Free Lettering Template Search! Enter Your Topic Below:

Modern Lettering in BOOK PRODUCTION "PART-1"

BY RUARI McLEAN

If you take three sheets of paper and a line of poetry, and type it out on the first sheet, write it on the second and print it in Baskerville type on the third, you will have some evidence on which to start thinking about the best form for the visual expression of words.

The typewritten line is legible, but negative or dead in feeling; the hand-written line may or may not be legible but will introduce the personality of the person who wrote it out, possibly to an unwelcome degree for other readers; the printed line is clearly legible and in addition has some feeling: but not to a degree likely to become annoying if it has to be read often.

For the text of a book intended to be read, therefore, a suitable type face is pre­ferable to both typewriting and handwriting. Legibility is not enough: a certain degree of feeling is required in addition. There is no lack, in the printing trade today, of good letters, in the form of types faces, for composing words; and if the letters and words are set and arranged on the page in the right way to make the book fit for its purpose, the page of the book may be as beautiful as the perfectly plain and functional shape of a cup can be beautiful.

But civilized people want to decorate their cups, and also their books. The most natural and appropriate way to decorate a book is to start playing with the lettering; and if the book is printed, and therefore meant to be read by numbers of different people, elaboration of the text itself may interfere with its purpose of communica­tion. The preliminary pages, chapter headings, initial letters and the binding, how­ever, lend themselves readily to embellishment.

So, returning to the starting point, we take a pen or pencil in our hand. Type for reading, lettering for embellishment. We think again about finding a form for the visual expression of words, and immediately make a startling discovery.

Beauty in lettering has nothing to do with the meaning of the words lettered. Lettering and calligraphy are in fact abstract arts: the traits and swirls of Bickham or Reynolds Stone are equally fair, whether the name written is Amaranth or B. Bloggs; the famous Edward Johnston letter to Fred Phillips which begins with what look like three great P's (but are not) is visually, not verbally, exciting; and a Persian manuscript moves a person who cannot read a word of Persian. Indeed, there need not even be any words: a page merely of A's and B's can be entrancing. It is the same with a drawing: the subject matter is irrelevant. Rodin, in line and cobalt wash, portrays lovers, and Steinberg, a row of Manhattan dustbins; what matters is the artist's nervous line; what moves us is something abstract, formal and, in the last resort, inexplicable.

To a very limited extent, lettering may help to express a feeling or mood that is in harmony with the meaning of the words. On a package, or a book-jacket, letter­ing should help to make the article look like what it is, as well as stating what it is; on a book-page the letters may have an ecclesiastical air, or be delicate, or chunky; they may look traditional, or avant-garde. All that has nothing to do with their essential virtues as lettering. Lettering cannot express grief, or hope: that is the province of words or drawing. When decoration relevant to the subject is introduced into lettering, when rope is coiled to form the words "Ship Ahoy" or branches writhe into " Our Trees" or there is a heavy snowfall on the serifs, that is illustration, not calligraphy. The loop and lift of a flourished letter expresses nothing that has anything to do with the words involved. What it does express is different; perhaps:

"I too will something make And joy in the making"

What, anyway, does a flower express? The joy and pride of the calligrapher with a pen in his hand is that he can raise a completely new species of flowers then and there, he can trace beauty out of his head, he can create.

It may not be possible to analyse the appeal that lettering makes to human beings— but it is a deep-seated appeal, that goes back very far.

The earliest surviving letters which Western Man endowed with beauty are the stone-carved capital Roman letters of which those on the Trajan Column are the best known. (Although the word "calligraphy" is Greek, the best surviving Greek lettering consists of straight-line symbols without the subtlety and finesse of the later Roman letters: if there was true Greek calligraphy it was made on materials that have perished.) Since then, in every age, the calligrapher and letterer have worked chiefly on skins and paper. It is interesting to look at the pages of Jan Tschichold's Schatzkammer der Schreibkunst (perhaps the best of the three or four excellent anthologies of the art of writing and lettering which have appeared lately): until one does look at such a book one may not realize how much of the marvellous calligraphy of the past still survives—just as, until one visits a particular collection, one tends not to realize how many marvellous statuettes, or chased helmets, or exquisitely painted fans have survived and are tucked away here and there throughout the hoarding world. In this age of destruc­tion, it is wise to remember that even though every human being and every work of art is unique, yet the earth can afford its losses. What is important is the making.

The letters of our alphabet have many different forms and shapes, but the accepted norm consists in the large and small letters of the kind known to printers as "Roman", of which the type that these words are set in (Aldine Bembo) is a good example. It is fittingly called "Roman" because the shapes of the capitals are exactly those evolved by the Romans for their stone-carved inscriptions about two thousand years ago. No one has since improved on the basic shapes then perfected.

No small letters were cut by the Romans on their stone memorials, and the shapes we use are those (developed out of the eighth-century Carolingian models) in which humanistic manuscripts were written in Italy at the time of the invention of printing five hundred years ago. The shapes of the small letters are less firmly canonized than the capitals; and there is an alternative set, known as "Italics", derived from a faster, more condensed kind of writing. Although some of the letters in the two alphabets are identical, others are quite different. They may be mixed quite legitimately by calligraphers, but not by printers.

These shapes of large and small letters are the heritage we have received to play with, the basic units of both printing and lettering today: the departure point.

