Easy reading: Venetian typesetting from the da Spira brothers (left) and Nicholas Jenson
Not all of the new printers made money, and the quality of their product varied greatly. But it was the fifteenth-century equivalent of the goldrush, and with no restrictions on joining the fray. Erasmus observed that for a while it was easier to become a printer than a baker.
The greatest single expense was production of the metal type, which was already a truly international commodity. Styles were refined in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman who had travelled to Mainz in 1458, where he had probably picked up Gutenberg’s techniques but rejected the more impenetrable elements of his Gothic output. But Jenson’s classical Venetian – strong and stately with thick slab serifs – was only a stepping stone for the great modern breakthrough to come.
Fifteen years after Jenson’s death, his work was lightened and rounded by the Italian ‘old face’ of Aldus Manutius, the humanist publisher credited with inventing the semi-colon, and establishing the modern book trade with his easily transportable pocket-sized versions of Greek philosophy and literary Latin – the ancient texts that illuminated the Italian High Renaissance.
Many of the types for these books were in fact cut by the goldsmith Francesco Griffo. It was Griffo who created the ancestor of the classic Bembo font – which he devised to set a brief account of a trip to Mount Etna by a Venetian cardinal of the name – and, around 1500, introduced italic type – not as a method of highlighting text but of setting entire books in a more condensed form.*
Not everyone approved of these new types, nor the use to which they were put. A stroll from the Rialto to San Marco now offered a world of knowledge previously unavailable, and affordable books in Greek and Latin were joined by vernacular and Roman texts that told of concepts both intellectual and erotic. The bestsellers were no longer just religious, they were the opposite – lustful texts by Virgil and Ovid. Even those who had previously advocated the printed dissemination of wisdom complained of dumbing down: Hieronimo Squarciafico, who worked with Manutius, feared that the ‘abundance of books makes men less studious’, and he dreamed of a scenario in Elysian Fields in which great authors bemoaned that ‘printing had fallen into the hands of unlettered men, who corrupted almost everything’. Of particular concern was the digested read and the accessible history – knowledge falling within the hands of those who had previously regarded it as being beyond their reach.
The phrase ‘the fount of all knowledge’ originated around this time, and there are two possible derivations. It was thought that a single fount or font could now reveal everything that was known. Or a fount could have been short for fountain, as used in a lecture in Venice in 1508 by the mathematician Luca Pacioli. Referring to the fifth book of Euclid’s Elements, he suggested that readers would surely prosper in the world of arts and sciences if only they heed ‘this ever-flowing fountain, the knowledge of proportion’.
In London, the merchant William Caxton set up a printing press in Westminster in 1476, after returning from a long stint in Bruges (the first book printed in English is believed to be his publication there of Lefèvre’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye around 1473). Caxton was a practical man, as keen to exploit new developments in communication and commerce as the pioneers of the Internet. He was a proficient translator (the Troy histories was his own work), albeit one aware of his linguistic and typographic shortcomings; he frequently, if perhaps rhetorically, asked his readers ‘to correcte and amende where they shal fynde faulte’.
In his Vocabulary in French and English (c. 1480), Caxton or his compositor not only confused his ‘p’s and ‘q’s, but even more frequently muddled his ‘b’s and ‘d’s and his ‘u’s and ‘n’s, so similar did they appear in his small typefaces. The Vocabulary has so many misprints that you feel like writing in disgust to the publisher. In an introduction to the facsimile edition of 1964, the Cambridge under-librarian JCT Oates found 177 errors in French, of which 102 are confusions between u and n, and 38 misprints in English, including 17 mix-ups between u and n in such words as aud, dnchesse and bnt. But Caxton’s influence on the standardization of English was considerable, as was his introduction to the language of silent letters (as in Ghent and nought), betraying the Flemish training of some of his letter carvers.
