The biggest and most noble demonstration of its unifying potential came in early 2010, when the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) released ‘Coming Together’, a font consisting of 483 different ampersands. This cost $20, with all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders to assist with the Haiti Earthquake appeal. Almost four hundred designers from thirty-seven countries contributed one or more glyphs, ranging from the Caslon-esque to the almost unrecognizable. It was the fourth FontAid event, the first three benefiting Unicef (26 letter pairs), the families of victims of September 11 (a collection of question marks) and those affected by the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami (400 floral ornaments known as fleurons).
Coming Together swiftly became a bestseller at the digital font agencies that offered it. This is the best thing about the ampersand – its energy, its refusal to sit still. It is almost impossible to look at one and not think about its shape, or to draw one and not think about liberation.
In October 1775, a German physicist and hunchback named Georg Christoph Lichtenberg travelled across Europe to visit one John Baskerville of Birmingham, only to find that he had died the previous January. It was a cruel disappointment: Lichtenberg had hoped to meet the man he considered the pre-eminent type designer of his age.
Baskerville worked chiefly as a japanner – someone who made objects with decorative lacquer – and as an engraver of headstones. But his passion was for printing and letter making. Oddly, considering Baskerville is one of the great names of type history, he met with little success in his lifetime. His books – notably his editions of Virgil and Paradise Lost – were works of art with huge flaws. His paper was too shiny and the texts were peppered with corrections (‘like the crossings of a schoolboy,’ one critic observed).
But Baskerville’s fonts were, for their time, unusually slender, delicate, well balanced and tasteful. They appeared modern, though type historians would now classify them as ‘Transitional’, an eighteenth-century bridge between Caslon’s slightly heavier ‘English Old’ face and the ‘Modern’ hairline artistry of French typefounders Didot.
Baskerville and his punchcutter John Handy produced a single basic font in several sizes and forms, and it has one attribute that makes it infallibly recognizable and timelessly stunning – the upper-case Q. This has a tail extending well beyond its body width, a great flourish seldom seen beyond calligraphy. The lower-case g is also a classic with its curled ear and its lower bowl left unclosed, as if all the ink was being saved for that Q.
Baskerville’s M and N have traditional bracketed serifs, the oval O is conventionally thicker at its sides than at its top and bottom. But by the time Baskerville came round to designing the Q he may have been getting restless. So the squirrelish tail flits a little to the left and then much further to the right, varying its thickness as it does so. In words such as Queen and Quest, the tail almost underlines the u, cupping it with tenderness.
Georg Lichtenberg would have used the Baskerville Q in the word Quire, for amongst his many interests (hydrogen ballooning, the patterns of tree branches) was the standardization of European paper sizes. His ill-timed journey from his university in Gottingen to Baskerville’s house in the English Midlands had been encouraged by King George III. Lichtenberg had taken the King on a tour of the Royal Observatory, and when the two began discussing books, George expressed an interest in Baskerville. Lichtenberg was also encouraged by Johannes Christian Dieterich, a German publisher and bookseller and another fan of Baskerville’s work. He wrote to Dieterich from St Paul’s Coffee House on his return to London, and conveyed the grim news:
The Baskerville Q in all its glory
Only on my arrival did I learn that he was buried more than six months ago. I waited on his widow, an excellent woman, who is continuing the type-foundry, but has almost certainly given up the printing press.
In one sense, Lichtenberg arrived at the perfect moment. Baskerville’s wife Sarah was conducting the eighteenth-century equivalent of a car boot sale. He found her to be a grieving woman in fabulous black mourning silks, but not averse to giving the visitor a full tour of the works. ‘She accompanied me herself into all the most dirty nooks of the type-foundry,’ Lichtenberg wrote to Dieterich. ‘I saw the punches and matrices for all the elegant letters which we have so often admired.’
Sarah Baskerville ‘took no pleasure in such a life,’ he reported, and wanted rid of it. ‘She is willing to sell her whole printing equipment, with all punches, matrices, and everything appertaining to the type-foundry … for £4,000, her husband formerly having been offered £5,000.’ Lichtenberg noted that this even included free delivery to London. ‘What a chance, if only one had the money: just fancy the type that might be cast from the existing moulds and the moulds that might be struck with the existing punches; it is a transaction which would either make a man’s fortune or bankrupt him.’
