True to type

“Of all the things Berthold [Wolpe] heard and saw” as a fire warden in the 1940s, “one of the most awful was a piano, in flames, falling slowly through several floors of a burning building … It seemed to him like the sound of the end of civilization.” A haunting passage of this kind – a snippet from the life of the designer of Faber’s acclaimed postwar book jackets – may come as a surprise in a volume subtitled The biography of a typeface. But readers familiar with Simon Garfield’s work – not least The End of Innocence (1994), his award-winning study of the Aids crisis – will know its quality. Finding the human at the heart of the mundane has long been his strength, and it makes him a superb guide to the dusty, frequently insular world of typographic history.

The three books in this series – one a study of Baskerville, first cut in the 1750s; one of the titling face Albertus, completed in stages between 1927 and 1940; and one of the much-reviled Comic Sans, a kind of escaped lab experiment of the 1990s – are welcome sequels to Just My Type (2010), in which Garfield led readers from the Venetian workshop of Aldus Manutius in the fifteenth century right up to the iPad of Matthew Carter (designer of Verdana, Georgia and, by far his most admired work among typographers, Galliard). And of these three new titles it is Albertus – as much a biography of the courageous and eccentric Wolpe as it is a history of his lettering – that is the most unique. Wolpe’s surviving family have clearly furnished Garfield with a stock of lively anecdotes: dragging his young sons to Portobello Road, for instance, Wolpe would “be looking at pen cases and styluses and writing tablets with inscriptions”, and then, after disappearing for more than an hour, would emerge having “spent all the food money on a new Byzantine implement”. Comic Sans, by contrast – and despite being the shortest of the three offerings – goes on a little and occasions little comment. (Its best material is not really about Comic Sans at all, but about the explosion of un-serifed faces generally in the screen-reading age.) Yet all three books are, at their cores, deft, well paced, funny and at times rather affecting portraits of the strange lives behind this careful art.

To continue with Wolpe: here is a man born to Jewish parents on the outskirts of Frankfurt in October 1905, whose remarkable (and, even to minds not deranged by typomania, highly memorable) lettering is shown by Garfield to be uncomfortably bound up with the dismal politics of his age. His Albertus – the “Faber face”, which has branded everything from Sylvia Plath to late-night kebab vans to the botched Star Wars spin-off Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) – began life on a small bronze tablet in the late 1920s. Garfield quotes Wolpe’s account of the process: “the background was lowered and the outline only of the letters cut in … this makes for bold simplicity and reduces the serifs to a bare minimum”. Albertus is indeed a kind of reverse inscription, lyrical and full-bodied where an engraved classical display face such as Trajan, drawn by Carol Twombly in 1989, is chilly and sharp.

When he made his initial carvings for Albertus, Wolpe was still living in Germany. The first font of it – a set of titling capitals – was commissioned from afar by the great Stanley Morison (in-house wizard at English Monotype, progenitor of Times New Roman and, towards the end of his career, editor of the TLS), who had chanced on a photograph of the tablet while searching for a new display face for The Times. Garfield recounts an apt family saying that Albertus more or less saved the Wolpes from extermination. Yet, even as this way out glimmered ahead, there was Sachsenwald (translation: “Saxon forest”), Wolpe’s “heavy German black-letter typeface, a version of which appeared in a [1935 Nazi] songbook … for which he also drew some illustrations, including a spread eagle”. One of his sons later found a note among his father’s sketches for the project insisting that “these [designs] are not for reproduction”. “He was certainly ashamed of it”, but it “may have been the only work he could get”.

There was nothing quite so dark in the life of John Baskerville (1707–75), though he, unlike Wolpe – who died knowing he was among the most acclaimed book and type designers in the world – did not live to see his peculiar genius fully recognized. His is a classic “ahead of his time” story. Until the eighteenth century the trend of western type design had been, broadly speaking, towards ever-increasing clarity: black-letter gave way to Italian forms, which were in turn simplified and strengthened by French (think Garamond), Dutch and, eventually, English punchcutters. This was a trend Baskerville continued in most ways: he enhanced the proportions of his lowercase “a”s and “e”s, for example, to prevent their “eyes” flooding with ink during the printing process. But he seriously deviated from it in others, and his eccentricity cost him.

A considerable number of his italic capitals, for instance – namely the J, K, Q, T, Y and Z – were essentially swash characters: that is to say, he gave them the curls, bars, flicks and squiggles normally reserved for decorative title pages or larger display lines, and he offered his clients no tamer variant cuts. Most distinctive of all was the lowercase roman “g”, with a prominent comma-like ear and an elegant tail that declined to double all the way back up to kiss the body in the standard form. These and other tweaks – increased contrast between thick and thin strokes, sharper serifs, a decidedly “expressive” italic lowercase and slightly drunk-looking numerals – made for highly distinctive new types, but also put off some publishers and book-buyers for good. Today Baskerville’s name graces the majority of font menus (although, like too many digital revivals, the system version is woefully faint compared to the metal original); and a successful, lightly restrained version by the International Type Corporation, New Baskerville, has been used for glossy cookbooks, high-end-shampoo bottles and The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. But it took Baskerville quite some time to land there.

Garfield relates a prank played by Benjamin Franklin (a rare contemporary admirer of Baskerville’s work) on a typically resistant “Connoisseur” who said Baskerville “would be a Means of blinding all the Readers in the Nation” with his “too thin and narrow” letterforms. Franklin presented “this Gentleman” with a type specimen and waited until his victim had gone “over the several Founts, showing [him] every where what he thought Instances of that Disproportion”. In fact, Franklin had produced a specimen of Caslon (the by then standard “English face”), “the Types his adored Newton is printed with”: the man in question had “never discovered this painful Disproportion in them, till he thought they were yours”, Franklin told his friend. In retrospect it’s a fun tale – the transatlantic polymath and US founding father cackling away with his mate the renowned master printer – but at the time it must have been small comfort to Baskerville in what was then his continual struggle for recognition. His edition of Paradise Lost was much mocked for its embellishments (which now seem beautiful) and occasional errors, and even in the twentieth century there were those who enjoyed kicking his casket: Garfield notes that the great type historian D. B. Updike thought Baskerville’s designs “not as good as Caslon’s”, and complained of their “slight touch of over-delicacy”.

In all of these lives – Wolpe’s, Baskerville’s, Caslon’s, even the much-lauded Carter’s – there hums the same undersong. Type designers (as they are now called), punchcutters (as they were then) and printers have always existed right in the middle of the Venn diagram, stuck between the harshness of industry and the loftiness of art, with neither side fully recognizing their contributions. It is his awareness of that half-tragic fact that gives Simon Garfield’s writing here its peculiar force, as well as its charm, vividness and humour.

Tom Cook is a poet and critic. He works as a typographer for Faber and is editing a new selected edition of Wordsworth’s poems

The post True to type appeared first on TLS.