Little Black Book

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centaur


This little black book celebrates a 1914 masterwork of American book and type designer Albur Bruce Rogers. It celebrates a typeface and its unique temperaments.


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table of contents His Successes 3 His Life 5 His Education 9 His Inspiration His Legacy

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Centaur’s Idiosyncrasies

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References 27 Bibliography 28

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ogers is the creator of the Montaigne and

Centaur typefaces. The latter is considered one of the finest revivals of roman type ever produced, whose characteristics stem directly from Montaigne.

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his successes He also designed the Oxford Lectern Bible, The Centaur, Lawrence’s famous translation of The Odyssey of Homer, and Fra Luca de Pacioli, which all run parallel to some of finest books ever made. T.E.

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a his life Rogers was born in Lafayette, Indiana in 1870. When he was small his interest in typeface and book design formed.

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When he was 12, a cousin gave him a copy of John Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing, which served as the pinnacle to Rogers’s curiosity about typeface design. His fascination also stemmed from Forest Hymn by William Cullen Bryan and The Poems of Sappho.

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“[My] early attempts at book decoration, though childish and commonplace, will doubtless furnish, to those who like to account for things, an indication of what my later endeavors might be expected to be, but they were hidden from me then, as it was my ambition to become a painter of landscape, or at least, a cabinet maker or a ship builder.�2 Rogers recalling the Art of the Printed Book.

Different angles of influence included Forest Hymn by William Cullen Bryan and The Poems of Sappho.

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his education

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At sixteen, Rogers extended his education by studying illustration at Purdue University. When he joined the university’s staff publications office, his talents were quickly recognized after he created lettering for the yearbook, university catalogs, and the College Quarterly magazine.

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“Even at that time the arrangement of type on paper was of strong interest to him. He [brought] home from the library several volumes of the works of the earliest and most interminable American novelist Charles Brockden Brown simply because the printing and binding of that particular edition seemed so pleasant to him.”3

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Fredric Warde Roger’s longtime friend, recalling Rogers’s early passion for letterforms.

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After graduating from college in 1891, Rogers held a number of small jobs such as creating illustrations for the Indianapolis News, clerking in a railroad office, and working as a general draftsman for the Indiana Illustration Company. At this time the Arts and Crafts Movement was developing under William Morris.

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In 1893, Rogers came across Poems by the Way, one of Morris’s imported limited edition books of the eminent Kelmscott Press. He was tilted by a revelation when he saw this particular book.

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As Warde explained, “His whole interest in book-

production became rationalized and intensified. He abandoned the prevalent idea that a book could be made beautiful through the work of an illustrator alone, and determined instead to use that curiosity he had always felt as to type and paper, toward a study of the physical form of printed books.�4

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From 1896 through 1900, Rogers extended his career by working as a book designer Houghton Mifflin in Boston. There he developed his hallmark style, which, according to his biographer, was characterized by a

“direct and forthright approach, a subtle lightness in the seemingly easy placement of words on a page, and above all, a sense of order. In later years of wider scope, Rogers’s work showed greater audacity and subtlety, but even in these useful books one may see a certain grace, not easily defined, that was an integral part of both the man and his work throughout a long and productive life. Rogers believed that books were meant to be read; his were rarely precious or flamboyant; never objects d’art to be preserved behind glass.”5

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His inspiration In 1900, Houghton Mifflin created a department of Special Collections and Rogers was placed in joint charge of the design and productions of limited edition books. The projects produced by the department were printed exclusively with metal type and not electrotype plates. In his new position, Rogers had complete freedom of conception, design, use of materials, and choice of printing.

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gg In 1903, Roger’s first attempt at type design resulted in the Montaigne face. He angled his design from Nicolas Jenson’s 15th century types.

“At an exhibition of books at the Boston Public Library, I saw for the first time a copy of Nicolas Jenson’s ‘Eusebius’ of 1470,” he later recalled.

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“I was at once impressed by the loveliness of its page, indifferently printed though as they were. The early judgment was confirmed for me many years later when Berkelye Updike wrote of them: ‘to look at the work of Jenson is to think but of its beauty, and almost to forget that it was made with hands.’”6 B.R.

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his legacy The Montaigne typeface actually gave Rogers shallow satisfaction because ten years later he produced another typeface: the Centaur. Rogers thought the design of Centaur to be of historic importance because it exemplified “an original design of cultivation and grace.

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Because of its classical elegance and its aristocratic Renaissance ancestry, the type calls for special handling. On the other hand, among devotees of fine printing, it has been accepted as one of the great type designs, and once the cutting was completed for the Monotype machine, it was welcomed be sensitive designers and printers for many of the best books and ephemera.�8


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In creating Centaur, Rogers once again turned to the work of Nicolas Jenson and the Da Evangelica PrÌparatione for inspiration. Early uses this typeface were exclusively for the signage and titling work produced at the Metropolitan Museum in New York as well as for Rogers’s personal book projects. Only fifteen years later in 1929 that a commercial version of Centaur was made available to machine composition by the English Monotype Company.

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centaur’s idiosyncrasies

In The Centaur Types, Rogers evaluated his typeface: “It is too definitely an Italian

Renaissance letter which I have tried to suggest by the classic column in my initial drawing. It is a little too elegant and thin for our modern papers and methods of printing, and seen at its best when printed on dampened hand-made or other antique papers, with more impressions than you can ordinarily get a pressman to put on it. He, and most of us, want printing as well as many of our other outlines in life to be as sharp and hard and definite as possible...

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...I rather think that, in printing, Bodoni inaugurated this fashion, and thus [was] as ‘modern’ as his types. The three qualities named sharp, hard, and definite, are no doubt admirable ones in their place; but Centaur does not take them too readily and naturally, and profits most when somewhat carelessly printed on paper that wouldn’t be passed as perfect in any modern paper mill. It looks surprisingly well on news stock, but we can’t make books of that. it is what might be called a ‘cool’ type unless humored in the composition and press-work.”13

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Centaur is a decorative display because of its long descenders, as well as a noble display because its capitals retain the proportions of Roman inscriptional lettering. As it is a lighter version than Jenson’s 1470 Roman type, it still retains the characteristics of a Humanist face.

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“Bruce Rogers is one of the greatest artificers of the book who ever lived.� Francis Meynell, founder of the Nonesuch Press.


References Joseph Blumenthal, Art of the Printed Book (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1973), 48.

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1455-1955

2 Joseph Blumenthal, Bruce Rogers: A life in Letters, 1870-1957 (Austin: W.T. Taylor, 1989), 3. 4

Ibid, 5.

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Ibid, 10.

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Ibid, 13.

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Ibid, 33.

Bruce Rogers, The Centaur Type (Chicago: October House, 1949), 13.

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All the above taken from: Sheilah M. Barrett, Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces (New York: RC Publications), 72-79. 27


Bibliography Carter, Sebastian. Twentieth Century Type Designers. Great Britain: Lund Humphries, 2002 (A&A: Z250 A2 C364 1995 and Vault) Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Vancouver: Hartley and Marks, 1997. (A&A: Z246 B745 1996 and Vault) Perfect, Christopher. The Complete Typographer. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1992. Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces, essays by Carolyn Annand ... [et al.]; edited by Philip B. Meggs and Roy McKelvey, New York: RC Publications, 2000. (A&A:

Z250.R45 2000)

http://www.linotype.com http://www.fonts.com Note: See the list at special collections for this designer. 28



This little black book was designed by Joy Li for Typography of Fall 2006 at the Washington University Visual Communications Program.




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