The Trajan letter in Russia and America

They re­main alone in the world,
Alone, like the plan­ets’ march,
The gates and hoops of cop­per let­ters,
Pol­ished by fire!
—Eduard Bag­rit­sky, “Night”, 1926

he cur­rent—mul­ti­lin­gual—ver­sions of its Tra­jan-in­spired typefaces, Tra­jan® Pro 3 and Tra­jan® Sans Pro, were rolled out by the U.S. di­git­al foundry Adobe in 2011. Tra­jan® Pro3 is the latest up­grade of the well-known Tra­jan (by Car­ol Twombly), ini­tially is­sued in 1989 in two weights, reg­u­lar and bold, com­prised only of cap­it­al let­ters, fig­ures and punc­tu­ation signs (such faces are of­ten called “titling”). The typeface was con­ceived and de­signed as a re­pur­pos­ing for print of the mo­nu­ment­al let­ter used in the in­scrip­tion on the ped­es­tal of the Tra­jan column in Rome. It was part of a set of dis­play typefaces called Mod­ern An­cients™. Lithos and Char­le­magne, also de­signed by Car­ol Twombly, be­longed to the same series. The first three typefaces offered as part of a sim­il­ar but much more am­bi­tious pro­gramme ori­gin­at­ing with Lino­type, Type be­fore Guten­berg, were is­sued one year later.

 

 

In 2001 an up­grade of that type fam­ily was is­sued, Tra­jan Pro. Its glyph set was ex­pan­ded: large-size small cap­it­als were ad­ded. The latest modi­fic­a­tion of Tra­jan, Tra­jan Pro 3, fea­tures a much wider weight range (six, from Ex­tr­a­light to Black); its script cov­er­age was ex­ten­ded in­to Greek and Cyril­lic. The de­vel­op­ment of Tra­jan Pro 3 was dir­ec­ted by Robert Slimbach, Adobe prin­cip­al de­sign­er, in con­sul­ta­tion with Twombly who quit her full-time job at the com­pany in 1999.

The second typeface, Tra­jan Sans Pro, is Slimbach’s new work. It has been de­ve­loped as a com­pan­ion design to Tra­jan Pro 3. Its struc­ture, font com­ple­ment and ac­tu­al let­ter­forms are sim­il­ar to Tra­jan Pro 3’s, ex­cept, as the name im­plies, its glyphs have no serifs.

 

 

A brief re­count of the story of Tra­jan Pro 3 and Tra­jan Sans Pro, writ­ten by John D. Berry, a famed in­dustry ex­pert and au­thor, was pos­ted on Adobe’s Web site. Ger­asi­mos “Gerry” Le­oni­das and I ac­ted as non-Lat­in design con­sult­ants.

The launch of Tra­jan Pro 3 and Tra­jan Sans Pro happened to co­in­cide with a sig­ni­fic­ant book pro­ject de­voted to an­cient Ro­man in­scrip­tion­al let­ter (cap­it­al­is mo­nu­men­tal­is)—first and fore­most to the style used for the let­ter­ing at the base of the Tra­jan column. Titled The Etern­al Let­ter, the book was pub­lished by the MIT Press in early 2015. Its ed­it­or Paul Shaw, a well-known Amer­ic­an type his­tor­i­an, in­cluded my two short es­says in this mono­graph—on the role of the Tra­jan let­ter in the his­tory of So­viet ty­po­graph­ic design, and the de­vel­op­ment of Cyril­lic ver­sions of Adobe’s two typefaces, Tra­jan Pro 3 and Tra­jan Sans Pro.

So here goes…

The Tra­jan let­ter in the USSR

 

I fell in love with the Tra­jan let­ter early in my life… I was fif­teen or young­er when I no­ticed how beau­ti­ful and el­eg­ant the title of an Amer­ic­an art book looked.

