Typography as Vehicle of Science

Janu­ary 22, 2022 would have marked the 80th birth­day of graph­ic and type de­sign­er Ger­ard Un­ger. Of all the older gen­er­a­tion ty­po­graph­ers who had suc­cess­fully transitioned in­to the 21st cen­tury, Un­ger was per­haps the most open to ex­per­i­ments and the most genu­inely ac­cept­ing of al­tern­at­ive view­points both in type design and in sci­en­ce. In a con­ser­vat­ive pro­fes­sion­al en­vir­on­ment prone to over­es­tim­at­ing tra­di­tion, it is a vi­tal qual­ity for the de­vel­op­ment of type design and the trans­fer of know­ledge to new, young­er gen­er­a­tions.Ger­ard Un­ger’s in­aug­ur­al ad­dress at Leiden Uni­versity (where on March 16, 2007 he was ap­poin­ted pro­fess­or of ty­po­graph­ic design) came out in Am­s­ter­dam as a book­let in Eng­lish and Dutch. To hon­or the memory of a dearly loved de­sign­er, we are pub­lish­ing his ad­dress with kind per­mis­sion of his heirs. — Ed­it­or­i­al board

Ad­dress de­livered at the ac­cept­ance ce­re­mony of  the pro­fess­or­ship in Ty­po­graph­ic Design, sponsored by the Dr. P.A.Tiele-sticht­ing, at Leiden Uni­versity on March 16, 2007

Of all the evil on the earth
this is the greatest pain:
Who once has learned to read,
can nev­er give up again. Koos J. Ver­steeg

Ty­po­graphy is a won­der­ful and tested vehicle for re­cord­ing views and ideas and send­ing them out in­to the world. As a sci­en­ce, however, ty­po­graphy is much more than just a vehicle, and as a pro­fes­sion ty­po­graphy is more than a purely in­stru­ment­al af­fair, to me at least. As a ty­po­graph­er and a type de­sign­er I am con­stantly think­ing of the read­ers. Of course, au­thors are im­port­ant and as a de­sign­er you rep­res­ent their in­terests, but you equally rep­res­ent the in­terests of read­ers. Ty­po­graphy is also a so­cial tool. I con­sider it a chal­lenge to get people to read who cur­rently do not read, and to help read­ers gain ac­cess to vari­ous sorts of know­ledge and opin­ions, so they can make their own de­cisions and de­vel­op their own views.

Free­dom of speech is not pos­sible without the free­dom of read­ers to have ac­cess to know­ledge and opin­ions. In this coun­try every­one is ba­sic­ally free to ex­press, pub­lish, and dis­sem­in­ate any view or opin­ion (some min­im­al re­stric­tions ap­ply; it is il­leg­al, for in­stance, to of­fend the queen). Moreover, read­ers can freely choose the texts they want to read. In many parts of the world, however, hav­ing such choice is not a giv­en.

Read­ing is a fun­da­ment­al skill and this is un­likely to change in the fore­see­able fu­ture. This aware­ness must have promp­ted Unicef in 2005 to dis­trib­ute an ad­vert­ise­ment with a photo of ten-year-old Sham­ila from Afgh­anistan. The Unicef ad has her say: ‘Nobody will fool me any­more, for I can read now. For­tu­nately I go to school, but many oth­er girls don’t as of yet.’ Read­ing has equipped her with the power to judge for her­self, and many more girls should go to school in or­der to ac­com­plish the same. Read­ing is be­nefi­cial.

 

The concept be­hind this cam­paign ap­pears to hook up with an earli­er no­tion of read­ing, which in the second half of the nine­teenth and the first half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury was di­li­gently pro­moted by, among oth­ers, the so­cial­ists: read­ing con­trib­utes to el­ev­at­ing the work­ing classes. Read­ing helps work­ers to move up in so­ci­ety, bring them prosper­ity, make them more crit­ic­al, bring cul­ture with­in their reach, and so on. To this end, pub­lish­ing houses were set up that fo­cused on qual­ity and af­ford­able books. The Wereld­bib­lio­theek (World Lib­rary), set up in 1905, served as the Dutch coun­ter­part of Eng­land’s Every­man’s Lib­rary, com­mit­ted not only to is­su­ing first-rate texts, but also to qual­ity book design.1 Such ini­ti­at­ives went hand in hand with the on­go­ing mech­an­iz­a­tion of the graph­ic in­dustry, which fa­cil­it­ated the pro­duc­tion of print in ever lar­ger edi­tions against de­clin­ing rates.

The Dutch news­pa­per Het Volk star­ted out in 1900, to con­tin­ue as Het Vrije Volk in 1945. This is the news­pa­per we read at home. Of course, dur­ing the Second World War so­cial­ist news­pa­pers (and oth­er ones) were gagged, which sug­gests a dif­fer­ent take on read­ing: it is bad for you, if not dan­ger­ous. Start­ing your own news­pa­per or pub­lish­ing house al­lows you to ex­pose read­ers to in­form­a­tion you deem suit­able for them, as a coun­ter­bal­ance to pub­lic­a­tions that of­fer un­de­sir­able read­ing mat­ter. The Ro­man Cath­ol­ic Church un­der­stood this prin­ciple long ago already, which is why it es­tab­lished its In­dex Lib­ror­um Pro­hib­it­or­um, a list of pro­hib­ited books. It did so in 1529 and first in the Neth­er­lands be­cause of the Re­form­a­tion. Un­til as re­cently as 1966 this In­dex has been in use, and today read­ers are still con­trolled to some ex­tent in many coun­tries throughout the world.

