Through myths and legends, spoken languages
contribute to history. Although there are no audio recordings of ancient
times that can tell us how people lived or what they told one another,
there is a level of certainty about visual variants of language. A
fleeting visual version exists until this day: sign language. Contrary
to popular belief, sign language is not universal. As with spoken
languages, most countries have their own sign language, complete with
dialects. But this is beyond the scope of this book. We are dealing with
the recorded version of language, specifically the western forms of
writing and their resulting typography. This typography could only
develop after a long history that eventually resulted in the Latin
alphabet. The journey to those twentysix letters, ten numbers and some
added punctuation marks took more than 50,000 years. It all started with
the ‘sign’.
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(a) ‘glyphs’ or grooves and (b) dots that
perhaps denote enumeration units; (c) and (d) crossed lines, perhaps
indications of places; (e) arrows or spearpoints.
Pictographic writing system
The next step after depicting an object was the expansion of its
meaning. A drawing of a sun, for instance, was used to depict the notion
of warmth or day; the image of mountains was used to describe ‘over the
mountains’, or foreign. By grouping such symbols together, ‘legible’
connections were formed.
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Ideograms from left to right: a bird plus an
egg: the notion of fertility; vertical stripes from an arc in the sky:
night; crossed lines: enmity, and parallel lines: friendship.
The transition
In the evolution from the pictographic system of writing to word image,
Egyptian hieroglyphics are in a league of their own. There was also a
more practical, shorthand version. This was the cursive hieratic that
was used for religious texts on papyrus. Later, the more popular,
widespread Demotic script developed, shown here in the middle section of
the Rosetta Stone.
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The stone illustrated on the facing page was
found in Rosetta (Rashid). It contains the same text thrice: once in
hieroglyphs, once in Demotic and once in Greek. By comparing these texts
on this Rosetta Stone, Jean-François Champollion deciphered the
Egyptian forms of writing. Reproduction from: Wallis Budge, Books on
Egypt and Chaldaea – Volume XVII, The Rosetta Stone, London 1904.
The cradle
The Middle East of about three thousand years ago is the cradle of most
contemporary forms of writing. As well as Egyptian hieroglyphics – based
on ideograms – the Sumerian Cuneiform script and the early Semitic
alphabetic script developed there. The Phoenicians, a seafaring and
trading nation, are accredited with inventing the first alphabet, around
1250 BC. It consisted of 22 consonants and was written from right to
left. It was a so-called consonantal alphabet, or abjad. This means that
in reading, a suitable vowel needed to be added to each consonant. With
their merchant mentality, the Phoenicians spread the alphabet to Greece
and the rest of the Mediterranean world. In the homeland, the
Phoenician language evolved into by Aramaic around the year 1 AD.
Aramaic was influenced by Phoenician and had the 22 consonants in
common.
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All roads lead to Rome
After Phoenician and Aramaic, the written language of the Greeks took up
the ascendancy in the mediterranian world. Our word ‘alphabet’ was
formed from the Greek letters ‘alpha’ (a) and ‘beta’ (b), meaning ox and
house. Around 800 BC, they were using the Phoenician consonantal
alphabet plus the Aramaic vowels A (alpha), E (epsilon), O (omicron), Y
(upsilon). The I (iota) was a Greek invention. They also started writing
from left to right. Slowly but surely, this alphabet became the
alphabet of the western world. First through the Etruscans, who ruled
over what is now Tuscany, and after them through the Latins who
conquered the Etruscans.
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This map depicting Roman times (100 AD) shows
the trade routes over water, from which we can deduce how writing
systems spread. Of course trade routes over land existed as well, but
the spread of writing systems happened much faster over water. The black
area indicates the former Roman Empire. So it all started with the
Sumerians in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates and it ended with
the ‘Latins’. Our alphabet is still called the Latin alphabet.
Illustration: Joep Pohlen
The Roman and Holy Roman Empires
In the heyday of the Roman Empire, around the start of our western
calendar era, the alphabet had matured into an extremely harmonious
form. The peak of design technique in this development is the Roman
capital, the Capitalis Romana or the Capitalis Monumentalis, the
grandfather of all western capital or majuscule scripts. The Capitalis
Monumentalis was the letter used for recording the empire’s glory in
stone for eternity. A perfect example of this is Trajan’s Column in
Rome.
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Text on Trajan’s Column in Rome (detail), 113
AD. The highest line is placed about two metres above eye height and the
height of the letters decreases from top to bottom. The letters on the
top line are 11 centimetres high, the ones at the bottom only 9
centimetres.
Filosofia Unicase. Designer Zuzana Licko added a
modern uncial to her 1996 type face Filosofia. The Unicase above is a
mixture of capitals (majuscules) and lowercase letters (minuscules).
Anuncial is mainly written between two lines, while the longer
descenders and ascenders distinguish the half uncial. The Filosofia
Unicase plays with that by letting the ‘j’ and the ‘q’ just escape the
confines of the two lines. The overall impression is still that of an
uncial. The de sign is an interpretation of typefaces as shown in the
Manuale Tipografico by Giambattista Bodoni, published as a type specimen
book by his widow in 1818.
