dot-font: A Dialogue with the Typographic Past
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dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
Recently, Hartley & Marks did us the enormous favor of bringing A Short History of the Printed Word, Warren Chappell’s memorable 1970 survey, back into print. More accurately, this publisher gave us a new edition, revised and updated by Robert Bringhurst. The posthumous collaboration of Chappell and Bringhurst (Warren Chappell died in 1991) seems appropriate.
Once More, With Feeling
Hartley & Marks Publishers, of Vancouver, B.C. (and, by way of a convenient international post office box, of Point Roberts, Washington), has been bringing out an intermittent series of reprints of forgotten (or well remembered) typographic classics. The company also publishes both editions of Bringhurst’s own modern classic, The Elements of Typographic Style.
Bringhurst has the sensibility, and the depth of knowledge, to correct and extend Chappell’s text. He came to the task reluctantly, though. As he says in his preface to the revised edition: “I disapprove on principle. We ought in decency to leave the old books as they are—and if we can and when we must, we ought to write some new ones, to stand beside the best ones of the past. Yet I have broken my own rule. There is a reason.”
The reason is rooted in Chappell’s hands-on knowledge, accumulated over a long lifetime, of the techniques and materials of type and printing. “Chappell had a rock-solid knowledge of procedures and techniques that had been current for half a millennium when he was writing—and have all but disappeared in the past three decades. He knew some of the things that historians know, but mostly he knew what historians don’t know. I wanted the names and dates set straight, insofar as that was possible, and yet to hear the story as Chappell told it, from a workbench rather than a keyboard, with silences in place of self-advertisements, and graver marks and acid stains in place of any footnotes.”
First Impressions
Chappell himself, in his preface to the first edition, says: “The strongest feelings I have about printing always return to three simple concepts: the sculptural nature of type, the inevitableness of its arrangement on the page, and the authority of its impression. I offer these to the reader not as a creed but as a working point of view.” Bringhurst’s task, apart from correcting some historical inaccuracies and adding the non-Western origins and extensions of typography that Chappell ignored, was to present this working point of view to an audience for whom the “sculptural nature of type” and the “authority of its impression” are no longer tangible realities.
Chappell’s book is the story of printing and type, unfolded historically in lucid, straightforward prose. He talks about very specific things, such as the way in which a traditional punchcutter would create the steel punch from which a piece of type was made. The book is littered with illustrations, many of them reproductions of the pages or the typefaces he’s talking about, some of them the elegant diagrams drawn by Rudolf Koch that we’ve seen reprinted in so many contexts. There’s a helter-skelter pattern to the illustrations, because each one comes precisely where it’s referred to in the text, and they are not trimmed to fit any grid but the basic text page itself.
The first edition was composed in metal (although it was printed offset), in Linotype’s version of the typeface known as Janson (which was in fact designed by the Hungarian punchcutter Kis). The pages were extraordinarily comfortable to read. In this second edition, Bringhurst, an accomplished book designer himself, has used the digital version of Linotype Janson Text to try to replicate the feel of the older book, re-creating Chappell’s design using new tools. As Bringhurst says, at the end of a description of the typeface used in the book, “The type is still sold as Linotype Janson Text, though it is not Janson’s design, it is Kis’s design, and it is set on a computer, not a Linotype machine.”
A Work for Two Voices
When I spoke to Robert Bringhurst about this book, he told me that although he had made changes throughout, he had left it as Chappell’s voice and Chappell’s book. “It’s much more work,” he said, “to revise an existing book than to start from scratch and write your own.” I can’t compare the new edition with the old, because my copy of the original isn’t near to hand (and besides, my copy is an earlier reprint—unrevised—by David Godine), but I do hear echoes of Bringhurst’s voice here and there in the new text. As Bringhurst says in his preface, “Much in the book has changed—but the I in the first ten chapters is always Chappell speaking, though the third-person statements are often my own.” The final chapter, “The Digital Revolution and the Close of the Twentieth Century,” is all Bringhurst’s, of course. To avoid confusion, he doesn’t speak in the first person anywhere in that chapter, but the voice is unmistakably his.
It’s a dialogue, now: of Warren Chappell with the history he’s describing, of Chappell with his reader, of Robert Bringhurst with the older Chappell, and of Bringhurst with us, his contemporary readers. You can join in the conversation.
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