The ef­fort to pro­mote read­ing and pub­lic edu­ca­tion has defin­itely raised the level of know­ledge among the pop­u­la­tion, which in turn serves as basis for de­vel­op­ing autonom­ous views and mak­ing in­di­vidu­al choices. For many, ob­vi­ously, this has con­trib­uted to an im­proved life, with more edu­ca­tion, bet­ter em­ploy­ment, and a high­er stand­ard of liv­ing. But many or­gan­iz­a­tions act­ive in the ad­vance­ment of read­ing have sim­ul­tan­eously tried to push their polit­ic­al or re­li­gious con­vic­tions. Even though it may not have al­ways been their aim to have in­di­vidu­als de­vel­op their own views and opin­ions, once they can read and choose and com­pare what they read it is in­ev­it­able they start think­ing for them­selves. Soon­er or later this is bound to res­ult in the for­mu­la­tion of fresh views and new opin­ions, as well as per­haps the aban­don­ing of the par­tic­u­lar bi­as of the or­gan­iz­a­tions that pro­moted read­ing in the first place.

After 1945 much ef­fort was put in­to build­ing a new so­ci­ety, in­clud­ing a de­cent edu­ca­tion for all cit­izens and a free, hon­est press. The res­ult is a very high level of prosper­ity in many West­ern coun­tries – in ma­ter­i­al terms at least. However, from a spir­itu­al angle there may be less well­be­ing, while in re­cent years so­cial co­he­sion has come in­creas­ingly un­der pres­sure. Moreover, cer­tain so­cial groups ap­pear ever harder to reach, and more people seem to have no in­terest in read­ing and have trouble ar­tic­u­lat­ing co­her­ent opin­ions.

How do texts end up with the people who need them and who can really use them? How do we get those in­di­vidu­als to read who did not grow up in a fam­ily where read­ing was com­mon and who did not get much from school either? It seems as if au­thors and ty­po­graph­ers are al­to­geth­er power­less in such case. There is but one solu­tion: ex­pos­ing these non-read­ers some­how to a di­versity of views and opin­ions. Does the in­ter­net of­fer a solu­tion here? Those who can­not or do not read pa­per doc­u­ments are likely to avoid read­ing from a screen as well. And those who use the in­ter­net a lot gen­er­ally do so to find like­minded people. If it will not work to ex­pose people to a range of views through read­ing or show­ing, with im­ages and sounds, per­haps it will work on the basis of face-to-face in­ter­ac­tion. Al­though em­ploy­ment and im­proved ma­ter­i­al and so­cial cir­cum­stances are cer­tainly cru­cial, the same ap­plies to a wide avail­ab­il­ity and di­versity of opin­ions in so­ci­ety.

More than once I have run up against the cri­ti­cism that when it comes to the ba­sic ne­ces­sit­ies of life, design is not one of them. The un­der­ly­ing sug­ges­tion is that only con­tent mat­ters, not how this con­tent reaches read­ers. I strongly dis­agree of course: good, bal­anced, and com­mit­ted ty­po­graphy is more im­port­ant than ever. You can­not con­quer in­dif­fer­en­ce by means of in­dif­fer­en­ce.

We would hope Sham­ila, the girl in the ad­vert­ise­ment, will achieve her goals in­deed. Hope­fully many more girls from her coun­try will at­tend school, to learn to read well and make genu­ine choices on their own.

One of my in­struct­ors at the Kun­st­nijver­heidsschool (School of Ap­plied Arts) in Am­s­ter­dam, Theo Kur­per­shoek, had me as first-year stu­dent en­roll in a course on op­er­at­ing the Mono­type machine. Mono­type ma­chines were much used for type­set­ting books and you could get spe­cial type designs for them. This gave me a sol­id entry in­to ty­po­graph­ic prac­tice. Theo Kur­per­shoek also in­tro­duced me to the Ty­po­graph­ic Lib­rary of Lettergieterij Amsterdam. This marked my entry in­to the­ory, and, surely, it proved a rev­el­a­tion: ty­po­graphy as sci­en­ce vir­tu­ally com­plete, books as vehicles of their own sci­en­ce. At the time when I reg­u­larly vis­ited this lib­rary, mostly af­ter­noons, the door­keep­er, mis­ter Moen, would call the lib­rar­i­an upon my ar­rival, after which I was al­lowed to go in. At my third vis­it or so I over­heard the lib­rar­i­an say­ing on the phone: ‘He is here again.’ A few minutes af­ter­ward Prof. Dr. G.W. Ovink (1912–1984), who was in charge of the col­lec­tion, came in. He opened cab­in­ets and books for me and showed me around.

This won­der­ful ex­per­i­en­ce of get­ting broad ac­cess to ty­po­graphy, tech­niques, designs, and their vari­ous schol­arly fa­cets I have al­ways been happy to share with stu­dents, and I will con­tin­ue to share it with them.

One of the first books put in­to my hands in the Ty­po­graph­ic Lib­rary was Plain Print­ing Types (1900) by Theodore Low De Vinne (1828–1914), a print­er-schol­ar who ran a large print and com­pos­ing shop in New York and who has con­trib­uted much to the his­tori­ography of ty­po­graphy. The book’s title im­me­di­ately ap­pealed to me: Plain Print­ing Types – this was ex­actly what I as­pired to design! Later on, this book taught me how much in­genu­ity and at­ten­tion for de­tail are in­volved in achiev­ing plain­ness in type design. It is a per­spect­ive on ty­po­graphy to which I still feel close, even though in the course of my ca­reer I en­countered and em­braced many more con­struct­ive pro­fes­sion­al views and in­sights.

