A catalogue of work by a book jacket designer so renowned (in a field short of celebrities) that he has the distinction of being the subject of a Jeopardy! question. With contributions from authors and colleagues, it is as much fun for the book-trade gossip as for the illustrations themselves. The inclusion of some rejected layouts (of Anthony Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect, below, Kidd notes that ‘Nobody got it’) show what could, and perhaps should, have been. A small complaint from one whose job requires them routinely lay out book titles and subtitles on a single line: the surfeit of colons results in the ungainly formation Chip Kidd : Book One : Work : 1986-2006.
A Viking longship, a narrowboat on a British canal, and a racing shell crewed by an eight would not be mistaken for one another, but beyond the aquatic obvious, they have in common a length of about 20 metres. Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984) and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) share few formal qualities as movies. They all, however, have a running time of a little over 80 minutes. The various metrics of length can be telling, but sometimes, as with books, not always useful. When one is reading a book, page numbers provide helpful navigation (How much have I read? How many pages to go? Am I half way through yet?) and are essential for citation. But when one is reading about a book – in publishers’ press releases and catalogues, or bibliographic details accompanying reviews – the number of pages a book contains is less instructive than the number of words. A page count tells something about the look of a book, but unless one is consuming literature by the metre, a word count is, at least for prose, a much better indication of how long it will take to read it.
There are good reasons why books of the about the same number of words might have very different numbers of pages. Two novels from taken from the bookshelf, not quite at random, are The Soul of Kindness (1964) by Elizabeth Taylor, and Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) by George Saunders. They are both B Format paperbacks, so the same width and height (129 × 198 mm), and both are about 60,000 words. But Taylor’s book runs to 220 pages, while Saunders’s, set in significantly smaller type, is about 130 pages fatter. The Virago edition of The Soul of Kindness is formally typical for a novel: 19 chapters, each a river of text starting on a fresh page. Saunders has said that his wife teased him about the bloat of Lincoln in the Bardo (‘Pretty good use of white space there!’) but it requires its heft. Rather than rivers, its 108 chapters contain pools of type. Epigrammatic quotations from the vast literature devoted to Lincoln, further invented Lincolniana, and the thoughts and dialogue of spectral souls, caught between death and whatever might come next, in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington DC: each pool attributed to a real or invented voice.
But even though the form of a text can influence the form of a book, sometimes demands of commerce or marketing take a hand.
Published in 1924, the first edition of Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit ran to 312 pages. The two later editions shown above are both A Format (110 × 178 mm), the standard size for smaller mass-market paperbacks. The reprint of the 1953 Pan edition shown on the left has about 120 fewer pages than the first edition, the one on the right, a recent reprint of a 2002 Harper edition, about 70 more. For the same 70,000 word text, the 2002 edition, at 384 pages, has exactly double the page count of the 1953 one.
The thin man & the fat man.
A reader’s preference for one over the other is a matter of taste, but the books’ layouts were dictated by very different conditions. The 1953 edition would have been made as economically as possible. Paper had only recently come off rationing after the Second World War, so the type is small with little leading, the margins are tight with no running headers, and chapter headings are set wherever they fall in the run of the text, rather than being given a fresh page to themselves. The result is very portable and perfectly legible, but undeniably cramped. In the 2002 setting, when paper had become plentiful, the fonts are bigger and linespacing and margins are generous, there are running headers as well as folios in the footer, and all chapters begin on the recto (so are often preceded by a blank verso). A book with twice as many pages certainly looks like better value – and flatters the reader that they have read a big book – but it feels sparse, and might prove a little disappointing to someone expecting a longer read. In future editions, there might be a rethink. The growth of online shopping in recent years has encouraged paper manufacturers to increase their output of cardboard for packaging, at the expense of producing the sort of low-quality paper used in paperbacks. During the pandemic there has been a boom in book sales, and publishers, while not short of cardboard boxes, have run low on the products to put in them. Perhaps books will start to shrink. The Man in the Brown Suit, and its readers, might benefit from a reversion to something like its original extent.