It was a valid point. Even after it was cut, a metal typeface needed lavish care and expenditure. The metal would wear out and break, a particular problem with the fine vertical lines in Baskerville; this would necessitate a recasting with the original moulds. Then the paper had to be right (Baskerville introduced ‘wove’ paper with no watermark and a uniform surface), and the ink had to be the correct consistency to ensure adhesion and clarity, and then there was binding and marketing to consider. And Baskerville was an innovator as well: his wooden presses made a shallower impression, and his inks were blacker and dried more quickly. Despite his endeavours, and the finesse of his fonts, Baskerville often complained that they did not pay. He found that users would copy them rather than buy them: ‘Had I no other dependence than typefounding and printing,’ he observed in 1762, ‘I must starve.’ Contemporary type designers might complain that not much has changed. Nonetheless, the Baskerville font has been in extensive and more or less continuous use for the past 250 years.
But who was he, this genius of type, whose widow was merrily flogging his great passion? Opinions vary. According to Baskerville’s own account of himself, he was a man slightly possessed. ‘Among the several mechanic Arts that have engaged my attention,’ he wrote in the preface to his edition of Paradise Lost, ‘there is no one which I have pursued with so much steadiness and pleasure as that of Letter Founding. Having been an early admirer of the beauty of letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them.’
Some considered Baskerville’s ambitions realized from the outset, with Lord Macaulay noting that his work ‘went forth to astonish all the libraries of Europe’. The Parisian typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier, who promoted the idea of the point sizing system for type, noted of Baskerville’s faces that ‘he has spared neither pains nor expense to bring them to the utmost pitch of perfection. The letters are cut with great daring and the italic is the best to be found in any English foundry, but the roman is a little too wide.’
In 1760 Baskerville’s friend Benjamin Franklin wrote to him from London of a ‘pleasant instance of the prejudice some have entertained against your work’. Franklin, an industrious printer around Fleet Street who popularized the use of Baskerville fonts in the United States before pursuing his more scientific and constitutional ambitions, had met a man who said, ‘You would be a means of blinding all the readers of the nation, for the strokes of your letters being too thin and narrow, hurt the eye, and he could never read a line of them without pain.’
John Baskerville, painted shortly before his death
Franklintried tosupportBaskerville against this charge, but in vain. ‘You see this gentleman was a connoisseur.’ But then Franklin paid a trick on him. He gave him type specimens apparently printed in Baskerville, and the man in question again detected a ‘painful disproportion’. In fact, Franklin had given him texts printed only in Caslon. (Despite the emergence of Baskerville, and Franklin’s enthusiastic promotion of it when he returned to the United States, the first mass-produced printing of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was printed in Caslon.)
A
history of Birmingham published in 1835 observed that Baskerville ‘was a humourist, idle in the extreme. He could well design, but procured others to execute’. One visitor recalled ‘a most profane wretch, and ignorant of literature to a wonderful degree. I have seen many of his letters, which like his will, was not written grammatically, nor could he even spell well.’
In the event, Lichtenberg didn’t buy Baskerville’s punches and matrices. Instead they passed to Pierre de Beaumarchais, the dramatist responsible for The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, who bought them in 1779 for the Literary and Typographical Society. The society intended to use them to print the complete works of Voltaire in 168 volumes. It is likely that they were also used to produce much revolutionary propaganda in Paris. They were sold again to a French foundry before landing at their current resting place at Cambridge University Press. (Ironically, the first full Baskerville biography, published by CUP in 1907, was printed in Caslon.)
A similar restless fate befell the remains of Baskerville himself. Suspicious of religion, Baskerville had few friends in the church, and had arranged for his own mausoleum to be erected in his grounds. Here he was buried vertically, a further snub to tradition. But he proved a movable type: in 1827, half a century after his death, his body was found by workmen lying horizontally beneath a pile of gravel. He had been shunted from his mausoleum by the new owner of the grounds, and apparently just dumped nearby.
