L�st Letterf�rms
Joe Leadbeater
L�st Letterf�rms
Joe Leadbeater
Typefaces are ubiquitous, and have been for centuries. Whilst many are born to communicate, many are also lost. In the attic, above the off license, behind an old sign, at the bottom of a cardboard box found at a deceased relatives. Remains of these typefaces from the past are everywhere. You just need to find them.
Typefaces Used In This Book
-1
Neue Haas Unica
-4
Doves Type
-8
Times Modern
Typefaces This Book Revives
01
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Neue Haas Unica is Monotype’s revival of a typeface that has attained almost mythical status in the type community. Unica was an attempt to create the ultimate sans-serif – a hybrid of Helvetica, Univers and Akzidenz Grotesk. Designed by Team ’77 and released to great acclaim in 1980, Unica went missing under a heap of legal disputes and has never been available as a full, digital typeface. Until now.
Unica’s story starts in the 1970s. Electronic, on-screen phototypesetting was gaining popularity, but most sans-serif typefaces on the market had been designed earlier, in the era of metal type. The revered Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, saw the chance to develop a new sans-serif face that was optimized for the new technology and filled the gap in the market. To develop their new product, they turned to Swiss type design trio, Team ’77 (André Gürtler, Christian Mengelt and Erich Gschwind). Team ’77 set out to design a font based on Helvetica but drawing on other sans-serif typefaces, principally Univers. The name they gave it would also be a hybrid of the two. They went about the task with forensic rigour. Working from prints of Helvetica, Univers and Akzidenz Grotesk, the trio identified, compared and evaluated the finest of details, creating a new-generation sans-serif that eliminated the imperfections of its predecessors. “Unica was designed to be different,” said André Gürtler; “sharper than Helvetica, warmer than Univers, cleaner than Akzidenz.” Released in 1980, Unica hit the sweet spot. It was clean, understated and elegant. But it found only limited success. Desktop publishing software rendered phototypesetting obsolete. Unica became entangled in a dispute over ownership and disappeared from the market. The typographic love-child became the lost child. Lost no more. For 2015, Monotype’s Toshi Omagari has given this classic a fresh, digital lease of life, with a full set of weights, an extended range of glyphs and multi-language support.
Zeichen Bücher Netze at Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Artwork Published 2012. Designed by Lamm & Kirch.
Neue Haas
Unica 210pt
The Doves Type legend is one of the most enduring in typographic history and probably the most infamous. It’s the story of a typeface and a bitter feud between the two partners of Hammersmith’s celebrated Doves Press, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, leading to the protracted disposal of their unique metal type into London’s River Thames. Starting in 1913 with the initial dumping of the punches and matrices, by the end of January 1917 an increasingly frail Cobden-Sanderson had made hundreds of clandestine trips under cover of darkness to Hammersmith Bridge and systematically thrown 12lb parcels of metal type into the murky depths below. One century later and a new chapter has been added with the release of Robert Green’s digital facsimile of the Doves Type, available to buy and download from Typespec.
Some of the rusted metal type that has been sourced from the Thames by Robert Green. The process to digitalising must have been extremely difficult due to the erosion and weathering the time has caused.
