TYPOGRAPHY

the design, or selection, of letter forms to be organized into words and sentences to be disposed in blocks of type as printing upon a page. Typography and the typographer who practices it may also be concerned with other, related mattersthe selection of paper, the choice of ink, the method of printing, the design of the binding if the product at hand is a bookbut the word without modifier most usually denotes the activities and concerns of those most involved in and concerned with the determination of the appearance of the printed page. Thus understood, there was by definition almostbut not quiteno typography before the invention of printing from movable type in the mid-15th century; and, thus understood, it is only by analogical extension that the term can be applied, if ever it can be, to reading in which the material at hand is something other than words that remain stationary on flat firm surfaces. The electronically created letter that lives out its brief life while moving across the face of a signboard or a cathode-ray tube is not a typographic item. Typography, then, exists somewhere between the extreme of manuscript writing, on the one hand, and the transient image on the electronic device, on the other hand. Whether the letter be made by metal type or photographic image is no longer important in defining the subject; whether the finished item is a book or a page influences its inclusion as typographic not one bit. the design and selection of letter forms used to make a page of printed text and thus a book or other publication. The typographer's primary task is to make the letter forms easy to read and secondarily to make them aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps the most basic aspect of typography is, in the Western world, the highly standardized set of characters it inherited from handwriting. Western typefaces resolve into three main kindsroman, italic, and black letterall derived from kinds of script. A fourth style, sans serif, which came into vogue in the first half of the 20th century, can be considered a subtype. The roman capital letters were established in form by the 1st century AD; lower-case forms developed later but still well before the standardized script known as Caroline was imposed by Charlemagne on his empire in the 8th century. A script similar to Caroline, prevalent in Spain and Italy, provided the model for roman typefaces, while a slanted, cursive version, used by chancery scribes for speed, was the source of italic type. In Germany and Britain, however, Caroline gave way to the angular, thick-stroked script known as Old English or Gothic, the model for black letter, which, since printing was invented in Germany, was the first kind of type used. Within 15 years after Johannes Gutenberg had published his Bible (1456), printing had spread through most of Europe. Between 1450 and 1500 most of the conventions of typography were established: the three major types of typefaces, page numbering, the title page, printers' marks, and the colophon (an inscription giving the place and date of publication, the printer-publisher's name, and other information). In Renaissance Italy a typeface based on a script earlier than Gothic was preferred for classical texts, and a clearer, rounder face, called antiqua, the prototype of roman faces, quickly superseded black letter except in legal and ecclesiastical works. By the early 16th century antiqua was used everywhere in Europe except Germany, where black letter type remained standard until 1940. In the 1490s Aldus Manutius of Venice printed a series of Latin texts in a new cursive typeface, now known as italic and reserved for special functions (such as indicating foreign expressions). The ascendancy of the roman and italic typefaces was greatly furthered by early 16th-century French typographers, in particular Claude Garamond, the first commercial typefounder, who made his well-designed versions available to all printers and, as a result, so dominated typography that subsequent 16th- and 17th-century developments may be seen as mere refinements to Garamond faces. Garamond's designs were superseded by those of Romain du Roi, which departed from previous practice by being designed not purely in imitation of script but according to mathematically determined proportions. Among the greatest figures of 18th-century typography were William Caslon, whose typefaces are still in use, and John Baskerville and Giambattista Bodoni, both celebrated as much for their versions of italic and roman type as for their tasteful style of book design. Printing was mechanized in the 19th century, but type was still cast and composed by hand until the invention in 1884 of punch-cutting machines made feasible the Linotype and Monotype mechanical composition systems. The range of typefaces first used in such systems was small and of poor quality until typography came under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement and its leader, William Morris, whose private Kelmscott Press set a standard of craftsmanship and design that inspired a generation of printers and typographers. Early in the 20th century, as more printers installed composing machines, better designed