The Carolingian minuscule
In the fourth century, at the same time that the Roman Empire was in
decline, Christianity was proclaimed the state religion by emperor
Constantine the Great. In Western Europe, the church became an
important producer of texts, which were still drawn up in Latin. These
needed to be distributed, which could only happen after they had been
copied by hand. Writing was and remained the monopoly of monks for a
good thousand years. They perfected the art of producing and adorning
manuscripts. Few people knew how to read or write. Even Charlemagne, who
as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was the most powerful man around
800 AD, was illiterate. He did not want to learn how to write himself –
he had other people to do that for him – but to streamline the
communication and administration of his vast empire and thus continue
his vision and power, he decided in 768 to prescribe a new, official
half uncial, composed by his secretary Alcuinus. As an abundance of
often inaccurately copied texts were in circulation, Charlemagne had
brand new, accurate copies made of the most authentic sources. These
were marked ‘ex authentico libro’ (from the original work) and were
written in the official handwriting, the Carolingian minuscule. Partly
for its clarity and beauty it became the dominant letter in Western
Europe until the end of the thirteenth century.
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Carolingian minuscule: The longer descenders and ascenders are clearly visible.
That economic Gothic minuscule
Copying manuscripts, a backbreaking and eye-destroying task that was
performed, day in, day out, by monks in scriptoria, did not only ask a
lot from body and spirit, but also required a lot of expensive
parchment, made from treated animal skins. Writers quickly learnt how to
be more economical with the material by writing the letters smaller. At
the same time, writing speeds were increased by adopting a more angular
writing style. This is how the Gothic minuscule developed. After a
short period of about two centuries in which the Gothic minuscule
blossomed, hordes of other ‘gothic hands’ followed. The most important
of the ‘gothic hands’ was the Textura (or Textualis) – so called because
of its likeness to fabric – that surfaced around 1250. Other varieties
appeared later, such as the Rotunda or Gothic round script and about a
century later, the Schwabacher and the Fraktur. The movable type that
Gutenberg used in 1455 for his Bible printing was a Textura type.
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Detail Gutenberg 42-line Bible. For the western
world, Gutenberg was the inventor of printing with movable metal type.
Printing had been done before, but with complete pages cut on
woodblocks. For the design of his type Gutenberg used the manuscript
hand that was common at the time, a Gothic hand of the Textura family.
The big turning point
While the Gothic letter was at its peak in fourteenth and fifteenth
century northwestern Europe, the Renaissance period erupted in Italy. In
Italy, the Gothic forms never really took hold, not even in the
typefaces, although the first printers who worked with movable type came
from Germany. The rigid Gothic letter was seen as inelegant. The North
Italians went back to the clarity of the Carolingian minuscule that in
their minds was an older, more authentic and practical script, in closer
proximity to the classical writers; they expanded the script with
rounder and more graceful shapes. Classical texts were reborn in a form
that in itself was a renaissance of the Carolingian minuscule: the
Humanist minuscule.
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The typographical era
For convenience’s sake, we let the history of western typography start
with the Gutenberg Bible of 1455. This Bible was the first monumental
European book to be printed with individual metal letters. The letters
were based on Gothic manuscript scripts, so it is no surprise that the
first letter to be cut was the Textura with all the ligatures and
abbreviations as featured in the manuscripts. Before the invention of
movable type, books and texts were reproduced by copying them in
scriptoria or by carving the mirror image of a complete, handwritten
page in a wood block and printing from it. After the invention of
movable type, printing and typefounding techniques did not fundamentally
change for about four centuries. The most important technical
developments to increase working speeds took place over the last hundred
years, roughly from about 1880.
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For five hundred years, lead typesetting
remained the norm. The alloy for manual type casting is harder than that
of type casting machines like the Monotype. A hot-metal typecasting
machine’s metal
only needs to last one impression before being melted down and recycled.
Foundry-cast 'cold metal', on the other hand, needs to last a lot
longer.
Mechanical composition
The first important development was the introduction of the Benton
Pantograph in 1885 by the American Linn Boyd Benton. The machine allowed
the mechanical cutting of a metal letter in any desired size. A point
followed along the contours of the drawn letter. Engraving a mould for a
4 pt letter (or even smaller) by hand had soon become a thing of the
past.
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Photographic composition
The second important step was the introduction of photographic
typesetting in the late fifties of the twentieth century. Metal was
replaced by photographic film and photographic paper. This was a cheaper
and less unhealthy way of working that allowed for free spacing and
even overlapping of faces, that made continuous enlarging and reducing
possible and, to the sorrow of purists, the photographic distortion of
the letter.
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Digital composition
A third important development started in 1965, when the German company
Hell introduced digital typesetting using the cathode ray tube. Other
established providers had to follow suit and they, too, introduced
digital typesetting. An important consequence of this development was
the introduction of the fairly affordable and user-friendly Apple
Macintosh in 1984 – a machine that was, all on its own, responsible for
the second wave of democratisation. The graphic designer him – or
herself – could now set texts and edit them with digital typefaces in
PostScript format, after which the texts were exposed to photographic
film or photo paper with the appropriate laser exposure unit. This made
professional typesetters a lot less influential. Their responsibility
for the camera-ready copy transferred to the designer.
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