The Beatrice Warde memorial lecture
In slightly over a decade, beginning in 1924, there was an outpouring of books of typographical instruction, several of which are still being consulted today. Five stand out as giving advice and example for the typographer.
Francis Thibaudeau’s Manuel français de typographie moderne was published in Paris in 1924, and is the least well-known of the five, certainly in the Anglophone world, although Ruari McLean has written about one of its themes, the promotion of accurate traced layouts, what Thibaudeau called ‘le croquis-calque’. The book is an art-nouveau extravaganza, lavishly produced, and an unashamed showcase for the types and ornaments designed by Georges Auriol, in which it is set. It is stuffed not only with type specimens and ornaments, but specimen settings of books and advertisements, often as tip-ins. One of the author’s main themes is the promotion of a freewheeling layout style which he calls ‘la typographie des groupes’ and there are comparative settings of title-pages and advertisements in the classical style and this one.
It is hard to imagine a more dramatic contrast than that between this book and one which followed four years later, published in Germany: Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie, although its subtitle, Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäss Schaffende, translates as ‘a manual for contemporary designers’ which echoes Thibaudeau’s title. Printed on coated paper, in a sober black binding with rounded corners, it looks from the outside like an engineer’s handbook. Inside, it is spare and lucid, set in sans-serif with occasional use of a second colour, red, but it is comprehensively illustrated with many examples of work by Tschichold himself and designers he admired like El Lissitsky and Herbert Bayer.
Three years after this, in 1931, came Eric Gill’s Essay on typography, as redolent of its author’s national characteristics as the two previous books were of theirs. It was printed on handmade paper in Gill’s new type, Joanna, by his son-in-law René Hague, at the printing business set up by the two of them at the Gill workshop at Pigotts, and called Hague and Gill. The only illustrations are a few wood-engraved alphabets and examples of type. As one expects of Gill, it is distinctly heavy on analysis of the ills of society and light on useful design instruction, although the argument for ragged-right setting, in the chapter called ‘The Procrustean bed’ is justly well-known and influential. It is also by far the shortest book of the first three, but surprisingly it is the only one which has been continuously in print since publication – although Tschichold’s book has recently been reprinted both in facsimile, and in Ruari McLean’s long-awaited English translation.
One point which is worth remarking on is that all these three books were hand-set, and this was well into the era of mechanical typesetting. Thibaudeau was a Deberny et Peignot publicist, and the book was set by the foundry before going to be printed; given its complicated layout it is inconceivable that the Manuel could have been produced in any other way. Gill was a committed hand craft man, even though at the time of publication of the Essay on typography he was working closely with Monotype and had already designed Perpetua and Gill Sans. Joanna at that point was a foundry type: it was adapted for Monotype setting only later. But it is harder to understand why Tschichold, with his explicitly contemporary outlook and emphasis on engineering progress, did not have Die neue Typographie machine-set. Robin Kinross, in his illuminating introduction to Ruari McLean’s translation, points out that hand-setting was still commonplace among German book printers of the period. This apparent anomaly is worth bearing in mind before making glib generalisations about the introduction of hot-metal systems making hand setting redundant overnight.
The next book on my list, Stanley Morison’s First principles of typography, had actually first appeared a year before Gill’s, as an article in the seventh and last number of The Fleuron, but it was reprinted by general demand as a little pocket-sized edition in 1936. It was of course Monotype-set on both occasions. It has been translated into many languages and reissued several times in English. Like Gill’s Essay, and as its title suggests, it confines itself to general statements of principle, and gives very little in the way of guidance by example.
The last book on my list appeared eleven years after the first, in 1935, and is also by Jan Tschichold. Typographische Gestaltung was published in Basel after Tchichold’s enforced move to Switzerland. It too has been translated by Ruari McLean, under the title Asymmetric typography, an edition sponsored by the Toronto trade setting and design company Cooper and Beatty, and published here by Faber. Unlike the University of California Press edition of his Die neue Typographie translation, this publication makes no attempt to echo the typography of the original, and indeed the text differs from it occasionally, as we shall see.
