I guess you’re using “Romantic” like Bringhurst? The “other” Romantic type is the Didot stuff. With Walbaum being a more down-to-earth incarnation (which is why it’s more readable).

hhp

Yes, like Bringhurst. Thanks!

Bulmer, don’t know if Bell qualifies.

Héctor

While designed earlier, and despite the fact that the contrast isn’t as high as the above suggestions, I’ve used (Adobe’s) Fournier for a Romantic feel. And if Fournier can fit in here, there’s Baskerville as well (I prefer URW’s version), and then, as Héctor suggested, Bell. All of these likely fit more closely into Bringhurst’s Neoclassical category, but I lean towards these for an 18th century feel mostly because I just can’t bring myself to use Didot/Bodoni/etc.

The thing to remember about romanticism is that it tended to be strongly linked to nationalism, and hence the typographic expressions of romanticism are quite particular to individual countries. As Hrant notes, Walbaum is the more readable of the romantic types, and would be a fine choice indeed if you are happy to evoke specifically German romanticism.

English romanticism didn’t really produce any types of its own, so in that context you have the choice of using the later neo-classical British types such (of which I would recommend Bulmer) or opting for the imported Italian style.

Great; thanks for all the information and suggestions.

If not English, then perhaps the Scotch Romans, of which Miller is a good revival.

The Scotch Romans are Victorian, largely post-romantic.

>The Scotch Romans are Victorian, largely post-romantic.

It depends when and where you place the Romantic period.
Romantic (classical) music lasted into the 20th century.
Robert Bringhurst compared historical type genres with movements in other arts, and extended Romanticism, as applied to type, through most of 19th century.

Although he understands Neoclassicism and Romanticism as contemporary movements, he categorizes Romantic type as having evolved from Neoclassical, with greater contrast and finer details. This newer style, which was popular throughout the 19th century, especially in the US, is what we now term “Scotch” roman, or Modern (as in Modern 20). DeVinne and Torino are further examples. And certain display weights of Century.

It seems to me that the first “moderns” of Didot and Bodoni showed a classical restraint and simplicity of design logic, whereas the Scotch moderns are romantic in their quest for the awesome, by exaggerating formal qualities: More contrast! Finer hairlines! Bigger serifs!

> More contrast! Finer hairlines! Bigger serifs!

?
These are exactly things Didone does more than Scotch.

hhp

>?

Bringhurst, Elements, The Romantic Letter, 7.2.7 (1992 edition).

I’ve packed my Bringhurst, but it doesn’t really matter:
if he agrees with you on this, then he’s just wrong too! :-)
Wouldn’t be the first time either.

hhp

OK forget Bringhurst.
Check out Alexander Wilson’s 1833 Specimen (as shown in Updike’s “History...” as the definitive Scotch).
See how the didone effect is exaggerated by the extreme contrast, vertical emphasis (a result of the fine horizontal hairlines), and the small aperture (big serifs).

In Dan Hosek’s Serif: The Magazine of Type & Typography #1 (Fall 1994) Bringhurst includes in the Romantic Roman genus “many of the romans of Bodoni, Vafflard and the Didots, Austin Scotch Roman, the romans of Marcellin-Legrand and Walbaum.”

A fuller description can be found in Serif #4 & 5 (Spring, 1996 and Fall 1997) Under the titles: “The Invisble Hand: Neoclassical Letterforms” and “The Invisble Hand: Roman and Italic type in the Romanitic Age”

The second of the two begins: “Neoclassicism and Romanticism are two antagonistic, interdependant halves of a single movement in the history of European culture.The line between the two is often hard to find, yet it marks one of the major evolutionary ruptures in the hiistory of European culture, and in the history of European letterforms.”

For Gerrit Noordzij, using his catalogue of contrast types, romanticism corresponds to expansion and encompasses the baroque, and classicism.

In the fine arts, especially music, romanticism persists and evolves through the 19th century. But I think it is useful to consider Victorian as a distinct, parallel movement, especially with regard to applied arts. Victorian arts represent a kind of domesticated romanticism, from which revolutionary threat has been excised and replaced by middle-class stolidity. I think this is the context of the Scotch romans and their popularity in Victorian England.

A form or style persists, long after it has burst upon the scene as a radical novelty, eventually becoming a marker of conservatism. So there is nothing inherently bourgeois about the Scotch roman.

I see it as the end of the line, as the final specimen of a linear evolution of the typographic mainstream that begins and ends with Jenson, with Morris the revivalist as executioner.

