might; and these remarks must appear by now to be not only ramblings
but the ravings of an old reactionary who is blind to anything that
is new. That deduction will be almost literally correct, ladies and
gentlemen. There is no denying that I am old, and toward much that I
see around me, I am reactionary; and I have learned nothing in all my
years of striving for knowledge, more convincing than that statement in
the Book of Ecclesiastes to the effect that there is nothing new under
the sun. I plead guilty to this hideous indictment and throw myself on
the mercy of this court. I am even happy to have learned that much, and
wish, in the manner of the camp meeting revivalist, that I might pass
on something of this blessed revelation to the "brethern and sistern"
present.
While I thus brazenly deny the existence of anything really new, and
fail to recognize what is called "progress" and deplore the waste of
talent and energy that is dissipated in striving for these things, I
am far from blind to the value of revolt. Our creative sense is all
too prone to doze off into dreams of past glories. From these, and the
sterile copying of them, we may be awakened and rescued by even the
crudest of revolutions. We may benefit from them provided we do not let
them tear up our roots--provided we still can recognize an illusion
when we meet it. The squirrel in his revolving cage must have some
illusion of progress, else he would not take any exercise, and without
exercise he would fatten and sicken and die.
And, remember, there is always progress to be made within yourselves,
no matter if it is the same progress in the same direction that has
been made by countless other souls. And there will, I hope, always be
things new to you, as there are every day things new to me, even if the
sun has seen them all before. I don't want to live a day longer than I
can learn.
There is no reason to suppose that there is not today as much latent
talent for the arts in existence, as at any time in their history. But
talent for art is not talent for being an artist--one may have much
of the one, without much of the other. It seems to me that there are
more temptations and distractions working against the talent to be an
artist today than ever before. More alluring short cuts and seductive
philosophies--a disturbing babel of undigested ideas and indigestible
objectives. If in this riot you can keep your heads and not lose sight
of the important difference between "a grain of truth" and the whole
truth, if you can grow in understanding of what it is you want to do,
you may, even now, have a good chance of doing it.
But what has all this to do with printing and typography and their
related graphic arts? I seem by now to be so far off the track that it
will take a derrick and wrecking crew to get me back on again. As a
matter of fact I have not forgotten the subject altogether and have,
in my lumbering way, been working toward it. But because I can't think
of typography as an art in itself, unrelated to all the other arts, I
could not approach it except by the way I have.
All of these things that I have been complaining about in the other
arts, have their counterparts in present-day typography and printing.
The same restless craving for something "new," the same preoccupation
with isms, the same monotonous sameness. But this poison is aggravated
in the case of printing and typography, by the fact that of all the
arts, it is, by its very nature and purpose, the most conventional.
If it is an art at all, it is an art to serve another art. It is good
only in so far as it serves well and not on any account good for any
other reason. It is not the business of type and printing to show off,
and when, as it now so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionistic
antics of its own, it is just a bad servant.
For this reason the embarrassing ineptitude of the current efforts
toward a "new typography" are even more distressing than similar
contortions in other fields. Typography, I repeat, is a servant--the
servant of thought and language to which it gives visible existence.
When there are new ways of thinking and a new language, it will be time
enough for a new typography. When we have altered all of our manners
and social customs, only then will it be time to radically alter the
well grounded conventions of this very minor art. Within them there
is now ample room, as there always has been, for the exercise of
ingenuity, skill and individual taste. I suggest that those who cannot
abide the conventions of typography are mostly those who have never
tried them.
In what does the newness of this new typography consist? It seems to be
new as the neu in neurosis from which it largely derives. It is new as
it would be new for a man to enter the dining room on his hands instead
of his feet, and instead of eating his soup, to pour it into his
hostess's lap. It is as new and agreeable and pleasing to look at as
delirium tremens which it closely resembles. The new typography engages
in such side-splitting pranks as putting the margins of a book page in
just the opposite arrangement to that which practical utility and well
founded tradition have always placed them. It might with equal reason
and originality, turn the type page upside down. In advertising display
it makes use of that highly original and refreshing device of printing
what is to be read at a cockeyed angle. The make-up expert indulges
that other fresh and original dodge of bleeding pictures off the edge
of the page so that a flat two dimensional photograph is viewed without
a frame on two of its sides and must compete with a background of all
the three dimensional things in the room.
I refuse to bore you or myself by enumerating all the tiresome
stock-in-trade eccentricities of the typographic expert in search of
something new--the epileptic fits he throws to attract attention to
himself at the expense of the words he is printing. You see enough of
them every day to know what I mean. Nearly every magazine and newspaper
page, not to mention a good many books, present the same revolting
spectacle--the order of the day, it seems, is disorder.