Tschichold and Thibaudeau are honourable exceptions, in that they describe both book and advertising design: such instruction as Morison and Gill do offer is almost exclusively about the design of books. And this has been the area of typographical design by far most often discussed by their successors. But as a printer who has earned his crust for many years combining books with jobbing printing, I would like to give some attention to the relatively humble business of designing ephemera.
It is worth mentioning at this point that Beatrice Warde, in whose memory this lecture is named, was a champion of the small printing workshop, and its mainstay, jobbing printing. In The Monotype Recorder of Summer 1954, almost exactly fifty years ago, she devoted the whole number to my father’s work at the Rampant Lions Press, prefaced with an essay which she called ‘The recrudescence of the small printer’. She traced the origin of the trade term ‘job’ to a piece of printing which ‘could be worked off complete on a single sheet or section of a sheet’, and which did not need the elaborate teamwork demanded by book printing. ‘The short copy of a job could be entrusted to one compositor, a specialist who in time came to be known as an “art comp”, and not without reason. Such men came as near as any member of the printing trade has ever come to qualifying for the title of artist.’
One of the few grand printers who has gone on record in favour of job work was Daniel Berkeley Updike, who was active from the last years of the nineteenth century until his death in 1941. Updike was responsible for many handsome books, but his Merrymount Press was a general printing business which relied on day-to-day jobbing for much of its turnover. He was both practical and idealistic in his championship of this kind of work. Practical when he wrote, ‘what a Press needs and wants is work, and there is no reason to appear condescending in accepting it. Over and over we have said that all kinds of work are done here, and that no piece of printing, however small, is neglected – much less despised.’ Idealistic when he wrote of the process of design, ‘If this preliminary work is conscientiously done, that which results from it will be good, because so well adapted for its purpose as to appear inevitable. The result will give the same sense of satisfaction that a well-made glove or a good tennis racket produces. These principles apply to everything that is printed: to an edition of Aristotle, to a choral book for a cathedral, to the circular for a pottery or a sale of handkerchiefs, to the label for a pot of jam.’
One has to observe here that this is true only in the most general way: the design procedures in the various cases are very different. The most striking characteristic of jobbing printing is that it is done for a specific purpose: it may be ephemeral, but it serves an immediate need. Editions of Aristotle are designed for a notional reader who may be reading for pleasure or studying for an exam, but jam labels need to fit the pot, tell you the ingredients, and be alluring enough to tempt you to buy.
In Updike’s essay ‘On the planning of printing’, which also appeared first in the second number of The Fleuron, and was reprinted in his collection In the day’s work, published by Harvard University Press in the same year, 1924, much of what he writes relates to books, but he does talk about jobbing printing. Indeed, he tells a story about it which epitomises his view of the educative as well as practical benefits of good design in general.
‘I remember once being obliged to print, for a personage who dealt in muffins, a circular which was to show their excellence; and to this end he showed me an announcement printed in coloured ink from horrid types, on brown note-paper, with a “hemstitched” perforated edge, as a model for what was to be done. [I must say, this sounds as if it could come from any number of modern design studios.] This circular he had obtained from the establishment of a milliner. His mind worked in this way: as an expensive hat was advertised by a circular adorned with perforations, and this hat cost one hundred times more than a muffin, a circular adapted for the hat must be many times better than the ordinary method of muffin advertising! I explained that there was a suitable and even ideal way of advertising muffins as well as hats, and that to advertise a muffin as one would a hat might very likely mislead the public about its digestibility! We ended by making an advertisement which I thought pretty, and he said was extremely so, and it sold the muffins! [Updike’s italics]’
On the design of jobbing, Updike wrote:
‘For ephemeral printing – circulars, prospectuses, etc – we have to follow the principles laid down in planning books, except that we may treat the printing more fancifully and lightly. There, more than ever, we can hear the voice of the work speaking to us, if we are willing to listen. … One can only plan successfully these smaller pieces of work by considering minutely what they are meant to accomplish. Let us take a menu. What questions should be uppermost in one’s mind in planning that? The first that would occur to me would be the hour of the meal and where it was to be served. Was it to be day or night? If by day, by artificial light or not? The colour of the card and the size of type would be somewhat dependent on this. Was there any particular scheme of colour in the decorations of the table? Because my menu must either match or at least not be discordant with it. Was it to be a big table with ample room for each guest, or a small one. Was the menu to be laid on a napkin or to stand upright? That would dictate my choice of size; for a menu is an incident, not a feature, at a dinner, and should not be so large as to be in the way of laid down, nor so big as to knock over glasses and fall into one’s plate if it is to stand.’