I don’t consider the evolution from Jenson to Scotch roman as entirely linear. It is linear from Jenson to Caslon — you can actually trace the direct influences, and even movement of particular punchcutters or their types, through France to the Netherlands to England. But Baskerville’s types deserve to be seen as a truly revolutionary development — within the necessarily conservative confines dictated by the conventions of the received alphabet and the restrained nature of neo-classicism* —: the ’mainstream’ splits into myriad rivulets after him. And I think Noordzij is essentially correct, that what drives this revolution in type design is the change in the dominant writing tool during this period, from a broad-nib to a split-nib, reinforced in Baskerville’s case by his experience as an engraver.

* If I may be forgiven a somewhat obscure architectural parallel, Baskerville is the Durham to Didot’s St Denis: everything that is necessary to the romantic typeface is present in Baskerville’s neo-classical types, only restrained.

If I may be forgiven a somewhat obscure architectural parallel…

That was a great parallel, John! (although I might have inserted another building in lieu of Durham…)

>what drives this revolution in type design is the change in the dominant writing tool

To add to this, I would say that technology was the main force of change during that one long sequence from Jenson to Scotch.

Perhaps it was also the instrument precipitating Morris’ revivalism, in the shape of the slide projector that Emery Walker used to show him Jenson’s typography blown up huge, decorating the wall like the tapestries and wallpaper that Morris so loved.

Other instruments of 19th century change: stereotyping in the 1830s which allowed an increase in sharpness and detail, and the Benton punchcutter of the 1880s, which allowed type to be made more directly from drawings — that really let the cat out of the bag.

A number of design developments softened the dominance of the Jenson-Scotch sequence in the early 19th Century: diversification of weight and scaling; decorative display fonts; invention of the sans; the Caslon revival (not a re-drawing, but a re-casting from extant moulds). But these did not affect the basic form of roman text type. What Morris did was like introducing a flashback into a movie or novel, disrupting the narrative sequence. His version of Jenson was not a revival, but a caricature; and a little later we find Cheltenham has become the most popular new typeface — a post-Modern design that applies an industrial finish to old-style proportions.

I tought it was Romain du Roi the first typeface to be drawn from scratch in a rationalist way, and on which Baskerville was inspired to design his own.

Héctor

A nod to the romain du roi is certainly in order, and I should have mentioned it. But the typical characterisation of the romain du roi as ’drawn from scratch in a rationalist way’ is apparently incorrect: the minutes of the committee meeting reveal that the design was based on the handwritten letters of Nicolas Jarry. These forms were transferred to the famous grid, leading to the perception that the type was designed by way of a grid. In fact, the romain du roi and Baskerville’s types are both based on split-nib written models.

>the first typeface to be drawn from scratch

Before L.B. Benton’s mechanical punchcutter, drawings had to be interpreted by human punchcutters working by eye. With Benton’s device, a pantograph followed the letter shapes as drawn, and transferred these directly to metal. This removed the creative/craft influence of the human punchcutter, making type design more the preserve of draughtsmen (and women), be they in the drawing office of a foundry, or independent designers.

In fact, the romain du roi and Baskerville’s types are both based on split-nib written models.

I wonder if this is entirely accurate. The romain du roi might have been based on the handwritten letters of Nicolas Jarry, but the Baskerville types might not be based on written models per se. It might be more accurate to say that the type of contrast or contrast manipulation inherent in the Baskerville types and the Didonis is based on the type of contrast produced by the split-nibbed pen. And that this is applied to letterform-construction protocols that are considerably older.

James Mosley Typography Papaers • 2 • 1997 cites the romain du roi as the first type for which a preliminary ’design’ is known to have been made, and sees the associated pied du roi as the basis for the reform of type bodies (≠ typeform).

Nick, I’m liking your take on typographical history.

It might be more accurate to say that the type of contrast or contrast manipulation inherent in the Baskerville types and the Didonis is based on the type of contrast produced by the split-nibbed pen. And that this is applied to letterform-construction protocols that are considerably older.

I’m happy to agree with the first part of this, but not with the second. The stroke manipulation model of the split nib heavily influeces ’letterform-construction protocols’. Indeed, I’m not sure what protocols exist that are not dictated or informed by the stroke manipulation as combined with the ductus angle. The way bowls join to stems, for example, is very different in Baskerville’s types from that employed in oldstyle types from Jenson to Caslon. This is precisely what I think of as ’letterform-construction’. The only shared protocols of the oldstyle types and the neo-classical are conventions of Italian humanist letter shape that precede both, and which are so general as to be uninteresting to contrastive analysis. Yes, both Jenson’s a and Baskerville’s a look like the humanist letter a, but it is everything that makes them different that is important. The relationship between them is not linear: Baskerville takes a step sideways, drawing on his experience as an engraver and responding to the stroke manipulation common in the handwriting of his day. There is no more a linear relationship between Jenson and Baskerville than there is between Arrighi’s chancery hand and Bickham’s round hand.

