind of customary unit of measure for printers: the Cicero.

In 1470, Nicolas Jensen, another Frenchman working in Venice, produced a widely-admired print version of the humanist minuscule. Jensen was trained to work as a coin-cutter for the royal mint at Tours, and had been sent to study printing in Mainz. In 1501, yet another Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius (who founded the Aldine Press) produced a stunning edition through a masterful use of italics. Manutius was fortunate to have a skilled letter-cutter like Franceso Griffo working for him but was himself a bold and innovative printer in his own right. He focused on producing classics in their original language, and pioneered a convenient and affordable book size that preceded the paperback. By 1532, the italic style was well-established enough for calligraphy master Ludovico Arrighi to issue an influential teach-yourself pamplet, La Operina. The pamplet formalised the sloped writing into a system that could be self-learnt and is considered an authoritatively source on humanista calligraphy, both as practice and printing that looked like lettering.

Excerpt from Ludovico Arrighi’s La Operina (approx. 1532).

Over time, the humanistica style letter-forms in print came to be known as Venetian or Antiqua (or in English, Old Style) to distinguish them from later styles, like Transitional and Modern (the principal difference being that newer families had varying stroke weights). Anitiqua came to be closely associated with Italy and Latin. Robert Binghurst, writes that: “For better or for worse — and it was mostly for the better, in my opinion — punchcutters and printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took for granted that every written language had a visual tradition of its own.”

Binghurst juxtaposes Jenson’s Latin and Greek (upper half) against a similar language versions from Adobe (below): https://www.commarts.com/columns/goldilocks-and-the-three-alphabets

Robert Granjon, in my opinion, added what he had learned through the study of Arabic calligraphy to the style pioneered by Poggio and Niccolo, and codified by the efforts of typographers like Nicolas Jensen, Aldus Manutius, Francesco Griffo, and Ludovico Arrighi. His enthusiasm and expertise in tilted letters made him synonymous with the italic style. This is best evinced by his dream project, Civilite. Granjon dreamed that this design style would become synonymous with the French language, the way Fraktur was associated with German, Antiqua with Latin and the way Greek and Arab also had a distinct form and texture in print.

Within the century, efforts would begin to standardise typography into a form of mathematics. Eventually, along with other technological evolutions, this would make almost all European languages look the same in print. It would be Robert Granjon and his generation of typographers that contemporary designers would turn to when they were looking for examples of distinctive, unique and, funnily enough, fresh ideas.

III. BETWEEN THE PUNCH AND THE PIXEL

Matthew Carter’s apprenticeship at Enschendé had been reserved through a little string-pulling. Harry Carter was a peer and professional acquaintance of Jan van Krimpen, Enschende’s master designer. Later, he would assist the proprieters of the firm with their catalogues. It only needed to be mentioned for the one year-long apprenticeship offered by Enschedé for school-leavers to be reserved for Harry Carter’s son.

Jan van Krimpen was one of Europe’s finest type designers and he specialised in old, old school type (“How old? Old men. From old time,” to quote Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh). Haarlem, like Antwerp, was a heritage location of European printing. According to the Dutch, Haarlem’s Laurens Janszoon Coster had developed mechanical printing in Europe earlier than his Mainz born rival, Johannes Gutenberg. Enschendé was one of the town’s oldest and reputable firms. Established in 1703, the firm’s specialism was in ultra-fine printing, such as for stamps and currency. Interestingly, the firm was so long-lived that a catalogue of its collections notes six different sets of Granjon’s Civilitethat had been made during 16th centuries. Unlike Plantin, Enschendé is still going (even dabbling in NFTs).

In the typefaces designed by Jan van Krimpen, one notes an orthodox yet regal classicism. They have been described as “austerely beautiful”. Krimpen was the creator of the ultra-rare Cancellaresca Bastarda ( I wonder if Krimpen is alluding, in the naming of his typeface, to suggest that this typeface aims to unite the humanism of Niccolo Niccoli with the print acumen of Gutenberg’s vision). His specialism in antique “roman” serifs is seen in the Romulus family (Romulus is Latin for Rome). In naming his exquisite typeface Lutetia (Latin for Paris), he seems to be acknowledging the role of Paris being the most important European capital, after Rome, for “roman” typefaces.