 

Later, I learned that the typeface that caught my eye was Goudy Old Style, cre­ated by an Amer­ic­an de­sign­er Fre­der­ic W. Goudy, and much later that the book was among the win­ners of the pres­ti­gi­ous Fifty Books of the Year com­pet­i­tion held an­nu­ally by the Amer­ic­an In­sti­tu­te of Graph­ic Art. I tried to copy those let­ter­forms, as closely as I was able to. I even ruined the jack­et of that book by tra­cing the cap- and the baselines, and mark­ing the ho­ri­zont­al bound­ar­ies of the let­ters.

In the USSR, the late 1950s was a time of big change in polit­ics, cul­ture, edu­ca­tion, art—in vir­tu­ally all walks of pub­lic life. That peri­od is of­ten re­ferred to as “the Thaw,” as it fol­lowed the long dec­ades of Stal­in’s chilling rule.

 

 

The open­ing of Druzhba [“Friend­ship”], a book­store in down­town Mo­scow that offered books in for­eign lan­guages, was one of the not­able events in the life of Mo­scow in­tel­li­gent­sia. Pre­dict­ably, Druzhba car­ried books only in the lan­guages of the so­cial­ist coun­tries (Ger­man, Czech, Pol­ish, Chinese, etc.), but even that felt ex­cit­ing. It was, in­deed, a break­through from cul­tur­al isol­a­tion.

Artists and de­sign­ers used to stop by Druzhba quite of­ten, be­cause with­in a couple of days, many new ar­rivals would be all gone. The mid- and the late-1950s saw the ap­pear­ance of some sem­in­al books on type, ty­po­graphy, let­ter­ing, and cal­li­graphy. Those were the sub­jects barely ex­plored by the do­mest­ic ex­perts, with one not­able ex­cep­tion: the mile­stone mono­graph Russkii grazh­danskii shrift, 1703–1958 [“Rus­si­an Civil Type, 1703–1958”] by Ab­ram Shits­gal, which was pub­lished in com­mem­or­a­tion of the 250th an­niversary of Peter the Great’s ty­po­graph­ic re­form. Two books of note briefly showed up at Druzhba in the late 1950s: Al­bert Kapr’s Deutsche Schriftkunst (1955) and František Muzika’s Krás­né písmo (1958).

One com­mon—and dis­tinct­ive—fea­ture of those books was the show­ing of the Tra­jan let­ters, which made their way even to the dust jack­ets.

I think the last time Tra­jan let­ters were men­tioned in a Rus­si­an-lan­guage book, be­fore those Ger­man and Czech books reached Mo­scow, was in 1946, in Bor­is Kissin’s Graficheskoye oform­le­nie knigi [“Graph­ic design of the book”]. 

The re­spect­ful and care­ful showing in Muzika’s and Kapr’s books looked very con­vin­cing com­pared to Kissin’s casual and inaccurate rendition. Kapr’s fea­tured a stun­ning 3-page fold-out pic­ture of the in­scrip­tion on the base of Tra­jan’s Column. Some­how, those show­ings seemed to pos­sess an au­then­ti­city that was miss­ing in Soviet architectural lettering of the 1950s… Which, by the way, looked and felt very sim­il­ar to the American monumental inscriptions of the 1910s–1920s in the Beaux-Arts style.

 

 

In fact, that let­ter­ing style had a lot more to do with the Renais­sance treat­ises on let­ter con­struc­tion—by Dürer, Tory, Pa­ci­oli, Ar­righi, et al.—than with the clas­sic­al Ro­man cap­it­al­is mo­nu­men­tal­is.

The large-scale, cred­ible show­ings of the Tra­jan let­ters in Muzika’s and Kapr’s books made a last­ing im­pres­sion on the de­vel­op­ment of type design in the USSR. In 1958, Vadim Lazurski be­came the first Rus­si­an de­sign­er to cre­ate a Cyril­lic ad­apt­a­tion of the Tra­jan in­scrip­tion­al let­ter. In 1964 an­oth­er Cyril­lic in­ter­pret­a­tion of the Tra­jan let­ter­forms, by a Bul­gari­an de­sign­er Vasil Barakov, had been pub­lished.

