Breaking News from the Sixteenth Century: Typography Takes Off

by Alastair Johnston

Stan Knight, Historical Types (From Gutenberg to Ashendene), Oak Knoll Press, 2012, 104 pp., hardback in dust-jacket, $39.95

Historical Types is based on a smart concept: an annotated picture book of enlargements of typefaces to show how they really look. After all, type is that tiny code we look at without really seeing it: it gives meaning to thoughts, but we rarely give it a thought.

Obviously this approach -- enlarged images of letterforms with commentary -- has been a key part of modern typographic education. A lantern slide show by Emery Walker in 1888, given to the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in London, where he projected blown-up images of Jenson, Ratdolt and Rubeus pages, inspired William Morris to start his own press. Walker, a commercial photo-engraver, went into partnership with T J Cobden-Sanderson to start the celebrated Doves Press after Morris' death. Bruce Rogers, who also knew Walker, had photo-enlargements of the Jenson pages made to draw his Centaur type.

As a teacher I rely on large projected letterform details to explain their subtleties. I often use images from a wonderful article, "Photographic enlargements of type forms" by Philip Gaskell, that was published in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society, no 7, 1972 (and is missing from Knight's bibliography). Gaskell's photos, which were printed 5 times actual size, have proven enormously useful in discussing type design and its evolution and are a significant precursor to what Knight has done.

Two gros romain romans attributed to Claude Garamont, from Gaskell's article in Journal of the PHS, 1971. The top type, from 1530, has since been identified by Dr Vervliet as the work of Maître Constantin (from Virgil, Opera, Paris: Robert Estienne, 1532 [R115]); the lower type, from 1549 (as seen in Dionysius Halicarnassus, Scripta Omnia, Frankfurt: Andrea Wechel's heirs, 1586) is by Garamont [R118]

However didactic his aim, Knight has not achieved the same compression and intensity that Gaskell did (in 11 pages!), perhaps because his book is aimed halfway between scholars or students and a general audience. But Knight has provided accurate information on these typefaces. This may sound odd, given that so much has been written over the last five centuries about the legacy of Gutenberg, Fust & Schoeffer, Jenson, and so on.

Faustus and Chauffeur (dubious attribution)

But we have discovered a lot of it is speculative or inaccurate and we can no longer rely on Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde and D B Updike for facts about the design of type. In discussing Ratdolt's work, Knight cites studies from 2009 and 2011 (showing how type scholarship is constantly evolving). Fortunately we have James Mosley, who teaches at Reading, Charlottesville (Virginia) & London Universities, formerly the Librarian of Saint Bride's in London, as a guiding light in the search for typographic truth. Mosley has been blogging about such matters since 2006. His "typefoundry" blog has been a great resource for Knight, particularly in the untangling of Jannon versus Garamond, the actual spelling of Garamont's name, and other details.

Many documents have appeared to further the historical discussion, from the series of Type Specimen Facsimiles (under the editorship of John Dreyfus from 1963 onward), to the exemplary Enschedé (1993) & Plantin-Moretus (2004) facsimiles edited by John Lane. Some of the older facsimile works could be revisited with the new approach heralded by Knight, for example the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen sheet which was reproduced in 1920 by Gustav Mori in collotype. That sheet was the first specimen broadside to clearly identify Garamond and Granjon as cutters of their types and, as it was printed from newly cast type, was the best possible source for modern interpretations: Adobe Garamond by Robert Slimbach (among others) was drawn from it.

But for most of the twentieth century Garamond revivals (and there have been roughly a zillion of them) were based on the wrong type: a poor imitation cut by Jean Jannon in the French province of Sedan in the 1620s. This typographic Lady Gaga, a tragi-comic homage to classic typefaces, should have been left in the dustbin of history but accidentally gained an important place in the story of type development, so Knight has included it. Also included is a text debunking many of the myths about Jannon and Garamond (thanks to Mosley's research). One of the most fanciful stories has Cardinal Richelieu's troops looting Jannon's types to bring them back to the Imprimerie nationale in Paris. This yarn was first spun by Beatrice Warde in 1926 and picked up by Warren Chappell in his Short History of the Printed Word. As late as 1999 Canadian poet Robert Boringhurst was embroidering the fable in his edition of Chappell's book (p. 148), saying that after Richelieu’s armies seized Jannon’s type they felt bad about it so they reimbursed him for them!

As technology improves it greatly assists us in seeing what we are looking at (though collotype mentioned above is hard to beat). Up to now many books on type have used small illustrations of large pages shrunk down, printed from line blocks. In the end you cannot see any details. So the next step is to do more books of this kind that show, as closely as possible, the impression and the texture of the paper, and more specialized books. Knight's previous book was Historical Scripts (also from Oak Knoll) with a similar hyper-visual approach to the history of calligraphy.

