Typo

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Sélection de textes à tendance typographique Ces textes ont été composés par les étudiants de 2è année section graphisme de l’ESAD Novembre 2013

Index Robin Kinross, Unjustified texts Perspectives on Typography, ”Large and small letters : authority and democracy”, 2002 Caroline Appelgren, Louise Cirou, Morgane Passard Robin Kinross, Unjustified texts Perspectives on Typography, ”Black art”, 2002 Maxime Castagnac, Ouassila Arras Rosalind Krauss, L’originalité de l’avant-garde et autres mythes modernistes, ”Grilles”, 1978 Mélanie Peretti Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, ”Chapitre 6 Le lit de Procruste”, 1931 Rémy Sénégas

Memphis Extra Bold 50 pt

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La couverture est faite à partir d’ éléments typographiques que j’ai moi-même crée. Elle se compose des lignes sur FontLab qui définisse la hauteur d’x, d’un dessins préparatoire fait sur calque et du caractère le plus difficile à dessiner: la lettre ”g”. Cette couverture à pour but de montrer le processus de création d’un caractère typographique.

g

Large and small letters: authority and democracy Unjustified texts: Perspectives on typography Robin Kinross

Hierarchies Forget for a moment the precedence of speech and say that in the beginning was a single set of characters: ideograms becoming letters and numerals. In Greek and Roman antiquity these were developed into the familiar forms we know in English as ‘capitals’ (or in other languages as ‘Großbuchstaben’, ‘majuscules’, ‘kapitalen’ ... ). The word brings with it the suggestion of being at the head (‘caput’ in Latin): the chief city of a country or the crowning feature of an architectural column. One might suppose that the application of the word to these letterforms is connected with this latter sense, for capitallctters were to be found, most publicly and formally, in inscriptions placed ‘at the head of’ columns in built structures.

Columns of stone and of text: the analogy with architecture is here, as elsewhere in typography, hard to resist.

The capital letters of Rome and its empire entered into the consciousness of Western cultures as the forms for letters. Think of the first letter of the alphabet and you probably think of two diagonals meeting at a point, with a cross-bar. Try to describe the lowercase ‘a’ in words, and you are in trouble, even before getting to the problem of whether it is a two- or single-storey form. Nicolete Gray once observed that the lack of a positive term (in English) for this other category of letters supports the idea that capitals are the essential forms. 1 And now that metal type is almost extinct, ‘lowercase’ may need to be explained: capitals (or majuscules or large letters) were kept in the upper of a stacked pair of cases, the minuscules or small letters lived below. That the old terms live on may be due to the upstairs/downstairs class distinction that attaches to the two kinds.

Certainly for traditionally-minded people there are capitals - proper letters - and then, as a secondary matter, these other forms. This view was clearly expressed in one of the gospels of traditionalism, Stanley Morison’s First principles of typography. Writing about title-pages, he insisted on capitals for book title and author’s name, adding: ‘As lower-case is a necessary evil, which we should do well to subordinate since we cannot suppress, it should be avoided when it is at its least rational and least attractive- in large sizes.’2 The most celebrated and influential public letters of Roman antiquity were proportionately square capitals, on the Trajan column.

At the same time another set of forms was in use: rustics. These letters were distinguished by narrow proportions and more flowing strokes. Rustic letters were used in less prominent situtions and for less formal messages. For private, ephemeral communication there were free scripts, rather formless to our eyes. The coexistence of different forms for different purposes has persisted. Whether or not capitals are seen as the essential forms of letters, they are still generally accepted as the most suitable variety for public declarations, or in displayed text. Small letters are for quieter, more intimate uses: from one person to another. This broad distinction may be true, but the matter becomes complicated by the fact that, for a millennium or so, we have been using large and small letters together, and this is where the game of ‘upper or lower?’ really starts. For typographers who are not traditionalist nor postmodernist, the difficult issue is not whether to set a whole word in capitals – the need for that may rarely arise – but whether to set its first letter with a capital. What are the conventions that help us to decide?

the deity (Deity) should be capitalized points to the strong cultural pressures at work here. Logic can only go so far. Even in a largely secular community, we still hesitate to set ‘god’ (a concept that can be disbelieved) and not ‘God’ (an undisputed primary being).

English-language practice shows some significant differences with that of comparably developed languages. The French seem more reasoned in their approach to capitalization. Thus in setting titles of books, say in a bibliography, the standard French style is ‘first word and proper names only’: The life and adventures of Robin son Crusoe; while an unenlightened English-language text would have The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Applying this system to titles of periodicals brings some problems: one has lllustrated London news or The guardian, both of which may look odd. So perhaps this category of title should be regarded as a proper name and capitalized throughout.

The German case German orthography is different and requires lengthier discussion. Like the history of its speakers - one is inclined to say German is especially problematic. In all the politically and culturally various communities that constitute the German-speakingworld, nouns are capitalized. In one doubtful respect this makes life easier. Evangelists and card-carrying atheists will treat ‘Gott’ (god) and ‘Hund’ (dog) equally, for purely grammatical reasons. Yet there are many fin judgements to be made ‘we pronounce ‘Dog’ and over what exactly is a noun, espewrite them differently?’ cially when in another context the same word might be an adjective or a verb. See the long lists of rules and exceptions concerning this question in any manual of German orthography. Or consider such silly sentences as ‘Ich habe in Moskau liebe (Liebe) Genossen (genossen)’ , where the capitals tell the difference between what has been found in Moscow: comrades (capital G) or something more intense (capital L).

The convention of capitalizing nouns in German seems to have been formally instituted in the eighteenth century. As in other languages, words were then heavily but rather indiscriminately capitalized. (One imagines that this was sometimes affected by the arbitrary factor of what was available in the typecase at that moment.) While in other countries the rationalization of that time was towards a minimum of capitals, in German the opposite direction was followed. Some enlightened voices spoke out against this convention.

The most famous of these were jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, who formulated the criticisms that were to emerge again in the twentieth century: the German language was written and printed in ugly scripts that were hard to read, especially for foreigners, and it suffered from irrational, wasteful capitalization. In his Deutsche Grammatik, Jakob Grimm practised a reformed orthography, using capitals just at sentence openings and for proper names. While the first edition of this text (1819) was set in blackletter with all nouns capitalized, the next (1822) and succeeding editions used roman type with this reduced use of capitals. Later, in the Deutsches Worterbuch (first volume 1854), jakob and Wilhelm Grimm took this further, using capital letters only at the start of paragraphs; within paragraphs sentences were marked off only by full points and a slightly increased word space.

The Grimms were philologians and wrote in a spirit of gentle rationalism. As conducted a hundred years later, the argument took on sharper overtones. A reform of orthography and of letterforms was embodied in the work of the poet Stefan George (1868-1933) as part of a larger project of a simplification and acstheticization of life.

(The architect Adolf Loos’s Iowercase preferences would be another contemporary instance of the attitude.) The later books of George’s verse, designed under his direction, use a specially modified sanserif type face and capitals only for opening words; punctuation is also simplified. Early, pre-humanist and precapitalized German literature may have provided some inspiration here.

Some of these arguments were made by others at this time Rules of style for quite different reasons: those of business efficienc}. Waiter Capitalization could begin to become an issue from the time Porstmann’s book Sprache und Schrijt (1920) proposed a total when texts were printed. With this multiplication in identical abolition of capital letters, together copies, the transcription of langwith the use of a phonetically more uages began to be standardized. accurate orthography and modified Although manuscript production ‘write small! no letters with powdered wigs and punctuation. Porstmann had written could be, and was, highly organiclass-coronets / democracy in orthography too!’ a doctoral dissertation on measuring zed, the process of writing a text systems and had a scientist’s sense of allowed a certain indeterminacy good order, but this book was aimed about how the language was to be orthographically ‘dressed’. The very nature of printing, as a succes- at the world of administration. His ideals were exactly those of the Taylorist theories of conveyor-belt production, then at the height of sion of distinct processes (copy preparation, composition, proofing, their influence: ‘quick, clear, positive, fluent, economical’. 3 machining) encouraged a more detached attitude to the product, and allowed a much greater ability to control consistency of ‘dress’.

These arguments were quickly taken up by modernist typograpIt took some centuries after Gutenberg for the issue of consistency hers in Germany and incorporated into their more aesthetically and to emerge clearly, in manuals laying down rules of style. But by the also socially conscious vision. Sprache und Schrift was cited as the source for the single alphabet argument, as developed by (among end of the eighteenth century, in the major Western languages, the wildest variations in spelling and capitalization had been brought others) Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer andjan Tschichold. In 1925, the Bauhaus cut its expressionist root in conservative Weimar and to cultivated order. moved to industrial, Social-Democratic Dessau. And, confirming The conventions for presenting printed language are specific to a language-community at a particular time; but within the commu- this shift, capital letters were now abolished at the school. In the heightened atmosphere of Germany at that time, the social-political nity there may be subgroups following different practices. To take implications of ‘Kieinschreibung’ (lowercase typography) began to just the English language as printed in the late twentieth century, emerge clearly. rules for capitalization may be outlined as follows. We agree that The debate over ‘Kleinschreibung’ can be traced in the pages of words should have initial capitals at the start of sentences and when they are proper names. The first category is clear; the second is not. Typographische Mitteilungen, the journal of the Bildungsverband der Deutschen Buchdrucker (educational organization of German There may be no argument over ‘London’, ‘Mary’ or ‘Easter’. But letterpress printers). The extent and seriousness of concern with what about ‘Marxism’, ‘Gothic’ and ‘God’? The question of whether the question among printers – not just typographers – is suggested by a poll that was carried out by the organization, announced in a special issue on the theme in May 1931. Members were asked to

read the articles carefully and then vote for the approach that they supported: (1) capitals for sentence openings and proper names; (2) complete abolition of capitals; (3) continuation of the present rules.

The result was a clear majority for the first option: 53.5 per cent of the 26,876 members who voted; with 23.5 per cent and 23.0 per cent for the second and third approaches. The organization then adopted this moderated ‘Kleinschreibung’, as a campaigning policy.

But the argument was soon forgotten, displaced by an intensification of the blackJetter/roman debate. And when the NationalSocialist party seized power in 1933, the burning typographic issue was the matter of letterforms, not orthography.

The discussion in Typographische Mitteilungen did produce one unambiguous statement of the political associations that could be attributed to lowercase. An editorial statement in the special issue concluded: ‘write small! no letters with powdered wigs and class-coronets / democracy in orthography too!’.4 So lowercase was adopted by people who felt that egalitarian principles should extend to letters. For example, Bertolt Brecht habitually wrote and typed ‘small’ in his letters and diaries.

This debate was resumed in Germany after 1945. As after the First World War, the context was a society starting again from zero: basic assumptions were open to question.5 Socially critical writers such as Gtinter Grass and Hans ‘dog’ identically, so why Magnus Enzensberger went lowercase in their poems, and capitals were dropped for much internal communication at the Hochschule ftir Gcstaltung Ulm (figure 6). But, despite some persuasive advocacy of the moderate reform, German language orthography remains out of step with all other Latin-alphabet languages.

Meaning and articulation The German debates raise the problem of upper and/or lowercase in rather extreme forms: a process that helps to illuminate the issues. The argument put by Porstmann, and taken up by MoholyNagy, Bayer and the other new typographers, was ‘one sound, therefore one alphabet’: we pronounce ‘Dog’ and ‘dog’ identically, so why write them differently? And - to raise a slightly different question if we can manage with only one set of numerals, why do we need two sets of letters?

In reply one might pose another question. If written language must follow speech, then should not every word be an exact transcription, responding to regional dialects and even personal idiolects? You say ‘tomarto’, I say ‘tomayto’. And if I came from Tasmania or Singapore, then further spelling adjustments might be necessary; and all spellings would have to be continually reviewed, to make sure that pronunciation had not changed. But written language does not merely transcribe the spoken. It is a fabricated system with an independent existence and its own conventions. If this unsettles the single-alphabet view, it does not prove a need for capital letters.