However geeky this may sound, I have been to many Double Crown Club dinners where distinguished designers of the Club’s menus could well have paid it more attention. Nevertheless, it gives no guidance on the typography of the menu. Nowhere does Updike give more than very generalised criteria for what constitutes good design, as distinguished from good production values.
There is one point on which I vehemently disagree with Updike. He recommends the planning of printing – a phrase which can be taken as including typography in this context – as taking place ‘in a quiet room (from which examples of other people’s work are banished)’. I cannot overestimate the importance of the role of models, and books of instruction, in the design process, even if eventually they can be left behind.
While Francis Thibaudeau’s attitude to jobbing design was ineffably of its time – and in truth of a time rather earlier than that in which he was writing – Tschichold’s was explicitly a blueprint for the future. He attended to the seemingly mundane matters of letterheadings (and even the layout of the typed letters themselves), of postcards and envelopes. Die neue Typographie is full of precise instructions for the design of invitations and press advertisements. Even the rather more relaxed Typographische Gestaltung has specific examples, including an interesting comparison of two styles of exhibition card. Ruari McLean’s version reproduces the illustration but does not translate its caption, so I’ll attempt to translate it myself:
‘What the top example shows is how a disparate collection of instructions is organised under the New Typography rules. The lower example shows the same message set freely. [He might have pointed out also that the text has been slightly rewritten to read as continuous prose.] In both pieces, the heading is emphasised not by a larger size of type but a heavier weight.’
What Tschichold tantalizingly doesn’t say is which he prefers, but I will confess I prefer the lower example. Some years ago I wrote an essay which tried to classify design styles into two groups, the analytic and the synthetic. Analytic styles emphasise differences with varied type styles: the Victorian playbill is the extreme example. Synthetic design aims for a unified appearance and leaves the readers to select what they need from it. Tschichold’s two examples offer a perfect schematised contrast of the two approaches.
Although some of the pages of Typographische Gestaltung are printed in colour on tinted and textured papers, the result is still low-key. An insistent voice in one’s ear keeps urging, in the words of Harold Curwen, ‘Put the spirit of joy in your work’. This was the title of a leaflet put out by the Curwen Press in 1921, and it was the inspiration of a lot of Curwen’s jobbing printing, and has been the aim of my father and me at the Rampant Lions Press. The spirit of joy was rather lacking in Tschichold’s two books of instruction, although much of his work for Penguin, especially in the King Penguins, conveyed it.
Up to now I have been talking about mostly rather upper-echelon sorts of design, but I do not want to ignore more day-to-day ephemera. Over the years I have collected several boxes of pieces of work which I have liked and admired, but have neglected the tickets for theatres and concerts, and the various forms of transport which get you to and from them. Fortunately I have a habit, which drives my family wild, of using these things as bookmarks, and leaving them behind in the books, so I have been able to sift through the library and amass a small survey of this genre of work going back forty years or so. In addition, in May and June this year I did a long drive down through eastern Europe, and picked up a number of examples of Balkan ephemera. These show both the creeping uniformity of computer-printed ticketing and some splendidly individualistic, and I hope not too anachronistic, departures from it.
In conclusion, I would like to make a claim for diversity in jobbing printing. The examples you have seen range from the excellent to the pretty cruddy, but while I would welcome better book design at the paperback level – bring back Edward Young, Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller of Penguin – I would not want to live in a world of exclusively good design at the bus-ticket level. Canons of typography have a way of imposing solutions and limiting choices. The texture of daily living is greatly enriched by the wayward and the individual, and by the response of untutored designers to the problems they are set.
Sebastian Carter is a printer, designer and writer on typography. He is the author of Twentieth century type designers, and one third of the forthcoming History of the Monotype Corporation. Sebastian was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and worked for Ruari McLean and the Trianon Press in Paris before joining the Rampant Lions Press in Cambridge, which he now runs. He still prints by letterpress from hand-set type, but is making his first faltering steps in QuarkXPress.