The punches for Van Krimpen’s designs were cut at Enschidé by Paul Rädisch. Rädisch, naturally, was a purist and regarded as one of the best in the world at punch-cutting. A story went that he was very annoyed when management decided to install a pantographic letter-cutting machine to supplement hand-cutting in the workshop. Rädisch removed a piece of the machine each day and dropped it into the canal on his way home. Eventually, the whole machine disappeared.

While earlier, Rädisch had refused to directly train anyone, he accepted an assistant named Henk Drost. In 1956, when Matthew Carter arrived from England to take up the apprenticeship, he spent almost the whole year at a seat between Rädisch and Drost. Matthew Carter’s would be the last-generation to receive in-work training in how letter-forms were carved by hand for lead punch-cutting. At an ancient institution like Enschendè, an apprentice would have been properly schooled in the most ancient of ancient print traditions and their basis in ancient European calligraphy. It was comparable to learning the shenai in one of Varanasi’s ancient gharanas.

Men like Rädisch, however, couldn’t hold back the tide. Even in the 1950s, punch-cutting — a craft that could be traced to the days of Gutenberg himself — was now two generations obsolete. Its successor, the Linotype, which had replaced punch-based printing, was fast growing obsolete, too. It was being made redundant by photography-based typesetting processes.

This history is impossible to appreciate without watching this awesome documentary.

Instead of turning his nose up at technological change, Matthew Carter’s reaction would be pure fascination and adaptation. The challenge, he would later say, was to be: “technologically sensitive, not subservient.” In a slightly different context, the artist David Hockey has spoken about how it is the responsibility of artists to humanise technology.

Print technology changed majorly only twice in the last five hundred years, with Gutenberg and the Linotype machine. It would be revolutionised three times in the next fifty. The first of these would be a radical new update to the Linotype machine: the Linofilm. Carter was immediately interested. The Linofilm was, in his words, “the first phototypesetting machine to get the type right.” The next two revolutionary innovations would be bitmap-based typefaces, followed by our contemporary epoch where typefaces are rendered on the basis on vector-drawings defined by bezier curves. Carter would make a name for himself for being at the vanguard of these technologies.

Industrial printing in the 1950s was increasingly a photography-based process. Instead of metal type, fonts were stored on translucent images on glass plates. They were scanned and the images recomposed on a cathode ray tube as type. Carter describes this as: “Characters scanned ahead of time in the font factory and packaged ready-digitized for the typesetter made the next generation of machines truly digital, faster and more efficient — the typographic equivalent of sliced bread.”

In 1960, Carter had met a fellow typographer with English roots settled in America, named Mike Parker. Parker, after graduating from Yale, had spent a few years working, sorting and cataloging records, at the Plantin-Mortetus. He had joined the Mergenthaler Linotype Company and quickly risen to the position of director. Parker would be responsible for bringing Helvetica to the USA. In 1965, he invited Carter to the USA to work for Linotype and the two started to work together to see if they could use the new photocomposition technology to create a contemporary version of the material they had found digging in the museum’s collections. They immediately agreed to continue the work of the previous generations of British typographers on Granjon (Harry Carter would publish several catalogues on Robert Granjon). The objective was to explore what kind of design possibilities had been made possible by the new photo-based technologies afforded them.

Carter took advantage of photographic processes to integrate calligraphic strokes to form delicate letter-forms that would have been very hard to cut, forge or survive in metal printing. Moreover, the photographic process meant that type designers were no longer restricted by the Em square. The result was Matthew Carter’s critically-acclaimed version of Granjon’s Galliard. The typeface was named after a fancy ball canter popular during Granjon’s time.

Robert Granjon’s Romans were on the doorstep of surviving to the digital age.

Fom Hendrik D.L. Vervliet’s book on Granjon (1981: Poltroon Press). It uses M. Carter’s phototype of Galliard. Note also Harry Carter’s catalogues mentioned in this list.