The argument must then back out of the dead end of soundtranscription and concentrate on the visual forms of text and what they mean. Let us agree that a requirement to capitalize all nouns is indefensible. But why stop short at proper names and sentence openings? Concerning the first category, the defender of capitals would say that it can actually make all the difference, in some contexts, to know that ‘Reading’ means the town in Berkshire or Pennsylvania, while ‘reading’ means the activity you are now engaged in. Or that ‘END’ is not ‘end’, but the group campaigning for European nuclear disarmament. Capital letters are part of the typographic repertoire and can articulate text in many ways, including those still undiscovered. Consider how clumsy a British or Canadian postcode is when set just in lowercase (especially with capital-height numerals).

The justification for capital letters to open sentences would follow this last line of argument. It is not so much that capitals give meaning here, more that they give subtle assistance to the reader’s assimilation of text. We may not be able to measure it, but reading does seem to be made more comfortable by seeing sentences demarcated by initial capitals. The advocates of a radical ‘Kieinschreibung’ recognized this when they suggested the mid-positioning of full points or oblique strokes, to make up for the loss of the capital.

The tendency for capital letters to stick out of text too noticeably has long been countered by the practice of designing forms that are just short of ascender-height, and by the development of small (x-height) capitals. But this close-grained typographer’s view has hardly been noticed in a debate dominated by philologians and visionaries.

Seen in this more complex light, the absolute demand for lowercase seems mistaken: a product of utopian thinking in extreme conditions, but not a real option now, except in special cases. There are, however, still reforms to be fought for, in the German-language countries above all. Even in relatively enlightened English-language communities, capitalization often seems to go too far: in bibliographical lists or in display setting, where every noun is capitalized, if not whole words. We are still under the sway of a traditionalist-authoritarian view, which demands obedience to the ‘three-line whip’ of capitalization. The opposing attitude, which values informality and equality, and which sees small letters as the norm and capitals the exception to be deployed carefully and meaningfully, is not yet widely shared. A further push towards letter-democracy is still required. Octavo, no. 5, 1988 This was commissioned by the editors of the design group 8vo’s magazine Octavo for a special ‘lowercase’ issue.

1. Nicolete Gray, Lettering on buildings, Architectural Press, 1960, p. 53· 2. Stanley Morisson, First principles of typography (1930), 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1967, p. 14. The arguments in Britain in the early 1960s over road-sign alphabets raised this question very publicly: seriffcd capitals versus upper· and lowercase sanserif. The victory for the latter seemed to be a landmark for the late arrival of modernbm in this country.

4· Typographische Mitteilungen, vol. 18, no. 5, 1931, p. 123. The contrast with Stanlcy Morison’s view (note 2) could hardly be greater.

3. Waiter Porstmann, Sprache und Sell rift, Berlin: Verlag des Vereins Deutscher Ingenieure, 1920, p.84.

5· Sec, for example, the articles for and against ‘Kicinschreibung’ in the ‘Sprache und Schrift’ issue of the journal Partdora, no. 4,1946.

Rules of style Capitalization could begin to become an issue from the time when texts were printed.

With this multiplication in identical copies, the transcription of languages began to be standardized. Although manuscript production could be, and was, highly organized, the process of writing a text allowed a certain indeterminacy about how the language was to be orthographically ‘dressed’. The very nature of printing, as a succession of distinct processes (copy preparation, composition, proofing, machining) encouraged a more detached attitude to the product, and allowed a much greater ability to control consistency of ‘dress’. It took some centuries after Gutenberg for the issue of consistency to emerge clearly, in manuals laying down rules of style. But by the end of the eighteenth century, in the major Western languages, the wildest variations in spelling and capitalization had been brought to cultivated order.

The conventions for presenting printed language are specific to a language-community at a particular time; but within the community there may be subgroups following different practices. To take just the English language as printed in the late twentieth century, rules for capitalization may be outlined as follows. We agree that words should have initial capitals at the start of sentences and when they are proper names. The first category is clear; the second is not. There may be no argument over ‘London’, ‘Mary’ or ‘Easter’. But what about ‘Marxism’, ‘Gothic’ and ‘God’?

The question of whether the deity (Deity) should be capitalized points to the strong cultural pressures at work here. Logic can only go so far. Even in a largely secular community, we still hesitate to set ‘god’ (a concept that can be disbelieved) and not ‘God’ (an undisputed primary being).

English-language practice shows some significant differences with that of comparably developed languages. The French seem more reasoned in their approach to capitalization. Thus in setting titles of books, say in a bibliography, the standard French style is ‘first word and proper names only’: The life and adventures of Robin son Crusoe; while an unenlightened English-language text would have The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Applying this system to titles of periodicals brings some problems: one has Illustrated London news or The guardian, both of which may look odd. So perhaps this category of title should be regarded as a proper name and capitalized throughout.

The German case German orthography is different and requires lengthier discussion. Like the history of its speakers – one is inclined to say – German is especially problematic. In all the politically and culturally various communities that constitute the German-speaking world, nouns are capitalized. In on doubtful respect this makes life easier. Evangelists and card-carrying atheists will treat ‘Gott’ (god) and ‘Hund’ (dog) equally, for purely grammatical reasons. Yet here are many fine judgements to be made over what exactly is a noun, especially when in another context the same word might be an adjective or a verb. See the long lists of rules and exceptions concerning this question in any manual of German orthography. Or consider such silly sentences as ‘ich have in Moskau liebe (Liebe) Genossen (genossen)’, where the capitals tell the difference between what has been found in Moscow: comrades (capital G) or something more intense (capital L).

The convention of capitalizing nouns in German seems to have been formally instituted in the eighteenth century. As in other languages, words were then heavily but rather indiscriminately capitalized. (One imagines that this was sometimes affected by the arbitrary factor of what was available in the typecase at that moment.) While in other countries the rationalization of that time was towards a minimum of capitals, in German the opposite direction was followed. Some enlightened voices spoke out against this convention. The most famous of these were Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, who formulated the criticisms that were to emerge again in the twentieth century: the German language was written and printed in ugly scripts that were hard to read, especially for foreigners, and it suffered from irrational, wasteful capitalization. In his Deutsche Grammatik, Jakob Grimm practised a reformed orthography, using capitals just at sentence openings and for proper names. While the first edition of this text (1819) was set in blackletter with all nouns capitalized, the next (1822) and succeeding editions used roman type with this reduced use of capitals. Later, in the Deutsches Wörterbuch (first volume 1854), Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm took this further, using capital letters only at the start of paragraphs; within paragraphs sentences were marked off only by full points and a slightly increased word space.

The Grimms were philologians and wrote in a spirit of gentle rationalism. As conducted a hundred years later, the argument took on sharper overtones. A reform of orthography and of letterforms was embodied in the work of the poet Stefan George (1868–1933) as part of a larger project of a simplification and aestheticization of life.

(The architect Adolf Loos’s Iowercase preferences would be another contemporary instance of the attitude.)The later books of George’s verse, designed under his direction, use a specially modified sanserif type face and capitals only for opening words; punctuation is also simplified. Early, pre-humanist and precapitalized German literature may have provided some inspiration here.

Some of these arguments were made by others at this time for quite different reasons: those of business efficiency. Waiter Porstmann’s book Sprache und Schrift (1920) proposed a total abolition of capital letters, together with the use of a phonetically more accurate orthography and modified punctuation. Porstmann had written a doctoral dissertation on measuring systems and had a scientist’s sense of good order, but this book was aimed at the world of administration. His ideals were exactly those of the Taylorist theories of conveyor-belt production, then at the height of their influence: ‘quick, clear, positive, fluent, economical’.3 These arguments were quickly taken up by modernist typographers in Germany and incorporated into their more aesthetically and also socially conscious vision.

Sprache und Schrift was cited as the source for the single alphabet argument, as developed by (among others) Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Jan Tschichold. In 1925, the Bauhaus cut its expressionist roots in conservative Weimar and moved to industrial, Social-Democratic Dessau. And, confirming this shift, capital letters were now abolished at the school. In the heightened atmosphere of Germany at that time, the social-political implications of ‘Kieinschreibung’ (lowercase typography) began to emerge clearly.

The debate over ‘Kleinschreibung’ can be traced in the pages of Typographische Mitteilungen, the journal of the Bildungsverband der Deutschen Buchdrucker (educational organization of German letterpress printers). The extent and seriousness of concern with the question among printers – not just typographers – is suggested by a poll that was carried out by the organization, announced in a special issue on the theme in May 1931. Members were asked to read the articles carefully and then vote for the approach that they supported: 1 capitals for sentence openings and proper names; 2 complete abolition of capitals; 3 continuation of the present rules.

The result was a clear majority for the first option: 53.5 per cent of the 26,876 members who voted; with 23.5 per cent and 23.0 per cent for the second and third approaches. The organization then adopted this moderated ‘Kleinschreibung’, as a campaigning policy. But the argument was soon forgotten, displaced by an intensification of the blackletter/roman debate. And when the National-Socialist party seized power in 1933, the burning typographic issue was the matter of letterforms, not orthography.

The discussion in Typographische Mitteilungen did produce one unambiguous statement of the political associations that could be attributed to lowercase. An editorial statement in the special issue concluded: ‘write small! no letters with powdered wigs and class-coronets I democracy in orthography too!’4 So lowercase was adopted by people who felt that egalitarian principles should extend to letters. For example, Bertolt Brecht habitually wrote and typed ‘small’ in his letters and diaries.

This debate was resumed in Germany after 1945. As after the First World War, the context was a society starting again from zero: basic assumptions were open to question.5 Socially critical writers such as Günter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensberger went lowercase in their poems, and capitals were dropped for much internal communication at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm. But, despite some persuasive advocacy of the moderate reform, German·language orthography remains out of step with all other Latin-alphabet languages.

Unjustified texts perspective on typog raphy Large and small letters: authority and democracy Robin Kinross

Hierarchies Forget for a moment the precedence of speech and say that in the beginning was a single set of characters: ideograms becoming letters and numerals. In Greek and Roman antiquity these were developed into the familiar forms we know in English as ‘capitals’ (or in other languages as ‘Großbuchstaben’, ‘majuscules’, ‘kapitalen’ …). The word brings with it the suggestion of being at the head (‘caput’ in Latin): the chief city of a country or the crowning feature of an architectural column. One might suppose that the application of the word to these letterforms is connected with this latter sense, for capital letters were to be found, most publicly and formally, in inscriptions placed ‘at the head of ’ columns in built structures. Columns of stone and of text: the analogy with architecture is here, as elsewhere in typography, hard to resist.

The capital letters of Rome and its empire entered into the consciousness of Western cultures as the forms for letters. Think of the first letter of the alphabet and you probably think of two diagonals meeting at a point, with a cross-bar. Try to describe the lowercase ‘a’ in words, and you arc in trouble, even before getting to the problem of whether it is a two- or single-storey form. Nicolete Gray once observed that the lack of a positive term (in English) for this other category of letters supports the idea that capitals are the essential forms.1 And now that metal type is almost extinct, ‘lowercase’ may need to be explained: capitals (or majuscules or large letters) were kept in the upper of a stacked pair of cases, the minuscules or small letters lived below.

That the old terms live on may be due to the upstairs/downstairs class distinction that attaches to the two kinds. Certainly for traditionally-minded people there are capitals – proper letters – and then, as a secondary matter, these other forms. This view was clearly expressed in one of the gospels of traditionalism, Stanley Morison’s First principles of typography. Writing about title-pages, he insisted on capitals for book title and author’s name, adding: ‘As lower-case is a necessary evil, which we should do well to subordinate since we cannot suppress, it should be avoided when it is at its least rational and least attractive – in large sizes.’2 The most celebrated and influential public letters of Roman antiquity were proportionately square capitals, as on the Trajan column. At the same time another set of forms was in use: rustics. These letters were distinguished by narrow proportions and more flowing strokes. Rustic letters were used in less prominent situations and for less formal messages. For private, ephemeral communication there were free scripts, rather formless to our eyes. The coexistence of different forms for different purposes has persisted. Whether or not capitals are seen as the essential forms of letters, they are still generally accepted as the most suitable variety for public declarations, or in displayed text. Small letters are for quieter, more intimate uses: from one person to another.