 

There were more books in the lib­rary that in­stantly caught my at­ten­tion, such as The Let­ter as a Work of Art and Print­ing and the Mind of Man. The first work, a 1951 ju­bilee volume of Let­ter­gi­eterij Am­s­ter­dam ed­ited by the art his­tor­i­an Dr. G. Knut­tel Wzn. (1889–1968) with help from Prof. Ovink, shows in­scrip­tions, manuscripts, and prin­ted books along­side artist­ic works such as mur­als, build­ings, fur­niture, stained win­dows and sculp­tures. This book ap­plies art his­tory and art cri­ti­cism to ty­po­graphy and let­ter designs, for in­stance, by ad­dress­ing when, where, and by whom they were made. In most cases, it is pos­sible to trace is­sues re­lated to a par­tic­u­lar design’s peri­od, place, ori­gin, and de­sign­er. There is, for ex­ample, baroque and neo­clas­si­cist ty­po­graphy. The type designs by the French Ro­ger Ex­cof­fon (1911–1983) are quite re­cog­niz­able. They re­veal his char­ac­ter and hand­writ­ing, while as products they clearly re­flect the 1950s and in their ex­press­ive ges­tures they are also very French.

Print­ing and the Mind of Man was an ex­hib­i­tion in Lon­don in 1963, which dis­played books of so­cial and cul­tur­al importance. The ac­com­pa­ny­ing cata­log per­fectly il­lus­trates the role of ty­po­graphy as vehicle of sci­en­ce and as means for spread­ing ideas and ideo­lo­gies geared to­ward so­cial change. It con­tains a host of di­ver­gent works such as Can­on Medi­cinae (Stras­bourg, be­fore 1473) by Avicenna (980–1037) on Ar­ab­ic medi­cine, De Thiende (Leiden, 1585) by Si­mon Stev­in (1548–1620) which con­trib­uted to the in­tro­duc­tion of frac­tions based on the decim­al sys­tem, A Vin­dic­a­tion of the Rights of Wo­man (Lon­don, 1792) by Mary Woll­stone­craft (1759–97) on equal rights to edu­ca­tion and know­ledge for wo­men and men, and Die Traum­deu­tung (Leipzig and Vi­enna, 1900) by Sig­mund Freud (1856–1939) with the ba­sic ten­ets of psy­cho­ana­lys­is. Print­ing and the Mind of Man of­fers a vivid ex­ample of what has been ac­com­plished by al­low­ing know­ledge and opin­ions to spread freely, thus en­sur­ing their ready avail­ab­il­ity to read­ers. In this re­spect it should be ad­ded that the re­cent Unicef cam­paign in­volving Sham­ila un­der­scores that after over two cen­tur­ies Mary Woll­stone­craft’s call for equal rights for wo­men still has a lot of ur­gency.

 

The Let­ter as a Work of Art and Print­ing and the Mind of Man both show the scope of ty­po­graphy as a sci­en­ce: from ap­pre­ci­ation of ac­tu­al let­ter forms to re­flec­tion on con­tent and ty­po­graphy’s ef­fects on so­ci­ety and in­tel­lec­tu­al his­tory.

There is also a key text I first en­countered in the Ty­po­graph­ic Lib­rary: The First Prin­ciples of Ty­po­graphy (Lon­don, 1930) by Stan­ley Mor­is­on (1889–1967), a much trans­lated and very in­flu­en­tial study. Mor­is­on is, among oth­er things, the spir­itu­al fath­er of what is most likely the most used Lat­in type design: Times New Ro­man (1932). In First Prin­ciples he defines ty­po­graphy as ‘the effi­cient means to an es­sen­tially util­it­ari­an and only ac­ci­dent­ally aes­thet­ic end’ (p. 61). With this last part, the ‘only ac­ci­dent­ally aes­thet­ic end’ I strongly dis­agree, and Mor­is­on him­self has de­mon­strated the in­cor­rect­ness of his claim. After all, with his Times he has done a great ser­vice to read­ers every­where, and this spe­cific design did not grow pop­u­lar by ac­ci­dent: he con­trib­uted much to this at­tract­ive type design. De­sign­ers of course have a pen­chant for put­ting more in­to a product than what is strictly ne­ces­sary. Whenev­er pos­sible, you add a little ex­tra to a ty­po­graph­ic product that will en­rich the ex­per­i­en­ce of read­ing, give it more depth, or make it more en­joy­able. In oth­er words, you con­sciously try to cre­ate an aes­thet­ic­ally pleas­ing product.

It is an is­sue what, ex­actly, ‘effi­ciency’ or ‘util­ity’ en­tails in re­la­tion to design. Al­though these qual­it­ies may also im­ply that users are moved by a product, that they feel it to be ex­cit­ing or that it trig­gers some oth­er emo­tion­al re­sponse, most of all a design should not leave users in­dif­fer­ent. From this angle I have al­ways prac­ticed my pro­fes­sion, and this is also how they taught me to do it at the academy.

This emo­tion­al di­men­sion is part and par­cel of design, as a mere curs­ory glance at twen­ti­eth-cen­tury con­tri­bu­tions will re­veal: all the vari­ous -isms, trends, and move­ments, such as Fu­tur­ism, Con­struct­iv­ism and Da­da­ism, the prag­mat­ism of the late 1950s and the 1960s and the re­ac­tions to it in the fol­low­ing dec­ades, up to the more selfish ex­per­i­ments of the 1990s – all these shift­ing move­ments and aes­thet­ics sug­gest that ty­po­graphy, too, is fully part of a cul­tur­al dy­nam­ics, rather than merely be­ing its vehicle. Ty­po­graph­ic products, just like oth­er design products, are re­flect­ive of an era’s cul­tur­al cli­mate and of how people live and think. Ty­po­graphy mir­rors the on­go­ing changes in so­ci­ety and how these in­flu­en­ce the minds of de­sign­ers and users alike.