It’s not just the pen.
18th C. copperplate engraving put typography to shame with its finesse.
And the stone carved lettering in church and churchyard was equally magnificent.
Both these high-contrast genres introduced non-pen stress long before it appeared in type.

>linear relationship between Jenson and Baskerville

That’s many steps on a single path. The immediate step is from Caslon to Baskerville. Whether it’s forward or sideways, it’s still part of a linear temporal narrative. But with Morris you had to go back in time and start over, and with the Bauhaus you had to start from scratch. Both despised the Scotch modern.

It might be more accurate to say that the type of contrast or contrast manipulation inherent in the Baskerville types and the Didonis is based on the type of contrast produced by the split-nibbed pen. And that this is applied to letterform-construction protocols that are considerably older.

John writes: “I’m happy to agree with the first part of this, but not with the second.”

John, I’m basing this on a sentence in chapter 7 “The Great Break” of my translation of Gerrit Noordzij’s The stroke: theory of writing, where Noordzij writes: “The stroke of the broad-nibbed pen is the only norm for the pointed flexible pen.”

Nick, you might be interested to relate your point of view to another statement of of Noordzij’s in the same chapter, where he writes: “After John Baskerville applied expansion in his letters for printing midway through the eighteenth century, it remained the one and only point of departure for the contrast of letters for printing until into the twentieth century. William Morris and his kindred spirits are an exception. Even the nineteenth century sans serifs that are currently modern are derived, by contrast reduction, from expansion.”

What by the way do you mean by ’non-pen stress’? High contrast forms are acheived by contrast intensification on an expansion-based template, aren’t they?

>What by the way do you mean by ‘non-pen stress’?

It’s the point John made about Baskerville’s joints, how he adapted written forms by applying engraving techniques.

A pen can do a lot of tricks, and there are trick pens too, but the hardest thing to write (rather than draw) is a thick vertical stroke with a fine unbracketed horizontal serif. The stress transition is too abrupt for a flexible nib — it still carries a large blob of ink from the thick down stroke, and easing up the pressure abuptly will still leave a rounded terminal. If the stroke is eased off into the (right) serif, the shape takes the form of a bracket. The perpendicularity of main and serif strokes is a typographic form originally taken from ancient lapidary capitals, and applied to both typographic upper and lower case. The more constructed (ie built up by multiple strokes) forms of engraving and stone carved lettering don’t have as much difficulty in rendering the “modern” serif.

So in the 18th Century you have the archetypal lapidary-derived serif being pushed technically by stone carving and engraving into a region that the pen cannot write, and type will not be able to match until Didot and Bodoni.

I’m giving this a shameless bump because it’s just fantastic and I hope more people contribute. (I wish I could)
Meanwhile I’ll just keep looking over and over at Baskerville samples to see if I can understand at least some of what had been said.

Peter, what does Noordzij mean by “expansion”, or should I wait till your translation is published?

Nick, his translation is already published! I bough the little book, and it is fantastic. http://www.hyphenpress.co.uk/titles/stroke/index.html

>Indeed, I’m not sure what protocols exist that are not dictated or informed by the stroke manipulation as combined with the ductus angle. The way bowls join to stems, for example, is very different in Baskerville’s types from that employed in oldstyle types from Jenson to Caslon.

John, do I understand you correctly to say that the greater stroke contrast and vertical stress are what make the Baskerville connections of bowel to stem fundamentally different? Or are there other factors as well you are referring to?

Seconding Nick Shinn’s question: Baskerville is of course wider than Caslon. Is this what you mean, Peter by ’expansion’ or is there something about the stroke as well?

Welcome back William!

Expansion is different from proportion.
See the following page from my ATypI 2003 Vancouver presentation on Henk Krijger’s Raffia Initials:
www.enneson.com/public_downloads/pe/trans_expansion_rot.pdf

Pressure downwards on the flexible nibbed pen creates a swelling in the stroke. Noordzij discusses this in terms of the direction of the ’front’ and the size of the ’counterpoint’. (Note the varying widths of the little vectors im my pdf. Think of the endpoints of the vectors in counterpoint terms—literally as well as musically.) The Noordzij drawings on the left in my pdf come from Noordzij’s Letterletter. The drawings on the right come from a paper explaining the math behind Vinyas, a now defunct Indian font-creation software.

Expansion is the model for contrast manipulation in the old classification’s Modern (Noordzij’s Romantic, which includes Bringhurst’s Neo Classical—Baskerville—and Romantic—Bodoni). Pages 27 to 29 of The stroke demonstrate the fundamental similarity of the Baskervilles and the Didonis (note especially figure 2.13, but refer back to figures 2.8 to 2.12). You can see it on the Gerrit Noordzij site
(http://www.letterror.com/noordzij/streek/chapter2/index.html)
but buy the book.