This broad distinction may be true, but the matter becomes complicated by the fact that, for a millennium or so, we have been using large and small letters together, and this is where the game of ‘upper or lower?’ really starts. For typographers who are not traditionalist nor postmodernist, the difficult issue is not whether to set a whole word in capitals – the need for that may rarely arise – but whether to set its first letter with a capital. What are the conventions that help us to decide?

Meaning and articulation The German debates raise the problem of upper- and/or lower-case in rather extreme forms: a process that helps to illuminate the issues. The argument put by Porstmann, and taken up by Moholy-Nagy, Bayer and the other new typographers, was ‘one sound, therefore one alphabet’: we pronounce ‘Dog’ and ‘dog’ identically, so why write them differently? And – to raise a slightly different question – if we can manage with only one set of numerals, why do we need two sets of letters?

In reply one might pose another question. If written language must follow speech, then should not every word be an exact transcription, responding to regional dialects and even personal idiolects? You say ‘tomarto’, I say ‘tomayto’. And if I came from Tasmania or Singapore, then further spelling adjustments might be necessary; and all spellings would have to be continually reviewed, to make sure that pronunciation had not changed. But written language does not merely transcribe the spoken. It is a fabricated system with an independent existence and its own conventions. If this unsettles the single-alphabet view, it does not prove a need for capital letters.

The argument must then back out of the dead end of sound transcription and concentrate on the visual forms of text and what they mean. Let us agree that a requirement to capitalize all nouns is indefensible. But why stop short at proper names and sentence openings? Concerning the first category, the defender of capitals would say that it can actually make all the difference, in some contexts, to know that ‘Reading’ means the town in Berkshire or Pennsylvania, while ‘reading’ means the activity you are now engaged in. Or that ‘END’ is not ‘end’, but the group campaigning for European nuclear disarmament. Capital letters are part of the typographic repertoire and can articulate text in many ways, including those still undiscovered. Consider how clumsy a British or Canadian postcode is when set just in lowercase (especially with capital-height numerals).

The justification for capital letters to open sentences would follow this last line of argument. It is not so much that capitals give meaning here, more that they give subtle assistance to the reader’s assimilation of text. We may not be able to measure it, but reading does seem to be made more comfortable by seeing sentences demarcated by initial capitals. The advocates of a radical ‘Kieinschreibung’ recognized this when they suggested the mid-positioning of full points or oblique strokes, to make up for the loss of the capital. The tendency for capital letters to stick out of text too noticeably has long been countered by the practice of designing forms that are just short of ascender-height, and by the development of small (x-height) capitals. But this close-grained typographer’s view has hardly been noticed in a debate dominated by philologians and visionaries.

Seen in this more complex light, the absolute demand for lowercase seems mistaken: a product of utopian thinking in extreme conditions, but not a real option now, except in special cases. There are, however, still reforms to be fought for, in the German-language countries above all. Even in relatively enlightened English-language communities, capitalization often seems to go too far: in bibliographical lists or in display setting, where every noun is capitalized, if not whole words. We are still under the sway of a traditionalist-authoritarian view, which demands obedience to the ‘three-line whip’ of capitalization. The opposing attitude, which values informality and equality, and which sees small letters as the norm and capitals the exception to be deployed carefully and meaningfully, is not yet widely shared. A further push towards letter-democracy is still required.

Octavo, no. 5, 1988 This was commissioned by the editors of the design group 8vo’s magazine Octavo for a special ‘lowercase’ issue.

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1. Nicolete Gray, Lettering on buildings, Architectural Press, 1960, p. 53.

2. Stanley Morison, First principles of typography (1930), 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1967, p. 14. The arguments in Britain in the early 1960s over road-sign alphabets raised this question very publicly: seriffed capitals versus upper- and lowercase sanserif. The victory for the latter seemed to be a landmark for the late arrival of modernism in this country.

3. Waiter Porstmann, Sprache und Schrift, Berlin: Verlag des Vereins Deutscher Ingenieure, 1920, p.84.

4. Typographische Mitteilungen, vol. 18, no. 5, 1931, p. 123. The contrast with Stanley Morison’s view (note 2) could hardly be greater.

5. See, for example, the articles for and against ‘Kicinschreibung’ in the ‘Sprache und Schrift’ issue of the journal Pandora, no. 4,1946.

Unjustified texts perspective on typography Large and small letters: authority and democracy

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The most celebrated and influential public letters of Roman antiquity were proportionately square capitals, on theTrajan column.

Capitalization could begin to become an issue from the time when texts were printed. With this multiplication in identical copies, the transcription of languages began to be standardized. Although manuscript production could be, and was, highly organized, the process of writing a text allowed a certain indeterminacy about how the language was to be orthographically ‘dressed’. The very nature of printing, as a succession of distinct processes (copy preparation, composition, proofing, machining) encouraged a more detached attitude to the product, and allowed a much greater ability to control consistency of ‘dress’. It took some centuries after Gutenberg for the issue of consistency to emerge clearly, in manuals laying down rules of style. But by the end of the eighteenth century, in the major Western languages, the wildest variations in spelling and capitalization had been brought to cultivated order.

The conventions for presenting printed language are specific to a languagecommunity at a particular time; but within the community there may be subgroups following different practices. To take just the English language as printed in the late twentieth century, rules for capitalization may be outlined as follows. We agree that words should have initial capitals at the start of sentences and when they are proper names. The first category is clear; the second is not. There may be no argument over ‘London’, ‘Mary’ or ‘Easter’. But what about ‘Marxism’, ‘Gothic’ and ‘God’?The question of whether he deity (Deity) should be capitalized points to the strong cultural pressures at work here. Logic can only go so far. Even in a largely secular community, we still hesitate to set ‘god’ (a concept that can be disbelieved) and not ‘God’ (an undisputed primary being). English-language practice shows some significant differences with that of comparably developed languages. The French seem more reasoned in their approach to capitalization. Thus in setting titles of books, say in a bibliography, the standard French style is first word and proper names only: The life and adventures of Robin son Crusoe; while an unenlightened English-language text would have The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Applying this system to titles of periodicals brings some problems: one has lllustrated London news or The guardian, both of which may look odd.

So perhaps this category of title should be regarded as a proper name and capitalized throughout.

an er m G e

io at ul tic ar d an ng ni ea M

German orthography is different and requires lengthier discussion. Like the history of its speakers one is inclined to say German is especially problematic. In all the politically and culturally various communities that constitute the German-speakingworld, nouns are guages, words were then heavily but rather indiscriminately capitalized, (One imagines that this was sometimes affected by the arbitrary factor of what was available in the typecase at that moment.) While in other countries the rationalization of that time was towards a minimum of capitals, in German the opposite direction was followed. Some enlightened voices spoke out against this convention. The most famous of these were jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, who formulated the criticisms that were to emerge again in the twentieth century: the German language was written and printed in ugly scripts that were hard to read, especially for foreigners, and it suffered from irrational, wasteful capitalization. In his Deutsche Grammatik, Jakob Grimm practised a reformed orthography, using capitals just at sentence openings and for proper names. While the first edition of this text (1819) was set in blackletter with all nouns capitalized, the next (1822) and succeeding editions used roman type with this reduced use of capitals. Later, in the Deutsches Worterbuch (first volume 1854), Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm took this further, using capital letters only at the start of paragraphs; within paragraphs sentences were marked off only by full points and a slightly increased word space.

The Grimms were philologians and wrote in a spirit of gentle rationalism. As conducted a hundred years later, the argument took on sharper overtones.

A reform of orthography and of Ietterforms was embodied in the work of the poet Stefan George (1868-1933) as part of a larger project of a simplification and aestheticization of life. (The architect Adolf Loos’s Iowercase preferences would be another contemporary instance of the attitude.)The later books of George’s verse, designed under his direction, use a specially modified sanserif type face and capitals only for opening words; punctuation is also simplified. Early, pre-humanist and precapitalized German literature may have provided some inspiration here. Some of these arguments were made by others at this time for quite different reasons: those of business efficience. Waiter Porstmann’s book Sprache und Schrijt (1920) proposed a total abolition of capital letters, together with the use of a phonetically more accurate orthography and modified punctuation. Porstmann had written a doctoral dissertation on measuring systems and had a scientist’s sense of good order, but this book was aimed at the world of administration. His ideals were exactly those of theTaylorist theories of conveyor-belt production, then at the height of their influence: ‘quick, clear, positive, fluent, economical.3 These arguments were quickly taken up by modernist typographers in Germany and incorporated into their more aesthetically and also socially conscious vision. Sprache und Schrift was cited as the source for the single alphabet argument, as developed by (among others) Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer andjan Tschichold. In 1925, the Bauhaus cut its expressionist root in conservativeWeimar and moved to industrial, Social-Democratic Dessau.

And, confirming this shift, capital letters were now abolished at the school.

In the heightened atmosphere of Germany at that time, the social-political implications of ‘Kieinschreibung’ (lowercase typography) began to emerge clearly.

The debate over ‘Kleinschreibung’ can be traced in the pages of Typographische Mitteilungen, the journal of the Bildungsverbandder Deutschen Buchdrucker (educational organization of German letterpress printers).

The extent and seriousness of concern with the question among printers not just typographers is suggested by a poll that was carried out by the organization, announced in a special issue on the theme in May 1931.

Members were asked to read the articles carefully and then vote for the approach that they supported: (1) capitals for sentence openings and proper names; (2) complete abolition of capitals; (3) continuation of the present rules.

The result was a clear majority for the first option: 53·5 per cent of the 26,876 members who voted; with 23.5 per cent and 23.0 percent for the second and third approaches. The organization then adopted this moderated ‘Kleinschreibung’, as a campaigning policy. But the argument was soon forgotten, displaced by an intensification of the blackJetter/roman debate.

And when the National-Socialist party seized power in 1933, the burning typographic issue was the matter of lctterforms, not orthography.

The discussion in Typographische Mitteilungen did produce one unambiguous statement of the political associations that could be attributed to lowercase.⁴ An editorial statement in the special issue concluded: ‘write small! no letters with powdered wigs and class-coronets I democracy in orthography too! So lowercase was adopted by people who felt that egalitarian principles should extend to letters. For example, Bertolt Brecht habitually wrote and typed ‘small’ in his letters and diaries.

This debate was resumed in Germany after 1945. As after the First World War, the context was a society starting again from zero: basic assumptions were open to question. Socially critical writers such as Gtinter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensberger went lowercase in their poems, and capitals were dropped for much internal communication at the Hochschule ftir Gcstaltung Ulm (figure 6). But, despite some persuasive advocacy of the moderate reform, German language orthography remains out of step with all other Latin-alphabet languages.

n

Th

Forget for a moment the precedence of speech and say that in the beginning was a single set of characters: ideograms becoming letters and numerals. In Greek and Roman antiquity these were developed into the familiar forms we know in English as ‘capitals’ (or in other languages as ‘GroBbuchstaben’, majuscules’, ‘kapitalen’ ... ). The word brings with it the suggestion of being at the head (‘caput’ in Latin): the chief city of a country or the crowning feature of an architectural column. One might suppose that the application of the word to these letterforms is connected with this latter sense, for capitalletters were to be found, most publicly and formally, in inscriptions placed ‘at the head of’ columns in built structures. Columns of stone and of text: the analogy with architecture is here, as elsewhere in typography, hard to resist.

