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| Gothic "book hand" |
It took thirteen pages of last Thursday’s Times before I found anything sufficiently stimulating to contemplate as a possible blog topic; but it was worth the wait. At the heart of an article on page thirteen was Calibri. As a one-time active amateur letterpress printer, I was nearly thrilled to come upon an article that captured the passionate potential lurking in typefaces. For Calibri is the name of a typeface launched about a twenty years ago by the Dutch typographer Lucas de Groot. I don’t know how many typophiles are likely to read my blog, but in case there might be one or two I will say that Calibri is one of the newer “C” fonts, which also include the one I usually use on my own computer, Cambria, fonts that are generally elegant, conservative, unfussy, and maximally legible. But apparently in the eyes of the current presidential administration Calibri is also suspiciously woke. Marco Rubio has ordered the State Department to stop using it and to return to the allegedly less edgy Times New Roman.
We now tend to call the original Gutenberg font, that used in the famous forty-two line Bible, “Gothic” or black letter. It was in fact based on the common “book hand” of the professional scribes of late medieval manuscripts. Gutenberg, even in the revolutionary act that was letterpress printing, was entirely traditional in his type face. That is, he tried to make printed text look exactly like hand-written (i.e. scribal) text. For many years most printing remained “black letter”. Even when I was in graduate school a large number of German language books I had to consult were in a “Gothic” face. The modernization of German language printing type faces came about by German governmental policy in 1941, a date at which one might be forgiven for thinking the Germans had bigger things to worry about. But a modern political movement wanted to make a modern presentation. The Nazis really looked sharp. If Calibri is woke, fifteenth-century black letter must be—what? What is the opposite of woke? Somnolent, perhaps, or drowsy?
I alluded in my last essay to the twin aims to which poetry should aspire according to the poet Horace: utility and beauty, instruction and pleasure. Many other social habits combine similar goals. That the mechanical reproduction of writing was useful was perhaps too obvious to talk about; almost immediately typographers began the competition to make it ever more beautiful as well. Everyone I suppose is familiar with the distinction between Roman and Italic faces, though if you think about Rome as a city in Italy things can become confusing. In the great age of the Scholar-Printers the rebirth of learning demanded also a rebirth of scribal form. The artistic impulse of typography began even before Gutenberg. A picture being worth some large number of words, I recommend you make a visit to the Letterform Archive museum in San Francisco, which you can do either in person or (as I myself do) via a computer screen. I don’t know whether, as Secretary Rubio seems to suggest, typefaces vary in their political or cultural wokeness, but surely San Francisco would be the place to find out.
In Gothic book hand—the term often used of the common learned calligraphy of the fifteenth century—the letters i, j, l, m, n, u, and v were composed of what look at first glance like similar if not identical straight vertical strokes. The technical term for this mark is a minim, also used by musicians to indicate a half-note. A minim is definitely minimal, sort of the least thing that can be done, calligraphically or musically speaking. The minim invites visual ambiguity. The ambitions of verbal communication, on the other hand are maximal, and such early printers as Manutius Aldus in Venice supervised the creation of new fonts (based in ancient classical
monumental sources) both beautiful and precise.
Even in the weird political climate which we are forced to endure, I find it curious, to say the least, that grown men can find the sustenance for their political outrage in the inconsiderable differences between two popular and undramatic modern type fonts. But of course nobody can really believe that typography has much to do with it. Our politics have become so fundamentally polarized as not even to require identifiable poles.
Perhaps the English-speaking world, or at least the dominant American parts of it, should adopt an official national typeface. That might be accomplished without political controversy because of the blandness of the creator of the typeface and its role in our revolutionary history. It was the typeface of our own sacred foundational documents. It has been around so long that no one could accuse it of being the slightest bit woke. Semi-somnolent, perhaps, but that is a different matter. The natural candidate typeface would be Caslon. We know quite a bit about William Caslon, who supervised the casting for the punches. He flourished, to use the old phrase, in the first half of the eighteenth century in London. The early printers included many rather bold and politically engaged men, but so far as I can tell Caslon was not one of them. He was a stolid, practical businessman, a fine craftsman, and the founder of an incipient dynasty of typographers dominant in the London trade for more than a century. Historians have perhaps exaggerated the aesthetic aspect of the early printing industry at the expense of the economic. Caslon did well. Yet one will not find a single memorable fact about him in his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography that might make him stand out as a personality. His solid, stolid, beautiful, and unwoke typefaces long dominated English-language typography, and they are still around. Familiarity and legibility are hallmarks of Caslon, or would be if types had hallmarks. The face presents but one danger and that a minor one. One form of the lower-case letter s, called the “long” s, has a vertically lengthened form that can sometimes be confused with lower-case f. In an era in which the f-word was still transgressive, this typographical curiosity was once the source of great hilarity to the students in a graduate seminar meeting at which I was present more than sixty years ago. But social mores evolve in history no less than does printing technology. The only verbal transgressions likely to be noted today are heresies involving class, race, or gender. But not to worry. There is an abundant supply of them. We cannot soon run out of outrage.
