Introduction

Human history is full of Renaissances and revivals, but not all have the same character. We look to the past for inspirational achievements or instructional failures. We may imitate past heroes, to equal or surpass them, or we may study some aspect of history in order to reject it in favor of other models entirely. But in the end, we believe thoroughly in our own creative impulses and the validity of modern insights.

The early Italian Renaissance, by contrast, was more interested in recreating the past, and specifically reliving the glories of the Roman empire. At first there was no expectation of surpassing the ancients, only of imitating their achievements. The Florentines who invented the humanistic script between 1400 and 1420, for example, copied what they believed was the handwriting of the ancient Romans. They called their script “antique letter” because they saw in it a beauty and legibility that would be worthy of their ancient literary models. They did not set out to write new kinds of literature nor yet to create a new kind of page, but sought to reproduce old ideas and forms in the best historical manner.

The most important achievement of the Renaissance, however, was the invention of printing from moveable types. This was truly new, for the ancients had no such method for the mass production of words. Printing gave a technical impulse to writing, publishing, and design that changed the landscape of Europe. Before Gutenberg (who worked about 1450), books were relatively rare in Europe, and were owned by universities, churches, and members of the governing elites. Between 1450 and 1500, while population levels were scarcely growing, at least fourteen million books poured from the new printing presses. Europe became the first continent of print, and people of all social levels became familiar with the sight and look of printed material. It took longer for reading habits, literary tastes, and teaching methods to change, but the visual landscape of the modern city, full of printed as well as handwritten words, was changing radically when Nicolas Jenson began to print in 1470.

The next comparable leap in printing technology came about 400 years later, in the nineteenth century, with the creation of power-driven presses and automated typesetting equipment. This new technology occasioned many revivals of the types of the Renaissance, some of which we will examine later in this book. The spiritual and aesthetic impulse for revival accompanied technical needs: types had to be redesigned to the specifications of the new machinery.

Today, printing is no longer the only mass print medium—soon it may not even be the largest. Type on computer screens is supplanting printed text. In our time, the invention of the desktop computer corresponds to the invention of movable type and the “graphical user interface (GUI)” is our equivalent to the Roman-style typeface. Roman types put a friendly face on books and the GUI put a friendly face on the computer. The Internet has been around for quite some time, but the explosion in Internet technology had to wait for the friendly faced GUI of the HTML-based Web interface.

Short of reinventing the alphabet, (see Alphabet 26) we must continue to look back to the familiar types of the past for guidance in creating faces that are functional and beautiful. We will make our own Renaissance, create our own revivals.

In this book we hope to do two things:

Describe a concrete example of one Jenson revival, the 1995 version of Nicolas Jenson’s classic type, digitized by Paul Baker. This will give readers a primer on the methods of type creation in the digital age; and

Offer some historical background on Jenson’s type and its revivals, so that readers can compare artistic and historical considerations in the creation of Jenson and earlier revivals of Jenson.

On the facing pages, in somewhat discontinuous form, historian Paul F. Gehl tells the story of Nicolas Jenson and his types, and of the imitations and revivals from 1470 to the early 1900s. Historical sources are fragmentary for the early periods. For long periods people did not know or did not interest themselves in Jenson. On the other hand, twentieth-century imitations are too numerous to describe completely. So the story of the recent revivals is told in short anecdotes, arranged roughly chronologically, but mostly set out so that the themes of each section parallel those of Baker’s primary narrative.

We suggest that you approach the right-hand story in the normal way. Be aware that it is a single, linear story, even if you choose to use it out of order. Then dip into the left-hand history as it seems informative or interesting.

Our separate narratives may interest different readers differently. We wanted to intertwine them on the page in this fashion because it is our conviction, derived from working together for several years, that the best revivals proceed in just this way—constant and repeated reference back to the models of the past. It is not enough to look at monumental achievements and go away inspired. We must study them in detail, looking especially at the problems faced and resolved along the way to the final product.

New technologies present new problems, as did the old technologies in their day. Much of what we see and admire in a classic type is made up of solutions to older problems. Type history is like all of history in this regard: we learn not from the achievements of heroes, real or imagined, but from an analysis of the problems they faced.