We are probably stuck with page numbers, so might as well have some fun with them. There is one familiar to readers of Private Eye. Tedious cant and waffle is routinely flagged in print by being abruptly curtailed with: cont. p. 94 (a page which never arrives, of course, the magazine usually being about half that length). And a pagination skit appears in The Every (2021) by Dave Eggers. The satire, depicting a tech-driven dystopia fomented by a merger of fictional firms analogous to Amazon, Google and Facebook, into the eponymous conglomerate, sometimes feels like a cheatsheet that no leaders of those companies should ever be allowed to see. Among the book’s riffs on ideas which, while dreadful, might seem admirable to eyeball-hungry digital media outfits, is the proposal that authors might benefit more from algorithms than editors. At one point the story’s protagonist, Delaney Wells, who is trying to take down the corporation from within, is seconded to TellTale, The Every’s literature crunching department, which monitors the electronic reading habits of millions of customers. Her supervisor there is the profoundly un-bookish Alessandro who, after misgendering Charlotte Brontë, explains what readers really want.
‘We found so many things!’ Alessandro said. ‘Overall number of pages is fairly clear. No book should be over 500 pages, and if it is over 500, we found that the absolute limit of anyone’s tolerance is 577.’
‘Even that seems undisciplined,’ Delaney said.
Those of us who flick forward find that 577 is indeed the extent of Eggers’s text, and are left to wonder whether the number had been retrospectively inserted when the layout of the novel was otherwise complete, or the text was adjusted to run to that number of pages. The arguably excessive line spacing in the book suggests it might have been the latter.
And then there is pagination which feels like a bad joke. I doubt that many of his admirers would think that Denis Johnson’s Already Dead (1997) was his best book, but it deserves better treatment than it was given in the 1999 paperback from which the scan below was taken.
The angular figures of the spiky script used in the running footers, particularly when paired with the legible old-style body text, make for dismal way-finders, stylistic flair that serves only a whim of the designer. It certainly doesn’t serve the text or the reader. Experienced book designers’ first advice is usually a variation on ‘less is more’. Richard Eckersley, in a contribution to Richard Hendel’s On Book Design put it this way:
Book design is a process so transparent and anonymous that one sometimes wonders whether it exists at all. It’s a negative quantity: a book is well designed to the extent that it is not badly designed.
¶Notes. Information about paper shortages and cardboard gluts comes from a recent post on Richard Hollick’s website Making Book, highly recommended for informed commentary on the past, present and future of the book trade. ¶Sources. ‘George Saunders: “When I get praise, it helps me be a little bit more brave”’ by Paula Cocozza (the Guardian, 18 October 2017); On Book Design by Richard Hendel (Yale, 1998).
Bram de Does (1934–2015) designed two typefaces for the Enschedé Font Foundry, Trinité and Lexicon. The more recent of the two, Lexicon, comes in six weights of roman and italic and, unusually, each style has two forms, each with different stem lengths for the lowercase ascenders and descenders. Trinité – shown in the illustration below – has three forms, hence its name. The capsule biography of the designer on Enschedé’s website describes Lexicon as having ‘all the virtues to become a new Times New Roman.’ All but one perhaps. Times is bundled with many computer operating systems and apps, and its cost in licensing fees is part of the price one pays for the software, so appears to be practically free-of-charge. A licence for each style of each weight of Lexicon or Trinité is priced, for one user on one computer, at £ 320 plus taxes. Most work one would use a typeface like this for would require, at a minimum, a roman and an italic, so double that. If one wished to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the alternate stem lengths, which would seem to be one of the reasons for using it, double again, and think hard about the need for a bold font.
What a £ 320 font looks like.
It’s unlikely that Lexicon will ever earn for Enschedé anything that comes close to what Times has accrued for Monotype over the past 93 years. Enschedé is sticking to a version of the pre-digital model of licensing. Rather than competing in the increasingly crowded marketplace for digital fonts, the company has decided to carry on doing business much as it did when it sold metal type and matrices at a relatively high price to a discerning (and well-heeled) clientele.
Although Enschedé’s fonts are expensive, they are at least consistently so. Other foundries lower prices often seem quixotic. The bundle of five fonts comprising Bembo Book, released by Monotype in 2005, goes for £190, so about £38 per font. From the same foundry, for just £10 more, you can get the complete set of their excellent 2018 version of Walbaum. In a range of weights over five optical sizes from 6 point to 96 point, including decorative versions and ornaments, the bundle is comprised of 68 fonts: at £2.95 per font, less than 10% of the cost of Bembo. Although these typefaces are suitable for quite different contexts, and Bembo is certainly more suitable for most bookwork, the difference is stark.