Caxton’s type was initially imported from Flanders, though around 1490 he seems to have switched to new fonts cut in Rouen and Paris. We know this from the appearance of a ragged r in place of the old blackletter form – a certain link to French foundries. It was a clear sign too that a popular type matrix was now a regular commodity of trade, boxed in the cargo hold alongside spice, lace, wine and paper.
Caxton’s eye for business remained strong. He set up a temporary shop in Westminster to catch the passing trade of members of the House of Lords, selling imported books and manuscripts as well as his own publications. He printed about a hundred works, achieving his greatest success with the Canterbury Tales. The many versions of Chaucer’s manuscript were so popular among merchants and noblemen that when Caxton came to set it in type he found that, entirely befitting of a compendium of tall tales, it was hard to locate Chaucer’s original. He printed two folios, in 1478 and 1483, each in a typeface that we could mistake for slightly rushed handwriting. They were, however, fonts that showed a burgeoning public taste for a style as far removed from gothic formality as possible.
Stamps marking the 500th anniversary of printing in England
Caxton was not a great typographer, which was one of the principal reasons he valued Wynkyn de Worde, his young successor at his London press. De Worde was the first known printer on Fleet Street, setting up there around 1500 and employing an expanding range of European typefaces for his increasingly popular output. He exploited the growing demand for cheaper publications, selling Latin grammar texts to schools while also printing novels, poetry, music and illustrated children’s books for his bookstand at St Paul’s. At the onset of the sixteenth century, his innovations were being imitated throughout Europe, the revolution in movable type delighting the common reader and disgusting the church just fifty years after Gutenberg.
Good type never dies, but there is one notable exception – Doves, the type that drowned.
Nicholas Jenson’s Venetian font has inspired many dignified revivals, but the finest and most elusive was created for the Doves Press in about 1900. Doves Press was established in Hammersmith, west London, by the bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. It was named after a nearby pub, but its ambitions were loftier. Cobden-Sanderson said he would not cease until he had designed ‘The Book Beautiful’.
William Morris’s famous edict to ‘have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’ certainly applied to Doves, although there are few printed artefacts upon which we may view it. Its most famous application was in the Doves Bible of 1902, set in the traditional typographer’s style of black with red trimmings, and possessed of a slightly rickety serif form, as if someone had broken into the press after hours and banged into the compositor’s plates.
The type was cut in London by Edward Prince, who had earlier made typefaces for William Morris at the Kelmscott Press (notably his Golden Type of 1891, a lavish, weighty and flowery reaction to the cleaner, modern lines of the day). The hand-drawn text on the first page of the Bible (‘IN THE BEGINNING’) was drawn by Edward Johnston, the calligrapher who would go on to design the type for the London Underground.
Doves Bible – Cobden-Sanderson’s masterpiece
Doves type is most easily recognized by its ample space between letters, a y that descends without a curl, a ligature connecting c and t, and the bottom bowl of its g set at an angle, giving it a sense of motion, like a helicopter tilting at take-off. Edward Gorey and Tim Burton appeared to lean on it gratefully for their hand-drawn text.
Doves has another reason for notoriety besides its beauty. When Cobden-Sanderson split from his partner Emery Walker and the Doves Press dissolved in 19
08, the pair drew up a legal agreement that Cobden-Sanderson would own the type (which meant all the punches and matrices) until his death, after which it would pass to Walker. But then Cobden-Sanderson changed his mind. Fearing its use both in shoddy printing and undesirable subject matter, he took the entire letter fund to Hammersmith Bridge and threw it in the Thames.
Cobden-Sanderson photographed with his future wife Annie and her sister Jane, with Jane Morris (wife of William Morris), on a visit to Sienna in 1881.
Was this an impetuous act? Rather the opposite. Cobden-Sanderson thought about it for weeks, planning both its execution and purpose. His Last Will and Testament contained details of how he would ‘bequeath’ Doves type to the river, so it may be washed ‘to and from the great sea for ever and for ever’. His motive was not entirely aesthetic – it was also bloody-minded. Doves was his creation and he resented his partner.