The Story of Doves Type
The original Doves Type was crafted by master punchcutter Edward Prince, based on drawings produced by Percy Tiffin of Nicolas Jenson’s pioneering 15th-century Venetian type. William Morris, founder of the Kelmscott Press, had actually developed his own ‘Golden’ type some years before The Doves Press came into being but Doves is held by experts as being more faithful to the original Venetian letterforms. The Doves Type was commissioned in 1899 and created solely by Prince in 16 pt; it was used in all of the press’s publications including their iconic edition of the King James Bible. Each Doves Press book was beautifully bound and, notes Green, noticeably “stripped of decorative borders and illustration, the elegantly clear & legible type acting alone as visual siren-song.” By 1908, despite successful Milton prints & the aforementioned Bible, the Press was in dire financial difficulty due to dwindling subscriptions and its two partners began their bitter and acrimonious dispute. Walker issued a writ insisting the Press be closed and he receive 50% of its remaining assets after Cobden-Sanderson had dissolved the partnership without notice; in 1909 the only valuable remaining asset was the type. The thought of ‘his’ typeface being used by anyone else, and in a manner beyond his control, prompted Cobden-Sanderson’s now infamous course of action. Only the Doves Press, run exclusively by him, could be bestowed the honour of printing his type. And so the mission to destroy it, beginning with the punches and matrices on Good Friday 1913, began. On an almost nightly basis from August 1916 the ailing septuagenarian dumped the type into the Thames, wrapped in paper parcels and tied with string; “bequeathed to the river” as he put it in his personal diary. Every piece of this beautiful typeface, more than a ton of metal, was destroyed in a prolonged ritual sacrifice. Green’s quest to re-produce the Doves Type in digital form has been a true labour of love, a project he came close to shelving on several occasions due to the paucity of (affordable) source texts and occasional blind alleys he was inadvertently taken the complex geometries, then individual letterform dilemmas due to ink spread inconsistencies and anomalies in the punches and matrices. The end result isn’t so much a revival as a ‘digital facsimile’ of the original typeface, but most importantly he’s succeeded in doing justice to it. The first release (2013) in OpenType format was an Imprint weight, complete with ligatures and detailing from the metal predecessor; Green wanted to be as true to the original as possible but there are concessions to modern day requirements in the form of Dollar & Euro currency symbols plus extended latin diacritics which didn’t feature first time around. Doves Type® Regular, refined after recovery of the original metal type from the Thames, replaces the initial 2013 release and will be followed by a digital reworking of Edward Johnston’s decorative caps for the Doves Type.
THE DOVES TYPE® is Robert Green’s digital recreation of the Doves Press Fount of Type.
Punches & matrices thrown into the River Thames by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, March 1913.
Original type conceived, commissioned & directed by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, London, 1899.
Entire type dropped into the River Thames by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, August 1916 — January 1917.
Developed by Emery Walker, assisted by Percy Tiffin, at Walker & Boutall, London, 1899 — 1900.
Digital Doves Type® developed 2010 — 2015. OpenType Version 1.0 released December 2013. Version 2.0 released January 2015.
Punches cut by Edward Prince, London, 1899 — 1901. Left: The result of a digitilisation and recreation of one of Doves Type typeset within a bible.
Produced in a single size, 2 Line Brevier (16 pt), by Miller & Richard, Edinburgh, 1899 — 1905.
Above: A close-up of a paragraph glyph, originally printed.
First sorts delivered October 1899, full fount of characters completed July 1901.
Created using sources from original Doves Press publications & 150 metal sorts recovered from the River Thames by Robert Green & the Port of London Authority salvage team, October & November 2014.
Left: The 1001 years of yearning (2002). Suhrkamp maintained the paperback identity for over 30 years, but unfortunately was watered down over time, and Times Modern was no longer used. Mid: The Acne Jeans logo process as suggested by Zachary Ohlman Below: Twen magazine, December 1970.
“ Type that feels so familiar but every guess is slightly off. I immediately thought of Times, but the details here are sharper (‘S’), more dramatic (‘E’), with wedge-like serifs. The whole thing is more narrow than Times, with stronger contrast, indicating that this is a variation designed specifically for display use. "
Right: Willy Fleckhaus’ 1970s covers from Suhrkamp’s Taschenbuch Wissenschaft (science paperback) series. Umlauts are placed to the side of capital letters to accommodate the tight linespacing.
Top Left: ITC Grouch used in a two-volume catalogue, displaying the recently designed Home Collection of Vitra. Top Right: Caslon Graphique on a bookcover. Trafalgar Publishing House. Artwork by Jonathan Lun. Mid Left: Branding for Jonas Kleerup by Kurppa Hosk, set in Caslon Graphique.