One thing that practically all digital fonts have in common, be they pricey or free, is that rather than being sold as products which one can do with what one will, they are issued under licences which lay out what is and what is not allowed.
Commercial fonts
When one buys a licence for a font one is generally restricted in certain ways, usually by context (if it is to be used in print, for a web site, or in an app), number of users and number of computers it can be installed on, and whether one may alter the font software. But it’s worth reading the licence to check for other wrinkles. Some foundries have terms more common in licensing images, with a cap on the number of instances of a product that may be made if it includes their fonts.
Perpetual licences
This has been the main method of selling type since the advent of digital typesetting, particularly for print, where one pays once for however many users / computers one wishes to have licences for. A disadvantage of this method is that unlike a lot of software, font licences generally don’t come with upgrades. The version available at the time of licensing is the version one has access to. Should an improved version come along – say, in a new format, or with more glyphs and supported languages – one would have to pay for the new version to use the new features. This might soon become an expensive problem for a few people. New versions of graphic arts apps are starting to deprecate older digital font formats, and some people with ageing libraries of digital fonts licensed from the 1980s to the 2000s might soon find that their fonts no longer work.
Subscription licences
Software of all types is increasingly being sold as a subscription service, and fonts are no exception. Users of Adobe’s Creative Cloud products get access to the large Adobe Fonts catalogue – until one stops paying the subscription fee of course. Adobe’s library includes not just Adobe fonts, but those of numerous other foundries. This leads to the problem of vanishing content familiar to users of streaming TV services. Occasionally a foundry will withdraw their fonts from the library: troublesome for those of us who have had fonts disappear in the middle of a project.
Font rental
Fontstand, a distributor for several foundries, offer a service much like some car financing. You can rent a font by the month for 10% of its retail cost, and if you continue to pay for a full year, receive a perpetual licence. Also, much like test driving in the car business, you can take a font for a three-hour spin before you commit to paying for it.
Open source fonts
Open source fonts turn up in a variety of places, but Google Fonts is probably the largest single repository. Until recently Google’s FAQ about how one may use them amounted to two unhelpful sentences. The first described a general freedom:
You can use these fonts freely in your products & projects – print or digital, commercial or otherwise.
The second sentence, while short of being a contradiction, certainly undercut the first proposition:
This isn’t legal advice, please consider consulting a lawyer and see the full license for all details.
Again, reading the licence is undoubtedly sensible, but my guess is that if one can afford to consult a lawyer versed in intellectual property in the software industry, one can afford to go shopping at Enschedé. The latest version of the FAQ is more straightforwardly permissive, and suggests that now Google will only be adding fonts issued under the SIL Open Font License to their library.
Unlicensed fonts
Digital fonts are among the softest targets for software piracy, but the increased adoption of open source fonts and subscription services has probably ameliorated the situation a bit. Google Fonts now includes more than 1400 font families, and Adobe’s library almost twice as many, albeit with some overlap. But this is a cornucopia of type which obviates the temptation of thievery. A side effect of this abundance is that smaller foundries have had to make a clear proposition that their type is as good as or better than the excellent fonts available for free or as part of a subscription, and have upped their game accordingly. Not only are there more fonts, but better ones too. There will always be digital packrats who will stash anything they can lay their hands on, but most of us are happier paying for what we know we like, and living without the tyranny of choice – an unmanageably long font menu – that such nefarious hoarding engenders.
Beyond licences
The most reliable way of owning a digital font, rather than getting a licence to use it in a particular way, is to get someone to make it for you, or make it yourself. For most individuals and small companies, this is forbiddingly expensive, either in money or time. For big organisations, particularly media companies, it can be something of a bargain. If your product is used by millions of people, an outlay in tens, or even hundreds of thousands for a house typeface might soon save you millions in licensing fees.
But even with a bespoke font, ownership can be complicated. When writing about the prodigiously talented musician Prince, in discussing his career between 7 June 1993 and 13 May 2000, rather than use the acronym TAFKAP( The Artist Formerly Know As Prince ) one might prefer the glyph he used as his stage name during that period: ¶. The device, named Love Symbol #2, is a registered trademark. It is almost certainly fair to use it, and include it in a font as I’ve done here. But by including it, I’ve made a font I can never really own.