One of Baskerville’s punches, cut by John Handy
When the body was found it was wrapped in a linen shroud covered by sprigs of bay and laurel. His facial skin was described in a local newspaper as ‘dry but perfect’. The eyes had gone, but eyebrows, eyelashes, lips and teeth remained. ‘An exceedingly offensive and oppressive effluvia strongly resembling decayed cheese arose from the body, and rendered it necessary to close the coffin in a short time.’ The newspaper concluded that even in this undignified state he was ‘possessed of a natural elegance of taste, which distinguished every thing which came from his hands’.
Following this discovery, he was interred in a catacomb in a Birmingham churchyard, but then moved again when the space made way for shops. He ended up beneath the chapel in Warstone Lane, in a vault that has since been bricked up to deter vandals. This is how we honour our type heroes.
Fortunately, the famous Baskerville typefaces do not rot. They were revived in the 1920s and even before the computer there were a great variety on offer. In the United States in the 1950s Baskerville became a favourite advertising font, not least when a face was required to portray authority and tradition – or something folksy or English.
The names that Baskerville assigned to his types referred to their sizes. They are not in common use today but they would have seemed like family to many generations of compositors and printers: Great Primer, Double Pica Roman Capitals, Brevier Number 1 Roman, Two-Line Double Pica Italic Caps. These days they sound more like complicated orders for coffee, their varieties having been ordered into more familiar mediums and bolds. But every major foundry has long had their own version, tailored specifically for Monotype or Linotype composing machines in the 1920s, and for phototypesetting in the late 1950s. And when the Apple iPad was launched in April 2010, Baskerville was one of the initial five typeface choices available on its iBooks reading device.
Baskerville on the iPad: the other iBook launch fonts were Times New Roman, Palatino, Cochin and Verdana
Mrs Baskerville had been married before, and it was not a happy tale. At the age of sixteen she wed one Richard Eaves, with whom she bore five children, before he deserted her. She was then working as John Baskerville’s live-in housekeeper – and later became his lover. But she was unable to marry Baskerville until Eaves’s death in 1764 and it may be that some of the society disapproval of Baskerville’s work was fired by their unorthodox relationship.
It was a story that intrigued the contemporary type designer Zuzana Licko. ‘We were brainstorming for the name of a release,’ she recalls, ‘and when I mentioned the Mrs Eaves story, the name stuck.’ She also remembers reading the criticism Baskerville received from his peers, and ‘from experience, I could sympathize.’ But when she walks into a bookstore these days and sees how many book covers are designed with Mrs Eaves, she feels pride.
Mrs Eaves, which appeared in 1996, has less variation in its strokes than Baskerville, but maintains its openness and legibility, as does its more recent sans serif companion, . This is a Baskerville type without the serifs, but still linked to the eighteenth century through its quill-tailed Q, strident R, and the cat-tailed lower bowl of its g, the letters airily spaced and crisp. There is a Mr Eaves Modern version too, which is more geometrical, and might gain approval from John Baskerville for its precision and sophistication, if not its form.
Zuzana Licko’s Mrs Eaves (top) and Mr Eaves
What Baskerville might equally enjoy is a young Australian woman who calls herself Mrs Eaves and likes nothing more than to write all over her body in black marker pen and post the results on YouTube. The most popular video features Mrs Eaves (real name Gemma O’Brien) in gym gear, which leaves a lot of room to inscribe ‘Write Here, Right Now’ in different letter styles on her flesh, to the accompaniment of the Fatboy Slim song of almost the same name. She sums up her work thus: ‘eight hours writing, five marker pens, three baths and two showers’.
Mrs Eaves in action at the Berlin Type Conference
‘With care,’ the sheet of paper warned at the bottom. ‘Ink not waterproof.’
And in this way, in the midst of the First World War, began one of the most iconic, enduring and best-loved fonts in the world, Edward Johnston’s type for the London Underground. Within a few years would be visible not only at Elephant & Castle and Golders Green, but at all points where posters were pasted to walls: there was the university boat race at Putney in March, the FA Cup Final at Wembley in May, the fireworks on Hampstead Heath in November; there were the dahlias in St James’s Park, the crocuses at Kew, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and orators in Hyde Park. Edward Johnston’s work adorned every announcement, whether beautiful or grim ().