Hendrik Vervliet's recent three volumes on the Paleotypography of the French Renaissance have illustrations from Xerox copies and photostats. [Aside: I published Vervliet's monograph on Robert Granjon: Cyrillic & Oriental Typography in Rome at the End of the Sixteenth Century in 1979. We relied on Velox photostats from the Vatican for illustrations, which were so poor, some were even out of focus, but how do you tell the Vatican their reproductive services are lacking?] Vervliet's images (many composites to show full character sets) were painstakingly assembled over decades and often Xerox was the only service available. It would be a useful task for someone to give the blow-up treatment (shot in high resolution with raking light to show the impression, as well as the paper surface) to his studies (now that we have the key data assembled), and then move into the following centuries. 

Garamont's gros romain roman [R118] from the 1599 Le Bé-Moretus specimen shown in Vervliet, French Renaissance Printing Types, 2010, p. 193

Nevertheless Vervliet's work is the major contribution to the field in the last half century. So it's great to see late-breaking news from the sixteenth century when Knight reproduces a page of revolutionary new type from Henri Estienne (previously attributed to Garamond [see top illustration]) and, thanks to Vervliet, we now have to acknowledge the shadowy Maître Constantin for this massive step-forward in the Aldine style which revolutionized roman letterforms across Europe.

Claude Garamont's gros romain roman as seen in Les Vies des hommes illustres, Paris: Vascosan, 1559, shown in Knight (p. 41)

I myself have done a little work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but that indicated to me how much more needs to be done. Knight himself admits this is just a start: "Some worthy type designers like Pierre Haultin, Hendrik van den Keere, and Antoine Augereau are missing. But as well as the more famous names of Gutenberg, Granjon, and Bodoni, I have been able to include some lesser-known designers like Erhard Ratdolt, Simon de Colines, Johann Fleischman, and Alexander Phemister."

While to me there seem to be some close calls on who got omitted versus who got in, I think the general reader will enjoy the familiar mixed with the more exotic. The reader may balk at the name Miklós Tótfalusi Kis and be unaware that they have been lôôking at his type and versions of it all their lives.

I am sorry there is such a sadly inevitable bias towards the private press movement at the end of this study. There is certainly enough about William Morris, Cobden-Sanderson and St John Hornby out there in bibliomundo. A page on their cutter Edward Prince could have covered all of them (and freed up two pages). The Ashendene Subiaco type is a joke, or at best a footnote to the Sweynheym & Pannartz page; Eric Gill's Golden Cockerel type would have made a nicer terminus to the work. Otherwise, moving from Fournier to Bodoni is a big leap without including both Bodoni's early types that were imitation Fournier and the truly revolutionary types of Firmin Didot (which were cut by Pierre Wafflard). There is no easily accessible text in English which covers these most important steps forward in type design. William Martin (1757–1830) and Vincent Figgins (1766–1844) would have been solid inclusions and, despite most modern typographers' disdain for the excesses of the Victorian period, it cannot be ignored, but Phemister is the sole representative. (However, he and 26 other nineteenth-century type-cutters are covered in William Loy's book Nineteenth-century American Designers & Engravers of Type [Oak Knoll Press, 2009].)

In compressing info Knight has mixed up the legacy of Caslon: Mrs Elizabeth Caslon did not start the H W Caslon Foundry, that was 30 years later, and I really don't agree with using italic parentheses! For the most part the photos are excellent and give us true insight into the intricacies of these typefaces.

For all of its superficial appearance as a "coffee-table" book on printing types with pretty pictures, Knight's work is a solid piece of scholarship and corrects a lot of misconceptions found in "standard" texts that give a resumé of the development of printing types.
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The Art of 18th Century Handwriting

The Peter A. Wick Collection of rare writing manuals and calligraphy books celebrates a dying form of visual art.

by Stephen J. Gertz

Title Page.

TORIO DE LA RIVA Y HERRERO, Torcuato. Arte de escribir
por reglas y con muestras, segun la doctrina de los mejores
autores antiguos y modernos...
Madrid: [La Viuda de Don Joaquin Ibarra], 1802.
Palau 334356. Brunet V, 885. Graesse VII, 174.

When New York City's P.S.2 third-grade teacher Mrs. Stallone patrolled the aisles during penmanship classwork in 1960 we all sat in abject fear of the martinet with piercing eyes and tight, red hair bun.  She was a stern mistress of cursive script and the scourge of poor hand-writers. Her mandate: to transition us from block-lettering to graceful flowing lines and turn  illegible doodles into legible writing.