A Typeface With Many Faces The reason Times Modern is so tough to locate is that it is a font that was available digitally for years, but then silently yanked from the market, and thus the web — meeting the same fate as fonts like Haas Unica and ITC Didi. Complicating research even further, there are multiple designs known as “Times Modern”. Most articles we find today refer to the typeface designed by Luke Prowse and Neville Brody in 2006 for a redesign of The Times of London. And later, Eduardo Manso created Sunday Times Modern, an unrelated family for The Sunday Times. This Times Modern, on the other hand, is a pre-digital design. But it’s unclear just how old it is. The history of Times New Roman is, of course,
Right: Hawthorn In Use. Hawthorn contains the same bold eccentricities seen in Times Modern. Part of group show Salle d’attente III. Edited by Côme De Bouchony and Vincent de Hoÿm
a very long and thorny one, and there’s no need to go into that. Suffice it to say, this Times Modern appears to be entirely separate from Times or Times New Roman. It can be assumed that it was produced in the 1960s or ’70s, as it has the flavor of those off-kilter, high contrast headliners of the phototype era. Those who mourn the disappearance of EF Times Modern can still find like-minded eccentricities in type like Denver, ITC Grouch, Grumpy, Caslon Graphique, Benguiat Caslon, Cabernet, Troover Roman, Hawthorn, the new Superior Title, and more.
Times Modern Swash — 1960's Designer Unknown
“Times Modern”, found in the undated headline typefaces catalog of "Fotosetzerei Stuttgart". The text reads:Typography is the transmission of a visualized, semantic piece of information. This specimen is from a 1960's photoset type specimen, the exact date is not known.
Times Modern Swash — 2015 Digitalized by Joe Leadbeater
�ypografie ist die Übermittlung einer visualisierten, semantischen �nformation. A� � � Æ B � C��D �E�F�G�H�I�J� K � � � � �L���M���N��� � aæ����b��cçd����ef���� � �g�h������ij k��lm� � ��n����o�œøp��qr�s�ßt�� . ,:;?! ���� ����� �� � �� � ���� After coming across the specimen on the adjacent page, the 214 characters were digitalised and considered in terms of a point size and thickness. These characteristics were noted and kept to in order to create a consistent typefaces across all letterforms. The high res specimen allowed a very technical and precise revival, with very slight alterations made. Although the x-height, cap-height, and descender height were kept the same, the ascender height was made 2% larger to allow usage at a slight smaller display size (to suit this book). Please see next spread on stated characteristics and how they are used.
Above: Times Modern Swash digitalised at 36pt with 39 pt leading. Although the metrics appears very tight above, this is simply to demonstrate the similarity between the revival and the original. This extremely tight kerning is typical of display typefaces from the era of production. The revived typeface still holds the same characteristics, but with kerning and metrics that are slightly more loose.
Stated Characteristics Times Modern Swash is a high contrast humanist serif. A large x-height, short ascenders and short descenders and tight metrics allow the typeface to be used for display at a larger point size, whilst taking up less space.
01 02
03
04
Pt Size: 250
Technicalities 01 02 03 04
Asc Height: 800 Cap Height: 770 X Height: 538 Des Height: -212
Pt Size: 250
05 06 07 08
Uppercase Straight Vertical Thickness: 172 Uppercase Straight Horizontal Thickness: 38 Uppercase Curved Vertical Thickness: 187 Uppercase Curved Horizontal Thickness: 33
09 10 11 12
Lowercase Straight Vertical Thickness: 161 Lowercase Straight Horizontal Thickness: 52 Lowercase Curved Vertical Thickness: 23 Lowercase Curved Horizontal Thickness: 171
�ypografie Übermittlun visualisiert tischen �nf
ist die ng einer ten, semanformation. Pt Size: 170