The present prevalence of wide spacing in the composition of books, catalogs, pamphlets, periodicals and newspapers is a legacy from the ante-machine period.
In hand-set days, job and book compositors, when they were called on to set so-called straight matter, were required to use great care in spacing. In the spacing out of a line the conscientious compositor would remove thick spaces and insert thin spaces rather than add much extra space between the words. The newspaper compositor, on the other hand—he usually being a piece worker—seldom thin-spaced, but liberally added space between words, especially on occasions when his “take” was to “meet” that of another compositor. When machine composition was introduced the spacing practices of the news-room hand compositor were passed along to the machine, with the result that today a page of machine matter set in the average careless way shows open spaces running irregularly down the page, resembling a trench map of a modern battlefield.
Close spacing and the resultant neat and readable appearance of the page are possible in machine composition, as many users of these machines are obtaining such results; but the general standard, due not a little to the demand for rapidity and somewhat to ignorance of the fundamentals of good typography, is humiliatingly low.
The design and form of the type-face, of course, determine the amount of space between words. Johnston tells letterers that “the average space between two words is less than the width of the letter o.” Example [506] is illustrative.
A newspaper editor some years ago asked the hand compositors to thin-space, as there was a great deal of copy that day, whereupon the printers all laughed in ridicule of the lay notion that such a procedure would be of much use. That the request was not such an impractical one was recently borne out by an experience of a periodical publisher, who, on the machines in his own shop, produced close-spaced matter. In an emergency an outside machine-composition house was called on to set a part of the copy. When the work of making up was completed, it was found that there were several galleys of matter that could not be used, altho there was no more copy than usual. By again referring to Example [508-F] it will be seen that in the left group spacing between words is lavish, while in the right group there is no waste of such spacing. Altho there is more space between the lines of the right group, it contains three more words than the left group.
In the lower part of Example [508] is the word “Typography” set in small six-point, and near the word is the lone letter a, same size. It is difficult for a person without excellent eyesight to identify the small six-point “a,” but he can more easily and as quickly read the word made in the same size from ten letters. When the letters of the word “Typography” are widely spaced (even in larger size, as shown) they must be read one letter at a time, but when closely assembled they can be seen at a glance and read ten times as rapidly.
An experienced proofreader does not read a galley letter by letter, but recognizes a wrong type because the natural formation of the word has been broken.
Carrying the experiment further, place in “open formation” the words “Art and Practice of Typography,” and they must be read slowly one word at a time, but group the words closely, as has been done in the lower left of the same Example [508], and the entire group of words can be read practically at a glance. Just as an illiterate person laboriously reads letter by letter, a young child beginning to read will see only one word at a time. While on rudimentary primers the words should be isolated, there is no necessity for wide spacing between words in text matter intended for adults.
EXAMPLE 508
Legibility and other qualities illustrated