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

Bulmer, don't know if Bell qualifies.

Héctor

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.

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

>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!

>?

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

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 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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'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.

>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.

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

>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?

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.

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.

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

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

>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.

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?

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.

>it

>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.