"Round, curve, and glide, Mr. Gertz!" she despaired of me. And, alas, to this day, an hour after I've hand-written something, I can't decipher what I wrote.

Proper position for holding stylus.

SANTIAGO Y PALOMARES, Francisco Javier de. Arte nueva
de escribir, inventada por el insigne maestro Pedro Diaz Morante...
Madrid: [En la Imprenta de D. Antonio de Sancha], 1776.
Palau 299945. Berlin 5248. Bonacini 1353.

Correct posture for writing.

ROSSIGNOL, Louis. L'art d'écrire.
Paris: [Chez la Veuve de Pierre Fessard, ca. 1775].
Cf. Bonacini 1567. Berlin 5136. Jessen 2430.

Prior to the dominance of keyboard-based writing, clear, legible cursive penmanship was a necessary skill to communicate. Beyond legibility, however, an artful hand demonstrated good breeding and a cultivated and civilized mind. You were how you wrote as much as what you wrote.

And so as the literacy rate increased in the late seventeenth -through the eighteenth and nineteenth  centuries so did the need for writing manuals for those with lofty goals seeking instruction.

Many of the instructionals carried titles that proclaimed penmanship as an art form - Lucas' Arte de escrevir (1608), L'art d'escrirer par Alais (1698), Araujo's Nova arte de escrever (1794), Arte nuevo de escribir por preceptos geometricos y reglas mathematicas (1719), Rossignol's L'art d'écrire (1775), Torio's Arte de escibir...(1803) are examples - and so it was. Function developed into art form, an evolution of aesthetics.

"S" with calligraphic border.

SCHWANDNER, Johann Georg von. 
Disertatio epistolaris de calligraphiae
nomenclationem, cultu, praæstantia, utilitate.
Viennæ [Ex typographeo Kaliwodiano], 1756.
Bonacini 1663. Berlin 4908. Graesse VIII, 468.

Calligraphy is the art of beautiful handwriting taken to its logical extreme, and is found in all developed cultures. After the Roman Empire fell, each of its former regions in the West evolved their own handwriting standards, generally those of an area's primary monastery, the sites to which writing had retreated along with scholarship, and was preserved, essentially, for the copying of religious manuscripts, particularly the Bible. Most scripts were of a sacred nature, pretty yet near unreadable.

Calligraphic abbreviated names.

OLOD, Luis de. Tratado del origen, y arte de escribir bien.Gerona [En la Imprenta de Narciso Oliva..., ca. post-1768].
Bonacini 1310. Berlin 5247. Palau 201092.

The rise of the Carolingian Empire in Europe during the Dark Ages led to a new, standardized calligraphy. During the eleventh century, Carolingian script developed into Gothic ("blackletter," aka the script that makes readers want to scream for mercy), and in the fifteenth century, Gothic calligraphy was adapted by Gutenberg to become the first movable typeface.

Engraved portrait head of Frederik III
atop calligraphic body and horse.

Lex Regia, Det Er: Den Souveraine Konge-Lov...
København 1709.
Bibliotheca Danica II, 739. Graeese IV, 192.

But type cannot replicate what an artful individual's hand can create, nor was type practical for everyday, pre-keyboard writing. A graceful and elegant handwriting style still spoke to the character of the person wielding the stylus, and, until the advent of the ball-point pen, writing instruments allowed for artful variations in  the thinness and thickness of each stroke. Attractive, visually  impressive handwriting, once a routine aspect of one's education and cultivation, has ebbed to its present status as an arts & craft activity.

Facing archers.

TENSINI, Agostino. La uera regola dello scriuere vtile à giouani.
Bassano: [Remondini, ca. 1790].
Cf. Bonacini 1860. Jammes 30. Ekström, p. 26.

For several decades Peter A. Wick (1920 - 2004) amassed a collection of books focusing exclusively old and rare writing, calligraphy, and pictorial alphabet books, as well as early studies and histories of the development of writing.

Calligraphic initial.

ALBRECHT, Johann Christoph. Vollkkommene
Gründ- und Regulmässige Anweisung...
Nürnberg: {In Verlegung Joh: And: Endterischer Handlung, 1776].
Bonacini 16. Berlin 4921

The Wick Library of writing and calligraphy was acquired by old and rare art book specialist Ars Libri Ltd of Boston, which placed the majority of the Wick volumes with the Library of Congress in September of 2010. Its current Catalogue 155 features of portion of the Wick Collection not adopted for foster care by an institution.