The capital letters of Rome and its empire entered into the consciousness of Western cultures as the forms for letters. Think of the first letter of the alphabet and you probably think of two diagonals meeting at a point, with a cross-bar. Try to describe the lowercase ‘a’ in words, and you are in trouble, even before getting to the problem of whether it is a two or singlestorey form. Nicolete Gray once observed that the lack of a positive term (in English) for this other category of letters supports the idea that capitals are the essential forms.1 And now that metal type is almost extinct, ‘lowercase’ may need to be explained: capitals (or majuscules or large letters) were kept in the upper of a stacked pair of cases, the minuscules or small letters lived below.

That the old terms live on may be due to the upstairs/downstairs class distinction that attaches to the two kinds. Certainly for traditionally-minded people there are capitals (proper letters) and then, as a secondary matter, these other forms. This view was clearly expressed in one of the gospels of traditionalism, Stanley Morison’s First principles of typography.2 Writing about title-pages, he insisted on capitals for book title and author’s name, adding: as lower-case is a necessary evil, which we should do well to subordinate since we cannot suppress, it should be avoided when it is at its least rational and least attractive in large sizes. The most celebrated and influential public letters of Roman antiquity were proportionately square capitals, on theTrajan column. At the same time another set of forms was in use: rustics. These letters were distinguished by narrow proportions and more flowing strokes. Rustic letters were used in less prominent situations and for less formal messages. For private, ephemeral communication there were free scripts, rather formless to our eyes. The coexistence of different forms for different purposes has persisted. Whether or not capitals are seen as the essential forms of letters, they are still generally accepted as the most suitable variety for public declarations, or in displayed text. Small letters are for quieter, more intimate uses: from one person to another.

This broad distinction may be true, but the matter becomes complicated by the fact that, for a millennium or so, we have been using large and small letters together, and this is where the game of ‘upper or lower’ really starts.

For typographers who are not traditionalist nor postmodernist, the difficult issue is not whether to set a whole word in capitals - the need for that may rarely arise - but whether to set its first letter with a capital.

What are the conventions that help us to decide?

ca se

Hi e

ra rc hi

es

Octavo, no. 5, 1988

Robin Kinross

The German debates raise the problem of upper· and/or lowercase in rather extreme forms: a process that helps to illuminate the issues. The argument put by Porstmann, and taken up by MoholyNagy, Bayer and the other new typographers, was ‘one sound, therefore one alphabet: we pronounce ‘Dog’ and ‘dog’ identically, so why write them differently?

And to raise a slightly different question if we can manage with only one set of numerals, why do we need two sets of letters? In reply one might pose another question. If written language must follow speech, then should not every word be an exact transcription, responding to regional dialects and even personal idiolects? You say ‘tomato’, I say ‘tomayto’.

And if I came from Tasmania or Singapore, then further spelling adjustments might be necessary; and all spellings would have to be continually reviewed, to make sure that pronunciation had not changed.

But written language does not merely transcribe the spoken. It is a fabricated system with an independent existence and its own conventions.

If this unsettles the single-alphabet view, it does not prove a need for capital letters. The argument must then back out of the dead end of soundtranscription and concentrate on the visual forms of text and what they mean.

Let us agree that a requirement to capitalize all nouns is indefensible. But why stop short at proper names and sentence openings? Concerning the first category, the defender of capitals would say that it can actually make all the difference, in become contexts, to know that ‘Reading’ means the town in Berkshire or Pennsylvania, while ‘reading’ means the activity you are now engaged in.

Or that ‘END’ is not ‘end’, but the group campaigning for European nuclear disarmament. Capital letters are part of the typographic repertoire and can articulate text in many ways, including those still undiscovered.

Consider how clumsy a British or Canadian postcode is when set just in lowercase (especially with capital-height numerals).

The justification for capital letters to open sentences would follow this last line of argument. It is not so much that capitals give meaning here, more that they give subtle assistance to the reader’s assimilation of text. We may not be able to measure it, but reading does seem to be made more comfortable by seeing sentences demarcated by initial capitals. The advocates of a radical ‘Kieinschreibung’ recognized this when they suggested the midpositioning of full points or oblique strokes, to make up for the loss of the capital. The tendency for capital letters to stick out of text too noticeably has long been countered by the practice of designing forms that are just short of ascender-height, and by the development of small (x-height) capitals. But this close-grained typographer’s view has hardly been noticed in a debate dominated by philologians and visionaries.

Seen in this more complex light, the absolute demand for lowercase seems mistaken: a product of utopian thinking in extreme conditions, but not a real option now, except in special cases. There are, however, still reforms to be fought for, in the German-language countries above all. Even in relatively enlightened English-language communities, capitalization often seems to go too far: in bibliographical lists or in display setting, where every noun is capitalized, if not whole words. We are still under the sway of a traditionalistauthoritarian view, which demands obedience to the ‘three-line whip’ of capitalization. The opposing attitude, which values informality and equality, and which sees small letters as the norm and capitals the exception to be deployed carefully and meaningfully, is not yet widely shared. A further push towards letter-democracy is still required.

1. Nicolete Gray, Lettering on buildings, Architectural Press, 1960, p.53.

2. Stanley Morisson, First principles of typography (1930), 2nd end, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1967, p.14. The arguments in Britain in the early 1960s over road-sign alphabets raiecl this question very publicly: seriffed capitals versus upper· and lowercase sanserif.

The victory for the latter seemed to be a landmark for the late arrival of modern in this country.

3. Waiter Porstmann, Sprache und Sell rift, Berlin: Verlag des Vereins Deutscher Ingenieure, 1920, p.84.

4· Typographische Mitteilungen, vol. 18, no. 5, 1931, p. 123. The contrast with Stanley Morison’s view (note 2) could hardly be greater.

5· Sec, for example, the articles for and against ‘Kicinschreibung’ in the ‘Sprache und Schrift’ issue of the journal Partdora, no.4,1946.

Robin Kinross Black art Sebastian Carter, Twentieth century type designers, Trefoil, 1987

WalterTracy, Letters of credit: a view of type design, Gordon Fraser, 1986

Between these two words, of the reader and of the designer of text, the gap may sometimes feel impossibly wide, and yet each depends on the other

The extraordinary and hard won skills of the punchcutter then be bypassed, and the design of type was open to those who simply had an interest in letter forms, and some drawing talent.

The same ethos of good food informs twentieth century type designers: ‘in many ways types are like wines: one can learn to discrimminate between the varieties of Garamond as produced

by Monotype, linotype, ATF or stempel, just as the wine taster can detect the Chardonnay grape, whatever vineyard it comes from.’

‘The machine’ and ‘industrialism’, for Gill – as for Ruskin and Morris – were the devils to be wrestled with.

But, by this time, the battle was over.

Gill could only point to the loss, and to the evasions and lies involved in designing as if mechanization had not happened: ‘was i ask of machine‑made books is that they shall look machin‑made’.

More than five hundred years on from its first practice, some mystery still surrounds the ‘black art’ of printing. And now, when the secure identity of the printing trade is threatened by instant printers, desktop publishers, and women compositors, the mystery has been displaced and further confused.

Typographers feel this every time they are asked what exactly it is that they do. ‘Oh, newspapers?’, someone will hazard (this is the first connotation of print for many people). ‘No, books,leaflets, that sort of thing.’ ‘You print them?’ ‘No, design them.’

‘You make the illustrations?’ Then one tries to explain the function of editorial and visual decision‑taking that should intervene – or may happen by default – between the writing of a text and its composition and multiplication as printed pages. The other familiar conversation is of insiders talking together: the obsessive discussions of the visual forms of text matter, of line‑lengths and letters pacing. Between these two worlds, of the reader and of the designer of text, the gap may sometimes feel impossibly wide, and yet each depends on the other.

This gap can be traced to the essential workings of printing. Although the labour of producing manuscript books may be, and was, divided up, writing is a unitary process. Printing, however, consists of two stages – composing the text and then multiplying it and those performing these separate tasks may well know nothing of each other. The process of writing with a pen is easily comprehended and practised. The business of assembling the characters to generate printed words belongs, however, to the realm of the machine, and has never been very easily accessible: this has been ensured by the barriers of cost, religious and political censorship, and the closed shop. Another twist to the mystery is added by the fact that these characters must be mirror images of the letters they engender.

The history of the typographer is a story of emergence. At first the function was performed by the master printer, who oversaw the workshop of compositors and press operators. But with the development of power‑driven presses and (from around 1900) the mechanization of composition, the designing or planning function fell out of the hands of the printer. This role began to be picked up by outsiders to the trade, who came to appropriate the old term of ‘typographer’. Coinciding with and confirming this shift came a reintroduction of the aesthetic element into printing, which was seen to have been squeezed out by the rise of mechanized processes and of merely economic calculation.

William Morris’s Kelmscott Press represented this new impulse most forcefully. Its immediate legacy was the diversion (not at all wished for by Morris) of private press printing: unwanted texts, preciously dressed for the investor’s market. But the more important consequence of the Kelmscott books, for those who could get beyond imitation of their appearance, was a new understanding of typography. As against simple ‘printing’, typography now came to be a practice that infused elements of visual and tactile pleasure into the meaning‑governed organization of text. What form this aesthetic element took, and how inseparable and necessary was its place in the whole product, was the great question, to be argued out in the new journals of typography that began to appear alongside the printing trade press (which was, and is, limited to merely instrumental considerations).

The material conditions determining the forms of printed letters or characters were fundamentally altered at this time. In 1885 a machine for cutting ‘punches’ (the product of the first stage in the process of making metal type) was patented by Linn Boyd Benton. With this device, the design of letters was removed from the hand of the punchcutter, who had cut in metal at the size at which a letter would eventually be produced.

Responsibility for the final form of letters now passed to a person (either the ‘designer’, or more usually an anonymous technical draughtsman) who made large‑scale drawings that were then reduced, by pantography, to produce the necessary punches.

The extraordinary and hard‑won skills of the punchcutter could then be bypassed, and the design of type was open to those who simply had an interest in letterforms, and some drawing talent.

This new production method coincided with changes in the economy of printing. There were greater demands for novelty of form in letters, as printers responded to the pressures imposed by their customers, and especially those in the commercial sphere, outside the quiet preserves of book‑production.

So the image on the face of the type began to be treated as a commodity, and was sold separately from its material embodiment. Thus arose the greater differentiation of these types: where letters or printing had been rather loosely described in terms of their size and style (‘Pica Old Style’), there now began to appear ‘typefaces’, distinguished by trade‑names: ‘Ringlet’, ‘Cheltenham’, ‘Mikado’, and so on. (A count made in 1974 found there to be 3,621 such named typefaces.) In the years of aestheticism and free‑market capitalism, and up to the First World War, one sees a rather wild growth of new letterforms in Europe and the USA: chasing novelty and not restrained by any noticeable formal propriety. But in the 1920s a movement of historical revival got under way, in the USA and – where it was pursued with most enthusiasm – in Britain.

The recurring issue for this movement was that raised by the composing machine: could good work be done with it?

William Morris had not engaged with the problem, though by implication had answered ‘no’. The first generation of typographers, several of whom had been seduced by the astonishing sight and touch of the Kelmscott books, now began to enter into the worlds of publishing and print‑design. In several cases also these typographers professed a Morrisian socialism, but without Morris’s sense of the human damage wrought by machine production.