Mean­while ty­po­graphy has be­come part of a broad-ran­ging me­dia and com­mu­nic­a­tions land­scape. Ty­po­graphy has also grown more in­ter­laced with graph­ic design; it is in­creas­ingly driv­en by im­age and col­or, as well as an­nexed by artists. This has cer­tainly en­riched ty­po­graphy, and visu­ally, apart from the pleas­ure of read­ing, it has more to of­fer than ever.

At this point it is rel­ev­ant to refer to a strik­ing para­dox in­volved in the act of read­ing: a read­ing in­di­vidu­al is not ‘see­ing’. Of all products of art and design, let­ters and ty­po­graphy are unique in that they, when con­sumed and en­joyed, re­main in a way ‘un­seen’; they are not con­sciously en­joyed. If we are stand­ing in front of a paint­ing and fail to see it we are ab­sent­minded, if not worse. If we at­tend a con­cert without hear­ing the mu­sic we may be dis­trac­ted or fo­cused on something else. Yet in the case of let­ters and ty­po­graphy, it is quite com­mon that we are look­ing at them without really see­ing them. Ob­serving and see­ing are con­scious acts, but read­ing is an auto­mat­ic and un­con­scious act. Read­ers im­mersed in their text do not no­tice let­ters and ty­po­graphy any­more, as is par­tially true for the ob­ject that me­di­ates the text – the book, news­pa­per, magazine, or screen – and even the sur­round­ings will fre­quently es­cape the per­cep­tion of read­ers to some de­gree. Pos­sibly they ‘see’ be­fore start­ing to read, or dur­ing in­ter­rup­tions; this is when they may per­ceive ty­po­graphy.

This para­dox­ic­al phe­no­men­on may com­plic­ate dis­cus­sion of the ex­tern­al qual­it­ies of ty­po­graphy. There are ty­po­graph­ers who ad­voc­ate min­im­al­ism, and some even ar­gue that ty­po­graph­ic ex­tern­al­it­ies are com­pletely su­per­flu­ous – one type face is enough. This par­tic­u­lar para­dox has led to the the­ory of in­vis­ible ty­po­graphy (Warde 1956, p. 11–17) and Mor­is­on’s idea about ‘an es­sen­tially util­it­ari­an and only ac­ci­dent­ally aes­thet­ic end’ is prob­ably linked to this think­ing as well.

Let­ters and the ways in which they work to­geth­er as words and texts have taken on their shapes in the hands and minds of sculptors, writers, and ty­po­graph­ers es­sen­tially on the basis of er­go­nom­ic con­cerns. Pri­or to the de­vel­op­ment of ty­po­graphy, the shapes of let­ters and the ba­sics of ty­po­graphy were largely fixed already in manuscripts. This per­tains to type areas, type sizes, in­ter­lin­ear spaces, and many oth­er conventions. Dur­ing the sub­se­quent peri­od cov­er­ing over five cen­tur­ies the ty­po­graph­ic sys­tem has been fur­ther refined and en­riched.

 

Still, a con­tem­por­ary lit­er­ary work, con­sist­ing of text ex­clus­ively, is sur­pris­ingly close to early prin­ted works, such as books pub­lished in Venice between 1470 and 1480 by Nic­olas Jen­son (1420–±1481). This sug­gests the ex­tent to which ty­po­graphy had already crys­tal­lized as a sys­tem. At first sight an in­dus­tri­ally made pa­per­back nov­el — di­git­ally type­set, prin­ted on in­ex­pens­ive pa­per with a large high-speed ro­ta­tion press, ma­chine-cut on four sides and its glued back put in­to a board cov­er by ma­chine as well — ap­pears to be quite dif­fer­ent from a book which in Jen­son’s work­shop was type­set by hand, prin­ted on hand­made pa­per with a hand press, and bound in leath­er by hand. Yet the pro­duc­tion-based dif­fer­en­ces between this early book and re­cent pa­per­back quickly evap­or­ate once we read the two works. Al­though there have been many de­tailed mod­ific­a­tions re­gard­ing type area and type designs, es­sen­tially very little has changed — be­cause hardly any­thing has changed in how we read, not­ably the phys­ic­al and neur­al pro­cesses in­volved.

The mar­gin­al change in ty­po­graphy dur­ing more than five cen­tur­ies partly ac­counts for the view that there are strict ty­po­graph­ic rules, or even laws. These rules ex­ist in­deed, but they largely per­tain to lan­guage use and de­term­ine, for in­stance, where a word can or can­not be split up, or how punc­tu­ation marks ought to be ap­plied. As far as ty­po­graphy is con­cerned it is mostly a mat­ter of con­ven­tions, which, in con­trast to rules, are of­ten sub­ject to in­ter­pret­a­tion. Type sizes, word spaces, in­ter­lin­ear spaces, and white around text are among the ele­ments that of­fer room for vari­ation.

The phys­ic­al and neur­al pro­cesses in­volved in read­ing are stud­ied by sev­er­al sci­en­tific dis­cip­lines. Most of our know­ledge about read­ing is gen­er­ated by psy­cho­lo­gic­al re­search. From the angle of lin­guist­ics, read­ing has been stud­ied in terms of how lan­guage is pro­cessed by the brain. Edu­ca­tion­al ex­perts have stud­ied read­ing to learn more about how read­ing di­dactics can be im­proved. And in the past fifteen years neur­o­logy has con­trib­uted ma­jor new in­sights as to how the brain pro­cesses text that is be­ing read. Thus con­ceived, ty­po­graphy is a junc­tion or meet­ing place of sev­er­al aca­dem­ic disciplines.