We are herein presented to some five hundred thousand characters, each one deftly drawn in a line or two of agate type, each one standing out from the rest in bold relief.
Notes on the 1920 New York City telephone directory Robert Benchley, ‘Of All Things’.
Before type was specified as being of a particular point size – say, 10-point Palatino; 8-point Univers – fonts were known by named sizes, generally agreed upon and understood within the printing trade. Outside of remaining letterpress printing offices, few of these names are now in general use. Typographic layouts are still sometimes specified in multiples of picas (a pica being 12 points, about a sixth of an inch) but one no longer hears 12-point type being referred to as pica. Robert Slimbach’s versatile typeface Minion is familiar to users of Adobe’s page layout app InDesign, for which it is the default typeface. But its name owes more to the sense of a typographer’s compliant factotum than the traditional designation of minion as 7-point type. Among other names of sizes which have largely lost their typographic sense are pearl (5 point) and brevier (8 point), both shown in the detail below, of ‘Antique’ type from Edmund Fry’s Specimen of Modern Printing Types (1828).
Falling between these two sizes is agate. Widely used in the United States, agate signifies type of about 5½ point, generally accepted as the smallest size to remain legible in hot metal printing on newsprint. In newspapers it has typically been used for text that might be of little interest to most readers, but of obsessive importance to specialist audiences (think stock prices, racetrack results, ballgame statistics). The word escaped the bounds of printing argot and entered the vocabulary as a synecdoche for small print, both where it might be useful (a city bus schedule, an optometrist’s eye-test sheet) and where it might be hiding something in plain-ish sight (onerous terms and conditions in a contract, alarming potential side-effects in a prescription drug leaflet). Sometimes, as with the coronavirus antigen test certificate shown here, it’s used for text that isn’t really expected to be read, printed solely for regulatory reasons.
Robert Benchley’s introduction to the dramatis personae of the New York City telephone directory quoted above points to one of small type’s most useful 20th-century applications. Phone books, like newspapers, were printed in huge quantities using low-quality paper on fast presses. Later editions of the book that Benchley was having fun with were printed, from 1938, using Bell Gothic, a condensed sans-serif typeface designed by Chauncey H. Griffith, itself superseded in 1978 by Matthew Carter’s Bell Centennial. As well as being the designer of numerous interpretations of historic typefaces, Carter is known as one of the great typographic problem solvers (he led the design of Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana for Microsoft, typefaces which work nicely in print, but were designed with the limitations of PC displays in mind). Like Bell Gothic, Bell Centennial is condensed and economical in space, but the distinctive innovation was exceptionally deep indentations to de-emphasise the ‘ink traps’ – the junctions where parts of glyphs meet – which tend to overfill when printed in small sizes on cheap, porous paper.
The subtleties of fonts of different sizes was usually lost in the transition from metal setting to photocomposition. Typefaces, which had consisted of multiple fonts, differently proportioned and spaced according to their size, began to be issued as single instances, optimised for where it was assumed they would be used. A display face, intended to be reproduced in large sizes for advertising or on the covers of books and magazines, might be made to look at its best at 36 points or larger. A general-purpose face intended for the body text of books and magazines, would be targeted at about a third of that size. And advances in the quality of offset printing made the design differences even more obvious when type was set at a non-optimal size. More recently some digital typefaces, like Monotype’s 2018 version of Walbaum shown here, have been issued in different ‘optical sizes’, as fonts sharing structural qualities, but adjusted for different contexts. The refined 60 point version (five-line pica under its old named size) intended for headlines, simply couldn’t do the same work at small sizes as the 6 point (nonpareil).
The smallest size included in Fry’s Specimen, shown with a superimposed millimetre scale below, diamond (4½ point) is uncomfortably small for anyone without exceptional eyesight or a magnifying glass. Other foundries issued even more minute fonts in sizes brilliant (4 point) and minikin (3 point) but the use cases for such text must have been minimal in every sense.
I have been readingThe Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage in a paperback edition issued to coincide with the release of Jane Campion’s movie version of the book. Happily the cover doesn’t show an image of characters from the film (much better to do the casting in one’s mind), but uses a striking landscape photograph by Jay Wesler in a sympathetic design by Suzanne Dean. Less agreeably, the moody composition is interrupted by coming to netflix branding on a faux (i.e. printed, so unremovable) sticker.
