that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man’schief miracle, unique to man. There is no ‘explanation’whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary soundswhich will lead a total stranger to think my own thought.It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sidedconversation by means of black marks on paper with anunknown person half-way across the world. Talking,broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literallyforms of thought transference, and it is the ability andeagerness to transfer and receive the contents of themind that is almost alone responsible for human civiliza-tion.If you agree with this, you will agree with my one mainidea, i.e. that the most important thing about printing isthat it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind toother minds. This statement is what you might call thefront door of the science of typography. Within lie hun-dreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming thatprinting is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas,it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house alto-gether.Before asking what this statement leads to, let us seewhat it does not necessarily lead to. If books are printedin order to be read, we must distinguish readability fromwhat the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. A public speak-er is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But agood speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice.It is the transparent goblet again! I need not warn youthat if you begin listening to the inflections and speakingrhythms of a voice from a platform, you are fallingasleep. When you listen to a song in a language you donot understand, part of your mind actually does fallasleep, leaving your quite separate aesthetic sensibilitiesto enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning facul-ties. The fine arts do that; but that is not the purpose of printing. Type well used is invisible as type, just as theperfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for thetransmission of words, ideas.Wemay say,therefore,that printing maybe delightful formanyreasons,but that it is important, first and foremost,as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischie-vous to call any printed piece a work of art, especiallyfine art: because that would imply that its first purpose

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magine that you have before you a flagon of wine. Youmay choose your own favourite vintage for this imagi-nary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmeringcrimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. Oneis of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns.The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, andas transparent. Pour and drink; and according to yourchoice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are aconnoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings aboutwine one way or the other, you will want the sensationof drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have costthousands of pounds; but if you are a member of thatvanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you willchoose the crystal, because everything about it is calcu-lated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing whichit was meant to contain.Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor;for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfectwine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is thelong, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl.Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyesand the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins onbook pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless orat the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because theconnoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impa-tient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand man-nerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbi-trary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass!When a goblet has a base that looks too small for securi-ty, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feelnervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of settinglines of type which may work well enough, and yet keepthe reader subconsciously worried by the fear of ‘dou-bling’ lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay ormetal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense inwhich I am going to use that term. That is, the first thinghe asked of his particular object was not ‘How should itlook?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all goodtypography is modernist.Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has beenused in the central ritual of religion in one place andtime, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another.There is only one thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men’s minds to the same extent, and

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rystal

oblet

rinting

hould

nvisible

by Beatrice Warde (1900 - 1969)

“(...) the most important thing about printing is that it conveysthought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds.”

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descenders and thus gives a remarkablyeven line). No, he told me that originally hehad set up the dullest ‘wording’ that hecould find (I dare say it was from Hansard),and yet he discovered that the man towhom he submitted it would start readingand makingcommentson the text.Imadesome remarkonthe mentalityofBoardsof Directors,butMrCleland said,‘No:you’rewrong; if the readerhadnot beenpractical-ly forcedtoread—-ifhehad not seen thosewords suddenly imbued with glamour andsignificance—-thenthe layout would havebeen a failure. Setting it in Italian or Latinis only an easy way of saying “This is notthe text as it will appear”.’Let me start my specific conclusions withbook typography, because that contains allthe fundamentals, and then go on to a fewpoints about advertising.The book typographer has the job of erect-ing a window between the reader inside theroom and that landscape which is the

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was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sakeand for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy canalmost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its pri-mary economic and educationalpurposehas been takenaway;butprinting in Englishwillnotqualifyasan artuntil the present Englishlanguagenolonger conveysideastofuturegenerations,anduntilprinting itselfhandsitsusefulnesstosomeyetunimagined successor.There is no end to the maze of practices in typography,and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in theminds of all the great typographers with whom I havehad the privilege of talking, the one clue that can guideyou through the maze. Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designers go more hopelesslywrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an exces-sive enthusiasm, than I could have thought possible.And with this clue, this purposiveness in the back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-of things, and find that they justify you triumphantly. It isnot a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals andreason from them. In the flurry of your individual prob-lems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour onone broad and simple set of ideas involving abstract prin-ciples.I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleas-ing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you haveused. I said something about what artists think about acertain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture:‘Ah, madam, we artists do not think—-we feel!’ Thatsame day I quoted that remark to another designer of myacquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, mur-mured: ‘I’m not feeling very well today, I think!’ He wasright, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that iswhy he is not so good a painter, and to my mind tentimes better as a typographer and type designer than theman who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as areason. I always suspect the typographic enthusiast whotakes a printed page from a book and frames it to hangon the wall, for I believe that in order to gratify a senso-ry delight he has mutilated something infinitely moreimportant. I remember that T.M. Cleland, the famousAmerican typographer, once showed me a very beautifullayout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorations incolour. He did not have the actual text to work with indrawing up his specimen pages, so he had set the linesin Latin. This was not only for the reason that you willall think of; if you have seen the old typefoundries’famous Quousque Tandem copy (i.e. that Latin has few

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raphicDesign & Reading will be assigned reading for my gra-duatestudents this fall,' announces the testimonial on the backcover from Laurie Haycock Makela, chair of the 2D (yes, evennow!) department at Cranbrook. And this anthology of theoryshould be read - critically.We are given a solid piece on advertising 'inscriptions in painting'by the dependable Johanna Drucker but without getting close tothe objects discussed, and the book, sadly, includes no close read-ing of graphic design or typography. This is a pity, since thedesign of the book, by the editor Gunnar Swanson, could haveserved as a text for detailed reading: the intention to integrate sidenotes with text is worthy of respect. But is the coarseness of detailintentional - no hung quotes, no designed 'signage' of note num-bers - or are the author's intentions to be denied, in accordancewith po-mo practice? Cursory examination reveals that what hap-pens by chance in butting up the side-notes (in)to the text, couldhappen by design to provoke different readings, by elision oraddition.It is good to have Beatrice Warde's The Crystal Goblet once moredefending invisible typography, even with the editor's whimsicalqueries as to her invisible underwear. It is also good to have PaulElliman's multi-disciplinary and programmatic celebration of theletter 'e', originally published here, in Eye no 33, vol.9. Thereformed 'e' offered by Hrant Papazian, in 'Improving the Tool?(the Latin alphabet) is as provocative to the eye as it would be tothe wrist, but since Papazian wants to free us of manual con-straints, neither RSI nor the drawn logic of letterforms is dis-

rystal

oblet

Reviewed by Robin Fior

‘G

eavy

reathing

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