In Britain, the most important and certainly the most vociferous figure was Stanley Morison, who, in his role as consultant to the Monotype Corporation, was able to agitate for or instigatea number of new interpretations of pre‑industrial types for that company’s composing machines. So, for example, the Monotype‑owning printer could purchase a type called ‘Garamond’, derived circuitously from the style of letter defined in the work of the six teenth‑century French punchcutter Claude Garamond. With a fast‑talking blend of scholarship and salesmanship, Morison, assisted by Beatrice Warde (in charge of publicity at Monotype), raised the typographic consciousness of the English‑speaking printing world. In a few golden years of desperate activity, historical research in the libraries of Europe and the USA went hand in hand with business deals: persuading type manufacturers to issue these re‑creations, printers to buy them, publishers to issue the discussions and reproductions of old (‘fine’) printing and also of the work that was then being done in a spirit of ‘new traditionalism’. In Britain there grew up the network of publications, institutions, and enlightened businesses, which came to constitute a culture of typography: the Monotype Recorder and Newsletter, the Curwen Press, the Fleuron, the Double Crown Club, the Nonesuch Press.

The books by Sebastian Carter and WalterTracy are products of this culture in its present mutation, after the revolution of offset lithography and photocomposition, and in the middle of the diffusion of computer‑assisted and digital typesetting.

The travails of Fleet Street have dramatized this change of process and the degradation of the compositor’s work that is entailed by the application of computer technology. Less widely noticed have been the visual changes allowed by the new machines, especially in their cruder and earlier versions.

Standards in the forms and spacing of letters, which had been ensured by the very material of characters (lead, with carefully admitted additional elements), were lost in the new, unbounded technology of light. One might draw an analogy with change in the material of a simple hand‑tool, when wood is replaced by a synthetic substance: it may do the job as well, but one misses the incidental sensual pleasures of a slightly idiosyncratic, slightly malleable material. This is not to argue any special case for the items that now trickle from the hand‑presses of California and New England; though one might do well to take more notice of the letterpress printing that is still common in Eastern Europe and the Third World.

Tracy’s book is an attempt to explain what one might mean by quality in the forms of letters for text composition: why some characters or sets of characters are of greater ‘credit’ than others. It is written out of the author’s long experience of typeface development for the British branch of the Linotype company, and has the benefits of internal knowledge of production processes, clearly expounded in lucid prose and appropriate illustrations. This writer has managed to escape from the usual pattern for such books, which is that of a short history of Western (roman) letterforms. Instead he considers basic elements of type design and production (measurement, spacing, variants of style, and so on), with historical perspectives drawn where necessary.

This is followed by five essays on type face designers, which contain a good deal of practical criticism of letters.

Carter’s Twentieth century type designers might seem to duplicate this part of Letters of credit, though the two books are largely complementary in their treatments. Tracy is drier and more interested in the letters than their designers. Carter reproduces drawings or photographs of his subjects, and is’attentive to the men (as they all are, with one minor exception) behind the letters. This might be misleading, because, as in any process of industrial production, these designers worked within contexts shaped by a complex of factors: the policy of the commissioning company and its economic fortunes, the constraints and opportunities offered by their machines, the skills of the technical staff. This last factor was particularly important in the Monotype Corporation’s recutting of historical types, the forms of which owe more to the skills of their draughtsmen and workshop overseer than to their initiating consultant (Morison), distanced from ‘the works’ by a train journey and with several other irons in his typographic fire.

Carter does show some awareness of the multi‑determined complexity of any design process, and prefaces his essays on individuals with discussion of the conditioning factors, as well as with basic information about the making and assembly of type. The predominant mode of the book, however, is that of appreciation, conducted in the rather fruity tones of a Double Crown Club discussion. (A separation of the work from its creators, such as is sometimes possible in academic discourse, has not yet been entertained in the sphere of design, where you will soon find yourself sitting down to dinner with the people responsible for the artefacts you have discussed in print.) Beatrice Warde founded her theory of typography on an analogy with a ‘crystal goblet’: she wanted a transparent but just noticeable container that lent refinement to the meaning of a text. The same ethos of good food informs Twentieth century type designers: ‘In many ways types are like wines: one can learn to discriminate between the varieties of Garamond as produced by Monotype, Linotype, ATF or Stempel, just as the wine taster can detect the Chardonnay grape, whatever vineyard it comes from.

Among Sebastian Carter’s subjects are Eric Gill and Jan Tschichold: outsiders who posed awkward questions, though the posthumous reputations of both have been shaped so as to allow assimilation into the old boy’s club of British typography.

Both gave addresses to the Double Crown Club. In the course of his, in 1926 (a few weeks before the General Strike), Gill remarked that he felt ‘like a miner before a court of mandarins’.

This was the time of his first engagement with the activity of designing type faces for machine composition, and the involvement led him to think out the problems at some length in his Essay on typography. Although the principles of the Arts & Crafts movement had been formative for him, Gill was critical of its later mutations, and his position came to be an amalgam of Catholic‑anarchist‑pacifist beliefs, expressed in a fluent (sometimes logorhetic) discourse that bears some comparison with that of D. H. Lawrence. (Lawrence’s last piece of writing was a review of Gill’s Art nonsense: it sorts out the one ‘great truth’ from the pub‑bore element in Gill.) ‘The machine’ and ‘industrialism’, for Gill – as for Ruskin and Morris– were the devils to be wrestled with. But, by this time, the battle was over.

Gill could only point to the loss, and to the evasions and lies involved in designing as if mechanization had not happened: ‘what I ask of machine‑made books is that they shall look machine‑made’. Gill Sans, the type face designed, under Stanley Morison’s prompting, for the Monotype Corporation, was Gill’s best expression of this belief; though, in the subtlety with which its characters were drawn and in their avoidance of simple geometry, it was far from the elemental machine‑age typeface that the ‘Zeitgeist’ might seem to have demanded.

At that time, on the Continent, Jan Tschichold was the most articulate practitioner of the ‘new typography’: the typographic counterpart to the new architecture. In Tschichold’s work, especially of the early to mid 1930s, this approach to the design of text surpassed in visual subtlety and responsiveness to meaning the more celebrated typography that was practised at the Dessau Bauhaus. By the time that Tschichold came to talk at a Double Crown Club dinner, in 1937, he was living in exile in Switzerland and was on the point of renouncing his modernism for a return to a traditional manner (quite strongly inflected by the British ‘new traditionalism’). The depth of ignorance of modern typography that he would have encountered then in Britain is well indicated by the menu designed for that dinner: an anthology of misunderstandings. Fifty years later, Sebastian Carter writes appreciatively of Tschichold in both the ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ phases of his career. But the old difference is not so easily smoothed over, and a sour remark about the title‑page of Typographische Gestaltung (1935) – the clearest and most beautiful statement ofTschichold’s modern typography – betrays the distance that still persists between the clubbable English manner and the hard, elegant rationality of Continental modernism.

In 1947, Tschichold was called to work in Britain, to supervise an overhaul of the typography of Penguin Books. He had by this time condemned modernism, as a passed phase (if perhaps a necessary purgative of nineteenth‑century ornamental dross). He argued, very doubtfully, that in its ordering zeal it had shared in the spirit that informed National‑Socialism. At Penguin, in the face of the post‑war lassitude of the British printing trade, his ordering zeal did not diminish, though was now directed towards more reader‑friendly traditional configurations. The books from this reform, which was continued by another Continental import (Hans Schmoller), are now to be found yellowed and tattered, but the intelligence and assurance of their typography remains unsurpassed. Their success lay in the achievement of high standards of typographic detail, applied to a large list of titles. Faced with the hyped‑up but typographically dismal outpourings of the Anglo‑American publishing industry, one is inclined to protest that really what we need to do is learn again the lessons of those books.

London Review of Books, vol. to, no. 7,1988 Written on spec, after some exchanges with the editors of the London Review of Books about their own typography, and, about a year after submission, they published this piece. The heading ‘Black art’ was supplied by the LRB. The mere fact of publication in a journal of general interest seemed the most important thing about this piece. lt resumes themes of my book Modem typography, which I had by then written, but which was languishing in unpublished limbo.

Robin Kinross BLACK ART

Sebastian Carter, Twentieth century type designers, Trefoil, 1987 WalterTracy, Letters of credit: a view of type design, Gordon Fraser, 1986

More than five hundred years on from its first practice, some mystery still surrounds the ‘black art’ of printing. And now, when the secure identity of the printing trade is threatened by instant printers, desktop publishers, and women compositors, the mystery has been displaced and further confused.

Typographers feel this every time they are asked what exactly it is that they do. ‘Oh, newspapers?’, someone will hazard (this is the first connotation of print for many people). ‘No, books, leaflets, that sort of thing.’ ‘You print them?’ ‘No, design them.’ ‘You make the illustrations?’ Then one tries to explain the function of editorial and visual decision–taking that should intervene–or may happen by default between the writing of a text and its composition and multiplication as printed pages. The other familiar conversation is of insiders talking together: the obsessive discussions of the visual forms of text matter, of line– lengths and letters pacing. Between these two worlds, of the reader and of the designer of text, the gap may sometimes feel impossibly wide, and yet each depends on the other. This gap can be traced to the essential workings of printing. Although the labour of producing ‘Between these two words of the reader manuscript books may and of the designer of text the gap may sometimes be, and was, divided up, writing is unitary profeel impossible wide, and yet each This new production cess. Printing, howevdepends on the other. ’ method coincided with er, consists of two stagchanges in the econoes–composing the text my of printing. There and then multiplying it and those performing these separate tasks may well were greater demands for novelty ofform in letters, know nothing of each other. The process of writing as printers responded to the pressures imposed by with a pen is easily comprehended and practised. their customers, and especially those in the commerThe business of assembling the characters to genercial sphere, outside the quiet preserves of book—proate printed words belongs, however, to the realm of duction. So the image on the face of the type began to the machine, and has never been very easily accessibe treated as a commodity, and was sold separately ble: this has been ensured by the barriers of cost, refrom its material embodiment. Thus arose the greatligious and political censorship, and the closed shop. er differentiation of these types: where letters for Another twist to the mystery is added by the fact that printing had been rather loosely described in terms these characters must be mirror images of the letters of their size and style (‘Pica Old Style’), there now they engender. began to appear ‘typefaces’, distinguished by tradeThe history of the typographer is a story of names: ‘Ringlet’, ‘Cheltenham’, ‘Mikado’, and so on. emergence. At first the function was performed by (A count made in 1974 found there to be 3,621 such the master printer, who oversaw the workshop named typefaces.) In the years of aestheticism and of compositors and press operators. But with the free—market capitalism, and up to the First World development of power–driven presses and (from War, one sees a rather wild growth of new letteraround 1900) the mechanization of composition, forms in Europe and the USA: chasing novelty and the designing or planning function fell out of the not restrained by any noticeable formal propriety. hands of the printer. This role began to be picked up But in the 1920s a movement of historical revival by outsiders to the trade, who came to appropriate got under way, in the USA and where it was pursued the old term of ‘typographer’. Coinciding with and with most enthusiasm in Britain. confirming this shift came a reintroduction of the The recurring issue for this movement was that aesthetic element into printing, which was seen to raised by the composing machine: could good work have been squeezed out by the rise of mechanized be done with it? William Morris had not engaged with processes and of merely economic calculation. the problem, though by implication had answered William Morris’s Kelmscott Press represented this ‘no’. The first generation of typographers, several of new impulse most forcefully. Its immediate legacy whom had been seduced by the astonishing sight was the diversion (not at all wished for by Morris) and touch of the Kelmscott books, now began to of private press printing: unwanted texts, preciously enter into the worlds of publishing and print–design. dressed for the investor’s market. But the more In several cases also these typographers professed a important consequence of the Kelmscott books, Morrisian socialism, but without Morris’s sense of for those who could get beyond imitation of their the human damage wrought by machine production. appearance, was a new understanding of typography.

In Britain, the most important and certainly the As against simple ‘printing’, typography now came to most vociferous figure was Stanley Morison, who, in be a practice that infused elements of visual and tactile his role as consultant to the Monotype Corporation, pleasure into the meaning–governed organization of was able to agitate for or instigate a number of text. What form this aesthetic element took, and how new interpretations of pre—industrial types for that inseparable and necessary was its place in the whole company’s composing machines. So, for example, product, was the great question, to be argued out in the Monotype owning printer could purchase a type the new journals of typography that began to appear called ‘Garamond’, derived circuitously from the alongside the printing trade press (which was, and style of letter defined in the work of the sixteenthis, limited to merely instrumental considerations). century French punchcutter Claude Garamond.