At first I thought wavering white arc at the bottom of the Netflix roundel was a curious design element: perhaps a friendly smile? Looking closer, it was evident that it was text, but so small that even with a 4x loupe it wasn’t legible. A high-resolution scan revealed that the words, as might be expected, were there to protect the company’s trademark. The superimposed millimetre scale shows just how tiny the letters are, an indication of just how much detail is possible in modern printing, even with half-tone-grey-out-of-black text, a trickier proposition than solid black on white.
Two questions come to mind. When an expression of rights is made which is impossible to read without technological intervention, has that expression been made? And what size is the text? 2 point? 1½ point? Pointless?
Producing a complete printed catalogue of latin-alphabet typefaces would now be an impractically vast undertaking, but Paul McNeil’s substantial survey of around 320 examples, each given a full spread, is both as satisfying a historical summary of styles as one could hope for, and a handsome and useful book. Most of the illustrations are of specimen pages produced when the type was first issued. This has the advantage of showing accurate reproductions of historic letterforms and, to some extent, the ways in which manufacturers and designers expected the fonts might be used. Starting with Gutenberg in the 1450s, McNeil’s chronology is more granular than the rough arrangement of bookmarks shown below, but they give an idea of how much innovative and revived type has been issued in the past century.
Most typophiles could probably point out deserving type that isn’t represented. They would have trouble making a strong case for omitting any of the faces that have been included.
To say that Raymond Chandler described Los Angeles as ‘a city with the personality of a paper cup’ isn’t quite right. Even when the phrase is quoted correctly, the sentence almost always has its curdled opening omitted. What he actually has Philip Marlowe say, in The Little Sister, is:
The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.
The mean-mindedness of the beginning of the sentence undercuts the laconic zinger at its end, and makes one question whether either Los Angeles or a paper cup truly wants for personality. Hollywood has mixed feelings about its home turf: seedy and corrupt in LA Confidential, a place of strange magic in LA Story. Out-of-towners are divided about the place too, but for every Woody Allen (‘a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light’) there’s someone like the writer and critic Reyner Banham whose short film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles is as giddy an encomium as its title suggests. Whatever the place’s pros and cons, personality doesn’t seem to be its problem.
Paper cups, and their plastic successors, are difficult to defend ethically. Their current status is as environmental despoilers of the first rank – the epitome of the disposable culture and sinful single use.
I hate myself
But culturally, these humble objects deserve a bit of respect, and if the love of the things is aesthetic, it’s possible, guiltlessly, to have one’s cup and drink from it too. I have a couple of trompe l’oeil ceramic versions which mimic disposable ones. The first shown here is modelled on the infuriatingly flimsy plastic type which, when filled with a hot drink, scald the hand and crumple under the slightest pressure.
As crumpled as Columbo’s raincoat.
It is from ones very like this that Peter Falk, playing the fallen angel ‘Peter Falk’ in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, happens to be drinking when he speaks to the invisible angels who are benevolently haunting still-divided Berlin. In one of these scenes Falk detects the presence of the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and says to him:
I can’t see you but I know you’re here. I feel it. You’ve been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face. Just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here, just to touch something. See that’s cold . . . I feel good. Here . . . to smoke . . . have coffee. And if you do it together it’s fantastic.
The scene wouldn’t work if he was drinking from Meissen china and smoking a Montecristo in a grand salon. That would be about the pleasures of luxury and privilege, about being halfway to heaven. Cheap coffee from a plastic cup in wintery weather at a shabby currywurst stand is about the transcendent ordinariness of being human.
Steven Spielberg is a filmmaker who can get a lot from a lot and a lot from a little. He used the same kind of cup, getting it to do comedy, in Jaws. The drawn-out pissing contest between Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) and Quint (Robert Shaw) is played out in several scenes, but the best is the beer can v. plastic cup face off. In Jurassic Park, when pricy animatronics had been superseded by even more expensive CGI, anything that suggested rather than showed saved thousands of dollars per second of screen time. Spielberg got the movie’s most effective moment of suspense from nothing more than a couple of trembling water beakers on an SUV’s dashboard.