IV. THE BITMAP

The march of the history of print technology led generally in the direction of improvement in legibility. Design borne of experience and improvements in machining meant that letter-forms got crisper and crisper each century onwards from Gutenberg. The next advancement, the strange and wonderful contraption of the Meganthaler Linotype, delivered a beautiful and warm print end-result that was very easy on the eye. This was set to change with the introduction of offset printing. The print technology was less to blame than the art of typography. Letter-form design that could take advantage of the technology took time to evolve. However, with early computers screens and digital devices (such as LCD dislays on pagers, watches and Casio “diaries”) legibility was going to take a serious beating.

Around 1976, Carter recieved a commission that would help him prepare for the huge loss of reading quality that would be the result of the next rounds of technological change.

On the hundredth anniversary of AT&T, the company approached Carter to solve a problem for its phonebooks that occured in the switch from the linotype printing machine to offset printing. Bell Gothic, the company’s existing san serif typeface (designed for use on a linotype printing press) experienced a loss of quality when run through the new offset presses, especially in lighter weights. The attempt at trying to increasing the amount of ink to overcome this problem caused bleeding and blotting. This was because of the tiny size of the text and the thin quality of phone book paper and cheaper ink.

Carter responded by creating Bell Centennial. One strategy he employed was to increase the widths of the letters. This helped maintain the shape integrity of the letter-form and prevented the crowding of letters at the compressed small sizes. The genius touch was to compensate for the thin ink and cheap newsprint used in phonebooks through the creation of “ink traps” — these were circular gaps where the strokes of the letters came together. They filled with any excessive ink and left a nice, legible letter.

Schematic drawings for the “ink traps” © Matthew Carter

The stage was now set for the next major technological change: the use of the Bitmap character. There was, however, nothing new about the use of grids to describe letter-forms in typography.

In 1692, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a minister serving France’s Louis XIV, set up a commission of four scholars — Abbot Bignon, Jacques Jaugeon, Gilles Filleau des Billettes and Father Sebastien Truchet — to survey and prepare a compendium on existing arts, crafts and trades of France. In 1699, King Louis (the “Sun King”) XIV appointed them to his Academy, and they came to be known as the Bignon Commission.

Already, in 1463, expert stone carver of Roman-style letters, Felice Feliciano had published Alphabetum Romanum (1463). This book is credited with being one of the earliest manuals on ruler-and-compass construction based descriptions of letterforms.

Geometrically constructed letters. From Felice Feliciano’s Alphabetum Romanum (1463).

The Bignon Commission, however, was a much bigger and academic project. Its work for the academy would eventually result in a 113 folio volume encyclopaedia under the title of “Descriptions des Arts et Métiers, faites ou approuvées par messieurs de l’Académie Royale des Sciences” (description of the arts and craft technologies approved by the Royal Academy of Sciences).

The work began with studying printing. The experts and scholars of the commission were of the view that printing had a special importance amongst the industrial arts: it was “that art which will preserve all others”. In the first instance, the commission took on the vexatious issue of systemising typeface sizes. The ambition was to develop a basic standard method of measurement for type and this led axiomatically to the development of what we now call the “bitmap”. The mapping of letter-forms to a grid required a fundamental unit of measurement — the concept of the typographic point.

This approach made it possible not just the measure the difference between a small and large sizes within a typeface family, it also allowed the measurement of the positive and negative spaces created by letters within a typeface. This attempt at standardisation would be only theoretical until further work was done by successive generations of typographers, such as Fournier and Didot. The eventual industrial application of the idea were type matrices could be used interchangeably between printing presses. However, this standardisation remained incomplete, and like electrical plug-points or video playback standards (like NTSC versus PAL), type matrices had different specifications between Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. This is a problem that has never gone away.

From: http://www.riccardolocco.com/img/romain_du_R_Olocco_slide_12.2013.pdf

In the way, humanista calligraphy represented the high Rennaissance of Florence, the Romain du Roi can be seen as one of the central artefacts of France’s Age of Enlightenment. It was in Paris that typography was first abstracted academically into Cartesian mathematics while simultaneously visually refined into poetry for the eyes. The cold calculations of the committee were humanised by letter-cutter Grandjean (not to be confused with Granjon, dead over a hundred and fifty years by then). Reserved for excluisve use for the royal printer, the Romain du Roi made its first appearance in the magnificent Médailles sur les principaux énvenémens du règne de Louis-le-Grand (1702). The design approach towards a interpolation based expanding set of letter-form sizing paved the way for Didot’s experiments with stroke weights (which continue to shape the fashion industry’s look and feel along with Bodoni) and anticipated what Frutiger would do with Univers. It made French printing something special and distinctive to behold to this day.