The material conditions determining the forms With a fast· talking blend of scholarship and of printed letters or characters were fundamentally salesmanship, Morison, assisted by Beatrice Warde altered at this time. In 1885 a machine for cutting (in charge of publicity at Monotype), raised the ‘punches’ (the product of the first stage in the process typographic consciousness of the English·speaking of making metal type) was patented by Linn Boyd printing world.

Benton. With this device, the design of letters was In a few golden years of desperate activity, historical removed from the hand of the punchcutter, who research in the libraries of Europe and the USA went had cut in metal at the size at which a letter would hand in hand with business deals: persuading type eventually be produced. Responsibility for the final manufacturers to issue these recreations, printers form of letters now passed to a person (either the to buy them, publishers to issue the discussions and ‘designer’, or more usually an anonymous technical reproductions of old (‘fine’) printing and also of the draughtsman) who made large–scale drawings that work that was then being done in a spirit of ‘new were then reduced, by pantography, to produce the traditionalism’. In Britain there grew up the network necessary punches. The extraordinary and hard-won of publications, institutions, and enlightened skills of the punchcutter could then be bypassed, and businesses, which came to constitute a culture of the design of type was open to those who simply had typography: the Monotype Recorder and Newsletter, an interest in letterforms, and some drawing talent. the Curwen Press, the Fleuron, the Double Crown

staff. This last factor was particularly important in the Monotype Corporation’s recutting of historical types, he forms of which owe more to the skills of their draughtsmen and workshop overseer than to their initiating consultant (Morison), distanced from ‘the works’ by a train journey andwith several other irons in his typographic fire.

Among Sebastian Carter’s subjects are Eric Gill and Jan Tschichold: outsiders who posed awkward questions, though the posthumous reputations of both have been shaped so as to allow assimilation into the old boy’s club of British typography. Both gave addresses to the Double Crown Club. This was the time of his first engagement with the activity of designing type faces for machine composition, and the involvement led him to think out the problems at some length in his Essay on typography. Although the principles of the Arts & Crafts movement had been formative for him, Gill was critical of its later mutations, and his position came to be an amalgam of Catholic-anarchist-pacifist beliefs, expressed in a flu ent (sometimes logorhetic) with that of D. H. Lawrence. (Lawrence’s last piece of writing was a review of Gill’s art nonsense: it sorts out the one ‘great truth’ from the pub-bore element in Gill.) ‘The machine’ and ‘industrialism’, for Gill –as for Ruskin and Morris–were the devils to be wrestled with. But, by this time, the battle was over. Gill could only point to the loss, and to the evasions and lies involved in designing Club, the Nonesuch Press. The books by Sebastian as if mechanization had not happened: ‘what I ask of Carter and Walter Tracy are products of this culture machine-made books is that they shall look machinein its present mutation, after the revolution of offset made’. Gill Sans, the type face designed, under Stanley Morison’s prompting, for the Monotype Corporation, lithography and photocomposition, and in the was Gill’s best expression of this belief; though, in the middle of the diffusion of computer-assisted and subtlety with which its characters were drawn and in digital typesetting. The travails of Fleet Street have their avoidance of simple geometry, it was far from the dramatized this change of process and the elemental machineag typeface that the ‘Zeitgeist’ might degradation of the compositor’s work that is entailed seem to have demanded. by the application of computer technology. Less At that time, on the Continent, Jan Tschichold was widely noticed have been the visual changes allowed the most articulate practitioner of the ‘new typography’: by the new machines, especially in their cruder and the typographic counterpart to the new architecture. earlier versions. Standards in the forms and spacing In Tschichold’s work, especially of the early to mid of letters, which had been ensured by the very 1930s, this approach to the design of text surpassed material of characters (lead, with carefully admitted in visual subtlety and responsiveness to meaning the additional elements), were lost in the new, unbounded more celebrated typography that was practised at the technology of light One might draw an analogy with Dessau Bauhaus. By the time that Tschichold came to change in the material of a simple hand-tool, when talk at a Double Crown Club dinner, in 1937, he was wood is replaced by a synthetic substance: it may living in exile in Switzerland and was on the point of do the job as well, but one misses the incidental renouncing his modernism for a return to a traditional sensual pleasures of a slightly idiosyncratic, slightly manner (quite strongly inflected by the British ‘new malleable material. This is not to argue any special traditionalism’). The depth of ignorance of modern case for the items that now trickle from the handtypography that he would have encountered then in presses of California and New England; though one Britain is well indicated by the menu designed for might do well to take more notice of the letterpress that dinner: an anthology of misunderstandings. Fifty printing that is still common in Eastern Europe and years later, Sebastian Carter writes appreciatively the Third World. of Tschichold in both the ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ Tracy’s book is an attempt to explain what one phases of his career. But the old difference is not so might mean by quality in the forms of letters for easily smoothed over, and a sour remark about the text composition: why some characters or sets title-page of Typographische Gestaltung (1935) - the of characters are of greater ‘credit’ than others. clearest and most beautiful statement of Tschichold’s It is written out of the author’s long experience modern typography–betrays the distance that still of typeface development for the British branch persists between the clubbable English manner and of the Linotype company, and has the benefits the hard, elegantrationality of Continental modernism. of internal knowledge of production processes, In 1947, Tschichold was called to work in Britain, clearly expounded in lucid prose and appropriate to supervise an overhaul of the typography of Penguin illustrations. This writer has managed to escape Books. He had by this time condemned modernism, from the usual pattern for such books, which is that as a passed phase (if perhaps a necessary purgative of of a short history of Western (roman) letterforms. nineteenth-century ornamental dross). He argued, very Instead he considers basic elements of type design doubtfully, that in its ordering zeal it had shared in the and production (measurement, spacing, variants of spirit that informed National-Socialism. At Penguin, in style, and so on), with historical pers-pectives drawn the face of the post-war lassitude of the British printing where necessary. This is followed by five essays on trade, his ordering zeal did not diminish, though was type face designers, which contain a good deal of now directed towards more reader-friendly traditional practical criticism of letters. configurations. The books from this reform, which Carter’s Twentieth century type designers might seem was continued by another Continental import (Hans to dupli-cate Ithis part of Letters of credit, though Schmoller), are now to be found yellowed and tattered, the two books are largely complementary in their but the intelligence and assurance of their typography treatments. Tracy is drier and more interested in the remains unsurpassed. Their success lay in the letters than their designers. Carter reproduces drawachievement of high standards of typographic detail, ings or photographs of his subjects, and is’attentive to applied to a large list of titles. Faced with the hyped—up the men (as they all are, with one minor exception) but typographically dismal outpourings of the Anglo– behind the letters. This might be misleading, because, American publishing industry, one is inclined to as in any process of industrial production, these deprotest that really signers worked within what we need to do contexts shaped by a is learn again the complex of factors: the ‘The extraordinary and hard policy of the commislessons of those books. sioning company and won skill of the punch cutter then be bypassed, its economic fortunes, and the design of type was open to those the constraints and who simply had an interest in letter forms, opportunities offered and some drawing talent. ’ by their machines, the skills of the technical

London Review of Books, vol. to, no. 7,1988 Written on spec, after some exchanges with the editors of the London Review of Books about their own typography, and, about a year after submission, they published this piece. The heading ‘Black art’ was supplied by the LRB. The mere fact of publication in a journal of general interest seemed the most important thing about this piece. lt resumes themes of my book Modem typography, which I had by then written, but which was languishing in unpublished limbo.

Rosalind Krauss

Spatialement, la grille affirme l’autonomie de l’art.

À cause de sa structure (et de son histoire) bivalente, la grille est totalement et même gaiement schizophrène.

Washington, National Gallery of Arts.

(Traduit de l’américain par Josiane Micner).

organique ? Étant donné la cohérence visuelle ou formelle du style de Mondrian en sa maturité, et étant donné ses déclarations théoriques passionnées, on pourrait penser qu’une telle œuvre devrait s’en tenir à l’une ou à l’autre de ces positions ; et parce que la position choisie entraîne une définition de la nature même de l’art et de ses buts, on pourrait penser qu’un artiste ne voudrait pas obscurcir la question en paraissant choisir les deux options à la fois. Et pourtant, c’est exactement ce que fait Mondrian. Il y a certaines peintures qui sont par-dessus tout centrifuges, surtout les grilles verticales et horizontales que nous voyons dans les tableaux en forme de diamant, où le contraste entre le cadre et la grille renforce l’impression de fragmentation, comme si nous regardions un paysage à travers une fenêtre, le cadre de la fenêtre tronquant notre vue de façon arbitraire mais n’ébranlant jamais notre certitude que le paysage continue au-delà des limites de ce que nous pouvons voir à ce moment-là. Mais d’autres œuvres, datant pourtant des mêmes années, sont tout aussi explicitement centripètes. Dans celles-ci, les lignes noires qui forment la grille n’atteignent en fait jamais les bords extérieurs de l’œuvre, et cette coupure entre les limites extérieures de la grille et celles de la peinture nous oblige à comprendre que l’une est entièrement contenue dans l’autre.

Parce que l’argument centrifuge pose une continuité théorique entre l’œuvre d’art et le monde, il peut favoriser bien des utilisations différentes de la grille, partant de formulations purement abstraites de cette continuité pour arriver à des projets qui organisent certains aspects de la « réalité », elle-même conçue de façon plus ou moins abstraite. Ainsi, à l’extrémité la plus abstraite de ce spectre, nous trouvons des explorations du champ de perception (un aspect de l’utilisation de la grille par Agnès Martin ou Larry Poons), ou des interactions phoniques (les grilles de Patrick Ireland), et, au fur et à mesure que nous avançons vers le moins abstrait, nous trouvons les formulations sur l’expansion infinie des systèmes de signes créés par l’homme (les nombres et alphabets de Jasper Johns). En nous rapprochant encore du concret, nous trouvons des œuvres qui organisent la « réalité » au moyen d’éléments photographiques (avec Warhol et, d’une manière différente, avec Chuck Close), ainsi que des œuvres qui sont en partie une méditation sur l’espace architectural (celles de Louise Nevelson, par exemple). Ici, la grille tridimensionnelle (à présent, un treillis) est perçue comme un modèle théorique d’espace architectural en général, dont certains petits morceaux peuvent recevoir une forme matérielle ; à l’opposé de cette sorte de pensée, nous trouvons les projets décoratifs de Frank Lloyd Wright et l’œuvre de ceux qui suivirent de Stijl, comme Rietveld ou Vantongerloo. (Les modules et treillis de Sol Le Witt sont des manifestations plus tardives de cette position.)

En ce qui concerne la pratique centripète, bien sûr, le contraire est vrai. En se concentrant sur la surface de l’œuvre comme si elle était complète et organisée de manière interne, la branche centripète de la pratique tend, non pas à dématérialiser cette surface, mais bien à en faire l’objet de la vision. On rencontre de nouveau l’un de ces curieux paradoxes qui marquent sans cesse l’utilisation de la grille. En s’adressant au monde et à sa structure, l’attitude « au-delà du cadre » semblerait remonter au XIXe siècle dans son rapport aux applications de la science, et elle semblerait comporter les implications positivistes ou matérialistes de son héritage. Au contraire, concernée par une compréhension purement conventionnelle et autotélique de l’œuvre, l’attitude « à l’intérieur du cadre » semblerait avoir une origine uniquement symboliste et paraîtrait ainsi être porteuse de toutes ces interprétations que nous opposons à la « science » ou au « matérialisme », de ces interprétations qui donnent à l’œuvre une inflexion symbolique, cosmologique, spirituelle ou vitaliste. Pourtant, nous savons que dans l’ensemble cela n’est pas vrai. Par une sorte de court-circuit de cette logique, les grilles « à l’intérieur du cadre » sont en général de nature bien plus matérialiste (prenons des exemples aussi différents que les œuvres de Frank Stella et Alfred Jensen), alors que les exemples de cet « au-delà du cadre » entraînent souvent la dématérialisation de la surface, la dispersion de la matière en un vacillement perceptuel ou en un mouvement implicite. Et nous savons également que cette schizophrénie permet à beaucoup d’artistes — de Mondrian à Albers, Kelly et Le Witt — de penser la grille des deux manières à la fois.