Thanks Peter. Is there a US outlet to order The Stroke? Amazon says it’s not in yet, and I don’t see it in Oak Knoll’s web site.

Princeton Architectural Press is the North and South American distributor. But they also have it listed as forthcoming:
https://www.papress.com/bookpage.tpl?isbn=0907259308&cart=11223303901270...

I often order from Nijhoff & Lee in Amsterdam, but postal charges are bracing. They have it in stock.

Thanks for the links.

After a brief look at Noordzij’s theory, there seems to be a hole in it.

I don’t see how it’s physically possible to write this kind of letter (below): you can’t have one side of your expansion stroke curved and the other straight. Perhaps some other calligraphers will comment?

Well, theoretically (as in the Vinyas page mentioned) it could be accomplished with rotation, but the ink swell would be impossible to control, and the whole procedure is way beyond baroque wrist gymnastics.

This letter form can only be constructed, not written.

Nick, the hole will disappear if you read the diagram in the context of what comes before about the heartline.

It does not have to be physically possible to write a form for the contrast scheme imposed by a tool in the hand to be or become inherent in or underly a constructed form, i.e., to give the constructed form a ’logic.’

(Side Note: Nick have you seen Dwiggins’ Tippecanoe?)

Still seeing that hole.

Tippecanoe?

I’ll dig it up for you. A wacky Bodoni-esque experiment.

Nick: expansion underlies bodoni

>expansion underlies Bodoni

I like the Noordzij concept of the moving front, but I’m wondering if in the end, with all the possibilities of rotation and expansion it’s just a mathematically equalivant way of describing strokes. Eg. they could equally well be characterized by a Bezier curves or quadric splines. The moving front is heuristically nice, but if you get to the Bodoni where you couldn’t possibly write it with a pen—it has to be constructed—I’m wondering what is gained by the moving front way of thinking in such cases. Are you really saying more when you say ’expansion’ rather than ’greater contrast’?

Obviously after I read the book, which I very much want to do, I’ll know more.

“You can see it on the Gerrit Noordzij site
(http://www.letterror.com/noordzij/streek/chapter2/index.html)
but buy the book.”

My book just arrived in the mail. I am about to start reading it. Gee? I wonder who did the Translation? :-)

ChrisL

William, bezier curves and quadratic splines can tell a you great deal about the structure of an outline but very little about the characteristics of the shape they contain.

Mathematically they are as you suggest clearly inter-translatable, the one into the other, with perhaps some slight margin of practical indeterminacy. But for an understanding of typographical history Noordzij’s schematisms are far superior, even to the feature-description approach that dominates most handbooks. Noordzij’s schematisms are to feature descriptions what genotypical descriptions are to phenotypical descriptions.

Relative to the topic at hand they help one see the genotypical commonality between the baskerville and the didonis in a non-trivial way. More broadly they provoke a powerful reading of typographical history as consisting of various explorations along surfaces of the typographic cube that is displayed on the cover of The stroke and elaborated somewhat more fully in Noordzij’s 1991 contribution to Robert A. Morris and Jacques André (ed.), Raster imaging and digital typography 2: papers from the second RIDT meeting, held in Boston, October 14-16, 1991 New York, 1991, pp. 34-42

I used the word non-trivial, because relating modes of contrast manipulation or contrast re-production in punchcutting—as well as in bezier or spline adjustment in digital type design—to modes of contrast production in the activity it is continuous with (and keeps reasserting it’s continuity with—Hrant might say: to it’s detriment!) is intstructive (because it gives us insight into the internal logic of typographical history), and it might provoke even more drastic norm violations (relative to the stroke of the pen) in our contrast manipulations.

(And it is possible that fundamental—rather than incidental—norm-violations, such as those introduced in Bloemsma’s Legato, where the violations are neither additive or subtractive (or based on sampling, like for instance Fudoni), might lead to something that is advantageous from a ’heightened readability’ point of view.)

Chris: who?

“Chris: who?”

Some guy named Peter Enneson :-)
Thanks for doing all the work!

ChrisL

Thanks, Peter. My translation: the moving line model helps illuminate the history of type because its evolution is influenced by the changes in pens, and the moving line is a kind of mathematically generalized pen. Different variations in the moving line—translation, rotation, expansion, can characterize well different periods and the designs associated with them.

I do find this idea very valuable, and look forward to reading the book.