In 1981, Matthew Carter partnered with his Linotype collaborator Mike Parker, set up Bitstream in Cambridge Massachusetts. It was the first company freshly devoting itself to digital type. In the mid-90s, Matthew Carter was approached by Microsoft to create a typeface pairing: one with serifs and one sans serif. Engineers at Microsoft were looking at a future where uniformity in appearance would be required between the screen and pages printed through desktop printers. This commission would result in Georgia and Verdana, respectively. For Georgia, Carter would use Scottish Romans as a reference, which were once hugely popular in the United States but had since almost disappeared. Georgia was intented for the newspaper industry, and took its name from a newspaper headline from the State of Georgia which said: “Alien heads found in Georgia”.

At this point, scaling and anti-aliasing were not a standard part of typography and the screens were still primitive. To match the “binary” effect, Carter reverted to designing by bitmaps. Interestingly enough, as he mentions in this TED talk, believing he was more technologically constrained for computer memory than he actually was, he came up with a new kind of “Minecraft” serif (my term). He was pleased with the aesthetics of this result. It smoothened the blocks of the Romain du Roi a bit more towards a humanist direction.

Carter’s sketches for Georgia showing what I call Minecraft-serifs

There was no reference as such for the creation of Verdana. In an interview to Neshan magazine, Carter says: “I started hacking bitmaps with a rather primitive piece of software, and there were a number of advantages. It was fairly quick to do, and it was easy to put bitmap fonts in front of all the people at Microsoft who were involved. They could say, “Oh no, it’s too big, it’s too small, it’s too heavy, it’s too…” whatever. So we went through a number of revisions and when everyone had signed off on those, we had bitmaps that I could wrap an outline around.” Carter’s only reference, he admits, was to Bell Centennial, the phonebook typeface that he had designed for AT&T.

The problems of legibility, between cheap pulp and screens with poor resolution, according to Matthew Carter, were identitical.

The body text in this image is most likely Georgia

V. THE ROCKET SCIENCE OF TYPE DESIGN

In 1977, a computing professor named David Knuth sat down to review the galleys of the second edition of his book, The Art of Computer Programming, and was dismayed. He had been very pleased by the look of the first edition printed in 1968. It had been done on a Monotype machine. The second edition, however, was done by phototypesetting. The result was certainly inferior. Knuth set out to design his own typsetting system that would specialise in describing and controlling how mathematical formulae looked via offset printing. This system would be called TeX, and became standard usage for students and professors who published papers with formulae. Yet, as this page from the University of Exeter’s IT services warns, a user trying to print a document created by TeX on a laser printer that utilises PostScript and wants to use PostScript’s typefaces should anticipate trouble.

The origins of PostScript lie in two major innovations that happened at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s. One was the shift from code based typesetting that used macros (like TeX) to “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) word processing software. Second, was the development of advanced printers that made the idea a reality. Ex-Xeroxers Chuck Geschke and John Warnock approached computer-makers such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Apple to convince them that software going to be the new printing press. Their vision was that any computer could connect with printers and typesetters via a common language to print words and images at the highest fidelity. We take this for granted now, but back then, it was near impossible. They assembled a crack team that included Doug Brotz, Bill Paxton, and Ed Taft. By 1984, they had finished PostScript as a complete language. This led to the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution in the mid-1980s led by the Apple LaserWriter which was the first printer to ship with PostScript.

The Apple LaserWriter

The history of the mathematics and technology by which a computer renders and smoothens parabolic arcs for the human eye, both on paper and increasingly on the screen, mirrors the complexity of the technology itself. In digital typography, this mathematics would have two specific applications. The first is interpolation, echoing the problem first identified by the Bignon Commission and described by Truchet, a system by which the sizes of a typeface are made bigger or smaller. Theoretically, in PostScript, 72 points is supposed to be equivalent of an inch. At university, we are told conventionally use 12 points. Technically, this is a good size at it is exactly 1/6 of an inch. However, body copy rarely converts specifically and no one is exactly sure why two fonts never line up. Second, an interpeter like PostScript would use techniques, such a bitmap font with “hinting” or “anti-aliasing” to render the saw-tooth of a bitmap or Bezier curve into a smoother trajectory using gradations of grey. It is not the same as rocket science — it is rocket science . For example, the math for Bezier curves is based on Bernstein polynomials.

