BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES
By J. H. MASON
"MODERN" type is the name by which the design that came into general use in this country between 1800 and 1808 is designated. (It is the type face still used in Blue Books.) To quote Luckombe in his Printer's Grammar, of 1808, "The great improvement which has taken place of late years in the form of printing types has completely superseded the Elzevir shape introduced from Holland by the celebrated Caslon. Everyone must observe, with increasing admiration, the numerous and elegant founts of every size which have with rapid succession been lately presented to the public." And then follow specimens from the Fry Type Foundry, the "Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia, mostra?" so affected by the older founders that it almost became a proverb for "type specimen."
Well, modern opinion has gone strongly back to Luckombe, and with good reason. The only definite quality—not very definite either—which calls forth his admiration is the elegance of the design. I think we may concede this without damaging the case for the old-style types. The letters are well drawn, carefully and finely drawn, and show a good sense of proportion and of colour contrast in the thicks and thins and hair-lines in the size shown, called the Luckombe "French Canon," equivalent to forty-eight point (about two-thirds of an inch). But is elegant drawing the desirable point in type? It is not. It tends to keep the single letters distinct units instead of their coalescing into word, phrase, or even sentence units. For the mind of the reader is partly formed by the mind of the writer, by his own experience in the manipulation of the pen, and feels for the onward flow of the pen in the letter design. And this is found at its best in the Italian writing that developed the Caroline minuscule and formed the model for the early Venetian types. The letter takes its character from the pen in the hands of a master of his instrument, and the ink and paper or vellum play their part—it is not deliberately drawn and passed on, but arrives in the continuous flow that strives to keep pari flumine with the stream of thought. The serifs or finishing strokes, e.g., of the capital C or T in "modern," are perpendicular palings that shut off relations with their neighbours; in old style they reach towards their neighbours, as though to join hands with them. The onward flow is felt in the curves, e.g., of the small m of old-style type, but in modern it stands almost coldly self-centred, the elegance strikes us as primness. The fine lines too are unsuitable for letterpress printing as they are easily damaged and then the type becomes unsightly. In engraver's lettering on copperplates, of course, this does not happen, as the fine line is printed from a sunken scratch, not a knife-like edge in relief. The engraver as a rule only used small groups of words, not pages of continuous text. (I do not forget Pine—his Horace dates 1733—but of him another time.) I cannot help thinking that modern type is the outcome of a mistaken standard, that of the engraver; as if the finish of delicate gold-smithing were adopted for carving in sandstone. To the engraver the hair-line is perfectly simple, to the typefounder it is a tour-de-force. The old-style design continued the manuscript tradition of form, with only such changes as the process of typefounding involved, such as the elimination of ligatures or tied letters. It continued in use till the end of the eighteenth century, when "elegance" displaced it. In forty years (a short time compared with the three-and-a-half centuries of old style) old style was revived in the Chiswick Press Juvenal and Lady Willoughby's Diary, and was enthusiastically received. New versions of the old-style design were cut, and it has continued in favour ever since.