fonts (based on traditional faces like Caslon) began to appear. Perhaps the most influential figure in typography between the wars was the English typographer Stanley Morison, who organized the production of a range of fonts for the composing machine, taken from the best of traditional and contemporary typefaces (and including his own enormously successful Times New Roman). The most important typographic development of the second half of the 20th century has been that of phototypesetting, or filmsetting, in which type is composed optically on film before being transferred to either a lithographic plate or a letterpress block. Although traditional letterpress will probably be used by small businesses for some time, it has been rendered obsolete for most purposes by the combination of offset lithography, phototypesetting, and computerization. Additional reading There is a vast literature on typography and printing history. A Bibliography of Printing, comp. by Edward C. Bigmore and C.W.H. Wyman, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (188086), was still useful enough to merit reprinting in 1945. Several learned and technical journals print annual bibliographies. See especially Studies in Bibliography and Publications of the Modern Language Association, which emphasize articles dealing with analytic bibliography and printing history. The best brief history in English is Sigfrid H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, rev. ed. (1962). Curt Buhler, The Fifteenth-Century Book (1960), is an excellent survey of early printing and publishing practice. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (168384), is the earliest comprehensive manual on printing, typography, and type making. The 1962 edition of Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, with an excellent introduction and full annotation, gives considerable insight into the typography and printing of the day; there were no significant changes from the invention, c. 1450, until the early 19th century. Daniel B. Updike, Printing Types, 3rd ed., 2 vol. (1962), is a thorough and interesting history of the development of type design from the beginnings to about 1930highly personal, highly dogmatic, but the classic work on the subject. Of the many books and articles by Stanley Morison, three are especially noteworthy to the nonprofessional reader: First Principles of Typography, 2nd ed., with postscript (1967), is an expanded version of his Britannica article on Typography, which became the definitive statement of his views on the subject, and has been translated into several languages. The Typographic Arts (1950), contains two essays on, inter alia, the interrelationship between calligraphy, engraving, and type design. The Typographic Book, ed. by Kenneth Day (1962), is an expanded version of Morison's Four Centuries of Fine Printing (1924). It contains good reproductions of specimen titles and text pages spanning 14501935. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt (ed.), The Book in America, 2nd ed. (1951), is a historical survey of American printing and publishing from the beginning to the present. Kenneth Day (ed.), Book Typography, 18151965, in Europe and the United States of America (1966), contains uneven but generally good articles on its subject. John Carter and Percy Muir (eds.), Printing and the Mind of Man (1967), the catalog of two major exhibitions held in London for an International Printing Exhibition, contains much technical information on the technological development of printing and type founding from their invention to modern times, as well as notes on books important for their intellectual or aesthetic impact. Henri J. Martin and Lucien Febvre, L'Apparition du livre (1958), while heavily French in its emphasis, is a stimulating and original history of the social, economic, cultural, and technical evolution of the book trades from the manuscript period to the 19th century. Of the many modern manuals on typography, mainly reflecting the Bauhaus school, two that are representative and better than average are Jan Tschichold, Typographische Gestaltung (1935; Eng. trans., Asymmetric Typography, 1967); and Emil Ruder, Typographie (1967). The latter has text in German, French, and English, and also shows Dadaist and other modern schools. Tschichold became converted to traditional typography, and in Designing Books (1951), gives an excellent exposition of his later views. Hugh Williamson, Methods of Book Design, 2nd ed. (1966), is a full and good survey of modern book design and production methods. The Penrose Annual, published in London, has technical articles on new developments in design and processes as well as good essays on the history and aesthetics of printing. The Gutenberg Jahrbuch, emanating from Mainz, the cradle of printing, emphasizes incunabula but includes articles on later printing, publishing, and binding. Valuable information is found in Herbert Lechner, Geschichte der modernen Typographie: von der Steglitzer Werkstatt zum Kathodenstrahl (1981); Erik Lindegren, ABC of Lettering and Printing (1982); Bill Gray, Tips on Type (1983); and Words of the World: A Typographic Demonstration of World Alphabets and Languages (1983).