Lors de la discussion du fonctionnement et de la nature de la grille dans le champ général de l’art moderne, j’ai eu recours à des mots tels que répression ou schizophrénie. Puisque ces termes sont appliqués à un phénomène culturel et non à des individus, ils ne sont évidemment pas pris dans leur sens littéral et médical, mais uniquement de façon analogique et ce, pour que nous puissions comparer deux structures entre elles. Les conditions de cette analogie sont apparues clairement, je l’espère, lors de la discussion sur les structures et fonctions parallèles des deux grilles en tant qu’objets esthétiques et que mythes.

Mais il faut encore faire ressortir un autre aspect de cette analogie, et c’est la manière dont cette terminologie psychologique est dans son fonctionnement, éloignée de celle de l’histoire. J’entends par là que nous parlons de l’étiologie d’un état psychologique et non de son histoire. Telle que nous la concevons habituellement, l’histoire implique, d’une part, des liens entre des événements situés dans le temps, et d’autre part, l’idée que le changement est inévitable, au fur et à mesure que nous passons d’un événement à un autre ; elle implique aussi l’effet cumulatif du changement qui est lui-même qualitatif, de sorte que nous avons tendance à considérer l’histoire comme un développement. L’étiologie n’est pas une question de développement. C’est plutôt une enquête sur les conditions qui menèrent à un changement précis, c’est-à-dire à la maladie. En ce sens, l’étiologie ressemble plus au fait de fouiller dans l’histoire d’une expérience chimique, de demander quand et comment un groupe donné d’éléments s’est uni pour former un nouveau composé ou pour produire un précipité. En ce qui concerne l’étiologie des névroses, nous pouvons prendre une « histoire » de l’individu afin d’explorer les conditions de formation de la structure névrotique ; mais une fois que la névrose s’est formée, il nous est précisément prescrit de ne pas penser en termes de « développement », et nous parlons alors plutôt de répétition. S’il s’agit de l’avènement de la grille dans l’art du XXe siècle, il nous faut plus penser en termes d’étiologie que d’histoire.

Certaines conditions ont été rassemblées qui ont précipité la grille vers une position de prééminence esthétique. On peut parler de ce que furent ces conditions, de la manière dont elles se rassemblèrent au XIXe siècle, et l’on peut ensuite situer cette combinaison chimique — si l’on peut dire — dans les premières décennies du XXe siècle. Mais, dès que la grille apparaît, elle semble extrêmement résistante au changement. Prises au moment de leur maturité, les carrières de Mondrian ou d’Albers en sont des exemples. Personne ne pourrait dire que leurs œuvres tardives, composées sur plusieurs décennies, soient caractérisées par le développement. Mais en privant leur monde de développement, on ne lui enlève évidemment pas sa qualité. Il n’y a pas de lien nécessaire entre un art de qualité et le changement, si conditionnés que nous puissions être à le penser. En fait, une expérience accrue de la grille nous a menée à découvrir que l’un de ses aspects les plus modernistes est sa faculté de servir de paradigme ou de modèle à l’antidéveloppement, à l’antirécit et à l’antihistoire.

2. Cette littérature est trop abondante pour qu’on puisse la citer ici. On trouvera un excellent exemple de cette discussion dans John Elderfield, « Grids »,Artforum X, mai 1971, p. 52-59.

Grilles

1. Cet exposé n’a évidemment pas pour but de dénigrer l’art de Mondrian. Mais cela n’apporte rien de nier que la grille impose à cet art un caractère répétitif et il faut reconnaître, dans le cadre d’une discussion de la carrière de Mondrian, que cela est problématique.

Au début de ce siècle, une structure formelle commença à apparaître, d’abord en France puis en Russie et en Hollande, structure qui est depuis lors restée emblématique de l’ambition moderniste des arts visuels. Apparaissant dans la peinture cubiste d’avantguerre et devenant par la suite plus rigoureuse et plus manifeste, la grille annonce, entre autres choses, la volonté de silence de l’art moderne, son hostilité envers la littérature, le récit et le discours.

Comme telle, la grille a fait son travail avec une efficacité frappante.

La barrière qu’elle a abaissée entre les arts visuels et ceux du langage a presque totalement réussi à emmurer les premiers dans le domaine de la seule visualité et à les défendre contre l’intrusion de la parole. Les arts ont bien sûr chèrement payé ce succès, car la forteresse qu’ils ont construite sur les fondations de la grille a de plus en plus pris l’allure d’un ghetto. De moins en moins de voix provenant de l’establishment critique se sont élevées pour soutenir, apprécier ou analyser les arts plastiques contemporains.

On peut même avancer que, dans toute la production esthétique moderne, aucune forme ne s’est maintenue avec autant d’acharnement, tout en restant aussi imperméable au changement. Ce n’est pas seulement le nombre de carrières vouées à l’exploration de la grille qui est impressionnant, mais le fait qu’une exploration n’aurait jamais pu choisir terrain moins fertile. Ainsi que l’expérience de Mondrian le démontre clairement, le développement l’expansion, l’extension, la transmutation — est précisément ce à quoi la grille résiste. Bien que les critiques modernistes et les historiens de l’art insistent pour dire que l’œuvre de Mondrian est un prodige de diversité, à l’intérieur des limites strictes qu’il s’est imposées, cet argument n’est que vœu pieux, émanant d’une position de défensive. Après avoir admis la grille comme substance et sujet de son art, Mondrian continua pendant quinze ans à refaire essentiellement la même œuvre1. Pourtant, personne ne semble avoir été découragé par cet exemple, et la pratique moderniste continue à engendrer toujours plus d’exemples de grilles.

Pour proclamer la modernité de l’art contemporain, la grille fonctionne de deux manières : l’une est spatiale, l’autre temporelle.

Spatialement, la grille affirme l’autonomie de l’art. Bidimensionnelle, géométrique, ordonnée, elle est antinaturelle, antimimétique et va à l’encontre du réel. C’est ce à quoi l’art ressemble lorsqu’il tourne le dos à la nature. Par l’absence de relief qui résulte de ses coordonnées, la grille est le moyen de refouler les dimensions du réel et de les remplacer par le déploiement latéral d’une seule surface.

Par l’entière régularité de son organisation, elle est le résultat, non pas de l’imitation, mais d’un décret esthétique. Dans la mesure où son ordre n’est que relation pure, la grille est une manière d’étouffer la prétention qu’ont les objets naturels d’avoir un ordre propre. Elle montre que, dans le champ esthétique, les relations se trouvent dans un monde à part et que, en ce qui concerne les objets naturels, elles sont à la fois antérieures et finales. La grille proclame que l’espace de l’art est à la fois autonome et autotélique.

Dans sa dimension temporelle, la grille est l’emblème de la modernité parce qu’elle est précisément la forme omniprésente dans l’art de notre siècle, alors qu’elle n’apparaît nulle part, absolument nulle part, dans l’art du siècle précédent. Par une longue chaîne de réactions, la modernité est née des efforts du XIXe siècle et un ultime changement eut pour résultat de briser cette chaîne. En « découvrant » la grille, le cubisme, de Stijl, Mondrian et Malevitch se retrouvèrent en un lieu que n’aurait pu atteindre le passé. Ils atterrirent dans le présent, et l’on déclara alors que tout le reste appartenait au passé.

Il faut remonter loin dans l’histoire de l’art pour trouver des exemples antérieurs de grilles. Il faut remonter aux XVe et XVIe siècles, aux traités sur la perspective et à ces délicates études faites par Uccello, Léonard de Vinci ou Durer, là où le treillis en perspective est inscrit sur le monde représenté comme s’il était l’armature de son organisation. Mais les études de perspective ne sont pas réellement d’anciens exemples de grilles. Après tout, la perspective était la science du réel et non le moyen de s’en abstraire. Elle était une démonstration de la manière dont la réalité et sa représentation pouvaient être superposées l’une à l’autre, elle démontrait comment l’image peinte et son réfèrent dans le monde réel entretenaient effectivement un rapport, la première étant un mode de connaissance du second. Tout dans la grille résiste à ce rapport, l’écarté depuis le début. Contrairement à la perspective, la grille ne projette pas l’espace d’une pièce, d’un paysage ou d’un groupe de personnages sur la surface d’une peinture. En fait, si elle projette quoi que ce soit, c’est la surface de la peinture elle-même. C’est un transfert au cours duquel rien ne change de place. Les qualités physiques de la surface sont, pourrions-nous dire, projetées sur les dimensions esthétiques de cette même surface. Et ces deux plans — physique et esthétique — se trouvent être le même : ils sont coextensifs, et, par les abscisses et les ordonnées de la grille, coordonnés. Considérée de cette façon, la ligne inférieure de la grille est d’un matérialisme manifeste et résolu.

Mais si la grille doit nous faire parler de matérialisme — et il ne semble pas y avoir d’autre façon logique d’en discuter — , ce n’est pas de cette manière que les artistes l’ont traitée. Ouvrons n’importe quel ouvrage, Plastic Art and pure plastic Art, ou The non-objective World, par exemple, et nous verrons que Mondrian et Malevitch ne traitent pas de toile ou de pigment, ni de mine de plomb ni d’aucune autre forme de matière. Ils parlent de l’être, de l’âme ou de l’esprit. De leur point de vue, la grille est un escalier qui mène à l’universel, et ils ne s’intéressent pas à ce qui se passe icibas, dans le concret. Ou encore, pour prendre un exemple plus récent, nous pourrions penser à Ad Reinhardt qui, malgré son insistance à répéter que « l’Art est l’art », finit par peindre une série de grilles formées de neuf carrés noirs dont le motif qui émerge inéluctablement est une croix grecque. En Occident, aucun peintre ne peut ignorer le pouvoir symbolique de ce qui est cruciforme ; il ne peut non plus ignorer, lorsqu’il utilise cette forme, les références spirituelles de cette boîte de Pandore. À cause de sa structure (et de son histoire) bivalente, la grille est totalement et même gaiement schizophrène. J’ai été témoin et j’ai participé à des débats où il était question de savoir si la grille annonçait l’existence centrifuge ou l’existence centripète de l’œuvre d’art2 . En toute logique, la grille s’étend, dans toutes les directions, jusqu’à l’infini. Toute limite qui lui serait imposée par une peinture ou une sculpture donnée ne pourrait être, d’après cette logique, qu’arbitraire. En vertu de la grille, l’œuvre d’art donnée est présentée comme un simple fragment, comme un tout petit morceau arbitrairement taillé dans un tissu infiniment plus vaste. La grille fonctionne ainsi, allant de l’œuvre d’art vers l’extérieur, nous obligeant à une reconnaissance du monde situé au-delà du cadre. C’est la lecture centrifuge. Quant à la lecture centripète, elle va, tout naturellement, des limites extérieures de l’objet esthétique vers l’intérieur. Par rapport à cette lecture, la grille est une représentation de tout ce qui sépare l’œuvre d’art du monde, de l’espace ambiant et des autres objets. La grille est une introjection des frontières du monde dans l’œuvre ; à l’intérieur du cadre, elle projette l’espace sur lui-même. C’est un mode de répétition dont le contenu est la nature conventionnelle de l’art lui-même. Appréhendée par des lectures variées et conflictuelles, l’œuvre de Mondrian est un parfait exemple de cette discussion. Dans une peinture particulière, ce que nous voyons est-il la simple partie d’une continuité implicite, ou la peinture est-elle structurée comme un tout autonome ou

Chapitre 6 Le lit de Procruste48

48.

