I recall discussing modern typography some years ago with the late D. B. Updike, in his library at the Merrymount Press in Boston. A catalog from the Museum of Modern Art was at hand, designed by Herbert Bayer of Bauhaus fame.
It looked strange in its all-lower-case typography, and seemed to slow reading because of that strangeness. To many it was the newest of the new ... perhaps it would institute a trend? Mr. Updike smiled, reached to a shelf for a book. It was printed more than a hundred years earlier in Paris and set throughout in lower-case. "So far as this had any influence, then or later," he remarked, "the experiment of Typographie Economique is as dead as Queen Anne."
All of which points up Bertrand Russell's remarks, "On Being Modern Minded," in his recent Unpopular Essays[1]: "The desire to be contemporary is new only in degree," he declares, "it has existed to some extent in all previous periods that believed themselves to be progressive.
"The Renaissance had a contempt for the Gothic centuries that had preceded it; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covered priceless mosaics with whitewash; the Romantic movement despised the age of the heroic couplet.... But in none of these former times was the contempt for the past nearly as complete as it is now.
"From the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century men admired Roman antiquity; the Romantic movement revived the Middle Ages.... It is only since the 1914-18 war that it has become fashionable to ignore the past en bloc.
"The belief that fashion alone should dominate opinion has great advantages. It makes thought unnecessary, and puts the highest intelligence within reach of everyone."
Really thinking through the design potential not only seems the nub of the matter, but is basically sound typographically. Read Peter Beilenson attentively as he discusses the amateur printer and the development of a new style (page 313). "It is simple, but dull, to copy an old style," he points out. "It is hard, but exciting, to work out a new one. And while you are working at it, you must expect cynical observers to give your experiments the adjective 'wacky'; you must expect certain curious kinds of people to praise your work for the wrong reasons; and you must expect alternating moods of conceit and confusion. The proofs you gloat over at night will become commonplace by dawn....
"You will make misjudgments about the intelligence of ordinary readers. You will make mistakes of taste. You will find it too easy to get an effect by means of shock, and you will forget that any book, even a twenty-first-century book, must be a coherent unit. And you will often, since there are no highway markers for the explorer, feel lonely and discouraged and want to go back to the old familiar, well-traveled roads again....
"You can be subtle or bold, as you feel the urge ... you can advance your own work by looking to other fields of creation, enjoying and profiting by the experiments going on in them. You can feel yourself part of the whole forward-looking culture of today ... and if you do strike a vein with the least glitter of real gold in it, you will become rich indeed. For you will have become a creator in a new sense; your duty done as an amateur will be compensated with a twenty-four-carat satisfaction...."
There's sense in that essay, as there is in the views of Merle Armitage, T. M. Cleland, Porter Garnett, Eric Gill, Frederic W. Goudy, Edwin Grabhorn, Robert Josephy, Aldous Huxley, Stanley Morison, Bruce Rogers, Carl Purington Rollins, D. B. Updike and Beatrice Warde on related topics. Admittedly, some are in opposition—yet that very quality of provocativeness may help in dispelling the fog.