"The most important work on calligraphy...printed in Holland."

VELDE, Jan van den. Spieghel der schrijfkonste
in den welken ghesien worden veelderhande gheschriften
met hare fondementen ende oderrichtinghe wtghegeven.
Amsterdam: [bÿ Willem Iansz, ca. 1609].
Bonacini 1931. Berlin 5010-12.

The collection is another example of a book collector staking out a subject heretofore unexamined, staying sharply focused, building and, in the end, bequeathing a singular and important research library that without the collector's interest would not have existed.

If Mrs. Stallone, long since deceased, is trapped in the hell that we third-graders cruelly consigned her to, one look at these books will cast her immediately into Heaven. They certainly make me ashamed of my chicken-scratches.

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The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers, and Teachers of Handwriting (IAMPETH), over 500-members strong, has an excellent website, and has scanned and mounted the texts to many old and rare handwriting and penmanship books from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries here.

Wikipedia feaures an excellent primer about calligraphy from around the world.

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All images courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd, with our thanks.
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The First Personality in the History of Engraving

An anonymous artist and engraver from the early 15th century is conceivably the first major master in the history of printmaking.    

by Linda Hedrick

The Cardmaker
From L'Encyclopedie by Diderot et d'Alembert, Paris, 1751

The Meister der Spielkarten, or The Master of the Playing Cards is known only through the 106 engravings that have been attributed to him, including the set of playing cards that he is named for.  The term “master” is reserved for someone who has completed an apprenticeship and ran his own workshop, teaching apprentices.  His presumed students are also unknown but have similar names, such as The Master of the Nuremberg Passion, The Master of 1446, and The Master of the Banderoles.

9 of Beasts of Prey.
Central climbing bear also appears in a copy
of the Gutenberg Bible.
Multiple-plate card, each animal is on a separate
copper plate, several which are reused elsewhere.

The first woodcuts on paper were playing cards.  Prior to this playing cards were hand-colored and very expensive.  A way was needed to mass produce them and make them affordable to more people, as playing cards caught on quickly.  While French and Italian manuscripts in the middle 15th century mention woodblocks made for printing playing cards, a German manuscript from 1402 specifically mentions "kartenmahler" (card painter) or "kartenmacher" (card maker), according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.  

The Queen of Wild Men
Courtesy of the Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden, Germany

There was a distinction in the process of woodcuts between the designer who made the drawings and the artisan who cut the drawings in wood. Since engravers came from professional craftsmen, goldsmiths and armor makers who were designers themselves, this process could be accomplished by one person instead of two, making control of the entire process achievable.

Five of Flowers
Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Engraving was a more expensive process than woodcuts, and the resulting playing cards must have been unique.  The Master of the Playing Cards appears to have been trained as an artist rather than a goldsmith. His prints show images in three dimensions, shaded by parallel lines.   The fact that these cards were engraved, and therefore more expensive, suggests they were made for players of some financial means.

The Queen of Stags
Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

His cards have compositional elements that also occur in the Giant Bible of Mainz and the copy of the Gutenberg Bible in the Princeton Library.  Although there have been attempts to identify him as Gutenberg, it can only be postulated that Gutenberg knew of The Master of the Playing Cards and possibly worked with him.  The common design elements of both can be attributed to a design book for artists that may have been popular at the time.

Three of Birds

Efforts to positively identify The Master of the Playing Cards have not been accepted.  His style resembles paintings from southwestern Germany and Switzerland of his time period.  He also uses depictions of the alpine cyclamen, also from that area.  Some of the cards look to be composed of different plates that must have been held together in some sort of frame when printed.  This is another allusion to Gutenberg’s moveable type, which either shows collaboration or exposure to the same idea. Since copies of his suit symbols appear in datable manuscripts, the cards have been dated to circa 1440.

The Queen of Flowers
Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Some cards exist in two different states, and some in different versions. There are no numbers on the cards and the pips, or symbols, are different, which indicates that playing must have been difficult, especially quick playing.  Typical of northern European cards at that time, the cards have five suits:  beasts of prey, birds, deer, flowers, and wild men.  It is not know what card games were likely to have been played with these cards.

The King of Wild Men

The largest collection of the cards, forty of them, is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; fourteen more are in the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden.  It is rare that works by The Master of the Playing Cards come on the market.  In September of 2006, in London, an impression of the "Queen of Flowers" was auctioned by Christie’s for $450,000.

A Poet Reading
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

The Master of the Playing Cards also produced other works, mostly religious.  They are rather large for early engravings.  These were most likely intended as insertions to illustrate devotional books.  Most of his designs survive in copies by other  printmakers, and, of course, there are no doubt works that didn’t survive at all.  It is unknown but possible that he produced paintings, but nothing that exists of that era has ever been acceptably attributed to him.

