Senex: Can you not see something more in this Jenson type? Is it not more readable? I put them side by side at a distance of ten feet, where you can read the Jenson and cannot read the Bodoni.
Juvenis: True: but types in great primer are not made to be read at ten feet distance.
Senex: True again; but the mannerisms that obscure the Bodoni type at ten feet are more distressing in his small types, usually read at the distance of fifteen inches. The over-sharp hair-line, the dazzling serif, and the vanishing curve are more irritating in the smaller than in the larger sizes. Ordinary eyesight does not seize at a glance the entire face of modern type; it dimly sees hair-lines or serifs; it deciphers the stems only; it sees but half of the letter, and guesses at the invisible. The type of Bodoni is a wearying strain on the eye.
Juvenis: Your remarks do not fairly apply to readers of good sight.
Senex: They do apply to the majority of readers. It is a mistake to make for ordinary texts types with lines that cannot be easily seen by all.
Juvenis: If you think boldness of most importance in a type, why make Jenson's type your model? Why not go back still farther? Why not take up the lapidary letters of old Rome, Greece, or Etruria?
Senex: They are uncouth and wasteful of space. Designed to be chiseled on stone, they are unfit for types. The 'Caroline minuscule,' which is the basis of our Roman text letter, is more compact, quite as irregular, and much more readable.
Juvenis: If you believe that there was a gradual improvement in the shapes of letters between the first and fifteenth centuries, why stop at the fifteenth? Why not admit that this improvement continues?
Senex: Because the changes that followed were not always improvements. The faultless curves, sharp lines, and exact angles of Bodoni were disfigurements made at the expense of readability. Types are made to be easily read, not to show the skill of the designer. When they fail in readability the fault is fatal. The proper development of typography was checked by the invention of copper-plate that trod on its heels. Its delicacy of line, its perfect graduation of shadows, its vigorous blacks, and its facile rendering of a receding perspective put out of fashion all strong and manly work on wood. Dürer's 'Little Passion,' Holbein's 'Dance of Death,' and Vostre's Book of Hours were put aside, and the insipid effeminacies of overworked line-engraving took their place. Punch-cutters of the sixteenth century thought that printing would be improved if they imitated the methods of line-engravers, and so they cut their types sharper and thinner. They would not see that relief engraving and incised engraving are diametrically opposed in theory and practice, and that the imitation of one process by the other is impossible. Repeated failures did not check this desire to imitate. Increasing refinements in types produced a corresponding degradation in printing. The inferiority of the average book of the eighteenth century is largely due to the so-called 'improved' faces of type. The most irrepressible imitator of copper-plate effects was Bodoni of Parma. William Morris is right in saying that his imitations of copper-plate delicacy indicate a real abasement of the typographic art.