 

 

 

Much later, in 1973, Lazurski ac­know­leged the in­flu­en­ce of the Tra­jan let­ter on the de­vel­op­ment of his 1962 typeface when he ref­er­en­ced it in a wall chart titled The birth of a print­ing type. It was de­signed as a visu­al re­cord of the pro­cess of de­vel­op­ment of the eponym­ous typeface which was is­sued by NII­Poly­graph­mash in 1962.

The same power­ful in­flu­en­ce is clearly vis­ible in the let­ter­forms of a typeface So­lomon Telingater was work­ing on at the time; it was rolled out in 1959 un­der the name of Telingater Dis­play.

 

Around the same time—in 1958 or in 1959—I came across a genu­ine trove of books and peri­od­ic­als on type and ty­po­graphy. At the in­stig­a­tion of Telingater, I ap­plied for a lib­rary card to the Rare Book De­part­ment of the Len­in Lib­rary, the na­tion­al lib­rary of the USSR. It had the richest col­lec­tion of ty­po­graph­ic lit­er­at­ure in the na­tion. Three books in par­tic­u­lar caught my at­ten­tion: Roman Lettering by L.C. Evetts (1938); The Alphabet by Fre­der­ic W. Goudy (1922), es­pe­cially its chapter 4, “The De­vel­op­ment of the Ro­man Cap­it­al” with its mag­ni­fi­cent plates; and last but not least, an in­triguing mono­graph by Wal­ter Kaech, Rhythm and Pro­por­tion in Let­ter­ing (1956).

 

 

 

I was so im­pressed by those re­sources that I ac­tu­ally trans­lated most of Evetts’s text in­to Rus­si­an, and copied all draw­ings us­ing my own tools—pen­cil, com­pass, and ruler. Us­ing pho­tocam­er­as, and tak­ing pic­tures at the Rare Book De­part­ment was strongly for­bid­den in 1950s; this re­stric­tion has sur­vived to this day. 

In 1960, I was ad­mit­ted to the Mo­scow Print­ing In­sti­tu­te (MPI). Dur­ing two semesters, let­ter­ing was taught to us by the very same Vadim Lazurski. Ex­pec­tedly, ex­plor­ing cap­it­al­is mo­nu­men­tal­is was an im­port­ant part of his course. I lent him my am­a­teur­ish, hand­made trans­la­tion of Evetts’s Ro­man Let­ter­ing, and he hap­pily used it in class. For al­most the en­tire semester we as­sidu­ously worked on the Tra­jan let­ter­forms, try­ing to build Cyril­lic glyphs to match the Lat­in ori­gin­als.

When, twenty years later, I my­self lec­tured at MPI, my stu­dents drew the let­ters from Tra­jan’s Column for about three weeks. They also de­signed match­ing Cyril­lic let­ters, in the ori­gin­al cap size, ap­prox­im­ately 4½-inch high. From the jointly de­ve­loped A–Z (А–Я) al­pha­bet­ic­al glyph set—each stu­dent drew sev­er­al glyphs—a class list was com­posed in two ver­sions, one Rus­si­an and one Lat­in (e.g., Данила/Daniel­is, Дмитрий/De­met­ri­us, Мария/Maria, Елизавета/Elisa­betha, etc.). Also, as a trib­ute to Lazurski, who was a guest speak­er at my course, my stu­dents came up with an in­scrip­tion on a scroll us­ing the ex­tra-large size of the same style (cap-height around 1 meter) say­ing, Ave Vadimo, para­phras­ing the Ave, Caesar, mor­it­uri te sa­lut­ant.

Our in­form­a­tion­al re­sources were still the same as in my own school years: Evetts’s and Goudy’s mono­graphs, but they were com­ple­men­ted with a study that did not yet ex­ist when I was Lazurski’s stu­dent: Fath­er Ed­ward M. Catich’s The Ori­gin of the Serif (1968). That book not only shook up the world of let­ter­ing in the West, but it also had a last­ing im­pact on my un­der­stand­ing of the Tra­jan let­ter.