My only comment at this point would be that the moving line model has certain limits also. The modification of letter forms for type, as opposed to hand writing, takes into account optical illusions and the goal of evenness of color. There are also in roman type ’architectural’ factors, viewing the character as a weighted object resting on the base line. So in so far as these are not pen-driven, the moving front model would mainly illuminate by how these typographic features break the rules of the physical pen.

William: the moving line model has certain limits also.

Think of it as a coarse-grained template-like reference point for getting a handle on typographic stroke-contrast, rather than as a mechanism for ’thick description,’ i.e., for charting each inflection of every constructed stroke and terminal.

By the way, I think your restatement is apt.

>it

...it’s just a mathematically equalivant way of describing strokes.

In the same way that the ptolemaic way of describing celestial mechanics is mathematically ’equivalent’ to the copernican way.

>same way that the ptolemaic way of describing celestial mechanics is mathematically ‘equivalent’ to the copernican way.

Unfair temptation to an historian of science!

Ok, I give in. This is a revealing analogy. First, the Ptolemaic way—circular epicycles—never got the orbits as accurate as the when Kepler put elliptical orbits into the Copernican system. Then he hit it much more accurately. In addition you have to do the epicycles ’ad hoc’, meaning that you have to insert them in different ways for each orbit after the fact. The ellipses give you the right thing for the whole orbit, right away. Then there is the matter that Newton came along and showed you could get the ellipses from an inverse square law and his laws of mechanics, which also worked terrestrially. Game over.

The way the ellipses in a Copernican system are not ad hoc I think also may point to the limitation of the utility of the moving front description. If you restrict the moving front to translation and rotation, then you get the ’ductus’ (am I using it in the right sense John?) of pen drawn letters—the physics is right, following the analogy. But once you have unrestricted expansion and contraction, you can describe any shape ad hoc, which makes the model less interesting, as it is disconnected from any underlying physics.

I think if you put rules on how the expansion or contraction takes place, then it stays interesting. For example, if you could specify a restriction on what kind of expansion can take place, and get Baskerville or Bodoni—or better yet one and not the other—then you would really have something.

Noordzij’s idea is already very revealing that the ’baroque’ faces, as Bringhurst calls them, have rotation, whereas Jenson etc did not. But to get as much insight on later developments I think you have to put more constraints on the expansion and get it to match the facts. If no restrictions, then it becomes ad hoc and has less explanatory power.

William, would you consider Noordzij’s ’flexibility of the pen’ coefficient in his figure 2.15 (chapter 2) such a constraint? Note also his comment just before that: “Pure expansion is, from my vantage point, a decadent contrast sort that removes itself from systematic description because of what happens in the thin segments.”

(You’ll find more on expansion in chapter 7, and a perspective on changes in contrast in chapter 8)

It does not have to be physically possible to write a form for the contrast scheme imposed by a tool in the hand to be or become inherent in or underly a constructed form, i.e., to give the constructed form a ‘logic.’

This is very important to understand when reading The Stroke: Noordzij is providing an analytical tool for describing what is happening in a stroke, not a model for writing. Nick, the Bodoniesque o is easy to understand in terms of expansion if you remember that at every point along the stroke the ’heartline’ is equi-distant from the two edges. So it is perfectly possible, in the expansion model, for one side of the stroke to be straight and the other to be curved, and you can see exactly how by mapping the heartline, i.e the movement of the stroke.

I love expansion. Expansion is the new black :)

>would you consider Noordzij’s ‘flexibility of the pen’ coefficient in his figure 2.15 (chapter 2) such a constraint?

Yes, that’s exactly what I was talking about. Obviously from your quote Noordzij is well aware of the issue I was pinpointing, and it seems does not fall into the trap of becoming ad hoc in his explanations. Now I’d better shut up until I’ve read the book.

Thanks for your work translating it!

John, I wonder if it was clear my “Nick: expansion underlies bodoni” was a link?

http://www.enneson.com/public_downloads/pe/typophile/bodonipresupposesex...

To get back to the subject of Romanticism, it is hard to see why the term romanticism should be linked to ’expansion’ per se. It would rather seem that the flexble pen should be the instrument par excellance of the Rococo.

Bringhurst talks of both Neoclassical and Romantic types as having a rationalist axis. This seems to fit. It is as if, after the romain du roi, which rationalized the type surface, opportunistic use of expansion and the contrast it provides was able to happen.

But the question also arises how to think of romanticism in terms of a rationalist axis. (In the history of philosophy Kant is sometimes thought of in classical idealist terms, and Hegel in romantic idealist terms. Descartes and Hume, meanwhile epitomize two subcurrents with rationalism)

I think there’s still some work to do in aligning typographical history with cultural history.

