Hello. My name is Amelia Fontanel. I'm a
curator at the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection.
We are a rare book library that specializes in the many forms of graphic
communication, including printing, graphic design, and
the book arts. Today I want to focus on type specimens
which are a particularly strong area of our
collection. For those of you new to this genre of
documents, type specimens are sheets or books
printed by printers, type founders, or publishers
to show what types are available and their appearance.
They are essentially catalogs that give consumers
of the type creative ideas about how it can be used.
For our purposes I'm going to focus on printed specimens
in the Cary Collection. This talk is the result of class visits that I had
prepared for professor Kris Holmes who taught type design at RIT. She wanted
her students to see the evolution of type specimens
so they could be inspired to design their own.
A few things to note: for the early part of this talk I am showing specimens of
analog metal and wood type that were used for
letterpress relief printing. And the companies that manufactured the
metal type were actual foundries that cast the type.
Hence the term we now use for a company that creates and sells
even digital type. We call it a type foundry.
So let's dive right in. Here is a book published during the Italian Renaissance
by the famed writing master Giovanni Palatino. By this time
letterpress printing in the Western world had been used for over 100 years.
The illustrations in this book are not printed from metal type though.
They are wood cuts. This is not a type specimen.
This is a copy book or calligraphy manual
with models of alphabets for students to copy for practice.
But the important point is that the format that the type specimen
eventually adopted to show printed alphabets,
had a precedent in this genre of copy books
that showcased letterforms, sizes, and styles.
To compare Konrad Berner's type specimen is one of the earliest European
specimens on record. Tt was printed some 44 years after the
Palatino book. We at the Cary only have a facsimile of this piece.
Like Palatino's copy book we can see
different letter forms like the upright Roman versions
of the Garamond typeface with its italic designed by Robert Granjon.
As well as various sizes from about 48 point called the "Canon" here,
to sixteen point called the "nonpareille." Incidentally the text he printed to show
the type is from the book of Isaiah from the
Vulgate Bible. Also important in this type specimen
are the decorations like borders of typographic ornaments
and leaf felurons that mimic human embellishment
done customarily in calligraphy. As we'll see calligraphy and type design
have always been close companions.
Berner's specimen was a broadsheet or a broadside,
as opposed to a codex bound book. A broadside is a large piece of paper
that is printed on one side. This format never really goes out of
style when promoting type. Next here is William Caslon the First's
1738 specimen of 38 fonts in 16 sizes
in 11 languages. Eight of those languages use non-Latin alphabet systems.
This particular specimen was featured as a fold-out plate in an encyclopedia,
but it does not differ much from the Berner specimen.
Type is put on display in columns, in descending point size, with
typographic ornaments at the bottom. These are for printers to make a visual
judgment about what to buy for their metal type collections. It's
kind of a "try it before you buy it."
Since we jumped about 150 years in the last comparison,
let's zoom light speed ahead to 1950. I'm showing the Times of London's type
specimen broadside for their iconic super typeface family
the Times New Roman. Not deviating much from the Caslon
and Berner specimens, the broadside format is again
reaffirmed as it offers a comprehensive quick glance
to compare font sizes and styles. In this way it's a successful
information design solution for a lot of nuanced content.
And even though digital typefaces can now be examined
in such fine detail with infinite permutations
on the websites of type foundries, we continue to see broadsides being printed
for promotion. Here is the Hera Big digital typeface
family in all its juicy stylistic variations.
It was presented as a broadside or poster for the 2011 TypeCon conference.
Yes, the content may have been created as eye-candy for typographers
but make no mistake, this is a commercial document
that is meant to entice designers to buy this type.
In the very same spirit as Berner, Caslon, and The Times.
Let's circle back to Caslon. The type foundry that William Caslon launched in
England in the 1730s continued well into the 20th century
under various Caslon family members. During their time in business the
specimen broadsheet was only one tier of their marketing efforts.
Enter type specimen books as a format. While the broadside serves a purpose as
a ready-reference for showing type, the books could offer a deeper dive with
extended passages to really simulate a reading environment.
Multi-page books could also include more designs as the foundry's typeface
offerings expanded into myriad classifications.
This early Caslon specimen is fairly slim
but one can read through it with a good understanding
of what they sold. One of the masterpieces of the genre is
Giambattista Bodoni's 1818 two-volume "Manuale Tipografico"
of 276 types in various sizes, and languages with ornaments. This is a
rather luxurious type specimen when compared with Caslon
has Bodoni printed for an aristocratic patron, the Duke of Parma.
This patronage exempted him from the real economics of selling type to
printers. Rather his Manuale specimen, published
posthumously by his widow, is a limited-edition resume
of his Didone typographic innovations of slender upright letter forms with
fine serifs. I especially want to point out
the sumptuous, wide margins. Paper is one of the
costliest expenses in book production. The page design alone puts the Manuale
into the fine press classification of type specimens.
As the Industrial Revolution impacted consumerism in the 19th century,
marketing messaging proliferated to sell the goods produced in factories.
With this increase in advertising, typeface design
changed to offer more eye-catching variation.
These new display or decorative typeface families
called for type specimens that showed off ornamentation,
distortions in width weight and serifs, as well as an introduction of color
printing. I have been paging through a specimen
book of wood type by the Connecticut-based William H. Page
Company. Please note the format change.
This specimen is a collected volume of house organs or
short promotional periodicals issued in installments.
With this short publication cycle, the type manufacturer
could respond quickly to market trends. Machine-made paper, printed on an auto-
fed cylinder press, with machine-routed wood type,
this specimen is a much different
specimen from the painstaking craftsmanship
that went into Bodoni's Manuale, which was hand-printed
on an iron hand press, with hand-cast type.
