dot-font: Typography, Architecture, and Inscriptions

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.

“In the midst of change civic buildings remain as central icons of our community. This book is about these civic icons and their often compromised survival.” —Jack Stauffacher

Jack Stauffacher is a highly respected printer and typographer, proprietor of the Greenwood Press in San Francisco for more than 60 years, and a friend of the continuity of culture across the centuries. The new book he has put together, “Inscriptions” has been published jointly by the Book Club of California and the San Francisco Public Library (see Figure 1). This beautifully designed book documents the public inscriptions that adorned the Old Main Library—the SFPL’s former home in a Beaux-Arts building that opened in 1917 and formed part of the city’s ornate post-earthquake Civic Center. The main library moved into a brand-new building across the street several years ago, and the Old Main was in the process of being converted into a new home for the San Francisco Asian Art Museum (which is finally opening there, coincidentally, this month).

Figure 1: Detail from the cover of “Inscriptions,” with part of a rubbing of one of the actual inscriptions in a second color.

There was great controversy about what to do with the series of murals depicting California coastal scenes that had decorated the interior walls of the central staircase of the old building (see Figure 2), but in the fracas hardly any attention was paid to the panels of inscriptions that ran in a frieze above those murals. As Old Main partisans recalled, those inscriptions and those murals had formed an essential part of the public experience of using the library for most of the 20th century. And what is more essential to the spirit of a library than thoughtful words?

Figure 2: The central staircase and colonnade of the Old Main Library, with murals and inscriptions around the walls.

“Dr. Taylor selected terse maxims from the canon of Western literature for frieze panels and lintels around the second floor colonnade,” writes historian Gray Brechin in the book’s primary essay. “These apothegms served as guideposts from the past, a compendium of sage advice on how to lead a fulfilling and civilized life as one strove toward the light.” The “Dr. Taylor” that Brechin mentions was Edward Robeson Taylor, “physician, lawyer, printer, poet, and former mayor,” who not only chose the texts for all the inscriptions but was one of the driving forces behind the new building’s creation.

Brechin’s essay places the San Francisco library in the context of other great public libraries in the Beaux-Arts style, from the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, designed by Henri Labrouste in the 1830s, through the Boston Public Library, to the American West Coast.

“Impressive as it was,” Brechin points out, “Labrouste’s library was but one building in the capital city and thus not easily accessible to most French citizens who lived far from Paris. It remained for advocates in the United States to popularize learning in a manner commensurate with Thomas Jefferson’s belief that a lasting democracy depends upon widespread and continuing education.” Brechin gives a thorough survey of how public libraries came to cities like San Francisco, and how they got the distinctive architectural styles they have. This is a context for the focus of the book: the inscriptions.

Photographing in the Shadows

Complementing Brechin’s essay is a series of photographs taken by San Francisco photographer Dennis Letbetter, on a hurried tour with Stauffacher and others through the already-closed Old Main in 1997, of each of the inscriptions in situ. (He also took photos of the library’s interior, and later of related library buildings in other cities.)

In his own “Note on Photographing the Inscriptions,” Letbetter says, “Andrea Grimes led me to each inscription, one after the other, accompanied by a pressing and begrudging security escort. Everything had to happen in a very limited time, and there was even some suggestion that I might not be allowed enough time to finish my work. Lights were either completely burned out, uneven, or nonexistent. The inscriptions themselves had acquired a somber patina from age as well as from those more tolerant years when smoking was allowed on the grand staircase—evidence of the neglect that the city allowed the great Beaux-Arts structure to suffer” (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Another of the inscriptions from the central hall.

Grimes herself, Special Collections Librarian at SFPL, writes: “My second memory of that afternoon was the look on Jack’s face as we emerged into the light. I think this was his defining moment. Questions and ideas were taking shape that would become the subject of years of research, conversations, meetings, and proposals. Jack was unclear about the destiny of the inscriptions. What would happen to them during the building’s restoration? Would they remain intact where they were originally placed by anonymous craftsmen in 1916?” (In the event, they were cleaned and restored.) “Would anyone know why these inscriptions were here or what they had meant in a different time? For my part, I wondered who wrote the words and how they were selected long ago” (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: A one-line inscription from the library.