Al­though the read­ing pro­cess as such has seen little change over the cen­tur­ies, the read­er’s out­look changes per­man­ently. It is in­flu­en­ced by the era and en­vir­on­ment in which read­ers grow up and live, while ma­jor events and so­cial de­vel­op­ments – cli­mate change, wars, epi­dem­ics, re­li­gions, glob­al­iz­a­tion, and grow­ing con­ser­vat­ism – de­term­ine the mind­set of read­ers. Are they eager to learn more or do they rather hide from un­wel­come real­it­ies? Do they look for ex­plan­a­tions, un­der­stand­ing, and con­sol­a­tion, or do they rather want to es­cape and be en­ter­tained?

Change does not just af­fect read­ers, of course, but also writers, while de­sign­ers are sub­jec­ted to it as well. As a ty­po­graph­er I wish to know what is go­ing on in or­der to avoid merely be­ing swept along; I want to an­ti­cip­ate, make read­ing easi­er for read­ers, if pos­sible. And I would like to be able to ex­plain to stu­dents what is tak­ing place right now and what is to be ex­pec­ted in the nearby fu­ture.

Aside from such changes, tech­no­logy has been in a state of per­man­ent flux for some time now. In the fall of 2006 the Mas­sachu­setts In­sti­tu­te of Tech­no­logy, in the United States, and the Uni­versity of Southamp­ton, in Eng­land, an­nounced a pro­gram for ‘web-sci­en­ce’. On the WSRI-web­site one can read: ‘The Web Sci­en­ce Re­search Ini­ti­at­ive will al­low re­search­ers to take the Web ser­i­ously as an ob­ject of sci­en­tific in­quiry, with the goal of help­ing to foster the Web’s growth and fulfill its great po­ten­tial as a power­ful tool for hu­man­ity.’

As­sum­ing that pub­lic ac­cess to the World Wide Web, made pos­sible by the Mo­sa­ic browser, goes back to 1993, it has taken thir­teen years to set up this aca­dem­ic pro­gram. If in 1450 schol­ars had re­spon­ded in a sim­il­ar fash­ion to Guten­berg’s in­ven­tion, ty­po­graphy would have been a sci­en­ce in 1463; ‘…with the goal of help­ing to foster ty­po­graphy’s growth and fulfill its great po­ten­tial as a power­ful tool for hu­man­ity.’

Back in the fifteenth cen­tury, the French King Charles VII (1403–1461) was quick to real­ize the po­ten­tial of print­ing. He did so after eight years already, in 1458. He prob­ably had smart ad­visers who en­cour­aged him to find a know­ledge­able in­di­vidu­al who in Mainz could in­vest­ig­ate how the new mode of text re­pro­duc­tion worked. It is ques­tion­able, though, wheth­er the know­ledge thus gained would have be­come the ob­ject of sci­en­ce at that time. The pro­ject evolved dif­fer­ently any­how. The in­di­vidu­al sent to Mainz, Nic­olas Jen­son who was mas­ter of the mint at Tours, re­turned to France with his newly gained know­ledge of print­ing. However, the king’s death in 1461 and his son’s dis­trust of the offi­cials hired by his fath­er caused Jen­son to leave France and move to Venice, where around 1470 he star­ted his own print shop and pub­lish­ing busi­ness, in the ser­vice of sci­en­ce (Lowry 1991, p. 49).

Not un­til more than three cen­tur­ies later, in the course of the nine­teenth cen­tury, a pro­cess of drastic tech­no­lo­gic­al changes in the vari­ous graph­ic dis­cip­lines took off – a pro­cess that is still on­go­ing.

Com­pos­ing shops and print shops were mech­an­ized and in­dus­tri­al­ized. The first half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury was fairly quiet, but around 1960 a tech­no­lo­gic­al re­volu­tion erup­ted. Met­al type and let­ter press print­ing were re­placed with pho­to­type­set­ting and off­set print­ing, fol­lowed dir­ec­tly by di­git­al type­set­ting ma­chines, while also the auto­ma­tion of the vari­ous graph­ic dis­cip­lines star­ted off on a grand scale. Ini­tially these changes led to an enorm­ous de­cline of the qual­ity of print, and pre­cisely when it began to im­prove the per­son­al com­puter ap­peared on the scene – her­ald­ing yet an­oth­er re­volu­tion. Today, much print has very high qual­ity again, even though on screens it is still a mat­ter of get­ting by.

Apart from print, oth­er me­dia have gained much ground in re­cent years. Tele­vi­sion has turned liv­ing rooms in­to movie theat­ers. Mo­bile tele­phones have fully be­come part of our daily life, as is true of the web and the in­ter­net. And where the ap­plic­a­tion of text on pa­per is los­ing ter­rain, it is gain­ing ter­rain on screens. Much of the in­form­a­tion on the web con­sists of text, so we have ample reas­on to view ty­po­graphy as part of web sci­en­ce. Once in­ex­pens­ive high-res­ol­u­tion screens will be avail­able, the com­plete ty­po­graph­ic rich­ness of pa­per will also be­come vis­ible on screens, adding even more and al­to­geth­er new pos­sib­il­it­ies to ty­po­graphy.

The vari­ous tech­no­lo­gic­al de­vel­op­ments have had ma­jor so­cial ram­ific­a­tions as well. The graph­ic in­dustry was shaken up, it strongly de­clined in terms of its size, and it had to give up many cer­tain­ties. Pro­du­cing print has come with­in reach of many, not just with the per­son­al com­puter – which merely in­tensified an ex­ist­ing trend – but already much earli­er, in the 1960s, with the in­tro­duc­tion of elec­tric type­writers and desktop print­ing presses. ‘Free­dom of the press ap­plies to those who have a print­ing press,’ the Dutch Provo act­iv­ist Rob Stolk sup­posedly said around 1966. Like many oth­ers at that time, he used these small devices to make magazines, pamph­lets, and posters (an act­iv­ity that later on evolved in­to a full-blown print shop). In the mean time, many now have their own print shop at home in the shape of a print­er linked up to their pc, while the web has turned ‘free­dom of the press’ in­to a great­er liberty still. Today we truly live in a coun­try of free speech and opin­ion.