Cobden-Sanderson first dispatched the matrices – the casts for the type. But that was the easy part: disposing of the metal letters themselves would take him three more years. The war had made him despondent and unwell, but his own destructive force seldom receded. ‘I had gone for a stroll on the Mall,’ he wrote in his diary at the end of August 1916, ‘when it occurred to me that it was a suitable night and time; so I went indoors, and taking first one page and then two, succeeded in destroying three. I will now go on until I have destroyed the whole of it.’
These pages were solid blocks of type, just as they had been used to print the last Doves book. As the weeks went on, he would take as many blocks as he could manage, wrap them in paper tied with string, walk about half a mile from his press to the best spot, and drop them into the water after nightfall, often waiting for heavy traffic to obscure the sound of the splash.
Over the next five months, he made more than a hundred separate trips to the bridge with his type, a large undertaking for a frail man of seventy-six. And it was not without hitches. ‘On Friday night I threw two packets of type from the bridge,’ he noted in November 1916, ‘but they alighted one after the other on a projecting level ledge of the southernmost pier, and there remain, visible, inaccessible, irremovable by me.’
Cobden-Sanderson feared discovery – ‘by the police, the public, the newspapers!’ – but escaped detection to the very end, until, after his death, his will and diary were discovered. Emery Walker, for one, was not amused and started legal proceedings against Cobden-Sanderson’s wife, Annie, a militant Suffragette (and daughter of the radical Liberal reformer, Richard Cobden). He said he had made some attempt to have the whole font re-cut, but Edward Prince had lost his touch and Walker could find no one else who could do it justice. The case was settled out of court, Annie Cobden-Sanderson agreeing to pay £700. Doves was never recovered, at least not the full alphabet. Even now it seems likely that the disintegrating typeface is stuck firm in the riverbed, resisting both dredging and the digital age, perhaps occasionally breaking free to form its own words and sentences as fortune and the molten tide allows.
Much of what one needs to know about the history and beauty of a font may be found in its ampersand. Done well, an & is not so much a character as a creature, an animal from the deep. Or it is a character in the other sense of the word, usually a tirelessly entertaining one, perhaps an uncle with too many magic tricks.
Although long treated as a single character or glyph, the ampersand is actually two letters combined – the e and the t of the Latin ‘et’ (the word ampersand is a conflation of ‘et, per se and’). It is the result of scribes working fast: its first use is usually credited to a shorthand writing method proposed by Marcus Tiro in 63 BC.
The finest ampersand, cut by William Caslon, is still alive after almost three hundred years, and it has many impersonators but no equals. It is fiendishly difficult to draw, and when done badly may resemble aimless scribble. But when done well, it can be a work of wild freehand art in a way that few regular characters are allowed to be. It can bestow aristocratic virtue to a font, and it can cause the writer about fonts a considerable struggle to contain the purple prose.
Aldus Manutius was particularly keen on the ampersand and used some twenty-five of them on a single page of his Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499. They don’t have the beauty of Caslon’s symbol, but Manutius’s font-cutter, Griffo, came up with a character remarkably similar to the ones that gained favour in the last century and are in common use today.
For the first real flight of fancy, we need to look to that revolutionary Frenchman, Claude Garamond, the man who instilled the virtues of clear roman type on sixteenth-century Paris. With the ampersand, however, he allowed himself to head off from type to art. His character provides a clear indication of the form’s origin: on the left side the e, on the right the t. But they are linked by a cradle that begins weightily then thins out, and there are inky globular endings to each end of the crossbar on the t.
Claude Garamond …
… and his italicized ampersand
It betrays strong calligraphic roots, but what distinguishes it is the ascending stroke on the e portion, something that begins in the regular way as a belt across the letter, before ascending freely skywards, resembling the darting tongue of a lizard catching flies. It must have been great fun to sketch; painfully difficult to cut in metal.