The distance to which one can depart—in other words, the degree to which lettering needs to be legible—depends entirely on its purpose. While considering this, it is well to remember that legibility depends not so much on familiarity (for one can learn a language one does not know) as on the shape of each individual letter and its being clearly distinguishable from its fellows. Each letter has in fact its own essential nature. It is very hard to say how or why, or where the line is drawn: but some departures from a letter's basic shape look far and fantastic, yet the letter is clearly identifiable; other variations seem slight, yet it is no longer that letter. In the same way, a Yorkshireman or a Scotsman may speak English with a strong accent and be—probably—understood; a foreigner can make a very slight mispronunciation and be utterly unintelligible.

How far one can go from a letter without losing sight of it can never be laid down or described, it can only be felt. Such feeling comes from the study of and care for the history of lettering. For example, see Imre Reiner's book Grajika (from which an example is shown on page 60). Reiner is an original artist of great power and one of the most notable of living type designers, with Corvinus and Reiner-Script among his achievements. In Grajika he shows his pen leading him into some most charming, yet far-fetched and fantastic, calligraphic inventions. Yet he is steeped in the history of typography, and his work has not lost sight of its departure point.

Perhaps the most inventive letterer working in England today is Hans Tisdall, once a pupil of Anna Simons, herself a pupil of Johnston. Examples of his work are on pages 75, 76 and 77. Nearly all his lettering is on book-jackets, but in this narrow field he shows an unfailing fertility. He is also a painter, but his jackets are always calligraphic: if illustration is introduced (as for example in a jacket that many will remember, for Hemingway's The Old Man of the Sea) it is so formalized as to become almost an extension of the lettering.

It is a pity that Tisdall has never designed a type face or lettered a title-page.

In contrast is the work of Berthold Wolpe (see pages 65, 76, 77 and 80), once a pupil and colleague of Rudolf Koch and the designer of Albertus and Hyperion types. He too works mostly on book-jackets. He does not go so far in decorative invention as Reiner or Tisdall, but aims at maximum legibility, and can draw plain letters with more character and beauty than any letterer living.

The work shown in this book has with very few exceptions been executed since 1945. The period covered has been, in the world of printing and book production, beset with abnormal difficulties. The six years of global war preceding it meant six years' gap in the supply of apprentices to the printing trade and, in the experience of many book designers and calligraphers, six years of closed and bombed art galleries and libraries, and six years' decline in printing standards. The years since the end of the war have seen the costs of printing and materials, especially paper, soar to many times their pre-war level. Publishers have been fighting to survive; economy has been the watchword and few indeed have dared to produce 'fine' books.

But if the times have not been favourable that is not the only reason. In English book production, at least, there is a definite lack of invention, a deadly caution. And this is probably due more to timidity in designers than in publishers. There are not a few designers today who, because they cannot devote enough time to practise the discipline of lettering, and cannot therefore draw a perfect Trajan capital letter, are shy of playing with lettering at all.

Classic perfection represents a permanent need of human beings, and especially so in lettering. Although the Trajan capitals were perfected two thousand years ago, variations are constantly being sought for and achieved. Eric Gill's Perpetua, Berthold Wolpe's Albertus, Hermann Zapf's Sistina, Jan van Krimpen's Romanée and Max Caflisch's Columna are all masterpieces of lettering drawn for type-reproduction in this vein. But formal lettering, in which the proportions and perfection of the Roman capitals parade like Puritans in the background, is not the only sort there is. There are other needs, other kinds of vision, which have their expression in calligraphy as in other arts. Roughness and dash, unevenness and informality can also be virtues. Look, for example, at the note-book page of scribbling (but it is not scribbling) by F. H. Ernst Schneidler reproduced in Typographica No. 1, and at the same designer's types Legenda and Graphik; at Johannes Boehland's Balzac, at Ashley Havinden's Ashley Script, and at Imre Reiner's Reiner Script and his rich weavings of line-block lettering. These indeed are the qualities that most need exploring at the present day; and the results will enrich book-design, which badly needs fresh ideas.

Lettering is not only, or even essentially, a matter of patience and long practice. The main tradition of Western lettering and calligraphy is based on that control that comes only from practice, but not the practice of a life-time. Originality and invention are more greatly to be desired than the painstaking ability to copy which too often passes for good lettering. Nearly every talent, and especially that of letter­ing, may be improved by polishing: but without the talent, skill is nothing; and with it, exciting work can be turned out even at quite low levels of skill.

Rough and informal lettering of intrinsic virtue cannot, however, be achieved by just anybody, and not even by great artists in other fields, like Picasso and Matisse; as is proved by the current vogue of book-production in France, whereby type is dispensed with and the author or artist writes the text in his own hand, complete with crossings-out, mis-spellings and blots of ink. It may be art and it may be printing, but it is certainly not calligraphy.

ANTHONY GARDNER. Two bindings designed and executed by Anthony Gardner for H.M. Ministry of Works for souvenir books presented to the French President and Madam Auriol on the Occasion of their state visit to England

O. MENHART. Bookplate (actual size)

MARK F. SEVERIN. Bookplate engraved on Copper (actual size)

Herbrt post. Binding and book-jacket for Franz

MILNER GRAY. Binding for a Com- memoration Album, executed by Sangorski & Sutcliffe

NORMAN BALL. Writing in black on cream leather binding

HERBERT POST. Binding and book-jacket for Franz Steiner, Wiesbaden

debergny & peignot, Paris. Cover of type-specimen booklet.

(Original in many colours)

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here...