Researching the sources of the quotations was one of the major tasks behind this book; in the end, all but two were identified. (Taylor left no record of who he was quoting, and he may have modified the wording here and there to fit the space.) “One of the most exhaustingly difficult quotations, ‘Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweets but do not injure it,’ was cause for celebration after its accidental discovery,” says Grimes. Frustratingly, she doesn’t say how the source (Charles Caleb Colton) was finally found.

Context and the Long View

Besides the main tale of the library and its inscriptions, the book includes several supplementary essays that put this specific, local story into a larger context that reaches all the way back through the history of Western civilization. Michael Harvey, known for his carving of inscriptions in stone on public buildings like the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, flew to San Francisco to examine the SFPL inscriptions and explain how they had been created (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Michael Harvey examining one of the inscription panels.

“We have to go back to Roman practice to understand how inscriptions were created then,” he says, “and how little in essence these methods have changed in succeeding centuries… It was rare for a shop to specialize in inscriptions; these were generally carried out in shops equipped for general stonework. In essence, this is what happened in 1915, when the San Francisco library’s inscriptions were planned.” He shows how they were done using letter patterns, and cast rather than individually carved, in a newly developed faux-travertine that recalled the surfaces of public buildings in ancient Rome (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: One of the inscriptions from the library’s central hall, cast in faux-travertine.

Type designer Sumner Stone, who has given lectures on Roman inscriptions, contributes “Rock Wraps Paper,” about the phenomenon of public lettering, its permanence, and the letterforms used. “There is much to be said for physical presence,” writes Stone. “What would we be reading today had it not been for the remains of imperial Roman inscriptions in the landscape of the Italian humanists?”

Stauffacher adds a short, impassioned postscript, and also includes a translation of the relevant section from Leon Battista Alberti’s 15th-century treatise on architecture, a section called “Of the Inscriptions and Symbols Carved on Sepulchres.” The inscriptions that Alberti himself designed for his buildings in Renaissance Italy, says Stauffacher, “are remarkable for their insightful clarity and perfect integration with his many architectural works.” “Inscriptions” is all about this integration of words and buildings, and the place of both in a community.

A Handy Paper Monument

The book is beautifully designed and produced, as might be expected from a master printer with a talented team of contributors(see Figure 7). (Stauffacher had to be persuaded to list himself as editor, and not just run his own name in with the other bylines.) On the cover, over a full-size detail of a rubbing from one of the inscriptions, runs the simple title, “Inscriptions”; inside, on the title page, this is supplemented with a subtitle: “at the Old Public Library of San Francisco.” The format is almost square (9-1/2 x 11), which gives ample room to display photographs and present the text in an understated two-column format (using Sumner Stone’s Cycles, an elegant typeface that seems both calligraphic and lapidary). Stauffacher’s book design is always deceptively simple, and very comfortable to read. The physical book, printed on silky-textured Mohawk Superfine, feels good in the hand, though such a wide book might be more comfortable to hold if it were hardcover rather than soft.

Figure 7: Detail of a page spread from the book, showing examples of other kinds of inscriptions in stone, from various eras.

What Lasts

At the end of his essay, Sumner Stone asks, “Will these inscriptions of the Old Main Library still be decipherable in 2,000 years? Will their cultural context be understood by the epigrapher of the future? Will they outlast this book? Will their Roman letters endure another two millennia, carefully studied by students of the lettering arts?” These are questions that only time can answer, but both the inscriptions and this book were made to last.

John D. Berry is a typographer, book designer, design writer, editor, and typographic consultant. He is a former President of ATypI, and he is the founder and director of the Scripta Typographic Institute.
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