Garamond’s types became the most popular in Europe for the best part of two hundred years. The ampersand, the Q and the ‘double V’ setting of the W are the only characters that we would regard as fancy today, while the rest of it just looks clean, and sparklingly personable. There are a great many re-cut foundry variations, but in almost all of them the alphabet has a fine and open appeal, with a confident serif and stroke variation, particularly noticeable on the middle bars of E and F. It is most easily identifiable by the very small bowl of the lower-case e. It does have a plain, primitive and unsophisticated aspect but Garamond’s conscious mastery of technique ensures it remains the most popular early font in the pull-down computer menu.
We classify Garamond’s fonts as ‘old-face’, but when they emerged at the behest of François I in the 1540s, they marked a final transition from gothic letters to the roman alphabet we recognize today, refining the work a century earlier of Manutius and the Venetians. Like the work of his fellow Frenchman Jenson, these were not types masquerading as manuscript but type on its own terms. The alphabet is full of contrast and movement but with a precision of line and elegant serifs, so even today, if you want something respectable yet warm, a Garamond is a fine choice. In fact, Garamond may be the first typeface many of us encounter, being used for the Dr Seuss books and the US editions of Harry Potter.
A specimen page of Garamond’s original font
England had to wait almost two hundred years for a type designer to rival Garamond. William Caslon’s fonts from the 1720s may have had less of a lasting impact, in that they are less visible in current usage, but they were no less significant in their establishment of a strong English style: confident serifs, heavy capitals in comparison to the lower case, an important wide M grounding the alphabet from the centre.
Caslon may have modelled his types on those of the Antwerp printer Plantin, and his French typefounder Robert Granjon, and a part of their appeal was that they were specifically not German. Depending on the quality of printing and bleed of the ink, the whole alphabet could also display a vaguely piratical cragginess.
It’s no surprise to find that Caslon himself began as a gunsmith, engraving rifles with fancy swirls and initials, and he maintained these flourishes on his ‘swash’ capitals (capitals with elaborate loops and tails, usually for the first and last letter of a word). But his ampersand seemed to come from an altogether more hallucinogenic place, from the playground perhaps, or from the alehouse.
The finest example available today is the version supplied by the International Typeface Corporation – the ITC 540 Caslon Italic. This is practically a meal in itself, with a matronly e threatening to engulf the t, the two in perennial conflict o
ver which has the dandiest loops. It suggests a creator delighting in new freedoms after the repressions of strict Ts and Vs. Caslon’s ampersand makes an impressive T-shirt, intriguingly handsome to passers-by, occasionally eliciting a nod from another aficionado, like smug fans of a cool pop band before it becomes famous. (Hearteningly, the Caslon business is still going strong, and still family run. It now offers such things as digital press feeders and FoilTech supplies.)
Caslon’s ampersand, looking good on a MyFonts T-shirt
Ampersand madness – the Coming Together charity project
The ampersand travels well abroad, carrying the same meaning without need for ‘und’ in German, ‘e’ in Italian and Portuguese and ‘og’ in Danish and Norwegian. Occasionally it can go astray: it is the one element of Albertus that looks odd and too roughly hewn, and the ugly Univers version looks as if it was drawn by committee. Eric Gill argued that the ampersand was far too handy to be employed merely in business literature (as was usual), although he then tended to overuse it in his essays where just a plain ‘and’ would suffice (it doesn’t always look great in 12pt text).
Even in its more basic modern form, the ampersand is far more than abbreviation; its creativity provides a heartening reminder of the continuing impact of the quill in type design, and it signifies more than just a link. It also signifies permanence, not least to a professional partnership; Dean & Deluca are clearly in it for the long haul, as are Ben & Jerry’s, Marks & Spencer and the magazines House & Garden and Town & Country. But Simon and Garfunkel? No wonder they kept splitting up. Tom and Jerry? Of course they hate each other.
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