The other half of my collection is a souvenir of New York, a copy of the Anthora coffee cup. Designed by Leslie Buck, a marketing executive for the Sherri Cup Company, the Anthora has been around since 1963, and even if it isn’t technically exclusive to New York, after Milton Glaser’s I♥︎NY it is arguably the most recognisable graphic shortcut to the city.
The hardest-working cup in show business.
The association of America’s Greek community with selling coffee is a long-standing one which Buck recognised and saw the potential for having graphic fun with. The Anthora’s design, a slightly goofy evocation of Helenic antiquity, largely in the colours of the Greek flag, offered diners and coffee shops something displaying a friendly message with a dash of hyphenate-American pride. And as a curious, free-floating non-brand (the cup itself is a brand I suppose, but what goes in it isn’t Anthora coffee, or We Are Happy to Serve You coffee, it’s whatever coffee the place happens to serve) it became phenomenally visible, both in the city, and, later, in movies and TV shows. I remember thinking when watching Mad Men, on one of the occasions when the action shifted from New York to California, that the series must have had quite a budget to do so much West Coast location shooting. But of course I was being thick. The staff of Sterling Cooper and their New York homes and offices were already there, on the sound stages of Los Angeles Center Studios. It was the cup that flew in from the other coast. For productions not shot in New York the cup does this sort of work often. It’s a cheap and effective prop to place action in the city, and more subtle than an establishing shot (often on glaringly mismatched film stock) of the Lower Manhattan skyline.
If the Anthora ever was aspirational (most products featured in Mad Men were one way or another) it isn’t any longer. Any cachet it had has declined with the rise of Starbucks and other chains. In movies it’s no longer in the hands of the princes of ad-land, but in those of shlubbier folk like Robert De Niro’s bail bond bounty hunter in Midnight Run or John Turturro’s skid row defence attorney in The Night Of. When characters are seen with the blue and white beaker, we know they are deaf to the siren call of incomers like the green mermaid from Seattle.
¶Images. Any images included in this post may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. ¶Notes. A slightly scrappy video-to-digital transfer of Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles can be seen on YouTube.
Burger King seems unlikely to diversify from fast food into male grooming so is probably untroubled by this barber shop’s branding. Had McDonalds’ legal department come across the long-gone chippy shown below, it might have been less relaxed. The somewhat chaotic sign advertised burgers alongside a device practically indistinguishable from the Golden Arches trademark, albeit doing a headstand.
Of course Big Burger isn’t the only industry where liveries are jealously guarded. The Walt Disney Company’s wordmark is derived from a stylised version of Walt Disney’s signature, and when the letters spell out Disney (or most likely, as below, in unsanctioned and mischievous distortions) the word belongs to the company.
But preventing the use of the letters in other ways is more-or-less impossible. The copyright protection of letterforms varies from country to country, but a prohibition on duplicating the shapes of glyphs is practically unenforceable. Waltograph is a freeware font which expands the Disney logo to a full alphabet, with which you can do, well . . .
But there has been some benefit to Disney. Justin Callaghan, who made Waltograph, has put together a collection of images of how his fonts have been used by the company in their attractions and official merchandise.
The sign shown below is stealing some Disney stardust to sell liquor. It’s unlikely that the Mouse House would condone such use if they had a say. Disney’s theme parks were dry for many years, and the company still make sure that insofar as alcohol is now available in their Lands and Worlds, it is consumed in siloed locations.
But the brand is not the man, and the firm’s founder might have dropped by Brighton Your Spirit. He once said to a friend:
I’m not Walt Disney. I do a lot of things Walt Disney wouldn’t do. Walt Disney doesn’t smoke. I smoke. Walt Disney doesn’t drink. I drink.
¶Notes. In an essay from 2020 on CAST Luciano Perondi wrote an assessment of the developments in digital type since Robin Kinross’s article ‘The digital wave’ was published in Eye in 1992. Perondi’s piece contains a helpful summary of the current state of trademark, patent, and copyright law as it concerns digital fonts. Waltograph can be downloaded for non-commercial use from mickeyavenue.com¶Sources.American Experience: Walt Disney (PBS, 2015). ¶Images. Any images included in this post may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
In ‘But There Is No Sound’, published in the New Yorker in 1941, Joseph Mitchell wrote about a visit to the Union League of the Deaf, an exclusively-deaf social club in Manhattan. His letter of introduction to the society’s historian had been provided by an acquaintance who was a member, a Linotype operator. The printing trade was among the most common professions in the Union League: most big newspaper printing plants – noisy workplaces where a high level of literacy was vital, the spoken word less so – employed deaf workers. In Farewell etaion shrdlu, a documentary made for the New York Times almost 40 years later, an exchange in sign language between two printers shows that this tradition continued to the end of the age of hot metal printing in what was then the world’s biggest newspaper print works.
