Since childhood, I have loved the ‘Note on the type’ one finds at the end of many books. It generally says something like: “This book was set in Janson from matrices first cut by the Dutchman Anton Janson, a practicing founder in Leipzig during the years 1668-1687. The delicate serifs of Janson give a sense of peace and repose, while the sturdy hasts convey strength and stability.”
As a teenage reader, I was amazed at both how old some typefaces were and how many affective qualities were attributed to them.
The book editors already understood something I was slow to grasp: Typefaces do have an effect on the reader.
Yes, we all know italics and boldface and ALL CAPS give a different ‘feel’ to a text. But so do many subtler differences.
Sans serif fonts (the words ‘sans serif’ here are set in Gill Sans, one of the most famous typefaces to do away with the wedged ‘serifs’ at the ends of letters) have been seen as straightforward and sleek, while such a one as Didot, a famous script with serifs, has been hailed for how it connotes clarity and stateliness.
The font that has become almost ubiquitous in our current world is Helvetica, a sans serif typeface developed in Switzerland after the Second World War.
Helvetica has been used on countless posters; it is the typeface for the BMW, American Apparel, Jeep and American Airlines logos; and it is what is used for the whole New York City subway system. There has even been a documentary – a good one, by the way – made about Helvetica, and while some see the typeface as cold, impersonal and hyper-modern, others see it as accessible, inviting and democratic.
What the ‘Note on the Type’ made me realize in my youth is that typefaces often have long histories.
Times New Roman, which is often used for scholarly writing (and which is the font of these paragraphs), was developed in 1931 for the British Times. The ‘New Roman’ portion of the name refers to the fact if one traces the forms into the past, they go back to the Roman Empire, whose magisterial inscriptions on stone monuments were almost all written in what we now call Roman capitals.
No one understood monumentality like the Romans, and the Latin inscriptions they left (on, for example, the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome) still convey a sense of grandeur, stability and – well – MONUMENTALITY. To this day, Roman capitals are used for inscriptions on government buildings and public memorials. Most people do not know why, in historical terms, those letter forms suggest solemnity and gravitas, but they certainly know they do so.
That so many typefaces go back to the 16th and 17th centuries is due, of course, to the needs of the printing presses in the Early Modern era.
After moveable type was introduced in the second half of the 15th century, the first fonts cut were made to look like the handwritten Gothic scripts of medieval scribes. But the letters in medieval manuscripts were dependent on the positioning and slant of the stylus or pen.
After about 1500, printers realized they could reshape letters, and they wrote treatises that proposed new fonts.
My favourite is the 1529 book Champ Fleury by the Frenchman Geoffroy Tory, in which he designed every letter of the alphabet so it mapped onto both a 10×10 grid (100 was, of course, a perfect number) as well as onto the male nude body (there is a facsimile copy of the book in the D.B. Weldon Library). He also had a theory according to which every letter referred back to the nine muses and to the seven liberal arts. Tory, in other words, loaded the whole of the Renaissance and its return to Antiquity onto each and every letter. Leonardo Da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer also designed typefaces.
Different periods have favoured different letter styles.
The 18th century went a bit overboard with florid cursives. 19th– century advertising crammed many font styles and shapes into a single ad – anything to get you to look. Early 20th-century poets began to mix fonts on a page for effect. Some current artists play with ‘asemic’ writing that looks, at first glance, to be actual letters, but then turns out just to be evocative lettristic shapes, for which reason an attempt to find ‘meaning’ slips away.
Now, in the age of the computer and the e-book, we have never had so many typefaces at our disposal.
The dropdown menu in any word-processing program typically has more fonts than any one person will ever use. What is more, those ‘letters’ are no longer really letters. After all, the alphabetic forms we see on our screens are just groupings of huge quantities of zeros and ones that our software is manipulating.
The letters in our computers and e-books have thus disappeared entirely, and, as Pythagoras is reported to have said in the 6th century BCE, ‘All is number.’
Laurence de Looze is professor of Modern Languages. Trained as a medievalist at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, de Looze has published books and articles on medieval English, French, Icelandic and Spanish literature. He teaches a wide range of courses in the Department of Modern Languages and Department of French at Western.