Development of the Roman Type-Face
In the beginning, Roman letters were in capitals only (Example [464-A]), and, carved on stone, were at their best about the beginning of the Christian era. The present so-called Roman, Italic and Text types are descended from them.
EXAMPLE 486
Resetting in Bodoni Book of the 1789 Bodoni specimen on page [26]. Like the original, this specimen was printed and then zinc-etched
Use of the pen and brush in lettering and the tendency to letter rapidly finally gave us the lower-case type of today. The evolution is pictured in Example [465]. “A” shows the Roman capital alphabet as made with the pen (compare with the chiseled letters of Example [464-A]). In “B” we have the result (known as uncials) of hurried writing of the Roman capitals, and one can see how the lower-case letters were forming. At about this point in the development, the minuscules, or lower-case letters, took two separate growths—one in the direction of the “Black Letter” or German Text types of today, and the other toward the “White Letter” of the Caroline Minuscules, which, as Roman lower-case, are now used almost exclusively in America, England, France and other countries in North and South America and Europe, the notable exception being Germany.
EXAMPLE 487
Comparison of one of Bodoni’s alphabets with a new type-face. Both are rough, having been zinc-etched
When Gutenberg began to print he used a black Text type designed after the bold lettering of the German manuscript books, and when Germans went to Italy to print they had difficulty in rendering into types the character of Italian lettering. Example [468] shows the efforts in this direction by Sweinheim and Pannartz in 1465, and in Example [469], types by John and Wendelin of Spires, an improvement is noticed.
It remained, however, for the Frenchman, Jenson, to design and cut a letter that is the alpha of Roman type-faces (Example [470]). Jenson was fortunate in the selection of a model, and it is interesting to include in the corner for comparison a section of an Italian manuscript of the same century. Development of the Roman letter into the beautiful and legible form known as “Caroline Minuscules” was due to the encouragement of Charlemagne. Why it is called “White Letter” in contradistinction to “Black Letter” may be seen by comparing the light-gray tone of the Jenson page (Example [470]) with the missal specimen opposite page [14]. It may be well to explain that the seeming disfigurement of the capitals in the Jenson page is due to the custom that book decorators had of placing a stroke of vermilion over the capitals. In the reproduction these strokes came out black. Both the Spires and the Jenson specimens were reproduced from the original volumes in the Typographic Library and Museum at Jersey City.
Example [465] also shows, for comparison with the style of lettering known as the Caroline Minuscules, a type-face based on Jenson’s letter of 1470, following which are Moxon’s and Caslon’s lower-case alphabets.