licentious radio

Saturday, August 17, 2002
[4:31:25 PM]

I bought a pretty, strange little book: "A Type Detective Story" by Matthew Woolman. It gives some details on typography and the form of letters. The details are wrapped in attitude, in the form of a detective story. The attitude is curmudgeonly -- common among typographers. The story is silly; some letter got squashed, and the typo-coppers investigate. "Forensics" affords the opportunity to dissect type and provide the vocabulary.

The thing is, the book is pretty to look at. Some of us like letters, and the book makes pretty pages out of big letters and information graphics about letters. Really, it's soft-core typography -- smut for typophiles.

The problem is, if you like type enough to enjoy the smuttiness, you probably don't need the pedagogical aspects of the book -- you know what x-height means. Maybe if you are just learning about typography this would be a light-hearted introduction, but maybe the story would just get in the way.

For $10 at the second-hand store, it's fine if you just buy it for the pictures. I'd call it a "hold", more than "accumulate".

[12:55:37 PM]
In the big Boynton tour of Europe this summer, there were several interesting typographical highlights.

In Berlin, all of the signs are sans serif. That's only slightly exaggerated. There were a few old hotels and cafes with blackletter signs, and a few with cursive. But it's really quite amazing to see 99%+ sans serif.

Basel still had a quite high percentage of sans serif, but Bern seemed quite normal. Lauterbrunnen, a small tourist village, was also entirely what you expect -- in terms of type in signs.

Berlin, of course, was the center of Bauhaus. Basel seems to be aware of its typographic tradition, including Tschichold.

The best bookstore I've seen yet for type is the shop at the Architecture Museum in Basel. There were quite a few books I hadn't seen before. I bought "Erfreuliche Drucksachen durch gute Typographie" by Tschichold. It was originally published in 1960, and was published again in 2001. The book is another long list of rules from Tschichold from a later perspective -- very different from "The New Typography".

I was rather amazed at how easy it was to read "Erfreuliche Drucksachen". I don't read or speak much German lately, and didn't have a translation dictionary with me.

The Mill Museum in Basel actually has a working mill -- a wheel turned by running water -- that runs devices they use to make paper. I found it more exciting than the Tengli Museum. I suggest you see Tengli, before you see the mill, or you might be disappointed with the Tengli Museum. In contrast, I was very pleased to see the Tengli water park right after the mill.

I suggest: visit the Tengli Museum. Take the ferry across the river to the Mill. Then take the tram, and stop at the Tengli water park. That particular order creates a building sense of both mechanics and water, and their roles in our heritage.

Apparently I was a month late for a Tschichold exhibit at the Mill. They still had some interesting books at the mill museum shop, and around town. There's a two-volume collection of Tschichold's writings -- in German. Volume one is mostly "The New Typography". The mill museum didn't have the second volume, but other stores did. There was a republication of some Tschichold large-format book from the 20s or 30s. If I had thought about it a little more, I would have bought that, just as a souvenir.

The mill museum has a lot more than paper making. They have a pretty good exhibit on the history of type and typesetting on one floor, another floor dedicated to printing, and the top floor is about bookbinding. I think children can start at the bottom and work their way up to the top, and come away with a bound book that they made themselves. Maybe not. I wasn't paying much attention.

The typesetting floor had various typesetting machines, and cases of lead type. Ooh. Someday, I'd love to play with metal type, just to get a sense of what things used to be like. There was also a section on making characters.

Among their bibles, there was maybe the first pocket bible -- published in 1491 in Basel by Johannes Froben. I bet it was six-point type on eight-point lines. Each column of text was about six picas wide by 24 picas tall. (One inch by four inches.) That's a very rough estimate, but yow! Johannes just shrank one of these giant bibles down to pocket size -- maintaining all the proportions, including the relative size of the type and whitespace.

There were more bibles and old books in the basement of some old kirch in Basel that they use for a museum now.

The thing about looking at old bibles is that you start to understand that good type isn't so hard to do. The first 50 years of typesetting had better type than the last 50 years, if you just look at these old books. In fact, a lot of ugly stuff was thrown out over the years, and the amount of good typesetting was surely less then than now -- because there was so much less typesetting.

Still, just make lines of the right length, with enough space between the lines, enough space between the letters, and keep the space between words reasonably tight. As long as you start with pretty good characters with proper kerning, making good lines of type is pretty straight-forward.

(When I start talking about type, I always seem to come back to my typography manifesto.)