The late John Bartlett, whose "Familiar Quotations" have encircled the
globe, once remarked to a youthful visitor that it was a source of great
comfort to him that in collecting books in his earlier years he had
chosen editions printed in large type, "for now," he said, "I am able to
read them." The fading eyesight of old age does not necessarily set the
norm of print; but this is certain, that what age reads without
difficulty youth will read without strain, and in view of the excessive
burden put upon the eyes by the demands of modern life, it may be worth
while to consider whether it is not wise to err on the safer side as
regards the size of type, even by an ample margin.
It is now some thirty-five years since the first scientific experiments
upon the relations of type to vision were made in France and Germany. It
was peculiarly fitting, we may remark, that the investigation should
have started in those two countries, for the German alphabet is
notoriously hard on the eyes, and the French alphabet is encumbered with
accents, which form an integral part of the written word, and yet are
always minute and in poor print exceedingly hard to distinguish. The
result of the investigation was a vigorous disapproval of the German
type itself and of the French accents and the favorite style of letter
in France, the condensed. It was pointed out that progress in type
design towards the hygienic ideal must follow the direction of
simplicity, uniformity, and relative heaviness of line, with wide
letters and short descenders, all in type of sufficient size for easy
reading. In the generation that has succeeded these experiments have we
made any progress in adapting print to eyes along the lines of these
conclusions?
The printer might well offer in proof of such progress the page in which
these words are presented to the reader. In the four and a half
centuries of printing, pages of equal clearness and beauty may be found
if one knows just where to look for them, but the later examples all
fall within the period that we are discussing. It may be objected that
this is the luxury of printing, not its everyday necessity, and this
objection must be allowed; but luxuries are a powerful factor in
elevating the standard of living, and this is as true of print as of
food and dress. It must be confessed that an unforeseen influence made
itself felt early in the generation under discussion, that of William
Morris and his Kelmscott Press. Morris's types began and ended in the
Gothic or Germanic spirit, and their excellence lies rather in the
beauty of each single letter than in the effective mass-play of the
letters in words. Kelmscott books, therefore, in spite of their
decorative beauty, are not easy reading. In this respect they differ
greatly from those of Bodoni,[4] whose types to Morris and his followers
appeared weak and ugly. Bodoni's letters play together with perfect
accord, and his pages, as a whole, possess a statuesque if not a
decorative beauty. If the reader is not satisfied with the testimony of
the page now before him, let him turn to the Bodoni Horace of 1791, in
folio, where, in addition to the noble roman text of the poems, he will
find an extremely clear and interesting italic employed in the preface,
virtually a "library hand" script. But no force has told more powerfully
for clearness and strength in types than the influence of Morris, and if
he had done only this for printing he would have earned our lasting
gratitude.
Morris held that no type smaller than long primer should ever be
employed in a book intended for continuous reading; and here again, in
size of type as distinguished from its cut, he made himself an exponent
of one of the great forward movements that have so happily characterized
the recent development of printing. Go to any public library and look at
the novels issued from 1850 to 1880. Unless your memory is clear on this
point, you will be amazed to see what small print certain publishers
inflicted with apparent impunity on their patrons during this period.
The practice extended to editions of popular authors like Dickens and
Thackeray, editions that now find no readers, or find them only among
the nearsighted.
The cheap editions of the present day, on the contrary, may be poor in
paper and perhaps in presswork, they may be printed from worn plates,
but in size and even in cut of type they are generally irreproachable.
As regards nearsighted readers, it is well known that they prefer fine
type to coarse, choosing, for instance, a Bible printed in diamond, and
finding it clear and easy to read, while they can hardly read pica at
all. This fact, in connection with the former tolerance of fine print,
raises the question whether the world was not more nearsighted two
generations ago than it is now; or does this only mean that the oculist
is abroad in the land?
It is recognized that, in books not intended for continuous reading,
small and even fine type may properly be employed. That miracle of
encyclopedic information, the World Almanac, while it might be printed
better and on a higher quality of paper, could not be the handy
reference book that it is without the use of a type that would be
intolerably small in a novel or a history. With the increase of the
length of continuous use for which the book is intended, the size of the
type should increase up to a certain point. Above eleven-point, or small
pica, however, increase in the size of type becomes a matter not of
hygiene, but simply of esthetics. But below the normal the printer's
motto should be: In case of doubt choose the larger type.
A development of public taste that is in line with this argument is the
passing of the large-paper edition. It was always an anomaly; but our
fathers did not stop to reason that, if a page has the right proportions
at the start, mere increase of margin cannot enhance its beauty or
dignity. At most it can only lend it a somewhat deceptive appearance of
costliness, with which was usually coupled whatever attraction there
might be in the restriction of this special edition to a very few
copies. So they paid many dollars a pound for mere blank paper and
fancied that they were getting their money's worth. The most
inappropriate books were put out in large paper, Webster's Unabridged
Dictionary, for instance. At the other extreme of size may be cited the
Pickering diamond classics, also in a large-paper edition, pretty,
dainty little books, with their Lilliputian character only emphasized by
their excess of white paper. But their print is too fine to read, and
their margins are out of proportion to the printed page. Though their
type is small, they by no means exhibit the miracle of the books printed
in Didot's "microscopic" type, and they represent effort in a direction
that has no meaning for bookmaking, but remains a mere _tour de force_.
Quite different is the case with the Oxford miniature editions, of the
same size outwardly as the large-paper editions of the Pickering
diamond classics; these are modern miracles, for with all their
"infinite riches in a little room," they are distinctly legible.
As regards the design of type, the recent decades have given us our
choice among type-faces at once so beautiful and so clear as the Century
Oldstyle, Century Expanded, and Cheltenham Wide. To those should be
added Mr. Goudy's virile Kennerley. Still later have appeared, in direct
descent from one of Jenson's type-faces, Cloister and Centaur, two of
the most beautiful types of any age or country, and both, if we may
judge by comparison with the types approved by the Clark University
experiments, also among the most legible. Fortunately in type design
there is no essential conflict between beauty and use, but rather a
natural harmony. Already a high degree of legibility has been attained
without sacrifice; the future is full of promise.
In respect to books, we may congratulate ourselves that printing has
made real progress in the last generation towards meeting the primary
demand of legibility. The form of print, however, which is read by the
greatest number of eyes, the newspaper, shows much less advance. Yet
newspapers have improved in presswork, and the typesetting machines have
removed the evil of worn type. Moreover, a new element has come to the
front that played a much more subordinate part three or four decades
ago--the headline. "Let me write the headlines of a people," said the
late Henry D. Lloyd to the writer, "and I care not who makes its laws."
It is the staring headlines that form the staple of the busy man's
newspaper reading, and they are certainly hygienic for the eyes if not
always for the mind. While the trend towards larger and clearer type
has gone on chiefly without the consciousness of the public, it has not
been merely a reform imposed from without. The public prefers readable
print, demands it, and is ready to pay for it. The magazines have long
recognized this phase of public taste. When the newspapers have done the
same, the eyes of coming generations will be relieved of a strain that
can only be realized by those who in that day shall turn as a matter of
antiquarian curiosity to the torturing fine print that so thickly beset
the pathway of knowledge from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century,
and, in the twentieth, overthrown in the field of books and magazines,
made its last, wavering stand in the newspapers.