Bringurst wants to use terms like Neoclassical and Romantic as ’genus’ descriptors, by anology with biological classification. While I think the principle of genus / species thinking in type classification terms is fertile,I’ve wondered about the aptness of the terms.

There is very little lettering or type that can be specifically identified as rococo in the sense of belonging to that aesthetic movement and its time. Of course, there is a lot of 19th century split-nib calligraphy that could be might be adjectively referred to as rococo in exhibiting extreme ornament, but this is done after the rococo period has ended and when other arts have passed through neo-classicalism to romanticism.

Romanticism inherits the rationalist axis from neo-classicism, just as it inherits the symphony orchestra. It isn’t romantic in itself: it is what romantics do with it that matters.

>expansion underlies bodoni

Expansion (stroke contrast) is a quality of broad and split nibbed pens. It is also pleasing at the most basic level, as an example of comparative proportion, found in the golden section. But the exaggeration of this basic quality (prior to the 19th century) of type did not come from the impetus of writing instruments.

It’s extremely unlikely that type founders would have been inspired by calligraphers to produce the Didone style. In the first place, Calligraphers did not do vertical roman, because it is counter-intuitive. Stilted and wooden. You would need to use two pens to write a “Bodoni” — a broad nib for the straight verticals and a split-nib for the curves. Secondly, it simply would not occur to a calligrapher to have any shape other than an oval for the heartline of a humanist (as opposed to blackletter) “o”. The kinked “heartline” diagram you’ve linked to is theoretically possible, but physically impractical, if not impossible — there’s no leeway for even the slightest deviation without it looking cack-handed. Thirdly, calligraphers had been doing high-contrast lettering for centuries.

The spur to the Baskerville style was engraving, a form of printed reproduction in direct competition with typography. Consider the 18th century illustrated pattern books of Robert Adam, Thomas Chippendale, etc., where the exquisitely engraved lettering on the plates is directly comparable with the much cruder letterpress typography on the text pages. It must have been galling.

And the famous example, Pine’s Horace from the 1730s, where the whole book was engraved, after it had been typeset “for position”.

The conceptualization behind Baskerville’s rationalization is towards one end — achieving maximum finesse on a par with the engraved letter.

The schema behind the didone ’o” is not a written heartline, but this:

This lead somewhere Nick. I think your observations about the structure of heartline in the bodoniesque ’o’ are valid and bring us to the kind of point Williams questions brought us to as well.

You say: But the exaggeration of this basic quality [...] of type did not come from the impetus of writing instruments.

I think this might very well be the case. However, this suggests you think the basic quality is nevertheless there. That’s all I wanted to assert. I don’t think Noordzij wanted to make any assertion about the structure of the heartline, just that expansion about one and the same heartline can produce results that very markedly in appearance, ressembling those we see in Baskerville as opposed to Bodoni, but have a common denominator.

After he is finished talking about types of contrast Noordzij begins to talk about changes in contrast (increase / decrease). His schematisms for this are very different from his schematisms of types of contrast. (Chapter 8 of The stroke) So the sources for the type of contrast used can vary from the provocations for it’s exaggeration.

Aside from that, Noordzij’s “The Frankilin Letter” in Letterletter does present compelling evidence that Bodoni’s efforts had something to do with the ’standard of handwriting’ at the time.

I’d expect that what you see and what Noordzij sees can be made part of a larger picture. Let me try:
The didoni ’o’ is a special case of systematic exaggerative contrast manipulation on an broadly expansion-based frame, valued because it approaches a rational geometrical ideal (your schema). Contemporary engraving provided prototypes of how this might be pursued. The romanticism in it is the faith or illusion that text letterforms can approximate such an ideal and still be viable in functional terms.

Expansion (stroke contrast) is a quality of broad and split nibbed pens.

This is not what I — or Noorzij — means by expansion. Expansion is a particular kind of stroke contrast, and is contrasted with translation, which is the kind of stroke contrast one gets from broad nibbed pen. The third kind of contrast is produced by rotation. None of these are ’pure’: in practice some amount of rotation is almost always present in all writing, even if it is not the dominant and intentional method, and if you press really hard with a broad nib pen you can produce a kind of expansion. Again, what Noordzij is providing is an analytical tool: a way of looking at strokes and determining what is happening within them. The practical usefulness of this analysis is e.g. in determining the degree and kind of consistency across a collection of letters.

The Didot and Bodoni types, of course, represent a rationalist exaggeration of ’the swelling line’ — to use the term James Mosley adopted to describe Cresci’s influential calligraphy —, but the point is that it is describable in terms of the expansion model of stroke construction.

{Caveat: I haven’t read every word in this thread; but I’ll try later.}

> pantograph ... removed the creative/craft influence of the human punchcutter

This is true to some extent, but not entirely, for the simple reason that many type designers were also punchcutters; in fact some of them [used to] draw the desired shape on the head of the punch first!

