I think the position you’re attributing to John is flatly incompatible with what he has actually written. I suspect the root cause is that you’ve seen, and been rightly annoyed by, so many things written by people who know less about typography than they think they do and who think It’s All About Typefaces, that you now have a highly-tuned typographical bullshit detector that is triggered when you see something written by an amateur that focuses on typefaces. That’s a useful heuristic, but I suggest that in this case it’s led you astray (or, perhaps, led you to misdiagnose the variety of bullshit; I am not qualified to tell whether John is in fact bullshitting in some way other than the one you’ve claimed).

Oh, never mind. I hereby let it go.

I suppose in a way I’m asking after the source of the glamor that attached to engineers and the industrial. I realize that, in a sense, the answer is: that’s just what seemed exciting. But there is also an ambiguity. Varnedoe and Gopnik say modernists (for some value of ‘modernist’) wanted stuff to be ‘not made by artists’ because they were attracted to the ‘low’ – the street, the vernacular, crude vibrant life of the city. There’s a desire to tap into mass culture as authentic naivete. Urban pastoral, you might say. That’s their whole book. The alternative, as you say, is that modernists wanted what was ‘not made by artists’ because they were attracted to the industrial, the engineered, the rational. Engineered is not the same as ‘low’, however, even though they are both the opposite of ‘artistic’. But engineered products – mass produced stuff – can BE low. So this is two different threads, intertwining.

I think the problem with what Agha says is that he is only getting one thread, but it is probably a real one.

I read Crooked Timber, now and then, for informed comment about what’s going on in Belgium, or the disputed Lancet statistics of the dead in Iraq since 2003, to take two examples. I don’t read it for someone (this is brutal, but it seems true) conducting his education in public about a rather rarified field of activity. But since the DTP explosion of the mid-1980s, everyone, as the saying goes, has their favourite font, and many people have views about fonts, and some of them sound out in public about it.

Something seemed wrong when you based your discussion on two Tschichold books that are notably uncritical, and one of which (by Richard Doubleday) is permeated by an extraordinary number of mistakes: the spelling mistakes should be enough to let readers know something is up. It worries me that a university teacher isn’t able to see this in these books, even just by skimming the pages. You wouldn’t base your philosophy teaching on a schlocky Bluffers Guide? But that’s just what you are doing in your font-discussions. There are a few good sources out there. I’m glad a copy of Burke’s Active literature is on your reading list now. I might as well say that my own book Modern typography: an essay in critical history is partly a guide to the history / historiography of the subject, and tries to embody standards of critical discussion that would be expected in art-history or philosophy or literature, but which have hardly been there with the topic of design.

To go back to your review on the Berlin Review website. The passage you quote (‘Why is ‘Master Typographer’ a good title for a book about Tschichold, when it might be objected that he was not just a typographer, but a book designer and graphic artist as well? …’) is certainly clunky. I read this as you saying that typography is about letterforms, and graphic design and book design are different activities. Your explication now, to suggest that you mean typography to be about more than letterforms, I don’t find persuasive.

For what it’s worth, I might distinguish the fields of type-design, book-design, newspaper design, advertising & art direction, general/jobbing graphic design, and more. ‘Typography’ might cover the lot of them. Tschichold’s book of 1928, Die neue Typographie, can give us a lead here. He discusses the whole field under the heading of ‘typography’. But terminological discussions don’t bring much reward.

To respond to your last questions. I looked into my introduction to the UC Press Tschichold New typography, pages xxviii to xxx, and think most of it is there. Mainline Central-European modernist designers wanted the anonymous, the industrial; those designers wanted things made by engineers and not by artists. The typeface used in Tschichold’s book would be a good example. Le Corbusier’s adoption of stencil letterforms, which you can still buy in hardware shops in France, is another instance. The Loosian love of well-bred anonymous forms is a further variation on this – and one would probably make a few qualifications in that case.

It’s the curse of design (as taught in art schools, etc) that it represents knowledge: one cannot shake that off to achieve innocence; one cannot design undesigned forms (letterforms).

Mehemed Fehmy Agha, I wouldn’t make too much of. Or, he’s part of another chapter: the passage of European modernism to North America, and the way in which the hard edges got thoroughly softened there. A more vivid case would be that of Herbert Bayer, from the centre of things at Weimar-Dessau, then Berlin, his dalliance in Germany after 1933, before the move into art-direction for corporate capitalism.