In 1972 Prof. Ovink ar­gued that ty­po­graph­ers and graph­ic de­sign­ers should re­fuse as­sign­ments that in­volve du­bi­ous con­tent or that send a ‘wrong’ mes­sage. Ovink’s call was based on the view that our senses suffered from over­ex­pos­ure and ‘men­tal pol­lu­tion’ be­cause there was so much to see and read, in print and on TV, that no one really needed or was wait­ing for. Whenev­er ne­ces­sary ty­po­graph­ers should re­write texts and read­ers should col­lect­ively make clear which prin­ted mat­ter or broad­cast­ing they no longer wanted to re­ceive (Ovink 1972, p. 341–354).

It is not un­com­mon for de­sign­ers to re­fuse an as­sign­ment when their own views hap­pen to be at odds with its con­tent. Al­though oc­ca­sion­ally a ty­po­graph­er will pro­pose a cli­ent to re­vise a text, it is un­usu­al to do so for ideo­lo­gic­al reas­ons.

Since the early 1970s, vari­ous ini­ti­at­ives have shown that read­ers or view­ers are all but un­crit­ic­al con­sumers. One ex­ample in­volves the in­tro­duc­tion of offi­cial mail­box stick­ers that in­dic­ate you do not want to re­ceive un­so­li­cited prin­ted mat­ter. And of course, view­ers may zap and read­ers may throw away un­read print. Largely, however, these things have been left up to the mar­ket be­cause it is im­pos­sible to define or have every­one agree on which texts are use­ful to hu­man­ity.

As a self-em­ployed ty­po­graph­er I am in a po­s­i­tion to re­fuse as­sign­ments, but I have nev­er had to do so. I was re­fused a pro­ject by the Dutch Com­mun­ist Party, though, which ap­proached me for work on the title of its news­pa­per, De Waar­heid (The Truth). My not be­ing a com­mun­ist even­tu­ally caused the as­sign­ment to be can­celled. As a type de­sign­er I can re­fuse to sell my di­git­al let­ters to a cli­ent I dis­like. But once they are out there and be­ing used to spread views I hap­pen to dis­ap­prove of, the only thing I can do is grab a pen­cil or go sit be­hind my key­board and write a text in re­sponse.

Al­though like Mor­is­on I de­signed let­ters that serve as suit­able vehicles for opin­ions, I can­not pre­vent oth­er people from us­ing my let­ters for present­ing texts I dis­agree with. Nor do graph­ic de­sign­ers, ty­po­graph­ers, and type de­sign­ers have any con­trol over the views de­rived from these texts. Es­sen­tially, then, my type designs, as well as the ty­po­graph­ic sys­tem, are in the same po­s­i­tion as the print­ing press: they are at the ser­vice of free­dom of speech and pub­lic opin­ion.

Benno Wiss­ing (1923-2008), a de­sign­er who worked for Total Design, the design bur­eau where I had my first job, once felt that the sta­tion­ery he had de­signed for a cli­ent turned out so beau­ti­ful that they should use it for nice let­ters only. In the early 1980s type­writers were re­placed by laser print­ers, which made it pos­sible to type­set let­ters with very refined typefaces, which be­fore­hand only ap­peared in qual­ity print­ing such as books. On one oc­ca­sion it took some time be­fore a col­league – who it was I don’t know any­more – real­ized that he was hold­ing an angry let­ter in his hands. Upon read­ing it he only had eyes for Pal­atino, a type design from 1950 by Her­mann Za­pf (1918). This typeface merely triggered pleas­ant thoughts in my col­league’s mind, and this un­for­tu­nately did not ex­actly match the let­ter’s con­tent. Of course I would be happy to join such cheer­ful op­tim­ism, but ty­po­graphy has lim­its.

Per­son­ally I can prac­tice ty­po­graphy as a sci­en­ce only by peri­od­ic­ally re­turn­ing to the roots of my fas­cin­a­tion for let­ters and ty­po­graphy, to the ori­gin of my love of let­ters. Why did I be­come in­ter­es­ted in ty­po­graphy and let­ters in the first place? I have been un­able to track down when, ex­actly, it star­ted. Yet the ex­cite­ment I must have felt at one point for the first time when con­sciously look­ing at let­ters is still there: how beau­ti­ful let­ters are! What won­der­ful, ex­cit­ing shapes they have. Let’s briefly con­sider four dif­fer­ent R’s: Lute­tia (1925) de­signed by Jan van Krim­pen (1892–1958), Vendôme (1952), after an idea by François Ganeau (1912–1983) and made by Ro­ger Ex­cof­fon (1911–1983) (cf. Blanchard, Mendoza 1983, p. 21, 22), Cen­tury School­book (1919–1924) by Mor­ris Fuller Benton (1872–1948), and my own Swift (1985). And by way of com­par­is­on let’s look at two pieces of text, type­set in Swift and Cap­it­oli­um News (2006), which I also de­signed.