Dans la mythologie grecque, Procruste (ou Procuste, comme on l’écrit souvent) est un de ces bandits dont Thésée a purgé l’Attique. Selon Diodore de Sicile, il faisait prisonnier les voyageurs pour les coucher sur l’un de ses deux lits : ses victimes de petite taille sur le grand lit, où leurs membres étaient déboîtés et leur corps étiré jusqu’à atteindre la longueur dudit lit ; celles de grande taille sur le petit lit, et Procruste sciait les membres de leurs corps qui dépassaient.

¶ Il est évident qu’avec des lettres de largeurs différentes et des mots de longueurs différentes, il n’est pas possible que toutes les lignes de mots d’une page présentent une longueur uniforme. Néanmoins en sacrifiant l’égalité de l’espacement entre les lettres et les mots, les lignes courtes peuvent être composées de façon à remplir le même intervalle que les longues.

Lorsque la justification, c’est-à-dire la largeur de la page49, est très grande proportionnellement à la taille des caractères utilisés, ce sacrifice de 49. l’égalité d’espacement passe inaperIl faut comprendre évidemçu ; en revanche, lorsque la justification ment : la largeur maximale de est très étroite, l’inégalité de l’espacela colonne du texte imprimé sur ment devient manifeste. Or un espacela page. ment inégal est en lui-même déplaisant plus qu’une longueur inégale des lignes, qui n’a en soi rien de déplaisant. Cette inégalité ne nous choque pas quand nous lisons des vers blancs, une lettre manuscrite ou tapée à la machine. A contrario, dans une page de prose, elle n’a en soi rien de souhaitable. ¶ Une justification très grande est déplaisante parce qu’elle nécessite trop de mouvement de l’œil & de la tête à la lecture, & aussi parce qu’à moins d’espacer largement les lignes (interligner), on risque de doubler, c’est-à-dire de relire deux, voire trois fois la même ligne.

fioriture ornementale ou quelque enluminure —, l’imprimeur d’aujourd’hui n’obtient sa page rectangulaire qu’en sacrifiant l’une des principales composantes de la lisibilité, l’espacement égal entre les mots. De plus, si régulière et rectangulaire que parût la page médiévale, elle ne l’était pas véritablement ; le scribe s’autorisait toujours quelque accommodement ; en fait, ses méthodes de travail étaient à la fois humaines et rationnelles. De la part de l’imprimeur moderne, on n’attend pas, bien sûr, des méthodes humaines ; son irrationalité n’en est que plus à déplorer. ¶ Il n’est pas pertinent d’en appeler à l’exemple des premiers livres imprimés sur cette question d’espacement uniforme entre les mots ou d’égalité de longueur des lignes ; les premiers imprimeurs, il faut en effet en convenir, se contentèrent d’imiter sans les critiquer les aspects les plus importants à leurs yeux de la pratique médiévale, & s’intéressèrent plus à l’extraordinaire pouvoir qu’ils venaient d’acquérir, la multiplication des livres, qu’à des questions de rationalité typographique.

En outre, la pratique courante de l’abréviation, héritée elle aussi du scribe médiéval, continuait d’apporter son aide ; & ce serait une bonne chose typographiquement parlant si, sans faire fond sur les précédents médiévaux ou les incunables, les imprimeurs modernes s’autorisaient un recours plus fréquent aux abréviations. La règle absurde qui veut que l’on n’emploie l’esperluette (&) que pour les « marques commerciales » devrait être abrogée, & il y a beaucoup d’autres abréviations qu’une saine typographie se devrait d’encourager.

¶ Une justification très étroite, c’est-à-dire étroite par rapport à la taille des caractères, est déplaisante parce que les phrases et les mots y sont coupés trop souvent.

Les lecteurs expérimentés ne lisent pas lettre par lettre, ¶ Autre question, étroitement liée, et complémenni même mot par mot, mais phrase par phrase. Le taire à celle de l’espacement égal : celle de l’espaceconsensus de l’opinion semble privilégier une moyenne ment rapproché des mots. Nous nous sommes habide 10-I2 mots par ligne50. Cependant, pour le comtués à voir de larges intervalles entre les mots, non tant positeur, une ligne de dix mots est une 50. parce qu’ils contribuent à la lisibilité que parce que ligne courte, c’est-à-dire qu’elle rend imGill donne ce nombre pour un texte ce Lit de Procruste appelé Réglette du Compositeur51 possible l’égalité d’espacement à moins en langue anglaise, langue dans de sacrifier l’égalité de longueur — ou a fait de l’espacement aéré la solution 51. laquelle la longueur moyenne vice-versa, l’égalité de longueur ne saula plus simple pour contourner la diffides mots (en nombre de lettres) rait être obtenue sans sacrifier l’égalité culté qu’entraîne l’impératif tyrannique Ou « composteur » : réglette est un peu plus faible qu’en frand’espacement. Mais l’espacement égal d’égalité de longueur des lignes. Mais métallique réglable à la lonçais. Certaines statistiques indiquent est typographiquement plus important un espacement raisonnablement rappro- gueur de la ligne — où que la longueur moyenne des mots le prote place et assemble les que la longueur égale. L’espacement égal ché est en soi souhaitable. Pourvu qu’ils dans un texte en anglais moderne caractères. soient nettement distincts les uns des serait de 5,1 contre 5,3 en français. contribue beaucoup à une lecture aisée ; autres, les mots doivent être composés de façon aussi En réalité, l’expérience de la traduc- de là son attrait, car l’œil n’est pas troucompacte que possible. La séparation étant assurée, tion, par exemple, laisse penser que blé par la composition irrégulière, heurtée, saccadée et dispersée qu’entraîne leur proximité favorise ce flux continu qui est essentiel l’écart est un peu plus important (en particulier du fait de la fréquence l’espacement inégal, fût-il réduit au mipour une lecture agréable ; et cette lecture agréable est de termes monosyllabiques en nimum par une composition soignée. On le principal objet du compositeur typographe. anglais). On rencontre aussi parfois pourrait stipuler que l’espacement égal une évaluation selon laquelle, dans est souhaitable en soi ; que l’inégalité ¶ II est bien sûr évident qu’en accolant ici le mot l’œuvre de Shakespeare, la londe longueur entre les lignes ne l’est pas ; « agréable » au mot « lecture », nous nous exposons gueur moyenne des mots tournequ’il est possible d’obtenir à la fois une à mainte controverse. La lisibilité peut être envisagée rait plutôt autour de 4… Il est certes apparente égalité d’espacement et une comme une qualité mesurable, vérifiable à l’aide de vraisemblable que cette moyenne égalité de longueur des lignes quand la tests optiques & d’une analyse rationnelle, et peut-être soit sensiblement plus élevée dans justification permet plus de 15 mots par l’est-elle ; mais la lecture agréable est de toute évidence la langue moderne, avec l’utilisation ligne, mais que la longueur la plus adéun sujet bien plus délicat, et demande que l’on considère accrue du vocabulaire technique. quate pour la lecture n’excède pas I2 l’ensemble des inclinations & des aversions humaines.

Pour adapter les données chiffrées de Gill, il n’est sans doute pas mots, & qu’il est préférable de sacrifier la À cela on ne saurait se dérober tout à fait, et l’impriabsurde de tabler sur une moyenne véritable égalité de longueur plutôt que meur doit simplement faire de son mieux pour tenir un de 4,5 lettres par mots en anglais, l’égalité d’espacement, bien qu’une jusbon cap entre des tentations conflictuelles. D’une part, et de 5,5 en français. On peut ainsi tification de compromis soit possible afin l’industriel se contentera de faire ce que ses clients deestimer que la longueur moyenne d’obtenir une apparente égalité d’espamandent. Son travail reflétera leur qualité, bien davand’une ligne de 10-12 mots en cement sans irrégularité déplaisante du tage que la sienne ; et cette qualité sera au mieux ce anglais équivaut à celle d’une ligne bord. En d’autres termes, si l’on travaille que dicte la stricte utilité, au pire ce que la sotte senside 8-10 mots en français. avec une ligne de 10-12 mots, on peut bilité d’esprits inconséquents peut gober. D’autre part, avoir un espacement absolument égal en sacrifiant la l’artiste responsable, l’imprimeur qui choisit de rester longueur égale, mais comme cela entraînera généraen dehors de l’industrialisme, aborde le travail d’imlement un bord droit très irrégulier, le compositeur peut pression comme un sculpteur le travail de gravure latransiger et, sans rendre son espacement visiblement pidaire, ou un forgeron de village le travail du métal, inégal, il peut ajuster les espaces entre les mots suivant celui-là se considère comme associé à son client dans les lignes de façon à moduler un bord droit irrégulier une entreprise commune, la production de bons livres ; sans être déplaisant. Quoi qu’il en soit, s’il est clair et ces termes, bon, aimable, agréable, beau, ne signiqu’une ligne de 10-12 mots et un espacement égal fient pas simplement pour eux ce qui se vendra, ou entre les mots sont en eux-mêmes d’une importance ce qu’une réclame habile permettra de vendre, mais réelle, & primordiale, l’égalité de longueur des lignes ce que peuvent leur faire signifier la culture la plus ne présente pas la même importance, et ne peut être vaste et la discipline la plus stricte. Dès lors, découobtenue qu’en sacrifiant des choses plus importantes. vrir ce que l’on entend par « lecture agréable » suscite En fait, l’égalité de longueur des lignes, par nature, plus que des questions de fatigue oculaire, quelque imne constitue pas une condition sine qua non ; elle est portantes qu’elles soient ; cela suscite d’abord et avant une des conditions à remplir si possible : elle satisfait tout une réflexion sur ce qui est saint. Ici, certes, nous notre penchant pour une apparence régulière, pensommes au-delà des confins du monde industriel et de chant louable, mais qui a tourné en quelque sorte à la son humilité proclamée. Hors de ce monde, le terme superstition, en général au prix d’un trop grand sacri« saint » perd sa signification exclusivement morale; fice. Un livre est fait avant tout pour être lu, et l’appail cesse de désigner uniquement la conformité aux lois rence simplement régulière d’une page dont toutes les de l’église, ou la dévotion à une « élévation spirituelle » lignes sont d’égale longueur n’a pas toute sociale, pour s’étendre à ce qui grande valeur en soi ; cela participe est raisonnable autant qu’à ce qui trop des idées de ceux qui consiest souhaitable, au vrai autant qu’au Un livre est fait avant tout pour dèrent que les livres sont faits pour bon. Pour accéder à cette « lecture être lu. être regardés plutôt que lus. Il s’agit agréable », l’imprimeur & son client d’une superstition semblable à celle doivent découvrir les limites verselon laquelle toutes les églises chrétueuses de l’empressement (jusqu’à tiennes devraient être « gothiques » ; c’est un pur méquel point la rapidité de lecture est-elle souhaitable ?), diévalisme. Mais tandis que le scribe médiéval obtenait et celles de la fantaisie (quand une légitime expressa page de forme rectangulaire, & bien régulière, en sion de soi devient-elle une indécente mise en avant ?), recourant à de très nombreuses abréviations (ainsi les et semblables choses, de moindre importance. Et plus mots étaient-ils en moyenne beaucoup plus courts ; et il que tout, ils doivent collaborer pour découvrir ce qui est de toute évidence plus facile d’insérer dans la jusdans la vie humaine est vraiment agréable. tification des mots brefs que des mots longs) & par un Eric Gill usage franc de signes de remplissage — c’est-à-dire en complétant hardiment une ligne courte par quelque

Extrait de Un essai sur la typographie.

(An Essay on Typogaphy publié pour la première fois en 1931)

Caroline Appelgren

École Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Reims