As to my review, I talk quite a bit about letterforms, yes, because I decided to focus on one passage about letterforms that recurred four times in the book I was reviewing. So I made it the hinge of my review. But it’s quite clear from the review that I perfectly well know that typography isn’t just type design.

I write: “Fashion in type is sometimes analogized to fashion in clothing …”

You object: “In one quick move, discussion of typography is narrowed down to just discussion of type, or letterforms.”

Look, I was using the fashion point to move into a discussion of the limitations of ‘form follows function’, as a modernist principle, not to suggest that typography is just type design.

What do I say about ‘typography’ in general in my review? I say this:

“Why is ‘Master Typographer’ a good title for a book about Tschichold, when it might be objected that he was not just a typographer, but a book designer and graphic artist as well? Typography is the art of arranging shapes into letters, also the art of arranging letters into shapes. Graphic design is a matter of arranging two-dimensional shapes—some of which are typically letters—into two-dimensional shapes, and book design is a part of that. Tschichold’s contribution was to be a unifier of this field and, at the same time, a distinguisher of it from others.” Now that strikes me as a bit clunky. I could say it better. But surely it is clear enough that I think ‘typography’ doesn’t just mean type design, or even arrangement of type. It’s a matter of arranging elements in space. The review concludes by nodding at the (generally recognized) fact that Tschichold is one of the grandfathers of graphic design, in the sense we use that term today.

Reviews are reviews and posts are posts and, quite often, a reviewer or post author only talks about some things and not others. If someone wants to discuss fonts without giving a general account of typography, or window-frames without discussing all or architecture, or a new book, without discussing the general nature of all books – that’s fine. Indeed, usually advisable.

Now that’s cleared away, I hope, let’s have a friendly conversation. I am genuinely curious because, as I have repeatedly emphasized, I recognize that you know more about type (and typography) than I do: Do you think the Varnedoe /Gopnik passage is objectionable or perhaps sheer nonsense, because what Agha is saying is just too exaggerated, probably for dramatic effect? Or is there, perhaps, a kernel of truth to it? As I say in the post, it’s not the sort of question that will ever admit of definite answer, but I do think it’s interesting to think about. When these modernist type designers were taking inspiration for their type designs, what specific samples were they looking to for inspiration: the cheap, strong stuff – as Varnedoe and Gopnik suggest? Were they trying to refine the ‘low’ into the ‘high’? Is that the spiritual movement here? I like the Picasso, Braque cases because it’s charming to think you can say it started in 1911 when Braque stenciled either ‘bal’ or ‘bach’. It’s charming to be able to trace an aesthetic movement – an emerging style – to a particular artifact. But usually in cases like this it’s a false charm and you find that there are dozens of other likely suspects and there wasn’t anything utterly origin-like about Braque and his stencil.

As mentioned upstream, Loos came earlier and there was art nouveau, but I don’t have a sense that Loos had so much influence outside Austria, and I don’t have a sense that Tschichold and others like him were more inspired by art nouveau (too organic, not Engineer-y enough) than they were by, say, cubism. So you tell me, if you would be so kind: what specific ‘grotesque’ (call it what you will) sanserif type samples were the modernist type designers looking to, for inspiration for their designs? And what charmed them about these samples?

From my post: “We’ll start with fonts.”

Is it really, truly unreasonable to say ‘let’s talk about fonts’, and then talk about fonts? I say it is not.

When someone starts talking about typography and only talks about the letterforms, then it seems reasonable to say that they imagine that type is what constitutes typography.

Apart from that, my suggestion is that discussions of this particular x won’t get us anywhere interesting. Witness the confusion and sense of getting nowhere both in your recent posts and in the comments that have followed. A few pictures would be a start towards clarity.

Maybe not a question that can be answered decisively is putting it too mildly.

I like Doctor Science’s theory. It makes a lot of sense.

Anderson’s point about Loos being pre-Great War is right. Loos taking away all the windowboxes and frames, leaving those ‘eyes without eyebrows’ that so offended the Viennese, is a modernist gesture so similar to stripping away the serifs that it undermines the ‘it’s all Picasso and Braque and their gallic jokes’ explanation. (I did say in the post that I thought the Picasso/Braque single bullet theory was waaay to simple. Still, interesting.)