 

The Lute­tia R is one of the first let­ter forms I not only per­ceived con­sciously, but also copied. It is a very clas­sic R with a rather large up­per counter. Lute­tia well il­lus­trates the ex­tent to which Van Krim­pen fol­lowed clas­sic ex­amples while sim­ul­tan­eously leav­ing his per­son­al mark on it. The Vendôme R is much sharp­er and idio­syn­crat­ic, and less form­al than Lute­tia. This R too struck me quite early on and must have shown me how much space type de­sign­ers have to make a par­tic­u­lar let­ter their own. This typeface, then, is very French: it is a ges­ture, slightly nervous. Mor­ris Fuller Benton’s R is in fact not pretty, with its slightly slack twist as a tail. But the Cen­tury School­book I al­ways con­sidered very fine as a whole in­deed. It taught me that type designs and ty­po­graphy are not just about aes­thet­ics and de­tails, but that there are also many oth­er qual­it­ies, such as warmth and sol­id­ity, and that you may ad­apt let­ter forms to in­flu­en­ces from tech­no­logy or to spe­cial de­mands from read­ers. I ad­ded the Swift R be­cause it is easy to see that Vendôme served as one of its sources of in­spir­a­tion. The sharp­ness and the speed of Ro­ger Ex­cof­fon are trace­able in Swift.

These four R’s already show how rich and ver­sat­ile ty­po­graphy can be as a source of con­scious visu­al pleas­ure, aside from its un­know­ingly en­joyed func­tion as a vehicle of sci­en­ce, know­ledge, opin­ions, news, and lit­er­at­ure. One of the artist­ic styles of the 1950s and 1960s is called Hard Edge paint­ing. Of the artists work­ing in this style Ell­s­worth Kelly (1923) is my fa­vor­ite, with his sharp-edged sur­faces in smooth col­ors and with ex­cit­ing con­trasts between curved and straight edges. In my opin­ion, there is no harder-edged art to be found than pitch black let­ter shapes on a light sur­face. Sim­il­arly, it is pre­cisely these very shapes, I be­lieve, that al­low for the most in­tim­ate col­lab­or­a­tion between sci­en­ce and art.

After 1985 Swift has been widely ap­plied, for in­stance, in many Dutch news­pa­pers (in­clud­ing Trouw and Metro), and also in oth­er print, but only sporad­ic­ally in books. Ap­par­ently, book ty­po­graph­ers are more con­ser­vat­ive than oth­er ty­po­graph­ers in ap­ply­ing type with un­usu­al de­tails. Swift is un­con­ven­tion­al in its very spa­cious coun­ters and its an­gu­lar­ity and large serifs. Only re­cently the Swift was de­scribed as ‘un­or­tho­dox but not in­trus­ive’ (Rade 2005, p. 9). Still, it took some time for both ty­po­graph­ers and read­ers to get used to it. Oc­ca­sion­ally, in the late 1980s, I was called upon to ac­count for the al­leged ag­gress­ive char­ac­ter of Swift, but later on this nev­er happened any­more. Com­pared to Swift, Cap­it­oli­um News (used in the Neth­er­lands by de Volk­skrant) is more se­rene and con­ven­tion­al.

 

Evid­ently, much has changed over the past two dec­ades or so, but the first signs of a more con­ser­vat­ive turn in fact be­came vis­ible in the late 1970s already. The six­ties’ sense of liberty and the late six­ties’ com­mo­tion and stu­dent re­volts gradu­ally gave way to a new sense of prudence and tra­di­tion­al­ism, partly as a con­se­quence of the mount­ing and ac­cu­mu­lat­ing prob­lems in the world, which tele­vi­sion in par­tic­u­lar has man­aged to bring right in­to our liv­ing room. Some of these prob­lems I men­tioned already, such as war, cli­mate change, and large-scale mi­gra­tion. However, it is mainly the is­sue of the grow­ing in­tol­er­ance that has a more dir­ect in­flu­en­ce on ty­po­graphy, caus­ing people to re­main si­lent about things they ac­tu­ally want to talk about. Many cri­ti­cized the Dan­ish car­toon case as tact­less and silly, yet it has de­mon­strated people’s in­creased self-cen­sor­ship re­gard­ing the is­sues in­volved.

In the fin­al dec­ade of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury ty­po­graphy was sub­jec­ted to wild and dar­ing ex­per­i­ments. Un­usu­al and rad­ic­ally mod­ified let­ter forms and wild or dis­or­derly ty­po­graphy, made sub­ser­vi­ent to im­ages and col­ors, ec­lipsed the con­cern for readability. After 2000 such design is still done, but much less so, while tra­di­tion­al­ism and con­ven­tion­al­ism in­creas­ingly pre­vail in ty­po­graphy.

Should you go along in this trend? Wouldn’t it be a mat­ter of giv­ing in to the urge for mod­er­a­tion and more cau­tious for­mu­la­tion? I per­son­ally side with leav­ing no means un­tested when it comes to keep­ing read­ers read­ing and turn­ing non-read­ers in­to read­ers, as well as to guar­an­tee­ing max­im­al free­dom of speech. Com­pared to Swift, Cap­it­oli­um News is more se­rene. Al­though the ex­per­i­ment with large spaces in the let­ters is less vis­ible than in Swift, it is still part of it, al­beit slightly more hid­den. Cap­it­oli­um News, too, is a per­son­al and clear type design. My an­swer to the in­creas­ing prudence is to opt not for con­ser­vat­ive designs, but for clas­sic ones. A con­ser­vat­ive ap­proach sug­gests you’re afraid to lose what you have, but a clas­sic ap­proach al­lows you to breathe new life in­to an old idea or concept – it al­lows you to mod­ern­ize. Cap­it­oli­um News is based on my earli­er Cap­it­oli­um, de­signed for Rome and the year 2000, and in­spired on early baroque, It­ali­an in­ter­pret­a­tions of Ro­man mod­els (cf. Unger 1998, p. 61–73).