Farewell etaion shrdlu (New York Times).
The film was shot on 1 July 1978, the last night that text was set for the Times using some of the 60 remaining Linotype linecasting machines (80 had already been removed, replaced by CRT terminals for the new system of photocomposition). It was written, directed and edited by David Loeb Weiss, then a proofreader at the paper, and narrated by its technical consultant, Carl Schlesinger, a Linotype operator there. It’s unlikely that filmmakers who weren’t also on the staff of the paper would have been able to so coherently condense the mass of procedural detail it contains into the less than 30-minutes running time. But the film is almost as much about a societal shift as it is about a technological one. Only one woman appears (a page editor, not a printer), and the battened-down emotions of the men whose professional expertise was made redundant that night is evident. A sequence at the end showing the former printers reassigned to computer terminals and paste-up boards, much less specialised jobs than they were used to, makes it clear that the influence of the print unions was over.
About half way through the film we get to see a few seconds of the making stereotype matrices, known in the jargon of the industry as flongs. These were engineered-paper moulds taken from the flat setting of pages which had been composed on the printers’ stones. After they had taken an impression of a page, the moulds were precisely curved and cast in lead, making the semi-cylindracal stereotypes to be mounted on rotary presses. At the New York Times type composition, stereotyping and printing were all done in the paper’s own printing plant. Other newspapers would have been struggled to maintain rotary presses for their own exclusive use. In London in the 1970s and 1980s there were marriages of convenience : the composing rooms of the Guardian and the Sunday Times were effectively flong factories, where matrices were made before being sent to a shared printing works.
There are still working Linotype machines, but stereotyping is now all but extinct. Glenn Fleischman’s essay ‘Flong time no see’ is, on the web at least, a peerless history of the technology, and of its afterlife in the realm of collectable ephemera. Flongs of full pages of newspaper are rare. Some which have survived would have been run off not for making printing plates but as souvenirs of historical moments (the front page of the Washington Post of 9 August 1974 headlined ‘Nixon Resigns’ is shown in Fleischman’s article) but most would have been discarded as soon as they had been used for casting. Smaller pieces, like the ad shown below, are more common and easier to come by on eBay, but catch them while you can.
Flong gone.
Founded in 1979 the London Review of Books post-dated the age of hot metal. At its inception it was laid out for offset printing from photocomposition. Marked-up typescripts were sent to a repro house, and the typeset copy was returned as bromides – sheets of galleys reproduced on photosensitive paper. If there were errors or infelicities in the copy and there wasn’t time to get the text reset, corrections had to be made with scalpel and Cow Gum. In 2019 Anthony Wilks made a short film called The Lost Art of Paste-Up, in which Bryony Dalefield, the paper’s paste-up artist, recreated this painstaking process. As the film shows, the art is not yet lost, but the artefacts are. We thought it would be nice to show a page of the original typesetting in the film, and a search of the LRB’s archive was initiated. Not a single camera-ready layout has survived.
The Lost Art of Paste-Up (London Review of Books).
After eleven years of outsourcing typesetting, the LRB came to desktop publishing in 1990. For a time the pages were output as PostScript files and sent for imagesetting, but a 600 dpi laser printer and heavy Mellotex paper turned out to produced artwork good enough for offset on newsprint. For the past 15 years printing of the LRB, like that of almost all newspapers and magazines, has been a digital enterprise, and nothing material goes to the printers. Completed layouts are made into PDFs which our printers output directly to plates. But that isn’t to say that there is no longer anything to lose. Digital archiving – keeping copies of page layout files – didn’t start at the LRB until 2000. When the full-text archive of the paper was created in 2009, the text for every issue of the paper’s first twenty years had to be scanned and converted to a digital format. About half of these would have been available from the files we had diligently deleted once each issue had been published.