 

 

Tra­jan^® Pro 3 и Tra­jan^® Sans Pro

Many Cyril­lic ver­sions of typefaces based on his­tor­ic­al mod­els are not, strictly speak­ing, re­viv­als. There is not much to re­vive: Cyril­lic typefaces that could be clas­si­fied as Old-Style (e.g., Vene­tian old­style or French Old-Style) did not ex­ist in the 15th- and 16th-cen­tury Rus­sia, or in any oth­er lands where Cyril­lic was used. However, cred­ible and con­vin­cing Old-Style typefaces can be de­ve­loped by ex­tra­pol­at­ing the visu­al fea­tures of the Lat­in ori­gin­als and ap­ply­ing them to the let­ters of the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet.

 

 

What makes the “cyril­liz­a­tion” of designs ori­gin­ally cre­ated for the Lat­in script easi­er is the pres­en­ce of so many let­ters in both al­pha­bets that share sim­il­ar forms, even if those glyphs re­late to dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters. For ex­ample, in Eng­lish and Rus­si­an glyph sets, the up­per­case A, B, C, E, H, K, M, O, P, T, and X are all let­ters de­rived from the Greek script, the com­mon an­cest­or of both the Lat­in and the Cyril­lic al­pha­bets, and thus are vir­tu­ally the same. The bal­ance of the Rus­si­an cap­it­al glyph set—Б, Г, Д, Ё, Ж, И, Й, Л, П, У, Ф, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ъ, Ы, Ь, Э, Ю, and Я—re­main to be de­signed to “match” the look and feel of the ori­gin­al (Lat­in) ver­sion. But that is where the dif­fi­culty lies.

Ob­vi­ously, there is a lot more to a Cyril­lic font com­ple­ment than the Rus­si­an glyph set. Most di­git­al Cyril­lics sup­port the pro­cess­ing of text in dozens of lan­guages. The most com­mon lan­guage set covered by Uni­code code page Win­dows 1251 (“Stand­ard Cyril­lic”) cov­ers six Slavic lan­guages— Be­larus­i­an, Bul­gari­an, Mace­do­ni­an, Rus­si­an (mod­ern and pre-1918), Ser­bi­an, and Ukrain­i­an—and twenty-one non-Slavic lan­guages—Abaza, Adyghe, Aghul, Av­ar, Chechen, Dargwa, In­gush, Kabard­ian, Kabardino-Cir­kas­si­an, Karachay-Balkar, Karakalpak, Kumyk, Lak, Lez­gi­an, Mordv­in-Erzya, Mordv­in-Mok­sha, No­gai, Rutul, Ta­bas­aran, Tat, and Tsakhur. And then there is a Cyril­lic Asi­an code page (Para­Type 154) cov­er­ing forty lan­guages, both Slavic and non-Slavic.

This is where the design job be­comes really chal­len­ging, even if the typeface un­der con­struc­tion, like Tra­jan Pro 3, is all majus­cule, with no lower­case glyphs. Not only is the Cyril­lic ver­sion ex­pec­ted to be con­sist­ent with the design of the Lat­in, but it also has to con­form to the design con­ven­tions en­dem­ic to Cyril­lic.

As with Lat­in-based typefaces, there are let­ter­forms in Cyril­lic that work bet­ter in the Mod­ern (neo­clas­sic­al) idiom than in the Old-Style one (for ex­ample, the wavy, tilde-like ter­min­als in the З, Ц, Щ, and Э). To en­sure the design in­teg­rity of a Cyril­lic typeface, it is stand­ard prac­tice to coördin­ate the con­struc­tion of cer­tain glyphs that are visu­ally re­lated (for ex­ample, С, О, and Э; or Г, Е, Ё and Т; or Н, П, Ц, Ш, and Щ; or Б, В, Р, Ч, Ь, Ы, Ъ, and Я). 