Some people turn to graphic design because they dislike math and prefer pretty colours. I was one such person.

For our purposes, what is important to note is that the calculations required to be done by a laser printer of the 80s were so complex, when measuring and rendering type, that the printers themselves had to be built with chips with computing juice that vastly exceeded regular personal computers of that time. As screen resolution improved, computing became more powerful and cheap, and graphic design through software, such as Microsoft Word, Photoshop and Illusrator became industrial-level, the location of the interpreter shifted from the printer to the computer . Eventually, PostScript evolved into the PDF format and that was what really stood the behemoth of Adobe. Once Microsoft and Adobe agreed to the OpenType format, and drawing with Bezier curves made bitmaps obsolete, the door was open to niche and boutique type design firms to create unique typefaces.

One such firm, set up in 1991, was Carter&Cone. Within the decade, Bitstream, which started off as a roaring success, got over-financialised and failed trying to pivot into becoming a competitor of Adobe’s. This freed Matthew Carter to do what he always loved, which was to take on unique commissions and design type. Carter&Cone’s version of Galliard, Galliard CC is reputed to be the most authentic forms of the typeface extant today.

VII. Make Serifs Great Again?

Voltaire joked that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, roman or an empire. Similarly, Times New Roman, developed by English and American typographers, has no real connection with the Romans as such. It is no longer new (being almost ninety years old), and it owes much more to Linotype and Microsoft for its global popularity than The Times. The exhaustion with serifs in our age is now well documented. Designers like Radek Sienkiewicz have noted a “san serif invasion” trend where designers are jettisoning serifs.

The serif, however, is too wily and powerful to ignore.

One of Donald Trump’s props, the red MAGA cap (described as the new Klu Klax Klan hood) utilises a classic-looking typeface with serifs.
Much debate exists about the exact typeface used for the cap. Adding to the complication is that not all the MAGA caps are identical. In some versions, letters like the G from the “GREAT” don’t match the G in “AGAIN”. Many of Trump’s admirers have stiffed their hero of merchandise royalties by purchasing low-quality knock-offs made on the cheap. The logo takes less than five minutes to recreate and doesn’t need anything beyond a basic word processor. So, MAGA hat variants, like Covid, are plenty and abound.

The design appears intended to invoke nostalgia. A logo that resembles the mastheads of the great American lifestyle magazines — a throwback to an imaginary glorious period when the pinnacle of American achievement was represented by the glass-tower boardrooms of Forbes and Time during the day and the brick mansion plush-upholstered bedrooms of Playboy and Penthouse by night. This is the power of serifs. They are so cultured that they can imbue a personage like the Donald Trump brand with some refinement and give even that hair some dignity.

The blessings of serifs have never been unequivocally good. From the chisels of Rome, the warriors-monks of Ireland, the vaults of Germany, the gilded courts of Louis the IV, the attics of the Plantin-Moretus, the pea-soup steam filled alleys of London’s Fleet Street to the blinking screens of Massachusetts, serifs have enslaved, driven to exile and murdered. In the hands of Spanish Inquistitors, the Holocaust and Malthusians, serifs have resulted in the deaths of millions of people. In his book on the Alt-Right, Andrew Marantz talks about how editorial power, misogny and anti-semitism was an issue that William Caxton had to grapple with right from the very first books that were printed. In my piece on The Obey Sign from They Live, I traced how misinformation is spread and capitalised on by social media technology companies and politicians.

Yet, serifs in print have also redeemed billions of souls by keeping alive the greatest knowledge for thousands of years. Our improving lifestyle standards, eradication of diseases and improved nutrition is a reflection of the huge gains made through books and literacy.

After all, as Cicero himself observed, all a person needs to be truly happy in life is a garden and a library.