Johnston was the man who defined London with type, dominating the capital from the far western reaches of the Metropolitan line in Amersham to easterly Upminster on the District line. The blue plaque commemorating his time in Hammersmith remembers him, curiously, as a ‘Master calligrapher’ rather than the man who signed London, but it is the only plaque to appear in his own type. (Most are in hand-carved antique English fonts with a light serif, akin to what you see on Victorian gravestones.)
Johnston was a gaunt, fine-boned man with a full moustache. To Evelyn Waugh, writing in the Spectator in 1959, he was ‘a singularly pure and loveable artist’ to whom we all owe a debt: ‘Every schoolboy who learns the italic script, every townsman who reads the announcements of the Underground railway, everyone who studies the maps attached to modern travel books is seeing in the light of Johnston.’ Waugh had met Johnston when he was fourteen, the result of winning an art prize. Johnston welcomed him into his workshop in Ditchling in Sussex, and cut a quill from a turkey feather before writing a passage. Waugh recalls a feeling of ‘awe and exhilaration’. Eric Gill, one of Johnston’s students, was similarly affected.
Johnston’s original pasted-up designs for the Tube
Edward Johnston at work, complete with high-quality quill and ’tache
Johnston himself had studied medicine in Edinburgh, before finding his true calling after examining calligraphy at the British Library. From 1899 he held calligraphy classes at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts, where Gill said he was ‘struck as by lightning’ by his talents, and remembered the ‘thrill and tremble of the heart’ as he first experienced Johnston’s writing (the two became firm friends, later sharing lodgings). Another admirer, TJ Cobden-Sanderson of Doves Press fame, commissioned Johnston to write out his ‘Book Beautiful’ manifesto on vellum.
Johnston’s Underground lettering is often conside
red the first modern sans, preceding (and possibly inspiring) Jakob Erbar’s (1926), Paul Renner’s (1927) and Rudolf Koch’s (1927). (1928) certainly owes it an enormous debt, which Eric Gill was happy to acknowledge. It may also be regarded as the first ‘people’s typeface’, the first to be designed for day-to-day use that was not associated with learning, political manifesto or class, but instead with the need to travel. This was type design making a major contribution to society and everyday life. Or as Stanley Morison – redesigner of The Times and a man not given to hyperbole – put it: ‘Johnston sans’ standardization on the Underground conferred upon it, as lettering, a sanction, civic and commercial, such as had not been accorded to an alphabet since the time of Charlemagne.’
Johnston began working on his underground design in 1915, but the idea had been mooted two years before, when Gerard Meynell, head of the fine-printing house, Westminster Press, which had a contract to produce London Underground posters, introduced Johnston to Frank Pick, the Underground’s commercial manager. Pick, an influential figure in British design, had begun to think about a relatively new concept: branding. He had plans not only for the Tube, but for London as a whole.
Pick had an anti-Victorian sense of design and was looking for a font that would ‘belong unmistakably to the times in which we lived’. He considered using the classical Trajan-style lettering that Eric Gill had created for shopfronts for WH Smith, but judged them too flat; besides, there were already many WH Smith bookstalls on station platforms, and a duplication could be confusing. Pick declared that he wanted something ‘straightforward and manly’, with each letter in the alphabet ‘a strong and unmistakable symbol’.
When Johnston met up again with Pick, and the design was commissioned, he was accompanied by Eric Gill, who helped with Johnston’s alphabet before withdrawing because of other work demands (he received 10 per cent of the commissioning fee). Johnston produced his first letters at the end of 1915 – 2-inch capitals of B, D, E, N, O and U – which initially had small serifs. In the lower case the key letter was the o, whose counter (the internal white space) he created equal to twice its stem width, thus giving it ‘ideal mass-and-clearance’. His most distinctive letter was the lower-case l, which had an upturned boot to distinguish it from I or 1. The most beautiful was the i, on which Johnston placed a diamond-shaped dot that still brings a smile today.
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