In a mul­ti­lin­gual typeface, those design groups cor­rel­ate lo­gic­ally, ex­tend­ing across the bound­ar­ies of either glyph set, so the treat­ment of the Cyril­lic C is co­or­din­ated with the Lat­in D, G, and Q; the Г with the F and the L; the Б and the Я with the R; and so on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One con­vin­cing mani­fest­a­tion of the in­ter­de­pend­en­ce of glyph shapes is the be­long­ing of cer­tain let­ters to more than one group of cor­rel­ates. The Б, for one, is sub­ject to co­ördin­a­tion with В, Р, Ч, Ь, Ы, Ъ, Я, and R, but its con­struc­tion is also re­lated to Г, Е, Ё, Т, Ц, Щ, F, and L. The lineup of those rows of glyphs that share cer­tain visu­al fea­tures is not ri­gid: it is design-de­pend­ent. For ex­ample, the Ж may be har­mon­ized with К, Я, and R (as in most Cyril­lic faces is­sued after 1750), or it may be treated as a sin­gu­lar form, visu­ally un­re­lated to its sis­ter glyphs (as it looked in the typefaces be­fore Peter the Great’s ty­po­graph­ic re­form).

 

Some design fea­tures of Tra­jan Pro 3 called for a ju­di­cious re­vi­sion of the com­mon, ha­bitu­al cor­rel­a­tions in Cyril­lic glyph con­struc­tion. The poin­ted apices and ver­tices of the ori­gin­al A, M, N, V, W, and the spiky Z called for the use of the iso­sceles Д and Л (delta- and lambda-like), and the un­usu­al, zig­zag (“in­ver­ted-N”) form of the И. Pref­er­en­ce was giv­en, un­hes­it­at­ingly, to the straight-limb, kappa-like con­struc­tion of the К, the match­ing Ж and Я, and the stiff, v-like, not sag­ging, form of the У. Simple, aus­tere, geo­met­ric forms, re­min­is­cent of clas­sic­al Greek in­scrip­tions, were in­vari­ably pre­ferred to a more elab­or­ate, fanci­ful pat­tern of a lat­ter-day print­ing type. No fancy fini­als, bulbous or lach­rym­al—usu­ally found in Cyril­lic type design—were al­lowed. The hanging ter­min­als of the Д, Ц, and Щ were re­duced al­most to naught.

In 1958, Vadim Lazurski be­came the first Rus­si­an de­sign­er to cre­ate a Cyril­lic “ad­apt­a­tion” of the Tra­jan in­scrip­tion­al let­ter. He sub­se­quently cre­ated a sans serif in­ter­pret­a­tion of the Tra­jan­ic let­ter in 1965 and, in 1978, came up with a pro­pos­al of a multi-weight Cyril­lic typeface in the vein of the Ro­man Im­per­i­al cap­it­al. In his hand-lettered in­ter­pret­a­tion of Gav­ri­la Derzhav­in’s poem Reka vre­men (“The River of Time”) by Gav­ri­la Derzhav­in he used dif­fer­ent stroke weight—for lack of the bet­ter terms, from Black to Ul­tra Light, al­though with very subtle, flow­ing grad­a­tion—in all let­ters of each of its eight lines. In all of this he an­ti­cip­ated both of the main in­nov­a­tions of Tra­jan Pro 3.

 

Thus Vadim Lazursky man­aged to pred­ate by many years—by fifty, and thirty-sev­en, re­spect­ively—the de­vel­op­ment of Adobe’s multi-lan­guage typeface su­per­fam­ily in­spired by the Ro­man in­scrip­tion­al let­ter, com­pris­ing serif and san-serif styles and com­ing in a wide range of weights. Fred Goudy would have been 150 last year, but his max­im—Lazursky just loved re­peat­ing it to us—still holds true: “All the old fel­lows stole our best ideas”.