And speaking of magazines, it has fallen to my lot from time to time
in the past thirty-five years to design and redesign a number of
periodicals of one kind and another. Such jobs require really very
little actual work--it's by endless argument and conference that
they can wear you to the bone. My simple purpose with these things
has always been to bring any measure of order the case will permit
out of the disorder in which I generally find it. My mission, if I
have any, is to suppress typography, not to encourage it--to put it
in its place and make it behave like a decently trained servant. I
find magazines rolling in the gutter covered with the accumulated
mud of years of dissipation. I pick them up and brush them off, give
them a cup of black coffee and a new suit of clothes and start them
off on respectable typographic careers. But like other missionaries,
more often than not, I find them a year or so later, back in the same
gutter, drunk and disorderly and remorselessly happy about it.
If the philosophy of functionalism has hit the new typography as it
has the other applied arts, I see no evidence of it. On the contrary,
in this field, anything goes, so long as it is eccentric, free from
the restraints of reason, and can successfully discourage the reader
from reading. All the distortions of the Roman alphabet that were
discarded a half century ago--in fact any types which are as nearly
unreadable as types can be made--have been dragged out again and called
"modern." These range from the elaborately ornamental letters of the
most depraved periods of design to the stark diagrams of letters that
were called by type-founders in my youth: "Printer's lining gothic"--as
absurd a misnomer as could be imagined, since they have nothing
whatsoever to do with gothic letters or any other letter forms known
to history. Laymen called them, more accurately, "block letters"; but
in the new typography they are elegantly referred to as "sans serifs"
because, among other features of the Roman alphabet which they lack, is
a total absence of serifs. They bear the same relation to Roman letters
as would an engineer's drawings for a trolley track. At the moment
they are very much in vogue and are widely believed to be modern and
to be a simplification in harmony with the new architecture, furniture
and other things. They are supposed to represent the spirit of our day
like the noise of rivetting hammers in a modern musical composition.
They simplify the traditional forms of type as you might simplify a man
by cutting his hands and feet off. You can no more dispense with the
essential features of the written or printed Roman alphabet, ladies
and gentlemen, than you can dispense with the accents and intonations
of human speech. This is simplification for simpletons, and these are
block letters for blockheads.
The users of typography and printing, the publishers and advertisers,
are also confused by illusions of their own. Foremost among these is
the notion that they require every week new types to give freshness and
effectiveness to what they print and publish. This wholly unwarranted
assumption is undoubtedly a godsend to the type-founders, however
disastrous it is to the development of a sane and ordered typography.
It has peopled the earth with typographic experts who know "the latest
thing" and not much else, and it has relieved the designers of printing
from the burden of knowing anything about design. It is so much easier
to buy new types than to learn how to use effectively the types we
already have. And if, instead of flooding our composing rooms with
new types, which are seldom more than variations upon old themes of
distortion, our type-founders would give us at least twice as many
sizes as they now make, of a few good types, we should have a really
flexible medium to work in. We would have to make fewer compromises
with good design, and they might profit commercially, as typography
surely would profit artistically.
And this constructive suggestion reminds me that I ought perhaps
to temper this hurricane of destructive criticism with some further
helpful hints. At the moment I can only think of two that might relieve
the dreadful situation that I have pictured. One is that we organize a
pogrom of all type designers--a little hard on them perhaps, but they
would gain martyrdom to a cause--and the other is that we establish
a concentration camp in which to intern all those who think up or
think they think up new ideas in typography for such time as it will
take them to recover from their delusion. There they might while
away pleasant hours in the distinguished company of the inventors of
paper-towels, pasteboard milk bottles and beer in cans.
With my younger colleagues still in mind, I ought to say something of
the practical problems that we encounter in professing and practicing
one or other of the graphic arts. We are, or should be, if we are
really artists, more concerned with what we give to our art than with
what we get out of it. But we have to live--or think we do--and to do
that by the practice of art is certainly no easier now than it ever
was. If anything, it's a little harder. Beyond that inner satisfaction
with what we can give--and there is only a little of that and at rare
intervals--the only two things to be got _out_ of art are money and
fame; and I daresay there are few of us who would not welcome a little
of both. But we must compete today with a great many of those who work
for nothing else; and who, under the banner of one or another of these
isms of which I've been prating, can concentrate upon that unique
objective unhampered by any serious interest in art itself. They are
devotees of success, like their commercial brethren, and by means of
the same promotional paraphernalia they succeed so well that one is
tempted at times to believe that the only living art is the art of self
promotion.