> I’m wondering what is gained by the moving front way of thinking in such cases.

Very very good question. My answer: a cozy illusion is maintained. The hole Nick is seeing is not there, but there is a veritable black hole elsewhere, one that would suck all the progressive juices from most any mind...

> it would be quite possible to “describe” Legato or Fudoni in similar manner

Not Legato, because it’s anti-chirographic. Legato is a true, full break with the extant, pervasive ideological lethargy; the most significant font since Gutenberg.

> Noordzij is providing an analytical tool

Dunno. He doesn’t seem to be stopping people from continuing to actually apply those ideas... Quite the contrary in fact. To me, he is partly responsible for the misapplication of his ideas.

hhp

>Not Legato,

Legato is no exception.
Using Noorzij’s descriptive system of translation, rotation, and expansion, it’s possible to describe the structure of any typeface (any full-contrast graphic image, in fact), as if it is being “written” by a pen.

You’re just now really discovering Noordzij. Give yourself some more time to really discover Legato; maybe one day you’ll realize that it’s a result of a brilliant, brave and selfless Craftsman.

hhp

>maybe one day you’ll realize that it’s a result of a brilliant, brave and selfless Craftsman.

I guess you didn’t see the memoriam I wrote in the TypeCon2005 program.

***

>You’re just now really discovering Noordzij

Interesting, but not really my kind of thing. Probably won’t get the book.
Here’s my definition of “rotation” — what you got?

I’ll read the memoriam, even though you don’t get Legato.

> not really my kind of thing.

Mine even less. But:
1) I still pay attention.
2) Neither is that swirly thing.

Rotation is quite boring anyway. Laterality is the gold mine.

hhp

>you don’t get Legato

It’s not about me Hrant.
If you think Legato is so great, where are your type designs utilizing Evert’s discoveries?
Isn’t it about time your foundry actually published some typefaces? Including some which demonstrate the principles you so regularly propound? Walk the talk, man.

Nice swirl.

Héctor

Hrant, what’s “laterality”?

Not sure. The base sense is obvious; on the other hand the only thing that’s clear to me concerning the rich, relevant sense of the term is that it’s central to the human existence (much more so than something Modernistically appealing like rotation). I have yet to grasp the true depths of the issue, but I feel strongly that the way the human “machine” is physically built* makes the proper -if maybe always fuzzy- consideration of laterality a big, golden key.

* And I don’t mean “intelligent design”, thank you very much.

BTW, “The Alphabet and the Brain” is only book I know of that considers the readability facet of laterality with any seriousness; unfortunately the basic premise of the book’s editors has a chauvinistic undercurrent.

hhp

?

Héctor

laterality is the new bouma

Nick Shinn: “Legato is no exception” / “[Noordzij’s The stroke / moving front] not my kind of thing”

Hrant Papazian: “mine even less” / “rotation is [...] boring” / “what is gained?: a cozy illusion is maintained” / “a veritable black hole elsewhere, one that would suck all the progressive juices from most any mind”

Let me plunge in and start sucking:
1) Legato is no exception.

To understand what follows, you will need to have looked at:
a) http://www.evertbloemsma.nl/legato/about_legato/about_legato.asp

b) www.enneson.com/public_downloads/pe/typophile/paillason_sm.jpg

And it would help to have read:
i) “The Franklin Letter” in Letterletter,
ii) Chapter 8 (Changes in contrast) of Gerrit Noordzij’s The stroke and
iii) Gerrit Noordzij’s 1991 contribution to Robert A. Morris and Jacques André (ed.), “Raster imaging and digital typography 2: papers from the second RIDT meeting, held in Boston, October 14-16, 1991 New York, 1991, pp. 34-42, paying special attntion to the following two images:
www.enneson.com/public_downloads/pe/typophile/gn_cube_sm.jpg

www.enneson.com/public_downloads/pe/typophile/cube_underside_sm.jpg

Gerrit Noordzij’s schema for contrast exaggeration is this:
www.enneson.com/public_downloads/pe/typophile/contrast_change_exag.jpg

(Noordzij: The top of the block is a cross with a given contrast. Proceeding towards the bottom the thicker stroke becomes thicker, so that every horizontal cross-section shows a greater contrast than the top. An end of increases in contrast is reached when the thin stroke no longer has a meaning: at the bottom of the block the cross has turned into a rectangle.)

Gerrit Noordzij’s schema for contrast reduction is this:
www.enneson.com/public_downloads/pe/typophile/contrast_change_decr.jpg

(Noordzij: The thin stroke becomes thicker towards the bottom. The effect is a decrease in contrast. The endpoint of this decrease is reached when the strokes are equally thick.)