An even bigger point: a lot of art nouveau lettering was sans serif. But this makes for sort of an interesting question (or maybe not, depending whether it can be answered): were the modernists more inspired by art nouveau of a few years back, or more struck with the raw, industrial strength of the strong cheap stuff that was part of the urban landscape? Maybe not a question that can be answered decisively.

This story would have to be told together with an account of the urban romance of newspapers and broadsheets and such. Varnedoe and Gopnik talk about all that, but maybe not at sufficient length.

And vice versa.

;)

So if you think of serifs as a remnant of pre-printing technology – the beginning and ending of the stroke of the pen, or the finishing of the carving of letters in stone – then they are decadent disguises of the true nature of type, which is the imprint of cast metal on paper.

Get rid of the serifs, and you have the essence of print. That’s the concept, I imagine.

And someone (can’t find it now) mentioned serifs being fragile in woodblock print. So there might well be a technological determinant to all this – good old forces of production! – and at one remove, for all I know some such reasoning (perhaps taken to evince some more essentialist or abstract facts) might have influenced the modernisers.

There seems to be some agreement that, at some important point in the web of influences anyway, modernist thinking in favour of sanserif type was along the lines of the elimination of mere ornament in favour of purity or, quite differently, function. (And the account of Agha seems highly speculative for all that is said here, doesn’t it? Does he provide evidence for the ‘Gallic [/Iberian] joke’ thesis? And contrariwise, saving the hypothesis through discounting ‘blocky’ serifs might be thought a bit No-True-Scotsmannish. )

One mooted way in which the modernisers might have been wrong (as it seems they were a little later – if I may add some type-4 colour to this comment – in selecting ‘primary’ colours) is that serifs are after all functional in some or all cases, in terms, presumably, of legibility.

A more intriguing reason suggested for thinking them wrong is that serifs were integral to the letter forms – that introducing sanserif type was actually a more radical change than it appears to the casual contemporary observer who is used to both kinds. Perhaps this view would hold that it was (like) the introduction of a new, simplified (I think we can agree that it is simpler by measures as objective as we could wish for in the context) alphabet.

[Any interesting comparison or connection to be made with the US program(me) of simplified spelling? To European eyes, some examples seem not to be simple elimination of redundacym but to miss something. The fact that AFAIK there are no widely used Latin terms similar in all but the dipthongs ae/oe is a convenient one, but does not establish that nothing essential has been lost – and in the case of verb/noun distinctions based on the letters s/c, as in ‘practice’ (noun), something certainly is – though I’m not entirely sure this was part of the programme(s).]

But given that lower case letters originated in cursive script, is it really the case that serifs were the norm or an integral part of the letter-forms? I don’t know, just asking. Potentially relevant is the extent to which the lines which join letters in continuous script are (perceived to be) part of the letters themselves, and whether they coincide with the placement and form of serifs in printed type.

Indeed, if there had been any examples in which sanserif letters had been used, wouldn’t that establish that serifs were dispensible from the ‘essential’ form of the letters? (I don’t know if such essentialism is relevant here, though.) And in any case, a radical theory that – perhaps in the light of human psychology – serifs were, previously unbeknownst, merely dispensable ornament might be right, mightn’t it? There are plenty more subtleties and potential for metaphysics-in-oblique-context here but this is a bit too long already.

In any case, could there be a democratising or anti-authoritarian intent behind eliminating serifs from type, as a way of rendering it less King Jamesy – i.e. differentiation of an arbitrary kind, not essentially connected to the nature of serifs themselves?

When most text was hand-written, type needed to look like handwriting so that eyes that were used to reading handwriting could easily switch to type. As handwriting styles changed, type had to change, so that readers didn’t have to do extra visual processing to read type. This is the converse of the well-known process of learning how to read old handwriting: the modern-trained eye does not find old handwriting readable, so conversely we predict that eyes trained to read old handwriting might find modern text difficult.

One of the standard questions in choosing a font is readability, but I propose that the readability of a given font depends (at least in part) on how much it is like or unlike what the reader is used to. I thus postulate that sans-serif fonts could not become popular until most of the text people read was machine-made: that is, after the invention of the typewriter.

Before the typewriter, most of what the average literate person read was hand-written: personal letters, bills and ledgers, legal documents, notes. Other texts—bibles, novels, even newspapers—were very likely to be read aloud, not one reader at a time. I’m guessing that it took until the end of the 19th century for most readers to be in a world of print, not handwriting.

This is my theory, which is mine.