Lin­guists such as F. de Saus­sure (1857–1913) felt that writ­ten lan­guage is merely a con­ver­sion of spoken lan­guage (Olson 1994, p. 65, 66). A re­lated view, ex­pressed by D.R. Olson (1935), is that with ty­po­graphy one has tried to com­pensate for the losses caused by writ­ing in re­spect to or­al lan­guage, as in speak­ing softly and loudly, fa­cial ex­pres­sions and ges­tures, the prob­ing in­ton­a­tion or an iron­ic voice, and so on (Olson 1994, p. 92, 93). Olson is some­what right of course, but writers have many op­tions for in­dic­at­ing how speak­ers say something; con­sider, for ex­ample, the phrase ‘He turned red and roared…’

Ty­po­graphy is the toolkit – and the sys­tem – for writ­ing and read­ing. This toolkit con­tains, among oth­er things, cap­it­als and lower case, lar­ger and smal­ler type sizes, types with or without serifs, it­al­ics and bold, small cap­it­als, ran­ging and non-ran­ging nu­mer­als, and vari­ous kinds of white. At a high­er or­der level, this toolkit provides struc­ture to the title page, bib­li­o­graph­ic data, the table of con­tents, the foot­note and more.

As such these means hardly re­late to speak­ing and listen­ing (Gumbert 1993, p. 5, 6). In ty­po­graphy bold and it­al­ics are used for em­phas­is, among oth­er things, and a speak­er may stress something by rais­ing his voice. But it­al­ics is also ap­plied to in­dic­ate that a por­tion of a text dif­fers from the main text, as in a com­ment or a quote. In such situ­ations speak­ers have to make do with ‘and I quote’, ‘end of quote’, and oth­er sim­il­ar phrases. Ty­po­graph­ic pos­sib­il­it­ies have in­flu­en­ced speech; con­sider, for in­stance, an ex­pres­sion such as ‘mind the fine print’.

Many read­ers deal with ty­po­graphy un­con­sciously, while many au­thors are in­suffi­ciently fa­mil­i­ar with its pos­sib­il­it­ies. The reas­on for this goes back to our early edu­ca­tion, when we are trained to re­pro­duce writ­ten let­ters as per­son­al and in­form­al writ­ing, while at the same time we are taught to use ty­po­graphy and ‘form­al’ let­ters (with screens it is odd to speak of ‘prin­ted’ let­ters) without think­ing and also without re­pro­du­cing them – which, un­der­stand­ably, very few read­ers are able to do. Teach­ers who train chil­dren how to read and write usu­ally have no know­ledge of the tools with which they learn to read. In the light of the widely dis­sem­in­ated and in­tens­ive use of this par­tic­u­lar means of com­mu­nic­a­tion this is sur­pris­ing in­deed.

Those who have know­ledge of the vari­ous pos­sib­il­it­ies of the ty­po­graph­ic toolkit can make texts more ef­fect­ive and in­sight­ful, and they can ex­press them­selves more co­gently (Gumbert 1993, p.7, Janssen 2004, p. 33). Hav­ing ba­sic know­ledge of the ty­po­graph­ic sys­tem and its ap­plic­a­tion should be­long to the in­tel­lec­tu­al bag­gage of each uni­versity stu­dent. My col­league Frans Janssen and oth­ers have ar­gued that au­thors do not write books, but texts (Janssen 2004, p. 13). Today’s pro­grams for text pro­cess­ing on com­puters, however, of­fer such refined ty­po­graph­ic pos­sib­il­it­ies that this claim has lost some of its val­id­ity.

Rhet­or­ic is part of aca­dem­ic cur­riculums in Dutch and Clas­sic­al Lan­guages. The ty­po­graph­ic toolkit, I would ar­gue, of­fers tools for graph­ic rhet­or­ic, to be de­ployed in ar­tic­u­lat­ing, struc­tur­ing, em­phas­iz­ing, mak­ing dis­tinc­tions, mark­ing dir­ec­tions, in­sert­ing pauses, and so on. These vari­ous op­tions may be viewed as be­long­ing to the sys­tem of rhet­or­ic as well. Their re­flect­ive qual­it­ies turn ty­po­graphy in­to a fine aca­dem­ic in­stru­ment. Stu­dents are ex­pec­ted to have ad­equate know­ledge of lan­guage, be it Dutch or Eng­lish, and to ex­press them­selves well in writ­ing. These skills ought to be based not only in fun­da­ment­al know­ledge of ty­po­graphy as the vehicle of sci­en­ce, but also in sus­tained ex­pos­ure to ty­po­graphy as a sci­en­ce.

 

I would like to ex­press my grate­ful­ness to the Board of Gov­ernors and the Ex­ec­ut­ive Board of Leiden Uni­versity, the board of the Fac­ulty of Arts, the man­age­ment of the Roy­al Academy of The Hag­ue, the ex­ec­ut­ive boards of the Roy­al Lib­rary of the Neth­er­lands and Mu­seum Meer­man­no, the board of the Dr. P.A. Tiele Found­a­tion, and to all oth­ers who have con­trib­uted to real­iz­ing my ap­point­ment. I will de­mon­strate that your con­fidence in me is justified.

Many whom I would like to thank for their in­spir­a­tion are no longer with us: my teach­ers who sup­por­ted me from the out­set, and my par­ents and par­ents-in-law. My fath­er, with his in­terest in art and design, was the one to put me on the track of ty­po­graphy and let­ters, and my fath­er-in-law, who came from an en­vir­on­ment that looked upon artists with a sense of won­der, soon put his trust in me.

I ex­press thanks to my fam­ily: my sis­ters, my broth­ers, and my daugh­ter Flora. In par­tic­u­lar I thank my wife Mar­jan for our good dis­cus­sions, our col­lab­or­a­tion, and her frank cri­ti­cism, as well as for en­joy­ing to­geth­er with me our count­less trips and vis­its to ex­hib­i­tions over the years. In no small meas­ure she has con­trib­uted to the fact that my in­terests have moved way bey­ond my own dis­cip­line.

Thank you for listen­ing.