The basic scheme for the contrast in most Bodini romans is contrast exaggeration on an expansion frame following the model of Paillason’s “Premiere Position”
The basic scheme for the letter “T” in the title page to Bodoni’s Essai des caracteres de l’imprimerie (discussed in “The Franklin Letter”) is shown in Paillason’s “Seconde”.

The basic scheme for the traditional sans serif is contrast reduction on an expansion frame (contrast reduction makes serifs superfluous: it eats them up). The expansion base accounts for the vertical stress Bloemsma emphasizes as characteristic of univers and Helvetica.

Bloemsma’s Balance is contrast reduction on the contrast type shown in Paillason’s “Seconde”

In Legato Bloemsma has found his way onto the back row in the base of Gerrit Noordzij’s cube (top row of the 5 x 5 “cube_underside” grid). This row represents contrast reduction on a translation base (with the caveat that some rotation has been added—making the face neo-mannerist). And he has done this not by starting from translation, but from an introduction of inner form / outer form counter-rotations in an expansion based context.

On inspection, the tension caused by Bloemsma’s rotation seems to make the white of the word more active or salient vis a vis the black. Here he is in a line that includes W. A. Dwiggins. If I am right (in my understanding of perceptual processing in reading) about the place of ’the map of salient whites’ in reading (see the “bouma as bounded map thread”) we can see why Bloemsma is justified in thinking he is reconnecting (optically, ’after-helvetica’) the single units of our scripts, or restoring and extending the optical integrity of the wordform.

Because Bloemsma’s achievement circles back around to meet translation plus rotation, we learn something about mannerist and neo-mannerist (Bringhurst says: Lyrical Modernist) form. That is, we learn something about what’s (mostly) boring, and what is to be gained by reading.

You fail to mention the little problem... GN’s cube is missing (by his own admission) something central to good type design: the dimension of scale. And it is missing this because chirography cannot go that deep; it is a plaything of the surface. Optical scaling is anti-chirographic, and in more ways than one.

As for Legato, it very much is an exception (no matter how badly a Modernist wants to put everything under the sun among his neat row of boxes) because it treats the Black and White as equals (on some level, and an important level). 1) Chirography cannot do this, no matter how sincerely it wants to; 2) There certainly are other fonts that are anti-chirographic, but only by circumstance, and not in a way that can really hope to mark progress; all such efforts have been oblivious to good notan. In some cases (like WAD) the designer didn’t even realize he was being anti-chirographic! Dwiggins actually thought the only reason for extenders was aesthetics. Puhleez. The thing is, he was so genially good in other ways that he made up for the theoretical void between his ears.

Legato is an instance of progress in our craft that virtually nobody else could have carried out. Every type designer should have the humility to learn from it.

hhp

Does / How does Legato address the problem of scale?

“As for Legato, it very much is an exception [...], an instance of progress in our craft”

Yes, that (and just how, or in what respect) is what my post attempted to pin-point.

By ’laterality’, did you mean lateral connectivity across the bounded map?

Legato does not address the dimension of scale.* Doing so would actually not be exceptional (although it would still be great, as well as anti- or at least non-chirographic) since that’s been done before. Legato’s “first” is in the domain of notan; the ideal form of which (at least in terms of text fonts) precludes the GN moving front (since it’s hopelessly Black-centric).

* Although it’s interesting to note that Evert’s fonts tend to work well small.

> did you mean lateral connectivity across the bounded map?

I meant laterality of the human experience as a whole. Including things like the armature of the neck, and yes, the shape of the retina and lateral bouma effects, etc. In comparison, rotation seems to me to be in the conscious domain, and in a way artificial, or at least circumstancial and/or unintuitive; which is why the invention of the wheel was such a notable (and noted) leap, as opposed to just a “duh” moment.

hhp

>the Black and White as equals

What do you make of Fred Smeijers’ “Counterpunch” — where he addresses the role of the counterpunch in the design/production process? Isn’t this a strong argument for the thematic structural importance of “white” space in the typographic tradition?

Yes, many people -certainly including GN- have explicitly and sometimes forcefully pointed out the importance of the White. In fact virtually every type designer is aware of the issue, since simply defining sidebearings is part of it. But there’s a difference between seeing an issue and wanting to address it, versus actually doing the right thing about it; that’s why I wrote “no matter how sincerely it wants to” above.

hhp

The greatest proponents of using white space were designers similar to the folks who came out of Basle. There was perhaps more attention paid to negative space there in logos, letterforms, and typgraphy.

ChrisL

In fact I would say that typographers have used
the White much better than type designers so far.

hhp