The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Although he, himself, remains unknown, his work places him in the forefront of the art of engraving, and attests to his artistry and skill.  The Master of the Playing Cards stands as the most accomplished and influential member of the first generation of engravers.

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All images, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy of Wikipedia.

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How to Rake Up 500 Yr. Old Leaves, or Taking a Page From History

by Cokie Anderson

The Gutenberg Bible owned by the Library of Congress

Why bother turning over a new leaf when you can turn over an old one--a very old one--build a collection and save money at the same time?

Some of the most desirable antiquarian books to collect are incunabula, that is, books printed before 1501.

Incunabulum, the singular form of the word, literally means "cradle" in Latin, and these books are the babies born in the earliest days of printing. The most famous, by far, is the Gutenberg Bible, generally recognized as the first substantial book printed with movable type in Western Europe. It was produced in Mainz, Germany by Johannes Gutenberg circa 1455.

There are 48 known copies of the Gutenberg Bible (a number imperfect, some comprising one volume of two, and a few of those imperfect). All but three are in institutional collections. The last substantially complete copy at auction sold in 1978 for $2,000,000, and the Doheny copy of volume one, consisting of 324 leaves of the Old Testament only, sold for a hammer price of $4,900,000 in 1987 .

The opening of the Gutenberg Bible at Harry Ransom Center*

The British Library copy on paper...

While complete copies are very rare, single leaves from Gutenberg Bibles appear on the market with some regularity. Volumes that survived the centuries but lost some pages along the way have been broken up by dealers and collectors for sale as individual leaves. These still fetch in the neighborhood of $45,000--no bargain, but a long way from the millions a complete copy would command.

...and the copy on vellum. Which do you like best?

Other books to printed soon after the advent of movable type were various histories, the letters of St. Jerome (translator of the Vulgate Bible), Jacobus de Voragine's medieval bestseller The Golden Legend (an imaginative account of the lives of the saints), and other Bibles--lots and lots of Bibles. A number of such leaves are available on the market, many for under $500 and some for less than $100. It's a very affordable way to own a piece of early printing.

Der Edelstein (1471), a collection of morality tales whose title means "The Precious Stone"

The price of printed leaves is determined by the desirability and rarity of the book from which they came (thus the high prices for the Gutenberg leaves), the reputation of the printer and the rarity of his work, and the decoration and condition of the leaves themselves. Some incunables (the Anglicized form of the word) were decorated much like illuminated manuscripts, with large initials or miniatures painted by hand. Printers would sometimes leave a space for these embellishments, printing a small version of the initial to be supplied as a guide to the illuminator.

The Nuremberg Chronicle

Later, printers began inserting woodcut illustrations in the text. Sometimes, these would be colored by hand. One of the earliest and most extensively illustrated books was Hartmann Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (Book of Chronicles), published by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1493 and commonly called the Nuremberg Chronicle. It is a history of the world from "God created light" to the early 15th century, and is illustrated with hundreds of woodcuts (some of them repeated) that depict everything from small portraits of popes and princes to the family tree of Jesus to 15th century German cities.

Constantinople, as pictured in the Nuremberg Chronicle
(Note: all cities pictured bear a remarkable resemblance to medieval German towns)

The vast majority of incunabula were printed in Germany, where moveable type was invented and first used, and in Italy, particularly in Venice. Some of the "Italian" printers, such as Sweynham and Pannartz, were in fact Germans who had migrated south. German printers generally used gothic type, based on the handwritten script commonly used in manuscripts of the day. Italian printers were more like to use a roman font, such as that employed by Nicolaus Jenson, or an italic typeface, like that of Aldus Manutius in Venice. When printing arrived in England, the most commonly used type was a variation on the Gothic style called "black letter" and the most important printers were William Caxton and the wonderfully named Wynkyn de Worde.

But, you ask, how will I know what book or printer a leaf came from? How can I verify it is what the dealer says it is? Where can I locate these desirable and affordable objects? [Hint: it's not e-bay, but ABAA.]

Well, boys and girls, tune in next week, when all will be revealed: the mysteries of Goff and BMC, the joys of line counting, and the thrill of typeface identification. Bring your rulers and magnifying glasses.

Class dismissed!
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*Luckily, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has digitized their copy (shown above) so you can view it online and get some idea of what this treasure is like. That perennial show-off, the British Library, which owns a complete copy on vellum as well as one on paper, allows you to view images of the two versions side by side so you can decide which one you like best.

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