¶Notes. The title Farewell etaoin shrdlu is derived from the nonsense phrase that results from entering the first two columns of characters on a Linotype keyboard, more or less the equivalent of typing ‘1qaz 2wsx’ on a QWERTY one. In Britain, Cow Gum was the genericised brand of contact adhesive: Brits have been known to bemuse North American colleagues by referring to rubber cement thus. I began working at the London Review of Books in the early 1990s and have been on the staff since 2000. ¶Sources. ‘A Reporter at Large: But There Is No Sound’ by Joseph Mitchell (New Yorker, 20 September 1941); ‘The end of hot metal printing’ by Elli Narewska (the Guardian, 3 March 2015); ‘Flong Time No See’ by Glenn Fleischman (Medium, 25 April 2019); Farewell etaoin shrdlu and The Lost Art of Paste-Up can be seen on Vimeo. ¶Images. With the exception of video, any images included in this post may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
The sign above Peggy’s Cafe was uncovered for a while when this building in Brighton was being refitted. It hasn’t really been a cafe for at least 20 years: most recently it was a take-out pizza and burger place. By the look of them, the words date to the 1960s or 1970s. Hardly a landmark of sign-writing craft, but it’s cheerful and nicely done. It will probably be removed or covered over again soon, which is why I bothered to take a photo of it. A few years ago, I took a snap nearby when Channel was revealed during a renovation.
It must have been done at around the same time as Peggy’s, and the similarity of the pale drop-shadow suggests it might even be the work of the same local sign-writer. Again, no masterpiece, and maybe not worth making a fuss about, but what replaced it was even less distinguished (and is already gone).
If signs are thought to merit preservation by the city’s planning department, they are usually saved one way or another. Often this is achieved by simply boxing in the old words and putting new branding on the box. Sometimes the sign is allowed to stay. A.Billet&Co is now a bar called L’Atelier du Vin, whose proprietors have sensibly decided that the charm of the sign above the door needn’t be sacrificed to the name of the business behind it.
Since its original service for accountants and valuers, the sign for Christian and Cowell must have survived above numerous businesses. Until quite recently it was a second-hand bookshop. The current tenants, Cutter & Grinder, The Art of Barbering School & Shop have turned out to be good custodians, creating a graphic identity of their own which echoes the old hoarding.
Unluckier hairdressers were the barbers at Trafalgars who had a tricky problem when they took on the lease of their salon. The only part of the original livery that remains visible there is the street number.
The main part of the sign, laid out much as it is below, used to read, in the left-hand lozenge: Dispensing Chemist; in the big, middle one: J. Barker; and in the right-hand one: Practical Phrenologist. It was decreed by the planning department to be an ‘important architectural feature’ which should be retained. But the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain wasn’t happy that the words Dispensing Chemist appeared on the facade of a business that was not one (the RPS has form with this sort of thing : a few years ago they got antsy about a Damien Hirst-backed restaurant called Pharmacy.)
The solution here was a version of the boxing-in method: covering the old, glazed lozenges with vinyl patches to conceal and preserve the sign while sparing the dispensing chemists’ feelings. What, if anything, the phrenologists had to say about the affair is not recorded.
¶Sources.The Argus, 28 December 2007. ¶Images. Any images included in this post may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
The bottom one really isn’t usable any longer, but I can’t quite bring myself to bin it. Soft graphite pencils need frequent sharpening, so they don’t last long. But they are much nicer to write and draw with. In 2018 Patrick Brill wrote in an obituary in the Guardian for his mother, the artist Deirdre Borlase:
I asked her recently what the secret to a good life was. She replied: ‘Get a good pencil, a 2B or a 3B, not an HB … they are for architects.’
In 2019, under his art-name Bob and Roberta Smith, Brill and his family of artists – his wife Jessica Voorsanger, and their daughter Etta Voorsanger Brill – used Borlase’s advice as the title of a show for the Royal Academy, ‘a sort of family effort’, a homage to Borlase and other women artists. The introductory video has some nice pondering on pencils.
¶Images. With the exception of video, any images included in this post may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
Cookies are used to deliver the best experience on this website. If this is unacceptable to you and you wish to continue to use this website, your remedy is to block cookies for hellbox.co.uk