Another curious development of these times is the classification of
artists according to political ideology. We hear now of "left wing"
artists. As nearly as I can discover, these are to be recognized by
their contempt for any sort of craftsmanship and a peculiar inability
to keep their drawings clean. They make penury--the unhappy lot of
nearly all artists--a pious virtue, and they are not infrequently big
with pretension to being the only serious interpreters of life and
truth. These are balanced on the other end of the political see-saw
by a school of "economic royalists" who have made of art a commercial
opportunity. As Industrial Designers with large staffs and control
boards and troops of indefatigable press agents, they have welded art
and commerce so successfully that it is nearly impossible to tell them
apart. Somewhere between the two is the artist; and he is as often
as not a forgotten man. Not quite poor enough to be picturesque or
heartrending, just well enough off to keep his collar and his drawings
clean, he must nevertheless spend an exorbitant part of his life and
energies in worrying about bills.
And now to stop the clamor of the butcher, the baker _et al._, to whom
must we sell our graphic arts? For the most part, I suppose, it will be
to publishers, industrialists and advertising agents. The publisher is
a pretty decent sort, on the whole, but if he is a book publisher, he
can generally be recognized as such by the fact of having very little
money to spend on art. In my own experience, the most generous and
appreciative customer for our wares has been the industrialist. What
you do for him can often increase his profit very materially, and he is
not slow to recognize that fact.
The advertising agent, speaking very generally and with the particular
exception of one very dear friend in mind, deals largely in what might
be called scientifically organized fraud. I am aware that to say this
now is to risk being called a "communist transmission belt"--whatever
that may be. It has even been suggested that by these animadversions
upon advertising, I am biting the hand that fed me; but I suggest that
I am biting the hand that I have fed until I am fed up on feeding it.
It may be that you will find, as I sometimes have, in the ranks of
these shock troops of deception, sympathetic and amiable clients for
your work who can deal differently with artists than they deal with
the public--but not very often. Each of them employs what is called an
Art Director whose importance is derived, not so much from art as from
the financial size and number of advertising accounts toward which he
directs it. It is his duty to furnish you with what he calls "ideas,"
upon the theory that an artist is not mentally up to having any of his
own. Ten to one he will end by altering your drawing to give it the
"wallop" thought to be essential to all advertising. A public, already
groggy and half blind from the incessant battering of advertisements
with a punch, will hardly notice the difference.
"To think at all," says the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset,
"is to exaggerate." A careful measurement of anatomical detail in
the drawings and sculptures of Michelangelo will reveal startling
exaggerations of fact, but these enlargements upon fact are but his
medium for truthful expression. He gives us the figure of a man or
woman more essentially true than could be made by any anatomist with
micrometer calipers. So, I humbly pray, ladies and gentlemen, that you
will apply no instruments of precision to my words--they are the best I
could find in this emergency for saying what I believe to be true. If
you think me guilty of exaggeration, the foregoing remarks are my only
defense. But if you accuse me of being facetious, I will tell you that
I have never been more serious in my life.
COMPOSED IN BODONI BOOK TYPES
[Illustration]OSCAR OGG[Illustration]
_A Comparison of Calligraphy & Lettering_
Copyright 1947 by the _American Artist_. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher and author.
Superior writing and able lettering have never made inconsequential
literature valuable, nor have poorly conceived, incompetent calligraphy
and lettering ever invalidated good literature. Letters which are well
considered, expertly executed, conscientiously fitted to their purpose,
however, can create visually a spiritual state in a reader which will
influence him to be receptive to the message he reads. It may even be
possible that beautiful writing, aside from the intense pleasure it
gives us as graphic art, helps to make uninspired authors seem more
profound.
Perhaps it is this realization that has made graphic artists in recent
years exhibit a notable increase in interest in American "calligraphy."
The quotes are intentional. So much which is not calligraphy has had
the term applied to it and so much which is calligraphy has been
considered something else, that some sort of evaluation and comparative
definition now appears to be wise.
The aura of romance which has surrounded the tools, the methods, and
the products of the scribe has tended, we believe, to place them in the
eyes of practicing letter artists somewhat higher in the scale of the
arts than those of the letterer. Hence the "lettering man" likes to
call himself a "calligrapher." This same snobbishness is often evident
between easel painters and illustrators, between book illustrators
and magazine illustrators, between book designers and advertising
typographers. And all of it is false. By simple definition lettering
and writing are related but certainly not competitive arts.
_Calligraphy_ is "beautiful writing."
_Lettering_, in modern usage, refers to built-up, designed forms.
Stanley Morison, in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, says: "Calligraphy
is the art of fine writing. Writing is a means of communication by
agreed signs; if these signs or symbols are painted or engraved on
stone or wood [or paper] we have that extension and application of
writing known as _lettering_, _i.e._ a script generally formed with
mechanical aids such as the rule, compass, and square. But it is the
essence of hand-writing that it be free from such, though not from
all, government.... Calligraphy may be defined as freehand in which
freedom is so nicely reconciled with order that the understanding eye
is pleased to contemplate it."