The Industrial Revolution also introduced large-volume type
manufacturing by machines for a more literate public. This is a
type specimen of Arabic fonts that were available for the automatic
typecasting machine called the Linotype, invented in about 1884.
This system was in place in newspapers around the world
because texts could be typeset by keyboard
and the type would be cast on the fly. Hand type setting time was greatly
reduced for a daily publication. Even this specimen for an Arabic-
speaking consumer base follows the typical formula for type
specimens thus far: typefaces presented in different sizes
and styles, with showings of typographic ornaments.
And moving through the early 20th century type specimens are often
reiterations of similar page layouts using the codex
or book format. Let's look at a case study of the
typeface Astrée through time. It was first offered in
1921 for sale by the Parisian foundry
Deberny et Peignot. Its American distributor, Continental
Typefounders released a conservative two-page Astrée spread in its 1929
specimen book. This was followed by Deberny et
Peignot's similar presentation of Astrée in 1935.
It was one of the hundreds of typefaces offered in its comprehensive
two-volume specimen catalog. Note the quick-access tab
sections on the book's fore edge. These were organized by typeface
classification. In the 1950s Astrée again appears as a
reprisal of a backlist font in Deberny et Peignot's post-war
specimen. I don't see a lot of change in the
marketing strategies over 30 years of trying to sell this typeface.
The bindings for the books get more sophisticated in design but that showing
of types by size, with sales copy, or appropriate allusive
wording, remains constant.
The introduction of phototypesetting in the mid-20th century
changes a lot of approaches in the sales of types.
This technology shift ushers in the use of stroboscopic light
and film exposure for lithographic printing,
instead of metal founding for the manufacture of letterpress
type.
This is a photocomposition film disc that replaced
analog metal relief letterpress characters in typesetting.
Large codex type specimens are still in production during this era
but the primary source record also shows a lot of production
of ephemeral pamphlet or brochure specimens,
like this one for the first phototype super family
the sans-serif Univers designed by Adrian Frutiger
and released by Deberny et Peignot in 1957. Specimens increasingly added
illustrations and photographic images to their font examples. And for
brevity in such a shortened format, those
typeface samples are often condensed into simple alphabet
strings or line showings. Less common are the long
passages to see how the text fares in an extended reading scenario.
The phototypesetting era was so short-lived: only lasting from the
mid-1950s until the early 1980s. But it was crucial
for setting up the wave of digital type enabled by desktop
publishing in the mid-1980s. That transformation
deserves to be a whole course on its own, as do a lot of other topics
I've touched on here. What I do want to show to conclude this
lecture are some highlights in digitally-designed and printed type specimens from
the Cary Collection. Even though the actual design product of
type resides in a non-physical cloud or as bytes on a
hard drive, we humans are still producing creative
printed type specimens.
A groundbreaking digital typeface was Zapfino designed by Hermann Zapf
and released about 1998 by Linotype, which by then was retooled as a digital
foundry— not a typesetting machine manufacturer.
Zapfino script has such a comprehensive set of alternate characters
that when combined appropriately it can approximate
the variation of hand calligraphy. Linotype's specimen pamphlet shows off
these features, and even includes a reproduction of
Zapf's original calligraphy from his archive.
Further evidence that type and calligraphy have
inspired each other for centuries. Master printer/designers in the spirit
of Bodoni also continue to publish sumptuous
specimen books in the digital age. This is Russell Maret's "Ornamental
Digressions." It shows his suite of whimsical
ornaments. It was a letterpress-printed in multiple
colors, through digitally-designed photopolymer
plates and metal type. Only 100 copies of this
fine press edition were offered for sale: mostly to institutions and collectors.
His target audience is not the general font-buying public.
Some modern specimens combine the best features of printing craftsmanship with
high speed production. This is a collection of type specimen
chapbooks that are regularly published by P22 Type Foundry.
All of the content pages are digitally-designed and printed with offset
lithography. Most of them however, add a tactile touch
as they are bound with a letterpress cover,
printed by hand.
A developing genre of the 21st century, are specimens that feature
typefaces from languages that have traditionally been
under-represented in the historical record.
This is JamraPatel's "Kigelia" specimen book.
This typeface successfully unifies 10 diverse
African scripts into one super family. While the specimen is a slim book of
only 54 pages, it not only gives a comprehensive
showing of each alphabet, it also provides valuable information
about the geography and demographics of the people who speak
the languages. This specimen actually teaches the reader while
selling fonts.
And speaking of sales the current practice of marketing fonts
is not limited to books, pamphlets, and broadsides,
plus the internet, type consumers love merchandise with typographic
illustrations. Pictured here are miniature type
specimens, coasters, tools, spoofy funny books,
stickers, and postcards. I myself own typographic t-shirts, mugs, pins,
and tote bags, and they were all released by type foundries
to promote their typefaces. I wonder if William Caslon would have jumped on this
bandwagon were he alive? That the type specimens of the future
have a lot to learn from the rich exemplars from the past.
My final slides highlight what the future may hold with type specimens by
the budding designer students in Professor Holmes' RIT classes.
Ii think those students absorbed some nuggets of information from their visit
to the Cary Collection. Here are some of their type specimen
broadsides. These ones advertise blackletter typefaces
based on the students' own hand calligraphy.
Many of them created specimen pamphlets and books
using varying binding styles to show off their typefaces.
And these innovative formats fan out, fold up,
or are packaged in a stylish way. It seems that the type specimen genre has
few limits in creative expression. I'm really looking forward to revising
this talk in a decade to report on the landscape of innovative
type specimens to come. Ones that include animation, are variable
in weight and width, and hybrids of analog and
digital technology are all on our horizon. But thanks now
for traveling along with me thus far.