[Illustration: The same nib was used for built-up and written forms in
this freely rendered fragment of a ninth-century manuscript.]
Built-up and written forms each have their place. One of the tenets
of fine letter art is that the forms be in perfect taste; that is,
that the letter and its method of production be in harmony with its
use. A delicately drawn cursive is as out of place on a subway card
advertising a cough remedy as is a poster _egyptienne_ on the title
page of a small volume of romantic poetry. To assume, however, that
either the written or the drawn form is the more aristocratic is
unsound. To attempt a representation of either by the other is likewise
illogical. Written letters, based on traditional manuscript usage,
are more serious in concept than their less restrained contemporary
built-up characters and do not permit of the same unconcern with
anatomical discrimination. Both, properly executed, can be superb
examples of letter art--and both can be terrible.
[Illustration: A simple Roman, executed entirely with a broad nib.
Characteristic strokes employed in writing the above.]
[Illustration: A similar letter designed and built up using a brush.
Characteristic outlines to be filled in for above.]
The growing practice of calling all script-like letters "calligraphy"
is unjust to writing and lettering alike. Particularly the practice
of producing with a pointed pen or brush the built-up, tricked-out
impersonations of broad nib writing must be abandoned if the art of
making letters is to remain honorable.
Having defined, then, the general limitation of the terms, let us
look at some of the principal differences in character between the
two. Historically, we find them side by side. Since they were both
produced by scribes and illuminators working in like tradition, there
was no question of fitness one with the other. Both stemmed from the
same source and were produced with the same type of tool. They were
necessarily in harmony.
Contemporarily, however, much lettering is executed by craftsmen who
neither know or care about the historical background of the alphabet.
The responsibility for this lies, we believe, as much with the
purchaser as with the producer of letters. The art director, working
in a viciously competitive field, demands of the letterer something
"different." The result is usually a built-up form which has little in
common with its ancestors, either in shape or method of production.
But, if it is handsome in itself, it may have a real affinity for a
text of type. A written element may also serve beautifully as a foil
for the rigidity of a type page.
[Illustration: These two treatments of a title are by no means the
only likely ones by either method. The lower form was actually used.
The letter was designed in the spirit of the type which was used in
conjunction with it. Perhaps if a written title had been chosen, one
based on an Italian rather than an English hand would have been more
suitable. The great difference in these two treatments is that the
written serves as a contrast, while the built-up harmonizes with the
type on the page.]
To establish further the variance between calligraphy and lettering,
a brief inspection of the methods of production may be advantageous.
The designed form is conceived as a drawing--it is a device which may
be finished up with any instrument at hand. The only limitation which
the designer must not exceed is the recognizability of the particular
letter.
The written form depends upon tradition for letter shape and upon
tool for letter character. Distortion is possible and poor form not
unusual, but since the pen is essentially _the_ letter-making tool, the
natural action of a properly cut pen eliminates at least some of the
opportunities for improbable forms.
[Illustration: These two letters, enlarged from the two renderings
of "Wartime Correspondence," illustrate the control which is
exerted by the cut and size and handling of a square nib upon the
calligraphic form as opposed to the freedom from constraint in the
built-up treatment. The tool decided the shape of the first. A careful
patterning of curves and weights to conform to the type of the book
page (Poliphilus) determined the second. A Soennecken steel pen was
used for the written, and a pointed brush for the built-up.]
The calligraphic and the built-up approach to the execution of a book
title may indicate how each may be employed frankly and honestly
without recourse to camouflage to procure particular effects. The size,
general weight, and disposition of the letters are indicated in the
rough layout. The artist who executes the built-up rendering will keep
the weight of letters _even_ by constant checking of one against the
other. The calligrapher will cut a reed or pen to this weight and thus
maintain even color.
It will be noted that the designed form is completely and finally
established in the penciled form. The laying-out for the written form
is less accurate and is the product of a double pointed tool, set to
the width of the nib to be used. In any but a very tight design such
as this, the pen-executed letter requires rather less preliminary
penciling than is here indicated. A line for the bottom of the letters
is usually sufficient.
It has been impossible to crowd all one should like to write on this
subject into these few words. If, however, this first voicing of a need
for a sane concept of the relations between lettering and calligraphy
has even the smallest influence, the author will bear with pleasure the
rightful criticism of incompleteness.
[Illustration: The width of the nib is that of the widest part of the
down-stroke. Strokes 5 and 6 fill the openings thus left.]
[Illustration: Layout and demonstration of the written form
(calligraphic).]
[Illustration: The center line is drawn by compass. Width of the swell
is arrived at by moving the point 1/2 this width to right and left.]
[Illustration: Layout and demonstration of the designed form
(lettered).]
[Illustration]ALDOUS HUXLEY[Illustration]
_Typography for the Twentieth-Century Reader_